Our reads in August 2021

Another month,another pile of books. What will you be reading in August?

Dusty's TBR in August
SF/Fantasy reads
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Pirates of Venus ✔
Robert A Heinlein - Green Hills of Earth✔
Margaret Cavendish - The Blazing World ✔
David Lindsay - Voyage to Arcturus✔
Seabury Quinn - The Devil's Bride
Jack Williamson - Legion of Space✔
Garret P Serviss - Second Deluge✔

from other genres
Ovidia Yu - Auntie Lee's Delights ✔
Georgette Heyer - The Quiet Gentleman ✔
Beverly Cleary - Dear Mr Henshaw ✔
Sarah Addison Allen- Lost Lake✔
Margaret Ritter - Caroline,Caroline ✔
Not sure of reading plans this month,as I am practically glued to the TV many hours a day watching the Olympics! lol.I have barely read more than a dozen pages a day since they started

I've just passed the midpoint of A Voyage to Arcturus.
I've still got 2001: A Space Odyssey on my TBR pile from last month, along with Return to the Whorl.

I plan on finishing
A Desolation Called Peace
The Ministry For the Future
Project Hail Mary

Also have
Hummingbird Salamander
The Animals in That Country

After enthusiastic comments on the July thread I've embarked on Velocity Weapon, the first book of the Protectorate Trilogy by Megan O'Keefe.

I'm starting the month with a completion, A Fine and Private Place, which, for me, falls into an awkward spot between being more than a period piece but not quite a classic. This was a choice made by my relaunched book group since Peter Beagle is going to be guest of honor at our local SF convention.

As for the rest of the month the sure choices are The Ministry for the Future and Questland. I have a wealth of other options but the book-hold fairy came through with Piranesi so that might preempt everything else.

Actually, I had a small pile of novels picked out but, in general, most of my "holds" became available at the same time.

I am reading my next Hugo novella, Come Tumbling Down. The Wayward Children books will continue until the morale improves, I suppose.

still reading The Mists of Avalon, Neuromancer, and Ancestral Night.

I'll be working on Eye of the World. After that I have an ER book to get to.

Back in Merovingen with Fever Season - part of my C. J. Cherryh read through that got a bit boggled down last year but now is getting back on track.

finished Neuromancer. started Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders.

Finished Questland yesterday evening and I must admit that Ms. Vaughn's effort at a genre-adjacent adventure felt a little slight; okay so far as it goes.

Very disappointed in Pirates of Venus Carson Napier , very much a weak shadow of John Carter,was quite a dull character. Maybe I'll read the other 4 in the series at long intervals....... Now on to Heinlein's short story collection,Green Hills of Earth

Halfway through Klara and the Sun -- very good, though like much of his stuff, sad. Reads very quickly. I sense another good Ishiguro-book movie at some point.

Finished Mindship, one-third into Sturgeon's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea -- until the touchstone came up, I didn't realize there was another one by Jones.

Have started Robert Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment. It won the Nebula but I have heard mixed things, so we shall see.

I finished reading A Voyage to Arcturus (and posted my review); now I'm back to the Book of the Short Sun with Return to the Whorl.

I enjoyed reading The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish,Duchess of Newcastle who could rightly be acclaimed as a founder of feminist SF. I was enjoying reading a section mocking scientists and philosophers,assuming she was aping Jonathan Swift,so imagine my surprise to find she wrote the book 60 years before Gulliver's Travels satirized politics! She was one of the earliest women in England to write and publish in her own name. Eccentric for sure,but she seems to have been a delightful person.
Have been glued to the Olympics for weeks,so must dig in to catch up with my reading.
>17 paradoxosalpha: I am now reading Voyage to Arcturus and like it a lot.I enjoyed your review a lot too,though I havent the philosophical background to grasp some of it.. It must be my season for philosophy and strange worlds! lol.
I am taking Arcturus slowly,its very dense,but the changing landscapes,travellers and even Maskull's personality switches according to whom he is with are always interesting.It may take a while but it is fascinating.

Enjoyed Invader a lot, now reading Inheritor. I'm also reading a YA SF, Victories greater than death which is fun.

I've finished The Terminal Experiment (utterly wretched, I am baffled that it got the Nebula) and have embarked on Sarah Pinsker's new novel, We Are Satellites.

>18 dustydigger:

Cool that you're reading Voyage to Arcturus too! It is a sort of visionary sf that nobody would or perhaps could write today. I'm wondering if I should pursue any more David Lindsay books; this one is certainly his most read. Sphinx looks pretty good.

I was amused to look at other reviews in LT and elsewhere online and see the various C.S. Lewis fans who had come to Arcturus as an influence on their boy, but were really put out by how outré and morally alien the story is.

Edited to add: The LT-generated recommendations for Arcturus don't seem to be very fitting, which I guess is a sign of how very off the map this one is.

>18 dustydigger: >20 Stevil2001: I've read A Voyage to Arcturus a couple of times and still have no read idea what it's about. I seem to recall that Lewis called it "shattering" and "intolerable", and it clearly influenced him (don't quote me on this, the Lewis collection is downstairs and I'm too lazy to go and get the book), but I don't think he ever says how.

A few more from this (long) weekend from me, all of them enjoyable:
Fever Season, edited by C. J. Cherryh - while the Merovingen Nights books are not the most imaginative setting in the Alliance-Union, I really enjoy the subseries and the world actually gets more interesting than it appeared initially. Cherryh is great at writing aliens; here we are dealing with humans but they had been cut from anyone else for long enough to make them slightly different. And the anthologies format works a lot better than I expected it to.

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt - McDevitt has his own style which can get way too technical and forget about the characters but it seems to work for me and the story itself was interesting enough (plus McGyver in space can be fun).

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler - vampires may be usually fantasy and Locus may have put that on the list of Fantasy novels in its year but it is closer to SF than Fantasy IMO - or somewhere in between.

Reviews for all 3 up in their pages.

Now back to future England with Koli with The Trials of Koli.

Now finished The Amber Spyglass, which I enjoyed. Pullman shelved any literary pretentions and just let rip with a full-on genre novel (even if it isn't certain whether it's sf or fantasy). Lord Asrael is in his Adamant Tower, there are battles between Zeppelins and Gyrocopters, there are tiny people who ride dragonflies (but don't mistake them for anything gentle or cute), there is some solid alien world-building, and all the worlds of the multiverse are in danger. Oh, plus a journey to the land of the dead.

Having a break with an engineering biography, then back to genre with Ack-Ack Macaque.

About half-way through The Ministry for the Future, which I approached with a sense of grim obligation but which I'm enjoying quite a bit.

I read Arslan by M(ary) J(ane) Engh, originally published in 1976 and reprinted by Gollancz in their "SF Masterworks" line. I bought it knowing nothing about the story or the author, except that a blurb revealed that the initials hid, as is not unusual, a woman author. That was actually good to know beforehand because it's just possible that if I thought it might have been written by a man, I would have abandoned it some thirty pages in, after the eponymous warlord Arslan's performance in the occupied school's gym.

A warning to the curious: this is a cruel book, in two ways--it involves sexual violence (not lovingly, graphically, or teasingly described, as male authors are wont to do; but of extreme nature) and on top of it, it completely erases women's agency. This can be hard to take if "reading-while-female" but as we know, women get a training in being dealt with cruelly in books as elsewhere.

What's the most I can say without spoiling it? Well, it's startlingly "now" in regard to the environmental catastrophe ushering in economic and political unrest, and it is a study in fascism. What is more difficult to address, although it might be the most valuable contribution if one could manage to get at it, is what the book has to say about gender. Unfortunately it "speaks" about this through silence so the argument can be easily overlooked or denied.

If you have read the book but not this link, I recommend it:

http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/02/women-writing-sf-arslan-by-mj-engh.ht...

(I have a different take on Engh, though--not to counter Nussbaum's, but simply alternative. But I'm thinking it may be better to discuss it, as a specialised point, in the Feminist SF group.)

Finished a reread of Green Hills of Earth,pleasant but not earth shattering.On the other hand I found Voyage to Arcturus often to be unpleasant,but quite shattering. And I dont have a clue what its about,except maybe its about the meaning of life,with the depressing conclusion that there is no meaning,and life is futile! lol. Difficult but fascinating and original,and amazing for 1920. No wonder it had such an effect on other writers.
Now reading some pulpy stuff - ,Seabury Quinn's The Devil's Bride and Jack Williamson Legion of Space - and am girding up for Zamyatin's We which hugely influenced Orwell's 1984.

Just finished the fourth Murderbot novella, Exit Strategy. Found it somewhat better than books 2 and 3. Almost ready to read the novel, Network Effect!

>27 dustydigger: That's the second reference to We that I've seen in the last hour! Very strange.

>16 Stevil2001: Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment is also on my TBR list though it won’t be this month. So please let us know what you think of it.

This month I am reading Gene Wolfe’s The Citadel of the Autarch. I am enjoying it as much as the first three books in this Book of the New Sun series.

After CotA I plan to read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller which has been on my TBR list for years. Looking forward to finally getting to it after hearing so many good things about it.

>20 Stevil2001: oh! I should have read through the entire list before I posted my initial reply to you. What made TTE wretched for you?

>24 RobertDay: I really enjoyed Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Have you read his 2nd trilogy in the same universe? I haven’t read it yet but my daughter consumed the first two books last year.

>27 dustydigger: In early adolescence I absolutely loved Legion of Space. I wonder what I'd think of it now. I still like Williamson. A longtime favorite is Darker than you Think -- if you haven't read that, Dusty, try it.

Finished The Ministry for the Future yesterday evening. Though it suffers from all the faults that readers accuse Kim Stanley Robinson of he was definitely the man for the job to look at what it will really take to get a handle on runaway climate change.

>31 Neil_Luvs_Books: Terminal Experiment is kind of about two things, and Sawyer has no idea how to put them together. On the one hand, it's about someone who realizes that he can track the soul leaving the body-- this has absolutely no impact on the plot of the novel after about halfway in, it's just a background element. On the other hand, it's about how consciousnesses can be digitized, and this is incredibly cheesy and doesn't make a lot of sense. The book is inconsistent in the way it handles these things; it pays a lot of attention to how the first technology would be received and change society, but the second technology apparently passes without comment! I thought the book really failed in terms of plausible science and plausible worldbuilding in favor of generic thriller stuff.

>32 Neil_Luvs_Books: First two are on the TBR pile!

>33 rshart3: I liked Darker Than You Think a lot. i also read the weaker but still fun SeeTee Ship books. Legion of Space is just pulpy fun. A rookie space legionaire is appalled to find his relatives are about to betray the empire to gain power using a secret source of power. Of course there is a beautiful damsel in distress who has been kidnapped. He and 3 friends imprisoned by the dastardly traitors have just escaped their prison cells and are climbing up an airshaft,and there just happens to be a spaceship nearby to chase the villains. lol.Just relaxing fun,but a nice break from some of the philosophical stuff I've been reading this week! :0)
So far I have checked off the slide rule,cigarettes for all and a computer - not a machine but a person who computes courses for space ships! lol.

>37 dustydigger: Speaking of slide rules and computers, at one point in Sturgeon's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea he describes a desk cluttered with a number of things, including a slide rule and "a portable computer". This was published in 1961, 10 years before the earliest portables by that name that I'm aware of, so I'm wondering what it was. Except for the Seaview, nothing else in the novel was advanced technology Clearly not the human sense of "computer".

Any ideas?

>38 ChrisRiesbeck:

An abacus?

>35 Stevil2001: Thanks for the review. Unfortunate to hear that it doesn’t hold together very well. Guess that book goes down lower on my TBR pile.

>38 ChrisRiesbeck: One of these? (A friend of mine bought one of these from a second-hand store where they thought it was some kind of camera equipment :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta

>41 bnielsen: Fascinating. A nice mantelpiece ornament for today's techno-geek.

I have started (like, I am two pages into it) Jemisin's The City We Became.

I'm about halfway through Piranesi and I'm finding it more interesting than I thought I might; still a bit surprised that it wound up on the Hugo and Dragon shortlists.

>41 bnielsen:
>42 pgmcc:

Never heard of a Curta, that is fabulous and now I covet one.

>45 elenchus: I had a math lecturer at tech college that used to use one. He would challenge students to a computation race with their (new fangled) electronic calculators and always win.

My husband has several Curtas. He used to use them when he was into historic rallying - the time/speed/distance kind. He liked the low-tech approach. I've never bothered to learn how to use them, but they're elegant little machines :)

>45 elenchus:

Have to amend my earlier claim of ignorance, per Wikipedia: The Curta plays a role in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003) as an interesting piece of historic computing machinery as well as a crucial "trade" item.

I've read Pattern Recognition and I should have anticipated Gibson would have included it somewhere in his work. It's the sort of detail I tend to forget with only one encounter, though.

I'll keep my eye out for one, but at $1000 (or more) I'm unlikely to find one I can afford.

>48 elenchus: Yes, I'm sure my friend made quite a bargain! I'm only slightly envious :-)

>49 bnielsen: They are going for around $2-4K online depending on the model.

>50 justifiedsinner: Why would you spend that much on a computer when you could be buying BOOKS? I ask you. :)

>51 karenb: I've heard a rumour about a race of aliens living among us who have the psychic power to buy only as many books as they can actually read. It seems too implausible to be true.

>52 igorken:
That is truly an alien concept. Totally implausible. I’m with you on this.

Just finished Ack-Ack Macaque. It was OK, but it lacked that "sense of wonder" that I started reading sf for. And it won the BSFA Award for best novel in 2013, though it did tie with Ancillary Justice. Which worries me that a significant number of people thought that Ack-Ack Macaque was the best sf novel published that year. Really??

Still, it kept me entertained for a few evenings; I shall read the rest of the trilogy in the near future, though next up is a re-read of Wells' The Sleeper awakes, which i have in a wonderful 1930s cheap edition with battling biplanes on the cover and adverts for nerve tonics in the endpapers.

>52 igorken: >53 pgmcc: Sounds more like fantasy than science fiction to me, alien race or no. Perhaps the inhabitants of Atlantis and Mu had this power, and were therefore punished by the gods?

>54 RobertDay:
I loved The Sleeper Awakes. I made a list of the technologies he predicted that came to fruition. There were some that obviously did not fair so well, such as the man-powered flying machines, and the multi-lane travelators. He obviously did not think of the power consumption and maintenance efforts required to run such a system. The spaghetti junction required at the simplest crossroads would be problematic. Surely he would not expect people to get off one and step onto another, and don't call me Shirley.

I knew Wells was a self-confessed racist, but this book brought out his racist views very clearly.

>56 pgmcc: I'm only about 80 pages in, so there's not too much revealed about the future society yet. There's been one instance of racially dubious terminology that made me raise an eyebrow.

The multi-lane travelators may not have come to fruition in our reality, but they were adopted by later sf writers: Asimov used them in The Caves of Steel, and of course there was Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll. Heinlein did at least consider the role that maintenance would have to play in such a system.

I think I must have read this about 50 years ago, so as far as I'm concerned this is near enough to a new read.

>57 RobertDay: I think I must have read this about 50 years ago, so as far as I'm concerned this is near enough to a new read.

Enjoy that "first time reading" feeling. I recently reread Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker having first read it eleven years ago. While I remembered the overarching story I had forgotten most of the detail and that helped me enjoy the book all over again.

When I read The Sleeper Awakes the Occupy Wall Street protests were going on, and there were lots of protests at the G7 meetings. I was amazed while reading The Sleeper Awakes to see that the protests in the book were about the same things people were protesting about in real world. No matter what changes everything remains the same..

>41 bnielsen: Possibly but most such things were called calculators not computers. By the 1960's computers tended to mean electronic devices, usually room-sized or at least closet-sized, especially to anyone into math and science. "Portable computer" for the military could mean "movable by truck", but in the story, this was sitting on a desk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_portable_computers

Finished Bridge of Birds, nearly done with Star Surgeon -- the juvenile by Nourse, not White.

Reading What Entropy Means To Me, which is rather turgid but thankfully short; and How To Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, Tom Holt writing as K J Parker - wry and amusing as usual.

Finished up Piranesi yesterday evening. Interesting, and I mean that in a good way. If you like your fiction weird and symbolist, you'll probably enjoy it too.

>62 Shrike58: Nicely put. I concur with your analysis.

Finished Star Surgeon and in the middle of The Wonder Effect.

>62 Shrike58:, >63 pgmcc:

I should put my Other Reader's copy of Piranesi on my TBR pile. I've enjoyed the Susanna Clarke books I've read previously.

Thomas Disch's The brave little toaster, 1980, is ridiculously loveable. Five appliances forgotten in an abandoned cottage decide to reunite with their master somewhere in the big city. A Hoover vacuum, a radio/clock, a Tensor lamp, an electric blanket and the toaster figure out a mode of transportation that would take them through the forest into the city. They rig out a chair on caster wheels with a car battery, to be pulled onward by the vacuum.
Adventures ensue, some mild some horrible. Disch gets to tackle gently the unnecessary imposition of binary gender when a couple of squirrels can't get their heads around the appliances all being "it", genderless. And the great theme is definitely not just loyalty but the shame of waste and unbridled consumerism--there's even a direct (but unattributed) quotation from Marx! My favourite Disch read to date. (Others have been: Camp Concentration, The Priest: A Gothic Romance, 334, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World.)

This story was published first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction August 1980.

>66 LolaWalser: I was a big fan of the film as a kid. I am pretty sure I read the 1986 Doubleday edition at some point. I did not know it was originally published in F&SF!

Just read Home by Martha Wells, a Murderbot short story that links the novellas to the novel. Almost caught up!

Now I am starting Seanan McGuire's Spider-Ghost: Dog Days Are Over, one of the finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic.

>67 Stevil2001:

I didn't know there is a film!

Yes, the fact it was published in F&SF is why I decided to include it here...

finished Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear. Meh. Started Citadel by Marko Kloos.

Finished The Book of the Short Sun and thus the entire Solar Cycle. Thinking I might tackle Descent soon.

Garrett P Serviss' Second Deluge was possibly the first natural world catastrophe novel,about when a huge amount of rainfall results from a mysterious cloud of moisture from space which envelopes the earth,so that even Mount Everest is submerged. A brilliant scientist builds himself an Ark and handpicks 1000 worthy people to be the basis of the future once the waters go down. Ignore the very very dodgy science and odd ideas about eugenics,and you have a fast paced rip- roaring adventure very reminiscent of Jules Verne. Garrett does a pretty good job of depicting the devastating events.An enjoyable read
Will have to work hard to complete Legion of Space,and Seabury Quinn's The Devil's Bride as they will be competing with the Paralympics,just as last month it was the Olympics. I never even got near reading half of my TBR :0(

>6 Shrike58: I'm starting the month with a completion, A Fine and Private Place, which, for me, falls into an awkward spot between being more than a period piece but not quite a classic. This was a choice made by my relaunched book group since Peter Beagle is going to be guest of honor at our local SF convention.

Oh I am so jealous! Read that book at a very low time, and it helped me through a rough loss. Have read his other books but this is still my fav

This month our sci fi/fan book was The Goblin Emperor I liked it, but hated all of the names that were spelled in similar ways, and even tho I enjoyed a happy ending, I wanted a few loose threads tied up. And I really wasn't sure it was a fantasy; yeah so it had goblins and elves, it was still your standard young king tries to grow into his role kinda book

Recently finished Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome. It was fine, but unless you can find a copy for $5 or less, it is a horrible ripoff.

>66 LolaWalser: Well, now I know what I will be doing this weekend.

I recognised the title, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of, and recalled either wanting to get a copy or having bought a copy. A quick look at my catalogue informs me I do have a copy. Now, where the Hell is it?

Thank you, @LolaWalser for reminding me of this book.

>71 paradoxosalpha: So what did you think of the entire solar cycle? I just finished The Book of the New Sun. I quite enjoyed the first two volumes, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator. The last two volumes The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch did not draw me in as much. Still enjoyable but not as engrossing. I’m not sure why. I think maybe the first two volumes did a better job of developing relationships among the characters and building the world. The last two volumes seemed more about moving the chess pieces around to get Severian to where he needed to be by the end of the series.

I think…

But I really did enjoy Gene Wolfe’s prose. He has a way with words and phrasing.

Moving on from the original four books, I thought Urth of the New Sun was pretty amazing, and wrapped things up in a way where a further sequel was almost inconceivable. When I started in on The Book of the Long Sun, I thought it was merely "in the universe" of the earlier books, without even a stylistic similarity, but as it continued I saw more and more connections. In the last volume of The Book of the Short Sun (which continued on very directly from the Long Sun) it even got to the point where Severian himself was once more affected by the story, impossible as that might have seemed at the outset.

In many ways, The Book of the Long Sun is the most conventionally-written, linear segment of the whole. The Book of the Short Sun involves even more unreliable narration and non-linear plotting than The Book of the New Sun does. The fungibility of consciousness that uses the alzabo as its premise in the New Sun books is instead premised on divine possession in the Long Sun and on a sort of astral projection or spirit travel in the Short Sun.

I am starting Cemetery Boys, one of the Lodestar finalists.

Just started Hail Mary, the new "fix it with science" story by The Martian author Andy Weir. I heard Weir's Artemis wasn't very good so I skipped it, but early reviews of Hail Mary have been positive, and it is off to a good start.

>79 drmamm: I liked Project Hail Mary and The Martian, didn't care for Artemis much.

I just started 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I picked up recently when I realized I did not own it. The Penguin Galaxy edition has a great foreword about 'speculative fiction' by Neil Gaiman.

>80 Karlstar: I was grateful to ACCs novelisation of Kubrick's brilliant but obscure film,as it gave at least a hint about the meaning of the bewildering last section of the film! lol.We lesser mortals need a visit from a monolith to sharpen our minds to keep up! lol.
Aah,the nostalgia! I was at college at the time,and conveniently the city Central Library was right next to the narrow little side street that hid a cinema,and bored with doing homework, I nipped out and had the experience of a lifetime.

>80 Karlstar: >81 dustydigger: I really enjoyed the novel. Apparently the novel was written contemporaneously with the making of the film. As >81 dustydigger: said, the novel gave more of an idea of what was happening in the film.

Of course the purists will disregard the novel and focus on the short story as the seed for the film. :-)

>81 dustydigger: It's not a novelization. Firstly, ACC and Kubrick co-operated on the film and write the screenplay together, and secondly, ACC wrote the novel in parallel, even though it was finished and published afterwards.

ETA: Ah, now I see that @pgmcc made partly the same point. Sorry!

>82 pgmcc: I did know all that but for brevity's sake I just used the word ''novelisation''. Whatever,it was very helpful ! :0)

>84 dustydigger: "text version", perhaps?

I owned the 2001 book when I was a kid and probably read it four or five times by the time I saw the film, so I was never confused seeing the film. Peter Kramer argues in his monograph on the film that Kubrick saw the film and book as two halves of one text, and so felt free to strip explanations out of the film (an early cut had a lot of voiceover and other exposition IIRC) knowing that people could read the book if they wanted to know what was going on!

(I was, however, confused as to why the photo-inserts from the movie depicted things that didn't happen in the book!)

I did not see the 2001 film until 1978 (taken out of context that clause could hint at my having time-travelling powers.) having read the book several years earlier. The film was being shown in a cinema so I was really looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. I took my girlfriend to it knowing it would be brilliant. While it has it brilliant moments, I found it so slow in places that I was getting bored and worried at having been so enthusiastic about the film. The book had obviously built my expectations of the film to a level not matched on the screen.

Garrett P Serviss' Second Deluge,written in 1911, was possibly the first natural world catastrophe novel,about when a huge amount of rainfall results from a mysterious cloud of moisture from space which envelopes the earth,so that even Mount Everest is submerged. A brilliant scientist builds himself an Ark and handpicks 1000 worthy people to be the basis of the future once the waters go down. Ignore the very very dodgy science and odd ideas about eugenics,and you have a fast paced rip- roaring adventure very reminiscent of Jules Verne. Garrett does a pretty good job of depicting the devastating events.An enjoyable read.
Jack Williamson's Legion of Space (1934) is just THE pulpiest of pulp SF,but moves at a terrific non stop breathless pace from beginning to end.
One character ,supposedly funny,just became annoying very quickly but I learned to skip his paragraphs and for the most part this was quite good fun. :0) I will now read the first book in Williamson's companion series,The Legion of Time

>80 Karlstar: Have you read the book before or is this your first time reading it?

I saw the film as a pre-teen in a theater shortly after it was released, (hard to believe we could go to the movies by ourselves at that age in those days). I remember walking home from the theater feeling both confused and excited all at the same time. About two years later, I got around to reading the book and suddenly, it was like I had the whole world in my hands and only needed to decide what to do with it, (still trying to figure that out ~50 years on ;).

>89 ScoLgo: What a great trip down memory lane! I read 2001 in the early 80s and then dragged my entire family to see the film when it was being re-run in a local art house theatre in Vancouver. I was mesmerized! Needless to say that the rest of my non-SF family had no clue and I spent the drive home that night explaining it all to them from the back seat of our car.

What a great film… but reading the novel first I think helped me appreciate it more fully.

I think I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey about 12 times now. It amazes me how well the special effects look 50-odd years later. And notice Poole and Bowman watching BBC12 on what looks very like an iPad each.

Finished Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders. Sily-ish YA science fiction.

I definitely read it first, and was also excited to see the film. It was a disappointment, but I definitely was blown away by the music and the cinematography. Interesting that the two were made at the same time.

and much older, every time I am getting out of a chair I feel like that Thus Spake Z (can't spell it) should be played in the background.

Needing that Zarathustra boostah?

The Trials of Koli was a good middle book (and the new POVs made it actually less annoying than I was worried it may become). The third one is waiting for me (as soon as I go through some books the library wants back).

And I am slowly working through Butler's novels - Kindred was very good.

>94 paradoxosalpha: >93 cindydavid4:
Zarathustras on full!

>94 paradoxosalpha: hee, yep and thanks - I cant pronounce it let alone spell it !

>81 dustydigger: >82 pgmcc: >87 pgmcc: Ok, time to explain 2001. I saw the flick when first released as described by wiki:
“ The original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70-millimetre Cinerama with six-track sound “
This had three 70mm film cameras ( as opposed to one 35mm standard camera) running simultaneously on a huge curved screen and a killer stereo system. I realized I had read a story with the same plot about mid way through the movie. Most in the audience were speechless at the end and folks still applauded in those days. (Poster from place I saw the movie below)

I saw the flick later on cathode tube mono broadcast tv also video & Netflix and all were like a cartoon version of the real thing. Maybe someone will come up with a streamable version that is acceptable.

I too had an amazing experience in the theater when I first saw 2001, but it wasn't because I was bored with homework or thinking of the book. I was tripping on LSD and practically lifted out of my seat during some of the special effects sequences. I can't imagine what the adjacent audience thought if they noticed me.

For a long time now I've left the "special effects" up to books, film, & music - not pharmaceuticals.

I regret the loss of the 1970s cinemas when each cinema only had one screen, and it was big. Apart from the spectacle of 2001 there are two films I experienced a sense of awe from scenes due to seeing the film on a big screen combined with the music & sound quality. I have not had similar awe at the cinema in a long time because the screens have been smaller. The first will be no surprise. Star Wars, when the Imperial Star Destroyer appeared over my head as it was chasing the rebel craft with Princess Lea aboard. The attack on the Death Star was also fantastic and had me thinking I could feel the g-forces as the X-wing fighters did a 90 degree turn into the canyon. Of course I did not feel the g-forces but my head was spinning.

The other film in which I felt big screen awe which I have not experienced since when watching it on smaller screens, is Jesus Christ Superstar. At the start of the scene with Pontius Pilot we are brought along a canyon with the camera looking up at the canyon walls and the sky, while strong, imperial music is played on horns. I was dizzy looking up at the canyon walls. That was the last film I saw before the cinemas started bringing in smaller screens so they could have more theatres and show more films at the same time.

Something people seldom experience now is the "Intermission" when the film stopped and everyone joined a queue to buy their ice-cream tubs, ice lollipops, and diluted orange drinks from the usherettes standing at the top of each aisle at the front of the the theatre. You knew the intermission was coming because you would see the usherettes with their big trays of goods making their way to the top of the aisles in the dark. Once the intermission started they turned on their tray lights, the house lights came up, and people made a dash to join the queue for the usherettes, or dashed to the toilet. Intermissions are a cultural entity that is probably lost to the world as this stage. :-(

I saw 2001 when it first came out and I was probably 11; my Dad took me as a reward for getting my grades up. I'm pretty sure that I didn't get everything I saw but my mind was suitably expanded!

>80 Karlstar: I had no problem understanding 2001 when it came out. Mode perfect sense to me. Mind you the orange microdot probably helped.

>100 pgmcc: I'm pleased to say that the Proms still has ice-cream available, sold by people with trays, at interval (alongside the rush for the bars). As to the big screens, I've seen a few IMAX showings and the feeling gets old fairly quickly. I still find 2001 startling on a flat-screen TV.

>101 Shrike58: 2001 came out in April or May 1968 depending on where you were. I first saw it about then, in Brisbane. I was about 19. I still think that the opening, with the Moon hanging in space, then the Earth rising behind it and the the sun coming up over the Earth (with Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" booming out of the multi-channel speakers), is the most awe-inspiring 30 seconds or so ever put on film. And I now can't hear Other (unrelated) Strauss's "Blue Danube" without imagining those satellites (which the book tells us are bombs).

>99 rshart3: I did actually wonder if some pharmaceutical enhancement might have helped.

>89 ScoLgo: I must have borrowed it from the library way back when, I'm just correcting the problem that I didn't own a copy! I'm enjoying it quite a bit, I'd be finished if I wasn't working on some other projects right now.

>102 justifiedsinner: I understood the movie too, though I saw it years later. I made my wife sit through it a few years ago and I don't think she appreciated it much.

>100 pgmcc: I had similar sensations when watching the original release of 'Star Wars' on a big(ish) screen when it was released. I'm not convinced that the digital remaster with the remade fx shots quite captures the same sensations of the opening ("Gosh! What a big spaceship! AND SOMETHING'S KNOCKING THE SEVEN SHADES OF SH*T OUT OF IT!" And then I ducked as the star destroyer rumbled overhead, seemingly six inches above my head...), or for that matter the stomach-flipping attack run on the Death Star.

As for "2001": I think I've seen it theatrically some seven or eight times. The two most memorable ones were an outdoors screening at Compton Verney, a Jacobean house just outside Leamington Spa (just as the shuttle was arriving at Clavius, the clouds parted and a full Moon shone down on us, which was spooky); and in 2008, to mark the film's 40th anniversary a print was shown at the Birmingham IMAX - and even when blown up to seven stories high, nearly all the fx shots sill looked stunning. Only one - where the shuttle is approaching the Moon - failed because the limb of the Moon was obviously optically printed into the frame and was very one-dimensional. But for a forty-year old film to stand up to that level of enlargement was remarkable, I don't see too many of our current CGI fests standing up to that sort of treatment in forty years' time.

>88 dustydigger: Legion of Time is even pulpier, if anything.

Finished The Wonder Effect, taking a break with some Georgette Heyer, then Phoenix as part of a very sporadic reading of the Taltos books.

Finished Citadel by Marko Kloos. Really enjoyed it.

Starting Fugitive Telemetry, the most recent Murderbot novella. This will bring me up to date so I can read Network Effect soon.

>75 pgmcc:

You're welcome. As I recall, I disagreed with Disch quite a bit, but he's usually at least interesting.

Re 2001, I was in junior high when that movie came out. All my friends went to see it, as did I. None of us had a clear understanding of what the ending was supposed to mean. Something about rebirth? But none of us really cared. That was one cool movie! Arthur C. Clarke came and spoke at an assembly at our junior high soon thereafter. He took questions. All I remember of the event, beside having a clear picture of Clarke standing on a podium in the middle of the school gym, was during the question and answer period someone asking him how he had liked the finished version of the movie and his response, "Well I wrote the screenplay, so I was happy with the result." He was very friendly and seemed happy to be there

>111 rocketjk: You got to see ACC speak in the flesh! Lucky!

>112 Neil_Luvs_Books: Yes, lucky is correct! I wish I had a better memory of the details of his talk and his answers to our questions, but we are, after all, talking about over 50 years ago! Yes, I'm old.

Finished Hive Monkey: great fun and the occasional surprise. but equally lots that I could see coming a mile off, some unnecessary info-dumping (an AI airship navigator in an alternate 2059 declares "We shall fly to Bath, which is so named for the Roman baths there" - puhlease!) and a terrible tendency for Powell to not only recap events from earlier in the novel, or in the previous novel, but to keep on repeating those recaps!! And it suffers from the Alphaville effect: the story may be set in an alternative 2059, but it feels like the present day. Oh, and the action never strays north of the Thames Valley. But still fun.

Now taking a break from genre again with 1421 (UK editions subtitle it "The year China discovered the world"). After that, I don't know whether to finish off Powell's Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy or go for something else. Trouble is, the "something else" is O-Zone, which I was given on the basis that I'd offer the donor an honest opinion of it.