6/29 Too Like The Lightning, Ada Palmer (hf)
6/18 Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (hf)
6/15 The Obelisk Gate, NK Jemisin (hf, abandoned)
6/14 All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (hf)
6/12 A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers (hf)
6/9 Guardian, Joe Haldeman
5/24 Through Five Administrations (ProjG), William Crook
5/20 In The Merde For Love (P), Clarke
5/16 Swords and Deviltry, Fritz Lieber
5/9 Master & Commander, Patrick O'Brian
4/28 Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale
4/26 Alien Plot, Piers Anthony
4/26 Infinite Dreams, Joe Haldeman
4/22 To The Vanishing Point, Alan Dean Foster
4/17 Victory Conditions, Moon
4/16 Command Decision, Moon
4/13 Engaging the Enemy, Moon
4/11 Marque and Reprisal, Moon
4/8 Trading in Danger, Elizabeth Moon
4/6 A Year in the Merde, Stephen Clarke (p)
4/5 There Is No Darkness, Joe and Jack Haldeman
I've started doing some coding: (P) means physical copy, all others are ebooks. (ProjG) is from Project Gutenberg, and (HF) is Hugo Finalist. I only coded the novels even though I also read all of the novellas, novelettes, short stories, and Campbell nominees.
Like Movies, going from oldest to newest reads.
There Is No Darkness. Love me some Haldeman, and getting both brothers together is all the better. A novel set in a far space-flung future of a school traveling around, educating its student inhabitants. Quite a story, quite a commentary on culture.
A Year in the Merde is yet another Stephen Clarke comic French travelogue romance stories. They're lots of fun, lightweight reading. It's the first in the series about Paul West, a Brit marketing specialist who goes to Paris to consult in establishing a French chain of English tea rooms. It's a fish out of water series that's fun and weird, has a bit of a Pink Panther feel to it.
Elizabeth Moon's Vatta series: Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, Engaging the Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. Elizabeth Moon does an excellent job of writing space war. First off, she's an ex-Marine. She knows military training, procedure, and protocol. The books revolve around the Vatta family and their space shipping empire. Their daughter, Ky, is soon to graduate the space navy academy when a scandal gives her the choice: resign her commission and leave silently, or face a full courts martial an be stripped of her commission and thrown in the brig. She resigns. As she is a rated captain, her father gives her an old beater transport with a fairly simple task: take it on its final trade run then take it to the breakers and sell it for scrap. Buy tickets for the entire crew to come home. Of course, nothing can possibly be that simple. VERY bad things happen, enough to fill five books. I re-read them as Ms. Moon has released the sixth book of the series and I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the story, even though she insists that isn't strictly required. I'm very glad that I did as I had forgotten so much, and it is really an excellent series for the genre. Lots of character growth, lots of interesting space battles. She handles Newtonian motion in zero-G without getting bogged down in details like David Weber does in the Harrington books: some people like that, I tend to gloss over it. Anyway, definitely and enthusiastically recommended. The new book is Cold Welcome, it's book 1 of the Vatta's Peace series. She's on LJ at
http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/ and her web site is at
http://www.elizabethmoon.com/. She has a second space series known as the Serrano Legacy and an interesting magic/fantasy series known as Paksworld. Since I'm now finished with Hugo reading, I really should get ahold of Cold Welcome, though the new Charles Stross Laundry book should be arriving today....
To The Vanishing Point by Alan Dean Foster is one of his that I'd never heard of. An LA family has rented an RV and is driving to Las Vegas for vacation when they pick up a woman by the side of the road in the middle of the dessert. And their life changes forever! [cue ominous music] I've been a big Foster fan for a very long time, though I won't claim to have read everything he's written, nor do I try to, but this one is weird. The woman has one job in the world: to keep reality from unraveling. And now the family, through the act of picking her up, is part of that effort and has to see it through to the end. If they fail, reality falls in to chaos, perhaps forever. To be honest, this was not my cup of tea. It had interesting elements, but I just didn't care much for it.
Infinite Dreams, another Joe Haldeman. In this case, it is a collection of short stories. Lots of good stuff, too many to talk about specifics.
Alien Plot by Piers Anthony is another collection of short stories. I started reading Anthony ages ago: Xanth was a young series, I read the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the Incarnations of Immortality series, the Blue Adept series, and I doubt I'll read anything else by him. I stopped reading him probably when he finished Incarnations of Immortality, I'd long-since stopped reading Xanth by then. And after reading Alien Plot: yeah, I think I'm done with him. My tastes have changed and there are a number of authors whom I really enjoyed when I was young that I just don't care for anymore.
Catch Me If You Can is Frank Abagnale's autobiography. He is an amazing person who evaded the FBI for years and has a Tom Hanks/Leo DiCaprio movie made about him of the same title detailing his exploits. He was an amazing hustler, an expert at acting like an airline pilot to cage free rides around the world, cashing bogus checks to fund his lifestyle. He figured out how to exploit weaknesses in the banking system, including how to make his own checks with magnetic ink to maximize the time it took to detect the forgery. Everything finally crashed down on him in France, where he spent several months in a horrible prison. He was released to be transferred to a Swedish prison for a year where he found out that he was about to be bounced from country to country where he'd committed fraud, unless a Swedish judge revoked his passport, in which case he'd be immediately flown to the USA to stand trial, and they wouldn't extradite him from there. When the plane came in for a landing at La Guardia, he exploited his knowledge of aircraft to go to the bathroom, remove the toilet from the floor, and escape. The service hatch frequently popped open on landing, triggering an idiot light in the cockpit, and it happened often enough that it was ignored. It wasn't looked in to until the plane had taxied to the terminal, at which point Frank had run across the airport and was long gone. I'd read this before and it is an amazing read. He never committed any violent crimes, just fraud. Highly recommended, and it'll probably put a smile on your face. Frank is now consulting to show businesses how to protect themselves against fraud and social engineering as he pretty much created that industry.
Master and Commander is the first book in the sea-faring series by Patrick O'Brian, which I had never touched until now. I quite enjoyed it, and now have a greater than zero understanding of nautical terms. Very good stuff, but I won't be pursuing the series very diligently. My wife has some of the Hornblower books, I might check in to those, and we'll see what my free/cheap ebook newsletters pop up.
Swords and Deviltry is the first Fafhred and the Grey Mouser book by Fritz Lieber. Classic sword and sorcery stuff, I devoured all of them when I was a teen and in my 20s. While it was fun to re-read this book, I have now re-read it and have no desire to re-read any more of them.
In The Merde For Love is the continuing adventures of Paul West in France by Stephen Clarke. Paul is now working on establishing his own tea shop in Paris, and trying to find love. Fun stuff, an interesting perspective of France and Paris.
Through Five Administrations by William Crook is a very unusual book. Crook was a Washington, DC policeman who was part of the protection detail for President Abraham Lincoln, he was not on duty the night that Lincoln was assassinated. This book is a memoir of his work in the White House of his work with Lincoln and the four subsequent administrations and their families. Quite an interesting perspective on the politics of the day, also an interesting alternative take on how English usage has changed over the last 150 years. And it's free online and for ebook readers through Project Gutenberg.
Guardian, another Joe Haldeman, is more fantasy than science fiction except that it deals in alternative universe theories of time/dimension travel. It starts right around the time of the Civil War and revolves around a woman and her son and their life that ultimately leads them to the Alaska Gold Rush. There's no hard, gadget-based, sci fi in this, so I lean towards classing it as fantasy with sci fi concepts. Very interesting stuff with some exploration of Alaskan myths. Haldeman lived there as a kid with his family for several years.
Now we get in to Hugo stuff!
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers is the second volume following A Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet, which I read in late December. I really like Becky Chambers' writing, I find her description of the general environment to be kind of evocative of Firefly and Douglas Adams. This book is loosely a continuation of the first, but only loosely. At the end of the previous book, a mature AI dies and is reset and can't really continue where she's at as it distresses everyone around her. So she's put in to a body that does a remarkable job of simulating a human and goes off to live with a junker/tech who can help her adapt. Every other chapter is back-story of the tech, which is an interesting story device. The whole book is huge amounts of character growth, which I really liked. It's all about the AI re-learning who she is/was and learning to be a better person and the junker reclaiming part of her past. Very fun stuff, and I'm quite looking forward to the next book. The first book was self-published and could have benefited from some editing rigor. This book shows much more polish. I really look forward to seeing what Ms. Chambers comes up with in the future, she's on my Will Buy list.
All The Birds In The Sky by Jane Anders is a mix of science fiction and fantasy. A young girl learns that, in certain circumstances, she can talk to birds and apparently she's a witch. A young boy, who's more or less a tech genius, learns that the girl can provide him an alibi with his parents to make it look like he's being active outdoors. Years past and lots of things happen, including the ecological collapse of the planet. It's a bit of a downer, but very well crafted and quite interesting: I really enjoyed reading this book and it well-deserved the Hugo nod.
The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemison is book 2 in a series and I was not impressed. And I hate to say it, but I abandoned this book. I didn't want to, but she did was I've learned is an increasingly common literary trope: second person writing. You do this, you do that, you look there, you say this. That really put me off. But that wasn't all, it was just the story itself that did it. The story was too dependent on the first book to understand the environment and what was going on. It just wasn't my cup of tea. Regarding second person, when I got to the short stories I was reading one that was published in Uncanny called If You Stay Here You Shall Surely Drown, and it is also written in second person. I didn't mind that. It was more the story than the perspective of the narration that put me off. Besides, a story will be in last place, and if I like other books more, it won't take much to be knocked to the bottom.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee was, excuse the profanity, absolutely fucking amazing. Space war plus Chinese dynastic stuff plus Chinese mysticism. Wow. It wasn't strictly speaking magic, but nigh unto. The empire and its armies/fleets strategies and tactics are based on calendrical cycles and geometry. Sort of the ultimate expression of horoscopes and feng shui. Geometry will determine battle formations, and breaking an enemy's formation can determine victory. Lee does not get bogged down in the numbers, which I appreciate. The core of the story is an officer sent on a special expedition to suppress some calendrical heretics which threaten the stability of the empire. To overcome them, they must resurrect the greatest traitor the empire has ever scene, who is also the greatest general. His consciousness has been preserved even though his body was destroyed. And since she suggested it, she gets to host him. And the heretical rebellion turns out to be much more than it seems. This is the first book of a series or trilogy, I'm not sure which. And it is really, REALLY good. This was a page turner for me, I look forward to reading more of them.
Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer was another WOW book. Palmer is also up for a Campbell award for Best New Author, and I think she stands a solid shot at it. Solid future earth science fiction, but also very different. It's also very hard to describe. It has a feel of Cory Doctorow, in that countries are no more, people can now identify themselves in multiple ways as member of multiple groups. This determines voting blocks and elections for leadership. It's kind of complicated. For example, one group controls all air car routing, another controls everything concerning space travel and anything outside of earth's atmosphere. Another with law enforcement between major clans. There is no longer such a thing as capital punishment. If someone commits murder, or even multiple murders, they're stripped of all affiliations and sentenced to manual labor as a Servitor for anyone who will have them. The people who have them working for them give them food for their labor: if they don't work, they don't eat. It's more complicated than that, but like I said, it's hard to describe and it takes a long time for it to be fully explained in the book. The plot of the book is a theft takes place. Each of the major clans publishes a list of their projection of what the vote results will be in the next leadership election. Very important stuff. The theft is from one of the most respected papers. There's no blackmail, no murder, just stealing a piece of paper. But it sends ripples throughout the world of the ruling elite. And as the book progresses, it turns more and more sordid. Very much looking forward to future books in the series.
Simply put, Too Like The Lightning and Ninefox Gambit are the two best books that I've read this year, and the year's just half over. Absolutely amazing. It makes me kick myself repeatedly that I haven't bought supporting memberships for Worldcon in the past, but I'll definitely get them in the future! Just too much good stuff, and too many authors to look forward to!
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