March 2014 reading

Finished Baxter's Weaver as my coffee time book. A re-read of Banks' Consider Phlebas now takes up that slot in my busy schedule...

Currently reading Renaissance, which the SF Encylopedia claims is "probably Raymond F Jones' best novel". Er, that's not exactly high praise. In fact, the book is badly-written tosh, complete with bizarre misuses of English and a plot that the author clearly made up as he went along.

The very first sentence of 'Consider Phlebas' made a shiver run down my spine: "The ship didn't even have a name." Think of what we now know about Culture ships and their names...

Finished Little, Big. Onto Beggars and Choosers, quite a contrast.

Still working on From Hell, which is very, very good.

>3 RobertDay:

Rereading a series from the start after knowing where it is going is always an interesting experience - you notice a lot more - sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way... :)

Finished Renaissance, it was rubbish. Now rereading Requiem for Anthi by Jay D Blakeney to review for SF Mistressworks.

Almost done with N. K. Jemisin's The Shadowed Sun, second in a duology, may start with Elizabeth Bear's Carnival. I tried to read that last year, but got stuck on the setting.

I have a rather large backlog of f&sf books to read right now but nothing that much appeals to me; any recent authors people can recommend?

Finished Garan the Eternal by Andre Norton and started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

Finally reading the conclusion to Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, Homeward Bound.

Finally getting around to reading Roadside Picnic. Very good and it really seems to hold up well. It seems almost contemporary.

>1 RobertDay:
>2 iansales:
>6 AnnieMod:
Just started Consider phlebas, my first Banks novel. I received it from a kindly Santathing.

Still going on Firestar interesting, but long read about the origins of a serious manned space industry. Interesting from today's perspective where the space start ups most likely to succeed being for tourism rather then commercial flights.

Atlantis gene popular indie ebook, sci-fi thriller, also too long, but okay.

#11 tottman
Roadside Picknick is one of my favorite sci-fi novels! Completely blew me away. I should reread that sometime (but who has the time...).

>11 tottman:: >13 Vonini:: I too loved Roadside picnic. I'll definitely reread it in the future, after all it's pretty short! I was excited to see that another novel by the Strugatskys, Monday begins on Saturday, will be reprinted in the Masterworks series this August (in the UK at least).

ETA and I see that Hard to be a god will be added in November :-D

A new edition of Shirley Jackson's 1958 apocalyptic novel THE SUNDIAL has just been released. This one is a bit of a stretch as science fiction, but it is about what happens when the end is nigh and there is passing reference to aliens.

Jackson is not for everyone, but her fans (including me) love her.

An appreciative review of SUNDIAL is here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/03/shirley_jackson_s_the_sundial_r...

I finished Death of Integrity, and now (after years of anticipation) I'm on to The Dervish House.

>15 pennwriter: I read this recently and really enjoyed it. The review you link to is actually the introduction in my edition!

What did you think of Little, Big? That one has been on my TBR list for 3 years.

I've been a Jackson fan since I was ten. That is a heck of an introduction, BTW. Really good.

Just finished The Human Division by John Scalzi. It's a "fix-up novel" of linked short stories. I thought that the structure was very well done, and liked the way that episodes were self-contained for the most part while still referring to other stories. Had a bit of an issue because almost all the characters have the same voice (quick snark and mostly common sense philosophies) whether they be human, alien, male, female, young, old....

Glad I read it. Glad I borrowed it from the library instead of buying it.

>20 amysisson: I just finished it as well and had pretty much the same comments (though I'm fine with having bought it used). It's not quite a fixup so much as a serialized novel, like The Green Mile. Scalzi stated that he wrote them all before the first one was released. Fix-ups are generally an after-the-fact pasting of stories together with some editing and framing to make them all work as one continuous story.

I just really feel this was the first half of a book. That kind of thing gets tossed around a lot, but I think it applies in this case far more than typically. The last chapter of the book could have been put in as the first chapter or in the middle or whatever with very minor changes for continuity and it wouldn't have mattered much in terms of the plot.

>21 brightcopy: brightcopy

Yes! I should have said serialized novel instead of fix-up but the term was eluding me.... Duh!

My favorite fix-up is Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War", which (if I recall correctly) flows pretty smoothly as a novel. I think there has been substantial tinkering over the years, though, so lots of editions with little differences floating around out there.

I did think that this format allowed Scalzi to experiment a little. Most of the pieces were "problem? solve problem!", but then he had the one with Schmidt going back home for Harvest Day (presumably the new Thanksgiving), which had a different tone. That was the one with the chauffeur who sounded Just Like Scalzi... ;-)

>22 amysisson: I like Scalzi's writing, but that is definitely a major feature of it. The characters all start to blend together in personality. Though I will say that Coloma and Abumwe were distinct from the snarky melange, though now that I think about it perhaps they were not so distinct from each other.

>23 brightcopy:

Good point on Coloma and Abumwe.

#18 I guess that post was meant for me. I loved Little, Big. It is a novel that takes time to read. The spirits/fey/fairie that are the heart of the story are only half glimpsed and the novels is written that way. Nothing is definite everything could be several things.
It is a very allusive novel in other ways too. I'm sure I missed several of theses allusions. Maybe one day I'll go back and re-read it to catch them. Several are more obvious than others - Auberon and Sylvie being the main characters or what will become the main characters in Midsummer night's dream for example.
It is best read slowly and when you have time to do so.

Just starting The Windup Girl.

Finished The Parasol Protectorate Volume 2, starting Bumsider

Currently reading What Lot's Wife Saw but I suspect it won't be making my Hugo ballot.

I'm currently working my way through "The Journal Entries of Kennet Shardik, et al." @ pendorwright.com by Elf Sternberg.
This is erotic science fiction, some of the entries are more focused on the erotic side, some of them for on the science fiction side..

I'm nearly finished Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.

I started the month with Sideshow, finishing off the Arbai Trilogy, which I have read before, a long time ago. I remembered the set-up on the planet Elsewhere even though I had forgotten absolutely everything to do with the plot.

And now I have 2 sf books on the go. The Status Civilisation as an audiobook and Inverted World on my Kindle.

Reading Camoflage by Joe Haldeman...

Reading American Elsewhere - it's starting a little slow but I think it's going to accelerate nicely. I recently finished Hild by Nicola Griffith, which is not SF or fantasy, although Griffith is an SF writer. It's just such a vivid, beautifully written historical novel (7th century England) that I can't resist mentioning it.

Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson is next, as is a re-reading of Golden Space by Pamela Sargent.

Reading and very much enjoying Platinum Pohl by Frederik Pohl. It's a collection of his very best short stories and it doesn't disappoint. Hardly any meh stories.

>34 Magatha:

I have American Elsewhere on my to possibly buy list. So let us know how you found it after you have finished.

I have begun Transcendental.

Star Trek Voyager and New Frontier books

I'm a bit disappointed in The Windup Girl. I'm 200 pages in and still nothing has happened yet. I'd expected a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel to have a bit less background and a bit more story.

And a bit less racism and not rely on hoary old and offensive tropes like sex slavery...

>40 iansales:. "hoary old and offensive tropes like sex slavery?" I'm told that there are more people in slavery today than in any period in history. Most of them women and children and many if not most are enslaved for sexual purposes. It is a huge issue in southeast Asia, the location where The Wind Up Girl is set.

That doesn't mean it's not an old trope, or an offensive one.

>40 iansales: Yes that too. There are no likable characters in the book.

>42 iansales:, I guess I find it more offensive when sexual slavery is ignored.

You must be offended by a lot of novels then.

I started reading Dark Eden but found it insufficiently interesting for how heavy-handed it was getting, so I'll find something else to start today.

>45 iansales:, only when a novel romanticizes a culture glossing over the insidiously evil bits.

I'm sure the Thais are delighted to learn you believe their culture is defined by sex slavery.

>48 iansales:. First of all I said "insidiously evil bits" not the entire culture. But I'm quite sure that they won't care anyway. It is an enormous problem about which the Thai gov't will do something only when it ceases to be profitable or when the rest of the world puts pressure on it for the human rights issue that it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Thailand

I would like to draw your attention to the sections on human trafficking and child prostitution.

Finished Bumsider, started The Night Watch -- the one by Sean Stewart not the zillion others.

#49 From henceforth, every novel set in the US should feature a white cop who fatally shoots an innocent non-white young man, because that of course totally defines modern US society.

>51 iansales:. A few highly publicized incidents in any country is much different than a country having an international reputation as the leader in sex tourism, don't you think? But if a novel were about race in the USA then I think that it should not be left out, just as the non-white president should not be left out.

But again you talk about "totally defining" a society. I don't think that one "totally defines" anything by leaving out the negative parts anymore than it does by including only the negative parts.

I hope that some day sex slavery will be a thing of the past everywhere in the world. And then maybe I will be able to yawn along with you when reading books which contain such "hoary old tropes."

>52 vwinsloe: You do realise that this book portrays its sex slaves as happy slaves with dog like obedience and unable to stop themselves firting with every man they meet, don't you.

>53 JP000:. Yes, "engineered beings." I'm sure that all the sex slaves in Thailand are said to be happy slaves.

>54 vwinsloe: Just checking. I thought you were arguing that the book shouldn't be criticised because any book about sex slavery is a good thing.

Perhaps it's presumptuous of me to suggest that vwinsloe and iansales are arguing at cross purposes while being basically in agreement. I do understand the nuances, but neither of them approves of slavery or sexual exploitation, and more to the point at LibraryThing, they don't approve of literary exploitation of these issues for salacious dystopian effect.

I haven't read The Windup Girl, in spite of the awards, because the material sounded too unpleasant. I did read some of Bacigalupi's stories out of curiosity, and I found them very well written and almost (there was one story with suggestions of long-term partial relief) unrelentingly nasty in a slightly pornographic manner.

It's fine with me if he writes these tales, but they weren't telling me anything about the depths of human degradation that I didn't already know, and they seemed to wallow in it with an almost joyous enthusiasm.

There's a Robert Frost poem, To Earthward which ends:

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Sometimes, I think that the astonishing popularity of dystopias of every possible kind is just such a desire to rub-in our awareness that human nature and history leave something to be desired. That's not really news though for anyone who's read The Time Machine first published in 1895.

>56 lansingsexton:

An interesting point. Something that I think has changed since the days of The Time Machine and Brave New World and 1984 is that those works were sort of sounding an alarm for society and serving as (unfortunately fairly accurate) harbingers of where we were headed. I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but it often seems like writers/filmmakers/television producers now working in the dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic genres are doing so because it's a lucrative marketing niche. :(

>56 lansingsexton:. While I think that you may be correct that iansales and I both disapprove of slavery and sexual exploitation, there is also a question of "relative harm." You see, when charges of "racism" are leveled against someone who speaks the truth about culturally ingrained discrimination and violence against women, it evokes a hierarchy of evils in which women almost invariably take second place. As Yoko Ono so aptly observed, "Women are the niggers of the world."

One point of The Windup Girl was that even genetically modified humans who are engineered to be sex slaves would want to be free from abuse and from ownership. The general theme of the particular dystopia was an examination of a culture in which the advance of technology had outpaced any evolution in morality, ethics and human rights. Not so different from where we are now in many places in the world. Like those who voted to give it various awards, I liked The Windup Girl and appreciated the questions raised by it.

>58 vwinsloe: That doesn't sound like the book I'm reading. Admittedly I haven't finished it yet, but one message of the book so far seems to be that slavery is ok as long as it's socially acceptable. It's not until Emiko is thrown away by her owner, and finds herself living in a world of constant fear and abuse that she becomes unhappy. And even in a foreign country that's totally corrupt and violent, where every social and ethnic group hate each other with a fanatical passion, and everyone hates her kind most of all, she still doesn't consider running away until it is suggested to her by one of her abusers. And even then she goes and asks her new owner and prime abuser for permission to go.
In fact even in the worst abusive situations its not the ownership or the actual abuse that she is unhappy about, she just doesn't seem to like people looking down on her and laughing at her.
A good slave is a happy slave.

>59 JP000:. You will see the same phenomenon perhaps to a lesser degree among enslaved women and children (and battered spouses, kidnap victims, women in fundamentalist religions, etc.) People in those situations need to have their consciousness raised before they understand their worth and that their ill treatment is not deserved.

In The Windup Girl, Emiko is not only culturally conditioned, but she is genetically modified to be the perfect sex toy. Even then, once her consciousness is raised, she longs for self determination.

I don't think that any of the ills in the book, whether it be sex slavery, child labor, ethnic hate, corruption, etc. are extolled as virtues or even "okay as long as it is socially acceptable." I think that the book is saying exactly the opposite. I believe that Bacigalupi is showing that advances in technology do not cure social ills; to the contrary, technology may exacerbate them.

>60 vwinsloe: The book comes across more as an exercise in cramming as much nastiness and depravity into a book as possible. As far as I've read there is still no real story or even any new ideas in the book, it's just one offensive stereotype after another. The Thai's hate the money grubbing Chinese, the Chinese hate the lazy Thai's, The westerners distrust the sneaky Chinese, The Chinese hate the evil westerners, everyone hates the windups, but everyone wants to have sex with one, etc etc etc.
It's written to be offensive not informative. I don't see how it could be considered any more valid as a moral tale than the average slasher film could be considered a moral tale.

Anyway this is becoming a matter of opinion and somehow I doubt we will end up agreeing.

>61 JP000:. But all of that nastiness and depravity exists NOW. And it IS offensive for those who are aware of it and willing to acknowledge it.

In 2010, The Windup Girl won the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. In 2012 The Windup Girl won a Seiun award for "Best Translated Long Fiction" at the Japanese Science Fiction Convention. The German translation won the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis award in 2012.

Don't you think that you might possibly be missing something?

Writing a novel which is a commentary on a topic is one thing; using those same topics as tropes or world-building is another thing all together. The Windup Girl relies on racist stereotypes, it exoticises its setting... and I don't see that using a genetically-engineered "legal" sex slave as a character is a good way to comment on the inhumanity of sex slavery or demonstrate that those caught up in it are human - in fact, it's an own goal in that respect.

And no, I don't understand why the book won so many awards. Bad books often win awards, but its success was baffling.

>63 iansales:. It may have been baffling to you; it was not at all baffling to me. The Windup Girl extrapolates the contemporary into the future as SF often does. It is not "commentary on a topic," it is fiction that explores issues by teasing them out and perhaps exaggerating them in order to highlight them for examination. I disliked very much what the book portrayed. I believe that was the author's intent, and I appreciated that intent, and many others did as well. Obviously, you did not.

>62 vwinsloe: Ha, just because the book won a lot of awards doesn't mean that anyone who dislikes the book must not understand it. In fact that sort of thinking could just possibly go a long way to explaining why some books win awards they probably shouldn't.

#64 The author's intent is irrelevant - without telepathy, you've no idea what it was, and it has nothing to do with reader response. You can only judge a book on what's between the covers.

>65 JP000: & >66 iansales:. Do you really believe that in 2010 a book that is as racist and terrible as you believe it is, should not only not be widely condemned but in fact win multiple international awards? Really?

Why are you the only ones who noticed this? Are you Thai? Are you women? What gives you your special insight?

I am more than willing to accept the fact that you didn't like the book. But please, don't ask me to believe that the author and all of his fans and positive reviewers were unaware of the content of his book or that they thought racism and sex slavery was a good thing.

I don't think think that the author's intent was so difficult to discern--in fact, one comment that was oft repeated in reviews was that the book highlighted the negative influence of the western world on developing Southeast Asia.

Sometimes I do look outside the covers of a book to see what others, and the author him/herself, may have to say about it. I frequently do this when I find myself on the other side of the prevailing opinions about a book, but I do it at other times as well in order to enhance my enjoyment and understanding of a difficult book. I don't assume that my view is correct and that the world is wrong. That's not to say that I usually change my feelings about a book after I have researched it, I won't suddenly like something that I did not like when I read it, but often I can better appreciate the work and understand why others may have liked it so much when I did not.

Here is a link to an interview with Bacigalupi that might enhance your appreciation.

http://www.raintaxi.com/the-author-with-the-unpronounceable-name-an-interview-wi...

I particularly like what he says about his theme of genetic modification being driven by profit and control rather than altruistic purposes. He also speaks to the anti-westerner message of the book. But in any event, I don't believe that anyone can read this interview and still believe that the author is some sort of an ignorant sexist bigot.

>67 vwinsloe: You seem very passionate about this book. My initial complaint was that it was boring.
I'm sorry that you have such a problem with the fact that not everyone agrees with the consensus, but there really isn't much I can do about that. I still find it somewhat boring and full of racism and nastiness, and I seriously doubt that many of the people who voted for it would disagree with me on the last two points. I don't think it is something nobody has noticed before as you seem to be saying.
And I am sorry to disagree with you again, but the whole idea that the west is a negative influence on developing south east Asia is just dumb, self righteous, and more than a little racist in itself.
I truly think this book is nothing short of insulting to every group it touches on, and the fact that this is not the commonly held view is completely irrelevant.

Edit - I just read the link you added to your post, and wish I hadn't, there were some spoilers in there.
There is nothing new in it though.

>68 JP000: "You seem very passionate about this book. My initial complaint was that it was boring."

I do have some interest in the issues of Big Agriculture, the environment, slavery, and women's rights in the developing world. That is undoubtedly why the themes in The Windup Girl resonated with me.

I don't believe that everyone has to agree with me or agree with the consensus. You are certainly entitled to your own tastes and opinions, informed or not. But no one has proclaimed any one of us the final arbiter on what is good, bad, or, for that matter, racist. I find such pronouncements often to be self-righteous and pretentious.

Well I guess I was wrong. We did end up agreeing in the end.

>56 lansingsexton:

Nice post.

they weren't telling me anything about the depths of human degradation that I didn't already know, and they seemed to wallow in it with an almost joyous enthusiasm.

I started reading The wind-up girl and tossed it not many pages in with precisely this impression.

I'm reading Farthing for an online book club. It's alternate history set in 1949 in a Britain that took Rudolf Hess up on his offer and made peace with Germany in 1941. It is basically a country house mystery, with an oddly large number of characters who are secretly gay or bisexual, although it seems to be an open secret in most cases.

I was in the library and WOOL jumped into my hands as I walked by a display. Howey, the author, lived in my area when he started the series. I see now he lives in Florida {USA} where there are no state taxes! I found the book a real page turner & will probably read the rest of the series. I enjoyed his technical explanations grounded in his skill set picked up while working/living on ships. I had not expected to find the novel so compelling.

I am surprised at the apparent {or perhaps cajoled} vituperative opinions on The Windup Girl . I will watch Bladerunner again in spite of similar characters. Authors will engage readers by pulling at emotions, the readers can make the decision on whether it is exploitative, documentary, or didactic in some manner.

Finished What Lot's Wife Saw - it didn't make my Hugo ballot. Then read The Demons at Rainbow Bridge because at some point I bought a load of Chalker's novels for reasons that escape me and I may as well try them before getting rid of them. This one is crap, so I'll not bother with the rest of the trilogy. Then read Ark Baby, which is a lot of fun. I really must read more Liz Jensen...

Just started Abaddon's Gate.

I finished Farthing an alternate history that read more like a cosy mystery than sf. I'm now re-reading Matter for the sfbrp's Culture readalong. I decided to borrow the audiobook from the library, and I'm finding it drags a whole lot less than when I read the paperback. I'm also reading The Acceptance World (not sf) for a year long re-read of A Dance to the Music of Time.

I've just finished The Machine by James Smythe. Now starting Descent by Ken MacLeod.

Finished Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park, one of my favourite writers. I'd expected it to be meta-fantasy but it's actually meta-sf.

Finished Camouflage and about to start Last Call...

Finished The Night Watch, about to start Hull Zero Three

I was baffled as to why Hull Zero Three made the Clarke shortlist a couple of years ago.

Finished From Hell. My review is here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3QE8LCIK5FUMW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Current reading: taking a trip into non-fiction land with 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide. I admit it - the cover sucked me in:



Pretty entertaining stuff so far. :)

I continue my my dabbling in gaming fiction with the Travelller novel Shadow of the Storm.

I am reading Fire with Fire. I do not understand why anyone would think it worthy of a nebula yet it has been nominated.

A 100 years in the future. Man has reached the stars. and our heros lose their map when it blows out of the car window.

Dialog is often clunky, “Negative, Quarrel. I’ll have to come closer to see the heat from the fuse. Not getting the UV phased-spectrum signal from your beacon at all.”

The only people whose behaviour seems resemble anything I would expect are the women. They all act like a female in an early 70s Bond flick.
I have seen it described as good, old fashioned, SF. I think that is one adjective too many.

>84 SimonW11:

What a shame. Still I wasn't really expecting anything and wasn't planning on reading it. Typical Baen fare by a relatively new author. Presumably chosen to be on the Nebula nominees so as to toss a bone to the more reactionary members of the SFWA.

#84 Jack McDevitt's Starhawk must have been really bad, if that's what they picked as an alternative.

It used to be that the nebula was the award that pushed the edge. goodness knows I am not someone who values fine writing above story but I would have sent it back with a list of things to change. because stories hve to be plausible.

>87 SimonW11:

Hmm I think that might be rose-tinted glasses. There have been duffers on the nomination list for quite some time. McDevitt has been remarked upon in previous years, but there are others. There have been books that have pushed the edge, and we have some of them this year too, and some of them have even won. However too often there seems to be books reach this stage which are not doing anything new or anything exceptionally well.

nods,, When i was kid it was a golden age.

The book is not extraordinarily bad It is just that it is so... so, pulp!

I picked up Star Wars Heir to the Empire volume one by Timothy Zahn in paperback at the library discard sale for $.25. I thought I would learn a little more trivia and be able to understand the buzz about the upcoming new SW movies.

I am about half way through and I must be getting near the rumored Princess Leia, Chewbacca tryst. The Princess has Chewbacca as her guard while she is in hiding on the Wookie's home planet Kashyyyk. I wonder if Chewy engineered that or if was really happenstance? ;-)

Evidence of the tryst at this link {courtesy brightcopy}
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0vs9gYydo

Candid photo!

>81 iansales: Have to agree. I'm guessing Bear was channeling American SF of the 1960's when he wrote this, but the average stuff, not the classics.

Finished Hull Zero Three, starting Crossroads of Time.

I always thought the movie Pandorum and Hull Zero Three were similar. They both seem to be a nightmare come alive... with the movie edging out Zero Three for best liked.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/130750#3230015

I'm in the Liaden universe, reading the books in the Korval's game omnibus.

I have read the Windup Girl and find the whole idea of it fascinating. Love to know if you find its predictions plausible. Anyway its a good story, though for some reason, can't remember why, I never finished it.

Obviously Bacigalupi (Windup Girl) was in the mood for a disaster book which was unendingly depressing. Most probably that's why I did not finish it, but I did read the last few pages and extrapolated what happened. Its about degeneration - whether addictions, devastating miscalculations with genes/godlike powers, the inhumanity of man/woman to man/woman, corruption,etc. Of course, that includes slavery and sexual depravity, moral (& physical?) corruption. I hope Bacigalupi sees some hope for the human race.

I realize everyone finished discussing the book by the time I popped in, but I thought I'd put my 2 cents in anyway.

For those who want to read an interesting discussion with SPOILERS, go to:
http://io9.com/5478366/io9-book-club-meeting-paolo-bacigalupis-windup-girl/all

EMiko/Windup Girl - Actually Emiko was built to need permission. Her designers included that little item to psychically hamstring her. She wanted to get away from that aspect and really the only way to do it was to remove herself from all humankind, which was what she craved.

After reading folks talk about Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky, I picked it up and just read the first few pages. It does grab you right away and the idea of human's studying alien's refuse and not having the least idea of how it works is like being present at some archaelogical dig, but with the grave diggers ever present. I was looking for something different than dystopias, space operas, and the other usual scifi stuff. I guess I found it.

Also started reading The Departure by Neal Asher and watching The 100 on TV. Both deal with the potential demise of mankind, and maybe ending only with a whimper. At least that's how it looks at the beginning.

>96 triciareads55:. Bacigalupi's future southeast asia was not an orderly, clean, sanitary, quiet and pleasant dystopia. The awfulness is right out there where you can see, hear and smell it; it is not a "first world" dystopia in which the characters agonize about their freedom of speech or some other esoteric deprivation. You understood the Emiko character in the same way that I did. Let's face it, in a technological world where people spend billions on internet porn, what is the first thing that they are going to do with advanced tech? Cure disease? No way. Genetically engineered sex slaves? Yeah, baby. I identified with Emiko in that sometimes I would like to remove myself from all humankind as well.

The Martian and Ancillary Justice were both good reads, and now I'm reading Our Friends from Frolix 8.

Read Shift, the sequel to Wool, and it continues with an engaging plot and story line but I need a break .....the novels are 400 pages plus. Wool the "tightest" act so far, the serialization publication of the novels are more apparent in Shift with the chapters being not as cohesive.

Currently reading Nexus by Ramez Naam.

#101 Wool the tightest? Dear me. I thought it incredibly flabby.

I've taken a break from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to do some research for my next novella - The Astronaut Wives Club.

#103 Ian, You might already be aware of but in the Science section of LT there was a recent post of 1960's space memorabilia being on sale. A linked article mentioned that, unbelievably, life insurance was not provided by NASA for the astronauts at that time. Hence, there were cameras etc. quasi legally kept after activities on the moon and sold to collectors. Not one of the prouder moments for NASA especially considering the early deaths.

#104 Since they were only given 50:50 odds of surviving, I'm not surprised no one would insure them. After all, it's the business of insurance companies to make money, not do anything, you know, that might be considered humane. (Yes, I've recently made a claim on my pet insurance after paying several years of premiums, and the bastards have paid me back less than half of the vet's costs.)

>103 iansales: I felt Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrellwas dragging quite a bit in the middle. Fortunately, I did like the ending.

>103 iansales:, >106 zjakkelien:
My sentiments concerning Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell mirror those of Jo Walton, all quite positive!

Edited for adding link.

Just finished my coffee time re-read of Consider Phlebas - review here:

http://www.librarything.com/work/18595/reviews/25394575

Now on to The Player of Games....

>104 DugsBooks:

I wonder if it's because almost all early astronauts were military and would have had those benefits anyway?

#109 Amy.....A quote from the article

"The tragedy also cast a pall on the astronauts participating the program. At the time, NASA and the U.S. military provided astronauts with no life insurance. The incident, in part, drove many astronauts to look to ways to monetize their missions via souvenirs and commemoratives. Astronauts typically looked to create trust funds for their children and loved ones lest they perish as the Apollo 1 crew did."
Probably would want to fact check that stuff just to be sure.

& link to article See more at: http://www.dailytech.com/Camera+Used+by+Astronauts+on+Moon+Pulls+940+Gs+at+Aucti...

Finished the Blue Ant series of William Gibson and liked the last in the series - Zero History - the best.

Now moved on to Terminal World which is so far not living up to what I expect of Alastair Reynolds.

> 110: It may well be similar to the situation in the UK, where employees of the state are not covered by insurance because their employer is the Crown, and you can neither make nor enforce a contract with the Crown because the Crown is not subject to enforcement action. Equally, the Crown does not need to seek indemnity because its resources are, theoretically and to all intents and purposes, limitless.

According to The Astronaut Wives Club, Life Magazine provided life insurance for the astronauts (at least for the Mercury Seven).

Finished The Crossroads of Time, beginning Here Be Demons

>110 DugsBooks:

Wow, that's awful! Thanks for the info.

Reading The Martian by Andy Weir right now. Really enjoying it so far.

Finished Korval's game so can now pick up Theo's story in Fledgling.

Now I'm starting Fool's war, about which I've heard good things.

Hello, I am a newbie. I'm reading The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. I've read them both before - Makers by Doctorow and Rule 34 by Stross so I have high hopes.

Finished Abaddon's Gate. Good book. Probably the best in the series. Just started the first installment of Wool and is very good so far.

Finished Cain my first, but not last, Saramago.

Reading The Martian at the moment. It's riveting so far - a really great read.

Thinking about Ancillary Justice next.

>117 EnidaV:

Welcome! Nice to see you are over here as well as in the Comics group. I have a feeling we are going to have a lot to talk about. :)