July 2010 Reading

Looks like I'm first up. Just finished Deathwish (A), which feels like a culminating point in Thurman's tale of the Brothers Leandros.

I've just finished Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey, which was very entertaining. Now I'm reading Kraken.

I'm in the middle of Altered Carbon which reminds me a lot of the movie Chinatown. Noir mystery melded with sci fi. Interesting!

ETA: caffeine deficiency spelling error

3> Noir and SF (and fantasy for the matter) have a long tradition. If you like the form, and haven't read When Gravity Fails, check it out.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein is next for me.

Next up The Moon is Hell by John W Campbell, which is a space race story in the form of a journal.

>4 ChrisRiesbeck: I had that book but never got round to reading it because its part of a trilogy and I couldnt find the 2 follow ups at the time.

The Science Fiction Book Club has all three in The Audran Sequence and you can also find copies online. It does not include the short story collection Budayeen Nights. I definitely enjoyed When Gravity Fails a few weeks ago, but, unlike Ian Sales, I interleave series, so it'll be a few more books before I get to the second novel.

I wouldn't call it a trilogy though. The first book is very much complete in itself.

>8 ChrisRiesbeck:
hmmm actually it doesnt sound my cup of tea anyway:

Marid Audran walks down some seriously mean streets in this engrossing well-told novel of an Islamic post-Western future.

Hmmmm

Just started Jay Lake's Escapement.

9> It may not be. It's not hard-boiled lite, where the main character is a loner and talks tough. I put The Dresden Files in that category. That stuff can be fun but is basically like watching a typical American TV adventure series. When Gravity Fails is in the hard-core hard-boiled camp, where the focus is not on the characters strengths, but their weaknesses, in the face of societal and political powers almost Lovecraftian in their potency and indifference to average humans.

But it *is* SF too. There are things that happen that require the SFnal devices.

I'm 100 pages into King's Dragon by Kate Elliott, and a 16-year-old girl has been sold into slavery and a 16-year-old has gone to work at the count's castle mucking out the stables. Does this book get any better? It's about 700 pages long and I don't know if I can be arsed to wade through it all.

ETA: fixed touchstone

>13 iansales:

My general advice is cut and run as reading time is too precious to waste on something you are not enjoying. OTOH if you have read lots of good stuff from the author previously then maybe plough on...Kate Elliot is a unknown quantity to me.

>13 iansales:

That Touchstone certainly didn't work. Or did you choose the wrong alternative? Ah, yes, you did. You accepted the default option, which was wrong. I'll correct it here: King's Dragon.

Hmm, looking at the reviews:

"an epic and sprawling series"
"this book is all description"
"This book brought me back to my fantasy roots"
"It was perhaps surprisingly straightforward compared to other epic fantasies I've read."

It gets good ratings, but these snippets from reviews definitely put me off. And seven volumes? Ouch. LITS.

Not sure what SF I will read this month.

I'm re-reading The Puppet Masters by Heinlein on impulse. Still a good story, but a lot pulpier than I remember. The "dirty old man" side of Heinlein is also starting to show.

Well, I'm aiming to get through another Samuel R. Delany book or two... really want to crack on with the Neveryon series (up to Flight from Neveryon) but also have Nova and Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand in my to read pile. There will also, undoubtably, be another book for my book club and The Fuller Memorandum when it arrives.

ETA: Oh, and I'm halfway through Lord of Light right now 8-)

That's my sort-of-plan... will certainly be messed up by some other must-read throwing everything into disarray.

Alex
x x

I have read Boneshaker so far which I didn't enjoy as much as I expected to. I just got most of Mieville's work so I'll probably read those next

I've just started The God Engines by John Scalzi.

Finished Galileo's Dream. I thought the first third was pretty slow and though it did pick up after that, it still wasn't a page turner. It probably took me a week longer to read it than I would have expected based on the size of the book. (I also lost a week to work, but that's another story.)

This was my first Kim Stanley Robinson novel, I never read his Mars trilogy. For those of you who have read all four books, how does Galileo compare? I'm asking so I know how likely I am to love the Mars trilogy.

Thanks, in advance. :-)

I'm going to be reading Wanderlust

Gave up on King's Dragon and picked up The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe instead. Much much better.

Just finished reading some Heinlein Juveniles:

Farmer in the Sky
The Rolling Stones
Between Planets
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

Before that I read:

Lunar Descent by Allen Steele

Now I'm reading:

The Third Industrial Revolution by G. Harry Stine

Tomorrow, I'll be reading:

Cities in Space Edited by Pournelle and Carr (Endless Frontier III)

I keep thinking about reading Michael Flynns Firestar quartet.

And Thankfully we just booked a vacation for 10 days on the beach, more books here I come.

I just finished The Time Machine

#17: A friend of mine is reading the galleys of a new Heinlein biography; let's just say that Heinlein sounds like he was a dirty young man too.

#19: I also found it less enthralling than I thought it would be; there were better potential Hugo nominees out there. Not that I begrudge Priestly her good luck.

Just finished up Diving into the Wreck, which is a very spare space adventure; think Shadow Divers meets classic space opera, with a strong dash of modern political paranoia. I'll give it a strong 'B' but I hope that Rusch develops the world some more. Then again, maybe I'm missing out by not having read her other series of space fiction.

>21 pjfarm:

I have not read Galileo's Dream as it is not out in paperback yet, but I have read all of KSR's novels prior to GD. I would rate none below 3 stars. I would highly rate his Mars trilogy as well as his California and Washington trilogies. However some do find KSR less than wonderful...

Well I gave up with The Moon is Hell, a book I can definitely not recommend unless you like reading other people diaries-and boring diaries at that! There are no chapters just diary entries along the lines of "May 1st, food running low, but 5 extra power cells made, an increase over yesterdays output..." and thats how it is all the way through, with no dialogue at all, and although its only 128 pages I got to page 66, where theres a break in the book (The Struggle for Food) I cpouldnt be bothered to go on any further. Life's too short for dull books when I have hundreds on my shelf all waiting to be read!
So today I picked up Hothouse by Aldiss for a re-read-I last read it years ago but last year it got reissued by Penguin at Waterstones so I had to buy a copy!

Finished up Old Man's War and started In Other Worlds.

I gave up on Kraken, and am now reading The Sorcerer's House by Gene Wolfe. I am enjoying it so far.

> 30: Well, that sounds like hell to me!

Finished The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, DG Compton. The more Compton I read, the more I like his stuff. Think I'll buy some more. Also read Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates - that's for an Interzone review. And given that I know about half of the contributors, I'm wondering how many friends I'll have left afterward... Next up is Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael G Coney. And then I'll probably get started on the first part of my Summer Reading Project with a reread of Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love.

> 34: I read everything by Compton that DAW released back in the day when DAW was *the* source in the USA for both Compton and Coney, not to mention Tubb, Moorcock, Stableford, Bayley, Brunner, Watson, Wallace ... and Americans like Vance, Norton, Dick, Barrett, ...

Then after #700, basically nothing of interest to me appeared, and it's stayed that way ever since. Odd.

Some of those Brit sf authors weren't even getting published in the UK. I don't think the Dumarest books made it into a UK imprint until five or so years after the DAW originals...

I read a bunch of Ian Wallace a few years ago - Croyd, The World Asunder, Megalomania, The Sign of the Mute Medusa, Pan Sagittarius - but he was too slapdash and too weird for me.

Started Foundation's Edge by Asimov last week. Hope i'll be done with Foundation by the end of the month.

Any Stapledon fans out there? Just finished Sirius a brilliantly realized portrait of a dog with a brain scientifically enhanced to human levels. I'd read Odd John as a teen and it became one of my favorite books...however, Stapledon's Last Men books I found horrendous. Go for the first two if you've never tried him. You won't be disappointed.

Both Sirius and Odd John will be published in the UK this year in the relaunched SF Masterwork series, and I certainly plan to pick up copies when they appear.

38> Hmm, based on your experience, perhaps I should give Stapledon another try. I have a copy of Last and First Men and Star Maker: Two Science Fiction Novels but just could not get into the first title. Maybe I'll give Star Maker or one of those other titles a shot. I often like older sf (really enjoyed a collection of Cordwainer Smith stories), so I don't think that's the issue. Last and First Men was one of the few books I actually stopped reading after a few chapters.

BTW, your Sirius and Odd John touchstones go to the wrong books.

I'm about to start The Unincorporated War.

#40

Both of those are not easy to get into. They are way different in style to Odd John and Sirius.

Finished Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G Coney. Pretty good - excellent world-building, well-plotted, but protagonist Drove is a bit of a prat. Now reading Veteran by Gavin Smith, for review on SFF Chronicles.

This month, I have been mostly reading ...

Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett (still)
The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett (he really wasn't that good in the early days, was he?)
Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak (poor, in so many ways)
The Dancing Men by Duncan Kyle (non-Science Fiction thriller - just started)

(I thought touchstones were supposed to be improved?)

I'm reading Scout's Progress by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller.

Now reading Green Hills of Earth

#46 Read Green Hills as a teen. Recall a story where someone's butt is used to plug a hull breach. Have you read Glory Road? Heinlein at his most outrageous.
#42 Could have been by two different authors!

Finished Year's Best SF 25 and moving onto Year's Best SF 21.

#44 My first Pratchett was Strata, a flat world book I was quite unimpressed with. I deferred reading any Discworld books because I thought they were sequels. Then when I did try DW, I started with the first one, The Colour of Magic, which was also "meh." Another few years lost. Finally I read Small Gods which I loved.

I just finished The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which was recommended by a couple of friends. It's a YA retelling of The Running Man and was surprisingly good. Recommended.

I gave The Unincorporated War eighty pages before deciding that the tone was definitely looking inconsistant with The Unincorporated Man- rather internally inconsistant, too. I like Heinlein, and I like Peter David, but trying to combine their styles in one book does *not* work.

Finished The Godwhale now onto The Life of the World to Come

>49 ChrisRiesbeck:

I'm not alone then! I read The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, and gave up through pun overload. I did rediscover him again later on, and some have been very good indeed, but the start was a bit rocky.

I think I gave up on Pratchett about 9 or 10 books into discworld. Just couldn't be bothered with it.

#47: Yes I just read the Butt used to plug a hole story ;-)

I haven't read Glory Road it is on the list. It's a long list though.

>33 RobertDay:, yes, it is! Luckily Hothouse is like heaven in comparison!

Finished Vacuum Diagrams and now working my way through The Windup Girl. I'm finding I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

I'm reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War series this month. I'm currently reading The Ghost Brigades and have the next 2 sitting waiting to be read.

Last year I bought Child of Earth, the final novel in E.C.Tubb's Dumarest series. I have not read it yet. I had read most of the books in the series in the late 70's and early 80's. There were a few however that I missed and have since picked up, so I'm going to read/re-read the series starting with #19 The Quillian Sector, the first one I missed, and which I am reading now. I'm not expecting the same level of enjoyment from when I was younger, but hope they still pass. They are all short novels and should be easy reads to work in around more modern works.

Finished In Other Worlds and started Implied Spaces. The former was one of the first scifi books I can remember reading. It didn't hold up as well as I'd hoped. The writing style and "science" had me chuckling more than once.

Finished up 2010 and now halfway through American Gods. My second Gaiman book, and I find it very enjoyable despite the many libido-driven narratives which were quite unnecessary.

Reading The Man Who Sold the Moon, at the same time as The Sundered Realm, City in the Glacier and The Destiny Stone

Just finished Dusty's Fort By Steven Field. It's a time travel yarn. Good fun but not sure if the science side is really explored. Anything with a B-17 in it gets my attention - especially if it time travels!!

New review of DG Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe up on my blog here.

I just finished Logan's Run but having first seen the movie when I was about 9, and being a fan, I found the book hard to take. Being written when it was, a few times I thought I was a hippy on a drug trip lol
Just starting Star Trek TNG: A Hard Rain. A few pages in and so far it's like a pulp novel. Hokey but interesting.

Having another blast from the past, with Best SF 7, edited by Edmund Crispin, dating from 1970 (and ignore the dumb touchstone! I'll be posting an entry when I've finished it). Includes some classic shorts, like 'Heresies of the huge god' by Brian Aldiss and 'The doors of his face, the lamps of his mouth' by Roger Zelazny. I rememeber reading the latter story in the mid-1970s, and getting so caught up in it, finding that when I read the words "I got up and made myself a tuna sandwich, with mayonnaise", I had to go and do likewise! A sort of proto-Homer Simpson moment, at about the time Matt Groening was developing his original 'Life in Hell' strips...

What ever happened to Akbar and Jeff? Are they still around, or did Homer, Bart and crew put an end to them?

Just finished Consider Phlebas which I have a lot of mixed feelings about. Moving on to epic fantasy now The Name of the Wind.

I am currently reading The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett. So far pretty good, but I don't find it as interesting as I did Marcher (his other novel).

I've not read Marcher yet, but I did find The Holy Machine strangely old-fashioned.

Just finished The Man Who sold the Moon

#68-#69: I have it filed under books I started but set aside. Life is to short to read boring books.

Just finished Higher Education by Charles Sheffield.

Just starting Starwater Strains by Gene Wolfe.

Just started Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt, one of the earliest and most successful pulp writer's from the Golden Age. I understand it's a reincarnation/time travel fantasy dealing with the narrator and his Viking ancestors...with the Kraken (Release the Kraken!) mixed up in it somewhere. Got to the third chapter...not bad so far.

About to start Tau Zero first time for me and only my second Poul Anderson read

Just started The Reality Dysfunction after spending some time in fantasyland with George R R Martin and his A Song of Ice and Fire series. It will be interesting to see how this series stacks up to Hamilton's Commonwealth series (Pandora's Star, etc.), which I loved.

Finally decided to start Starship Troopers to see what all the fuss was about.

#75 Great writer. If you haven't already, try his classics, Brain Wave and The High Crusade, the latter one of the funniest sci-fi novels out there, but also full of action.
#77 Liked the movie better than the book--bad sign for a Heinlein novel, or anyone's.

(78) Yea Brainwave is the other Anderson book I read.

Just Finished Putting Up Roots by Charles Sheffield.

78> It might be a bad sign for me, but @ 3/4 of the time I prefer the movie to the book.
So I'm not expecting fireworks here.

I've set aside Starwater Strains and picked up By Schism Rent Asunder by David Weber. The Wolfe just wasn't holding my interest so I changed to mindless entertainment to give my brain a rest.

>77 dukeallen:: Tell me if you see it. I didn't.

Finished Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams and started Jennifer Government by Max Barry.

Got that series of Conan books Karl Edward Wagner edited back in the seventies and just finished the first, The Hour of the Dragon and started on the second, as well as on a volume of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Otherwise just finished Alexander Jablokov's first novel Carve the Sky, which I think might just have been one of the few cyberpunkish novels actually to have been following Bruce Sterling's lead from Schismatrix rather than Willaim Gibson's from Neuromancer.

Just finished Billion Dollar Boy by Charles Sheffield

Just started The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I am starting Emperor by Stephen Baxter. Book1 in the Time's Tapestry Alternate History series

Finished The Life of the World to Come. Time for some non-SF -- probably The Last Woman in His Life, randomly selected because it has "life" in the title.

Just finished 9Tail Fox (B-), marginally urban fantasy which works best as the character study of a seedy San Francisco cop who is given the cosmic chance to solve his own murder.

#88

You will need to stick with it. The alt-history isn't too apparent in the first book but the series becomes more and more SF-nal as the series progresses, until you get to Weaver which is an out and out SF book.

21> I found Robinson's Mars & "Science in the Capital" trilogies totally engrossing, as I did The Years of Rice and Salt.

However, I couldn't get far in Galileo's Dream. I liked the historical rendering of Galileo and his times, but found the pettiness of the future humans too implausible (not to mention the time travel).

Finished Jennifer Government by Max Barry and moving on to Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. I quite enjoyed the former. The term "libertarian dystopia" springs to mind. I found it had a lot in common with Market Forces that way.

I'm now reading The Essential Ellison.

I'm just about to start The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.

> 91 andyl,

I don't mind, I like historical fiction too. Though Baxter seems a bit too earnest about it all. Some of the prose is just plain clunky so far.

>92 edgewood: Thanks for the comment. You hit both of the things that bothered me about Galileo's Dream. I'll probably get around to the Mars trilogy at some point.

Continuing on in two series with 2061 and The Resaurant at the End of the Universe.

I finished up Dead Beat (A) this morning.