June 2013 Reading

For me, League of Somebodies...Sam asked me to review it, so I will, but superhero stuff isn't usually my cuppa. I like Cristina Garcia's work, and Joshua Mohr's work, and they blurbed him to the skies, so it's worth a try.

This month I'll finally be reading some SF by Iain M. Banks -- more specifically, Consider Phlebas. I was told that was an excellent avenue into his Culture universe.

I'm just finishing a crime thriller, The Black Box, so next up is SF. I think it'll be either Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson or Zoo City by Lauren Beukes; actually, both I expect.

Started Jack Williamson's 1980 The Humanoid Touch

Currently splitting my time between The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (print book) and The Voice from the Edge: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (audio).

On deck: Rendezvous with Rama! 8)

>3 ballfresno:

Get ready for the info dump with Cryptonomicon! Really good read though.

>5 artturnerjr:

Loved Rendezvous with Rama. Despite what many people say, I encourage you to read the whole series. It does get...............different......................as it goes on though.

>6 Goran: (>5 artturnerjr:): I was surprised when I read the Clarke/Lee Rama sequels; the first and third I found engaging, with characters who I found myself caring about. The second, though, I reviewed in four words: "Get on with it." Lee's standalone sequels, however, are a different matter altogether.

Currently reading The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski. First surprise was the space elevator constructed of biological material that was self-repairing instead of carbon nanotubes.

Starting The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

Currently reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Very impressed so far with this work. Strikes me as quite innovative, particular the well developed setting/world building aspect of the novel.

>10 chokai:

Read that book a while ago. Very original story, hard to follow at some parts but otherwise really good! Hope you read The Fractal Prince, sequal to The Quantum Thief. Awesome story.

>6 Goran: & 7 et al.

I have put up an RwR discussion thread over at TBR Challenge (http://www.librarything.com/topic/154994) if you guys (or anyone else!) would like to join in. We are gonna wait until the week of 6/16 to start the actual discussion so that everybody has a chance to obtain a copy and read a little of it. I think it would be interesting to have somebody in the group who has read it before, as the neither of the two of us who are presently discussing it have.

I've started June in other genres but will be watching this thread for recommendations in scifi.

Just picked up The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

Finished The Quiet War. Expected to like it a lot more than I did, though it slightly redeemed itself in the final quarter. Have just started Sovereign, a reread so I can review it for SF Mistressworks.

Just finished Murder on the orient express by Agatha Christie.

I know not Science Fiction but I had never read anything by her. It was actually very good.

So now I am reading Seeds of Earth by Michael Cobley.

Here's my review of Arslan: http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/arslan-mj-engh-2/

Reading a couple books from the bottom of TBR, World's End by Joan D. Vinge which I didn't know existed when I read Snow Queen and Summer Queen years ago, and This is not a game by Walter Jon Williams.

Also, A fire upon the deep for the monthly Green Dragon read.

I'm 2/3rds of the way through Jack Glass and enjoying the read. The middle section was perhaps a bit overlong; it seemed to drag part way in, but it's picked up again now.

I'm currently reading The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord.

Continuing to read more Jack Williamson, specifically The Best of Jack Williamson.

The Red Wyvern by Katharine Kerr.

< 22 : I would class that one in Fantasy. Isn't it part of her Deverry series?

Yes, but I read what I read without worrying about exact classification. I wander in life and wander in reading.

>24 markhagner: I wander in life and wander in reading.

I'll be sure to credit you when I use this phrase as my sig.

Finished Light and starting a random pick from the shelves of the unread Missing Man

Just finished Jack Glass which is an excellent romp, blending science fiction with crime mysteries and have started Osama which presents our reality as cheap fiction in the alternate reality of the text.

Just finished Necessary Evil (B+) this evening; a few elements seemed pat, but for the most part I think that Tregillis pulled off his meshing of intelligence thriller and dark fantasy. The one problem is that Charlie Stross has probably done this sort of thing better, though it is to be kept in mind that Stross is writing for satiric impact while Tregillis is playing his story totally straight.

>27 AlanPoulter:: I finished Jack Glass and really enjoyed it too. I'm not a big fan of mysteries but I liked how Roberts used the genre and blended it with SF.

Now I'm reading A fire upon the deep for the Green Dragon group read this month.

Started Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke really gets you right into the thick of things with that one, doesn't he?

Finished Consider Phlebas. Very filmic, would make a great miniseries. I liked it.

Started Titan by John Varley.

Finished The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection. The last story was KSR's Green Mars {short story}, which I only found out halfway into is a completely different universe than Green Mars, the novel. And it was mostly about mountain climbing and made me want to tear my eyes out from the boredom. Not looking good for me ever reading any of KSR's Mars work. I feared it would be Boring Activity X (on Mars!) and that's what this story was. Just not my cup of tea but different storks for different forks and all.

32>

It's surprising how poorly that stuff from the 1980s has aged, isn't it? I recently read the fourth Dozois Year's Best (I'm trying to get the whole set, but haven't found the first or second yet), and there were only two or three stories in it that I liked.

>32 brightcopy:. Titan? I am sure that you will have a blast.

#33 by @lorax> Yeah, mostly clunkers with a few interesting ones.

I'm missing 1, 2, 5, 12 and 17. I suppose I could order from someplace like Abebooks, but that seems like cheating. The only reason I started collecting the damn things was due to them being plentiful in used bookstores and fairly cheap. Now I hardly ever see them.

Read in the last three weeks:

The Siren Depths by Martha Wells, the last book of her trilogy. I really liked it and the first book in the trilogy, they read more like some of the stranger sci-fi than fantasy. The second book read like fantasy. I still liked it, just not as much.

Followed that with a non-fiction book on some recent history. I was alternately amused and annoyed by the author's hypocrisy, but I did learn some things.

Next was Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb, the fourth and last book of the Rain Wilds Chronicles. Good fantasy series and two very nasty characters finally got their comeuppance.

Just finished The Lawgiver by Herman Wouk. A short book, almost a novella, of how it's impossible to write a book or a movie about Moses along with other story lines. Sort of reminded me of The Princess Bride since Wouk inserted himself and his wife into the story. I liked it and you've got to admire a guy who's still putting out books at the age of 97. As one of the characters said in the book, "I didn't know Wouk was still alive."

Finished Fire upon the deep; quite a quick read despite the size of the book. I enjoyed all three plot strands and thought that Vinge's aliens were excellent.

Currently reading The Lowest Heaven and am quite impressed so far.

Not scifi persay, but i finished Weaveworld by Barker. What an imagination, absolutely worth the time. Started Rose Madder by King and Song of Susannah (being book six of The Dark Tower series) also by King. You know, I can't particularily relate to domestic abuse, but Rose Madder has me absolutely hooked. 200 pages in after 2 days and I can't stop reading it. Jump right back into the DT series after a few months out of Wolves of the Calla. Doesn't feel like I left at all :)

#39 by @Goran> I loved Weaveworld, too. Didn't expect to nearly as much as I did.

I loved Weaveworld too when I first read it, and went on to read a load more books by Barker. Sacrament was good, but the rest were 99% padding, and I stopped reading him. I still rate his 'In the Hills, the Cities' as a good story though.

>39 Goran:

I remember liking Rose Madder. The Dark Tower series is great, although I didn't like the ending (ymmv, of course).

#42 by @artturnerjr> I didn't "like" the ending, but I thought it was fitting. "Ka is a wheel" and all that.

>43 brightcopy:

I liked the "end end" but not the end, if you know what I mean (deliberately left ambiguous so we don't journey off into Spoilerland).

>32 brightcopy:

I haven't read all of Dozois 4, but of those stories I have read I'm quite fond of Lucius Shepard's "R&R", Connie Willis' "Chance", and Lewis Shiner's "Jeff Beck". How do you think the 2013 crop of best of the year anthologies will read in 2039?

#45 by @lansingsexton> I had typed up a longer post but due to my foolishness and the lack of drafts/autosave (hmm... maybe I could make a script for that...), it was vaporized. I haven't read 4th yet, but I did like Shepard's "A Spanish Lesson" in 3rd. So often I forget who wrote what, though.

It's hard to say about today's SF. I think a lot of it will hold up fine. I have this gut feeling that a lot of 70s SF holds up better than 80s or some 90s. But maybe that's just because my SF brain was formed in a large part by it.

>45 lansingsexton: & 46

I suspect that if the theoretical future reader is looking primarily for innovation, they will find more to like in the 60s and 70s than in other decades. If they are looking for overall aesthetic (and particularly stylistic) quality, they will enjoy the stuff written from the 80s to present day more.

#47 by @artturnerjr> I think it will depend on the reader. What I feel when I read some of the more well-regarded "prose-y" sf authors is "wow, they sure are trying hard."

>48 brightcopy:

Point. Madeleine L'Engle once said something like, "My job as a fiction writer is to come up with a good story and then get the hell out of the way". I think there are a lot of writers who would do well to embrace that point of view.

#49 by @artturnerjr> Well, I think it's one of those cases of personal preference. Those writers are bad for me. But I know of plenty of people who really dig reading their writing. I can't really say it's objectively bad. It's just a matter of tastes.

46, 48 brightcopy> I also really like "A Spanish Lesson". Regarding the recent comments, don't we all think that there are good and less good authors in every decade? It's also true, isn't it, that the further away we get from things the more they show their cracks and flaws as they age, until only the best, or maybe the things lucky enough to be pertinent to something current are still admired.

Your comment about your formative years is, of course, also true. Vincent Price stood an old cliche on it's head when he titled his book about his art collection, I Like What I Know. How many of us know current music the way we know the music of our teens and twenties?

artturnerjr> Someone said that science fiction is finally a big enough field to have split into literary and popular work just the way mainstream fiction did long ago. I do think that SF went through some growing pains in which stories were spoiled by unsuccessful, or at least not completely successful attempts to merge mainstream concerns with character, and genre concerns with concepts and action.

As for myself, I like Issac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, and Ted Chiang, and Jack McDevitt. I'm not a writer so I don't have to take sides. I can just enjoy everything that seems well done from any part of the SF spectrum.

>44 artturnerjr:

Yes, don't spoil it for me! I'm really enjoying Song of Susannah and I plan to push through to the last book when I'm done. The series overall has been enjoyable, though there does tend to be some insider information weird sh!t going on every now and then.

>51 lansingsexton:

I do think that SF went through some growing pains in which stories were spoiled by unsuccessful, or at least not completely successful attempts to merge mainstream concerns with character, and genre concerns with concepts and action.

You raise an excellent point there, I think. There are types of SF stories where the mainstream emphasis on character works just fine (dystopian SF is a good example of this), and there are some where it just doesn't. I think, for example, if you're telling a story that has evoking a sense of cosmic awe and/or wonder as its main purpose, you almost have to dial back the importance of the characters or it just doesn't work.

>52 Goran:

Well, any way you slice it, you're in for quite a journey.

Finished The Quantum Thief and was amazed by it. I am curious though if it would hold up as well to a re-read. Now working on the three novellas in the Gene Wolf book The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Really enjoyed Osama although the ending flopped. Am now reading Ashes of Candesce, fifth in the under-appreciated
Virga series.

Forgot to mention that I finished up The First Immortal by James L. Halperin last month - a novel of cryogenics, immortality and family. I enjoyed it, with caveats. It's not a rollicking great plot but is instead a bit more didactic and overly optimistic. Think of it as Kurzweil with a plot.

It shares much of this with his first novel, The Truth Machine, and turns out to be set in the same universe and eventually connects with it towards the end.

While I still think he's being far too optimistic, it has made me give serious thought to having my head frozen (hopefully after I'm dead).

By the way, it looks like Halperin has made both books available for free (word doc, but you could convert it easily):

http://coins.ha.com/information/ttm.s
http://coins.ha.com/information/tfi.s

" it has made me give serious thought to having my head frozen"

Chugging slurpees does that in a pinch :)

Actually, I'm immune from brain freeze. Makes everyone jealous when we're eating ice cream.

Hmm, wonder if that'd make me a better or WORSE cryo candidate...

Is that the reason for your nickname "hot head"???...Just asking :)

My nickname?? Have you people been talking behind my back? Oh, you'll pay. You'll pay alright...

:)

I'm immune from brain freeze too, because there's no way I'm letting anything that cold get past my teeth ;) I LOVE melting ice cream. Butter pecan flavour burst mmmmmm....

Resurrection Days by Wilson Tucker

Richard Matheson has died at 87.

64> Rats....I liked his story I am Legend and I look forward to reading The Shrinking Man, I remember seeing the movie in the 1957 movie "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which he did the screen play based on his book and the special effects were great in that movie given the year it was done. He was amazing

One of my all-time favorites was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Purely a sentimental favorite, I suspect, since I haven't read it in over 30 years. Sad, in a nostalgic way, that he's gone.

Sad. Matheson was a giant of American genre fiction. :(

#66 Nightmare at 20,000 feet was one of the best Twilight Zone episodes ever, IMOHO. I remember my friends all wowing about it.

I heard on the radio that Finches of Mars will be Brian Aldiss's last book. I have seen some mixed reviews.

Continuing the morbidness:

Y'all probably know Jay Lake is dying. I've decided to review a book a week by him, up to the Jay Wake on 27 July. Read my review of Rocket Science at Shelf Inflicted, and who knows, maybe even pick up a book of his. Hurry on up, though, since he's "on the last plane out." He said that himself, made me laugh.

Starting World War Z. Liked the movie, and heard the book was better (and very different.)

Still in back in the pulps with Edmond Hamilton's What's It Like Out There? and Other Stories

I just started Red Mars.

#73 Para..... In post 69 above, one of the reviews I read about Brian Aldris's new & last book Finches of Mars says that the book suffers from the "Kim Stanley Robinson" effect. In that KSR's books were so detailed that any subsequent books seem to be repetition when they describe conditions on Mars.

::edited a bit to make it understandable, Para must be an excellent reader to have deciphered the crap I jotted down ;-)

> 74

So far I'm liking Red Mars a lot. The most recently-written Mars novel I've read was Ares Express, which probably can't be accused of seeming KSR-derivative.

I'm reading The forever War by Joe Haldeman. I think the way he describe the future of earth is quite interesting (and pessimistic but maybe he will be right)

Finished up London Falling (A+) this evening; superior urban fantasy that does justice to the characters of a group of London police who have been given the task of running to ground a manifestation of deep evil.

did we lose a July thread? This overhaul of LT has had me stumbling around more than a bit. re #32 brightcopy and the Green Mars short story ... I haven't read it since it first appeared but at the time I thought the whole mountain climbing on Mars thing was "awesome." really. It is the story that pretty much made me a real KSR fan. I'd probably hate it now.

I recently finished Banks The Player of Games that I liked a lot more than Phlebas.

Nodding to Jack Vance's recent death I am reading the start of his Durdane trilogy, The Faceless Man which for a 1971 novel I am liking quite a lot so far. Reminds me a little of Lois Lowry's The Giver - just a little. Quite a few books from circa 1971 do not hold up well for me so this is a slight surprise. Maybe the 2nd half will stink.

On unrelated thoughts I was rather stunned by the cover of the latest year's best Dozois collection that came out a few days ago. Someone had to recycle Asimov's Foundation and Earth? AND the January 2012 cover of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine? Michael Whelan is a good artist but Geez

ETA: I did really enjoy Jack Campbell's alt american Civil War novella The Last Full Measure. CW history buffs should especially like it.

ok i just found the July thread .... sheesh