Our reads in March 2020

Another monthanother pile of books. Share your reading life with the gang.

Dusty's TBR for March

SF/Fantasy
Charles Stross - Labyrinth Index ✔
A E Van Vogt - Slan
Ben Aaronovitch - False Value ✔
Gregory Benford - Eater ✔
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Swords of Mars ✔
C J Cherryh - Voyager in Night ✔

from other genres
Miss Read - Village School ✔
Eileen Rendahl - Un-Veiled ✔
Kate Douglas Wiggin - Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm✔
Earl Derr Biggers - Behind that Curtain ✔

Finished Joanna Russ, an excellent study of her fiction. Nextup, The Flicker Men, I think.

The schedule this month is Gideon the Ninth, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Power: A Novel, and, probably, Nemesis Games.

Still reading The Magician King by Lev Grossman....

Almost done with His Majesty's Dragon. Hope to finish The Supernova Era. Also have Resnick's Menagerie and Bridge 108 to read.

No SF to start the month. Not quite as deep in the reading slump as I was, but I just can't seem to get interested in any of the new reads I try out. Oh, well. Life goes on.

I remember being quite impressed by a few of Ted Kosmatka's short stories, but the blurbs on his novel didn't really appeal - they a bit too commercial, perhaps even more like techno-thrillers than sf. But I found a cheap secondhand copy of The Flicker Men and decided to give it a try... And now that I've read it - the novel is an expansion of one of those stories I really liked, 'Divining Light', but in turning it into a novel, Kosmatka has added a whole bunch of stuff - conspiracy theories and One-Percenters and semi-immortal beings from another reality - that stretches suspension of belief beyond breaking point. This is all wrapped up in a thriller plot, with a protagonist who spends half the book hating himself, and either drinking himself into oblivion or contemplating shooting himself, and the other half being beaten up by the bad guys *and* the good guys. Disappointing.

I'm reading Future Home of the Living God and enjoying it more than I expected.

>2 dustydigger:. I've got Boneshaker sitting in my TBR pile, so I look forward to your comments.

I was disappointed in Damien Broderick's Godplayers. It started out promising. But despite throwing in lots of references to other SF books & films, and lots of references to theories in computation and physics, it was basically the "regular guy finding out he belongs to a family/group of beings with superpowers" thing, and not even especially well done. Rather like Zelazny's Amber books, in an SF setting, but not as well done. With a strained happy ending tacked on.

Gregory Benford's Eater about an alien attacking earth was quite a fun read. I have been binge watching astronomy and cosmology videos on YouTube all this week and it was good preparation for this hard science novel. As usual Benford makes an effort to draw sympathetic characters to mitigate the hard science. I definitely preferred it to Timescape
Next up is Slan.and the library says they will have Ben Aaronovitch's False Value for me next week so other books will be put aside for a while while I relax with one of my fave series.
New great grandson on Feb 29th.a Leap year baby. Reading time is going to be even more at a premium.but I have had plenty of practice in successfully juggling a book and a feeding bottle :0)

>11 dustydigger:

Yay! Happy new family baby!

Currently reading Asimov's Utopia, book three in Roger MacBride Allen's robot trilogy. Allen manages to write in the style of Asimov pretty well - which is both good and bad. Mostly good though as I'm enjoying my read-through of all the robot universe novels.

Also just finished a non-genre read: Stay is book #2 in Nicola Griffith's Aud Torvingen trilogy. The storyline is a bit slow in places but Griffith can really write and development of both the protagonist and secondary characters is very well done. I give it 7/10.

Over the past weekend, I re-watched Dreams With Sharp Teeth, (currently free for subscribers of Amazon Prime Video), which has prompted me to pick up Shatterday for a re-read. I had forgotten how weirdly wonderful Jeffty is Five is.

>11 dustydigger: Congratulations on the new great grandson.

>11 dustydigger: Congratulations on the addition to your family.

>12 karenb:
>14 pgmcc:
>15 seitherin:

thanks for the congrats,people . And I have a new grandchild due in May so the family tree is blossoming all over the place.lol.

Currently reading Elysium Fire. It opens with a group of habitats in the Glitter Band (a ring 10,000 or so habitats orbiting a planet in the Tau Ceti system) deciding they want to leave the Panoply, the political framework which administers the Glitter band. Gosh, I wonder what Al Reynolds could *really* be writing about...

>17 iansales: Lol! No idea that must be a subtle allusion.
On the other hand,I am reading Charlie Stross's Labyrinth Index.It is a pure wish fulfilment daydream.Black magicians have cast a spell over the whole USA so that no one can remember there is a POTUS. Nothing in the news or media,no one recognizes a photo even. Poor old chief exec is on the run from the black magicians,and even his own tiny band of security darent fall asleep,or they wake up with no memory of him.As I say,just a daydream.

>18 dustydigger: I re-read all of the Laundry books last year in preparation for this one, and it didn't disappoint - now waiting for Dead Lies Dreaming. Plus, I've sneakily managed to get my SF&F book group to choose The Atrocity Archives for next month's read in the hope of getting some of them hooked!

Recommending Lost transmissions : the secret history of science fiction and fantasy by Desirine Boskovich. It covers just some of the secret histories of (and connections among) the genre(s) through visual arts, written works, music, and film/TV. Excellent stuff.

About to start Man-eaters, volume 3 by Chelsea Cain, Lia Miternique, Elise McCall, et al. What if menstruation included becoming a cat (black panther) every month? Estrogen is added to tap water as a preventive measure, so the books have full-page ads of estro-free products for men and boys. It's a three-volume series, and already I love the alternate covers in the back -- of various handbooks for the revolution for all ages, including a Golden book for kids. (I want a copy of that book!)

Next up: a million novellas, for Hugo nominating.

>20 karenb:
Sounds like the writers were watching the 1940s movie "Cat People", where Simone Simon believes she's descended from a family whose women sometimes turn into black panthers when angry or sexually aroused. It's a strange movie but has some genuinely creepy scenes.

"About to start Man-eaters, volume 3 by Chelsea Cain, Lia Miternique, Elise McCall, et al. What if menstruation included becoming a cat (black panther) every month? Estrogen is added to tap water as a preventive measure, so the books have full-page ads of estro-free products for men and boys."

>21 rshart3:
The comics center around some school-age students and their families, so it's not quite as adult as "Cat People". (The 1982 remake went a lot further into the adult realm.)

Finished Bill Gibson's Agency. I enjoyed it. There's not much plot - fairly typical corporate shenanigans in pursuit of an AI-based digital personal assistant that can do a fair bit more than just order cinema tickets and tell you the weather. The book's strengths, for me, were in the scene-setting and the various characters interacting with their worlds and each other.

Having a break from genre with some not-too-serious history (1000 years of annoying the French).

On my break I'm going to start The Nightmare Stacks. I haven't read the previous entries in the series, but I picked up an advance copy at a convention back just before it came out and reviews assure me it's a decent starting point because it follows a different character, so I'll see.

One of my favorite moments at the 2018 World Fantasy Convention was briefly chatting with Aliette de Bodard about The Laundry series. Like me, as a government employee, she gets a snicker out of the concept of "residual human resources." I perhaps more-so because, well, I am archivist after all!

Hmm. Elysium Fire looks like it was inspired by the Brexit referendum, with its talk of swaying marginal votes using secret access to voting software. Unfortunately, the main plot doesn't make much sense, and is founded on such a heinous crime it beggars belief. I remember liking The Prefect (now retitled Aurora Rising), but this sequel was disappointing.

Finally found some time to read a sf novel again.
Aurora was good but I didn't feel it added a great deal to what Kim Stanley Robinson has written before.

>26 iansales: But the only voting software in the Brexit referendum was a pencil. There were a lot of things wrong with the whole process but the counting wasn't one of them.

>28 RobertDay: But there were also rumours of interference. And given how close the vote was... Reynolds's novel is clearly a comment on it - and possibly the US election - although that particular of the plot is thrown away pretty quickly and is used only to bolster the villain's maguffin.

>13 ScoLgo: Of all the "Asimov" books not by Asimov, I think Allen's are pretty much the only worthwhile ones. Good extrapolation into areas Asimov himself never went, and I prefer the mystery format for the Robot stories, which Asimov pretty much abandoned after two books.

Started Sue Burke's Interference, a follow-on to the excellent Semiosis. It's shaping up to be just as good.

>30 Stevil2001: Just finished Utopia last night. 3.5 stars. I liked Allen's Robot novels pretty well but personally prefer Mark Tiedemann's writing style. I also found Tiedemann's mysteries to be more complex and ultimately more satisfying. I should probably add a disclaimer that I have been a Mark W. Tiedemann fan since long before reading his Asimov's Robot trilogy, (Mirage, Chimera, Aurora), and own just about every book he has written. IMHO he is a criminally underrated writer of speculative fiction. With that said, I do think Allen writes in a 'voice' that is closer to Asimov's.

I have all three Allen books in hardback. Unlike Caliban and Inferno, Utopia was chock full of mistakes. Missing words, garbled syntax, misspellings, etc. Proof-reading, especially for a print book, was abysmal on this one. Nevertheless, the story itself was a pretty decent wrap-up of the trilogy.

Next up: A non-genre, non-fiction read of Dead Wake by Erik Larson. Also picking up Declare by Tim Powers, which will be a re-read.

>32 ScoLgo: I think I started the first tiedemann book when it came out but couldn't get into it and returned it to the library. But that was almost two decades ago now!

>33 alanlong: It's against the rules of the group to promote your own books, and especially disingenuous to phrase it so it sounds like someone else wrote it.

>30 Stevil2001: One of my book groups read Semiosis and enjoyed it. Looking forward to the next one; be sure to report back.

>32 ScoLgo: The new Tim Powers just showed up in my library system; I got all excited. It just came out: Forced Perspectives.

Finished The Red Threads of Fortune this evening. While I still don't care that much for the magic system I do like the character of Sanao Mokoya, and will continue with the stories on that basis. The cardboard evil empress is mostly out of sight; or is she?

The Laundry Files are getting steadily darker,and The Labyrinth Index was the darkest yet. Our Charlie certainly isnt sparing our old friends.I was really distressed at what happened to Derek and Pete. Poor old Pete,all hedid was help Bob with a bit of research on old manuscripts,and look at him now! :0(
still not to fond of Mhari,and am not keen on the breaking off for flashbacks or to follow lots of little groups. I sigh nostalgically for the lighthearted days when our Bob was just a rather inept junior always in trouble with his office managers.
Its a bit like Harry Dresden,I loved him when he was a mere wizard with a dog and a skull working in a cellar. then he decided to become saviour of the world and EVERYTHING from those days were destroyed. Still havent recovered! lol
Amazon are promoting the July issue of Peace Talks on Kindle,for £9.99,which seems to be the default price for kindle books now. Ouch!

I see than Max von Sydow died,aged 90. How iconic was the scene of him playing chess with Death? One of the papers has an affectionate tribute cartoon of Boris Johnson in Sydow's role as the melancholic knight challenging Death. He is asking Death if he has disinfected the chess pieces in case of Covid -19! lol.
I rewatched The Seventh Seal around Xmas,and it was as great as ever.

>38 dustydigger: The Seventh Seal was my first great cinematic love.

Antonius Block: Vem är du?
Döden: Jag är Döden.
Antonius Block: Kommer du för att hämta mig?
Döden: Jag har redan länge gått vid din sida.

Finished City at the end of time, started Taltos -- the Brust one.

>36 karenb: Ooohh.... thank you for that! I didn't realize he had written a sequel to Alternate Routes already. Ordering my copy now...

(For anyone that might be interested... I found it new for a lower price than Amazon Prime at both Abe Books and Biblio.com)

>36 karenb: Ohhhh! A new Tim Powers. Very interesting.

>39 anglemark: I think it was late 1962,when I was about 14,that Bergman's Seventh Seal and Through a Glass Darkly were on the TV. I was mesmerised by Sven Nykvist's magnificent photography. i was I suppose too young to grasp all the emotional nuancesof the film,but the camerawork just stunned me.The wild beaches are still etched in my mind,more than 5 decades later.
To this day I still prefer my films in black and white,which makes my family fear for my sanity!They would rather die than watch a b/w film! :0)

Hmm >43 dustydigger: We must also be of a similar age. I was just getting into Chess (and beat my Dad at age 12 - and he never played me again!) and when Death plays a game... I was entranced.

Guiido.

PS. I had a mate who had a rating of 2250. he refesued to play me because I dragged his game down :-(

>42 pgmcc:

If it is connected to Alternate Routes then my interest has gone down. I didn't like that one as much as most of his other stuff.

>43 dustydigger: Philistines. I love b&w films. But then I'm just a decade and a half younger than you.

>44 guido47: In all honesty, unless you had a really good rating yourself, someone with a rating of 2250 would neither have enjoyed nor benefitted from playing you. The ideal chess opponent has a rating from 0 to 200 better than oneself.

>46 anglemark:

I was only an average chess club player, Say 1600.. I did try and study, But,,,But geneticis!

Kasparovve Lasker, I love Cassablanka's games, Alekhine - a genius (but he was an arsehole of a man) Morphy's a man I could understand,

I did play through many of the greats games,

Guido

>45 andyl: I rather liked Alternate Routes, (and yes, this new book appears to be a sequel that features the same pair of protagonists). I enjoyed it even more in retrospect when not long after, I read House of Leaves, which also riffs on the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Two very different takes on that particular legend! However, Alternate Routes is not a secret history tale such as we usually get from Powers so in that respect, it was lighter fare and I could see that making it less enjoyable for some readers.

Finished Interference and found it a little disappointing after Semiosis. Some of the premises and decisions seemed implausible and arbitrary for plot purposes, and the characterization was a little thin. Still worth reading, but not as powerful as the first book.

Now about to start A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - it's got some very positive reviews so I'm looking forward to it.

>49 SChant: I had mixed feelings about A Memory Called Empire. I thought it over-rated, and spent way too much time and effort on world-building instead of plot.

Now reading 84K, which comes across as something like a cross between a post-Austerity dystopia and a 1970s consumerism-run-wild satire. I always have a problem with these sorts of books: the rentiers impoverish everyone and put them on minimal wages... so who buys the things they make, who eats in the restaurants where they serve? Ninety percent of the population cannot realistically service ten percent. It's like when companies close factories because wage costs are too high, and once people are out of work they can no longer afford to buy the companies' products, so their revenue goes down, so they have to cut costs even further...

Finished Taltos, next up Great Sky River.

Adding Sixteenth Watch by Myke Cole to my reading rotation.

Finished Supernova Era - it was ok. I am not sure if it was the translation or if it was really that dull. Also finished Bridge 108. It was ok - not as good as other Anne Charnock books that I have read. Halfway through a nonfiction book at the moment. But, I need a GOOD science fiction read next!

I did manage to get Light of Impossible Stars from the library before it closed indefinitely. Hope that one fits the bill.

Finished 84K. Didn't like it as much as The Sudden Appearance of Hope. Now reading Missing Man.

>50 iansales: I'm about half-way through A Memory Called Empire and, yes, it does have a lot of world-building but that intertwines beautifully with the slow unfolding of the plot. I'm find it fascinating and very immersive.

Reading Magician's Land by Lev Grossman....

Finished Gideon the Ninth this evening and while I was prepared to dislike it I found it worth my while; this is keeping in mind that the reader is being asked to take a lot for granted.

Finished The Power this morning and my response is that I respected it more than I liked it; such is the way of "modest proposals" such as this book.

I'm a good ways into The City & the City. It's a used copy that I got for free. It has some unknown prior reader's annotations in it, which feels a little distracting, and yet somehow apposite. I'm not sure whether I should work to "unsee" them as I read.

Finished Missing Man. Complete tosh. Now reading Beneath the World, A Sea, which is very Ballardian but also reminds me of Coelestis and The Heart of the Matter.

>60 iansales: My review Missing Man lists many issues and notes "The original novella won a Nebula which says a lot about how far SF writing has come", but there were a few bits I liked, so I wouldn't say "complete" tosh, whatever "tosh" means. It's definitely only for completists and those who like to dig into older SF.

Rather slight outing of the Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series.But Peter and his friends and colleagues were as delighful as ever in False Value
Hope to finish Slan and Swords of Mars this month,but I am barely managing 50 pages a day. Me and Mr Dusty are in lockdown, and I never get a chance to be alone to read! lol.

Just finished some popular history (well, since you ask, 1000 Years of annoying the French, which was far better than I expected and read like a cross between Game of Thrones and Horrible Histories). Next up is a return to sf with Wheelers by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Jack, who only died last year, was Emeritus Professor of Reproductive Biology at Warwick University and some other establishments, but is mainly known in sf circles as a consultant theoretical xenobiologist - he "designed" the Grendels in Niven and Pournelle's Legacy of Heorot, and indeed was an uncredited consultant on 'Alien'. Giger may have designed the Alien's appearance, but Jack designed its life-cycle.

>59 paradoxosalpha: I read that one a couple of months ago. Your "unsee"-ing annotations comment made me smile.

Now reading The Shape of Further Things, which is Brian Aldiss pontificating about a number of things, getting them wrong and generally being a bit blinkered. Nice writing, though.

Just to note, there seem to be many discounted/free ebooks out there right now, thanks to everyone cocooning, I guess.

Just finished The Practice Effect by Brin.

>66 dukedom_enough:

Do you know of a good way to find these? I found the Apex bundle today (here, until March 31st) and the SMBC bundle

>58 Shrike58: I agree with you about The power. I appreciate what it was trying to do but it missed the mark for me.

I've just started Floating worlds which I'm enjoying so far. An interesting rather amoral female lead who doesn't seem to care if people like her or not.

Finished Swords of Mars and.also Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.which I have been raeding as a break from C J CHerryh's dark,difficult and depressing Voyager in Night. Still 50 pages to read there,very hard going emotionally.
To cheer myself up I thought I would complete Harry Harrison's Space Medic Incredibly I jumped straight into a tale of how our space doc found his patient had a high fever. Antibiotics and treatments dont work,the patient got sicker and sicker and died from a completely new unrecognized virus. Soon 70% of the ship crew are infected,the passengers are quarantined,and the doc almost dies producing a cure.
Cant even get away from viruses even when travelling to Mars! lol

Finished Foundryside this evening and I liked it a lot, though maybe not quite as much as any of the "Divine Cities" books. I have a certain sense that the characters more obviously serve the plot rather than the plot flowing from the "choices" of the characters; though the lack of real choices among the various characters is a major theme of the book.

Started on Dune.

I hope I get all the way through it this time. The last time I tried to reread it, I got interrupted a third of the way in.

About three-quarters of the way through Wheelers and I have to say that I've enjoyed it, despite there being big expository lumps in it when each of the authors in turn got onto their specialist subject. A significant portion of the book is set in East Africa, and I'm a little twitchy with the way that's described, as the setting is the end of the 22nd century yet the society seems not as advanced as one might expect. However, the future history the authors created includes an event they call the 'Pause', a revolt against high technology followed by the embrace of Green issues and the realignment of much policy along those lines, so I suppose this goes towards explaining the description of the African segments; but I'm still not entirely happy with it.

China also plays a part in the plot, and the authors' view of that country is a bit out of kilter with events since the book was written (2000). But these things haven't spoiled the book too much for me.

Phew,thankfully I completed C J Cherry's Voyager in Night Nightmarish,bleak and depressing.Thank goodness she stopped doing these experimental early novels and went on to the Chanur,Alliance and Foreigner books we all love so much.lol.
Also read a Edmond Hamilton novella,Sargasso of Space.
With the libraries closed I will have to do most of my reading online(Praise the Lord for Open Library) and reread some of my old books like Cherryh's Chanur series,Lois McMaster Bujold Barrayar series and the like. This is definitely comfort reading time for me!

I see that WWEnd have a ''Covid-19'' reading challenge. Apparently lots of people are wanting to read books about plagues and the like! :0)
They printed a baker's dozen of titles.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826)
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949)
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969)
The Stand by Stephen King (1978)
Journals of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad (1988)
The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman (1989)
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (1992)
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2012)
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd (2018)
Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019)

Earth Abides and Andromeda Strain were pencilled in for this month a while ago,but I am postponing them for a while! :0)

Now reading Coyote Rising by Allen Steele...