Our reads in August 2018

Another month,another pile of books!

Dusty's TBR for August
SF/F
Jim Butcher - Brief Cases ✔
Kevin Hearne - Besieged ✔
Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud ✔
N K Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate ✔
Clifford D Simak - Time and Again ✔
Charlie Stross - The Nightmare Stacks ✔
Bryce Walton - Sons of the Ocean Deeps ✔
Lois McMaster Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi ✔
Clifford D Simak - Ring Around the Sun ✔
Andre Norton - Sargasso of Space ✔

from other genres
Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood ✔
Margaret Duffy - Stone Cold Stone Dead
Judith Cutler - Head Count ✔
Andrew Lang - The Yellow Fairy Book
Qiu Xiaolong - Red Mandarin Dress ✔

Finally got Charlie Stross's The Delirium Brief from the library after a long wait. Unfortunately I've been away for 2 weeks and now have only 3 days to get through it!

I quite enjoyed my foray into 21st Century SF with The Windup Girl despite the kind of plot inconsistencies that as a writer you hope the reader won't notice.

Next up I'm re-reading Restoree by Anne McCaffrey. Although I know it's a re-read the only thing I remember about the story is that it's about a woman who is...um...restored.

Still reading Annex (The Violet Wars) by Rich Larson.

Took a break from Amber - still have the final book to read Prince of Chaos
Currently reading Night School by Lee Child - almost caught up to the latest book.

I'm debating whether to read the Amber prequels - I found the first 3 books used but I've heard that the four books are an incomplete story arc...?

Just finished Shadowed Souls, a short story compilation edited by Jim Butcher.

Two thirds of the way through Sword and Citadel by Gene Wolfe. Not a quick read by any stretch, but so very worth reading!

>8 ThomasWatson:, read the New Sun about ten years ago and it's near the top of books I oughta reread someday.

Next in my queue is Blue Mars - which, according to Dusty, is going to give me the blues alright, lol

Just started Jeff Noon's A man of shadows. It's hard to visualize the Dayzone; I keep wondeirng if the images in my head have enough lightbulbs.

Started reading Prince of Chaos last night....

I just finished The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin. That book completed my reading of the Hainish novels and stories as well. The book was a worthy entry in an impressive cycle by Mrs. Le Guin. I enjoyed it about as well as I enjoyed most of her Hainish related work. I'll say that I agree with what seems to be the critical consensus that The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are probably the high points, though many of the stories are also wonderful...particularly Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.

I also recently finished The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. I guess it would probably be better characterized as a horror novel maybe, but anyway, it was a dark but compelling read. I think I am going to be thinking about it for a while.

>4 SFF1928-1973: Restoree was my first McCaffrey readway back in 1970. The heroine was quite unusual as a heroine back then,independent,quick witted and tough. I have reread the book at least 4 times since then,still a favourite comfort read.I love Harlan! lol.
My copy is part of a great omnibus, The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey ,together with Decision at Doona and The Ship Who Sang,both favourite McCaffreys of mine.

>9 Cecrow: lol! You will probably like it,Cecrow,I am in a minority who are underwhelmed.
I recently started 2312,and I am struggling with it,because I dont like the main protagonist and KSR keeps making info dumps which annoy me! lol.
Good luck with Blue.

Almost done with Revenant Gun. I think I like this one the best of the three. I have The Synapse Sequence, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, Elysium Fire and The Calculating Stars in TBR Sci Fi pile. I also have Apollo 8 and The House of Broken Angels as non-scifi reads. I usually get distracted by random books, so I don't know if I will finish all of those this month, especially since I look at what everyone else is reading. I haven't read Decision at Doona yet and I just picked up a copy at the library's used book sale. I may slip that one in.

I've started Crystal dragon, but found the prologue very difficult to get through. Not a compelling start at all.

>13 dustydigger: I wonder if the character Harlan was based on Harlan Ellison? It seems almost too much of a coincidence!

Just finished The Dark Forest and Death's End by Cixin Liu to complete the Three Body Problem trilogy. The first of the series definitely the best followed by the 2cd then last. Death's End had a tendency to drag on IMOHO. I liked Liu's nods to SF authors like one character called upon to be a "Seldon" by going in to hibernation and predicting the evolution of galactic societies, also a rectangular monolith similar to 2001 Space Odyssey enters the picture briefly near the end of the series. There were probably other tributes to Asimov or other SF writers but they did not jump out at as those did.

First book very interesting 2 & 3 a bit of a grind to get through IMOHO

>18 DugsBooks: Given I was unimpressed by the first book, I guess there's no reason to read the other two :-)

>19 iansales: 2&3 more of the same without the novelty of the 1st. I still like to delude myself by imagining that I get an insight into the Chinese "mind set" by reading the novels - got no idea if that is true or not.

>20 DugsBooks: In the first book I really liked the scenes set in the Cultural Revolution but I thought the SF parts were just meh.

Right now I'm re-reading The Stand by Stephen King. Specifically the 1978 edition, since this is the 40th anniversary of its publication and I had not read it in some time. I'd forgotten how much material had been left out of the original book!

>20 DugsBooks: I quite liked The Fat Years,which I suspect gives you a better idea of Chinese sf.

Nothing for me in the first book matched up to the horror of the opening segment...if Liu wrote historical fiction I would gladly read it.

Hi SFF1928-1973, I enjoyed The Windup Girl and have tried to get a couple of other people to read it but they both gave up.
Restoree was a favourite book of mine I first read as a teenager. When I re-read it much later as an adult I thought it had lots of elements of female sexual fantasy that I hadn't seen before. Almost like Jane Eyre transplanted offworld. The central concept of being a "restoree" was just as eerie and powerful as when I first read it though.

>25 vodkafan_bcf: I can kind of understand why it might be a DNF for some people. It's kind of slow to get started and there's a shortage of immediately sympathetic characters. I'm glad I stuck with it because it's a very credible vision of the future which will probably stay with me for a long time.

I had to break off Restoree because my paperback copy was giving me asthma. I'll have to resume in some kind of kindle or ebook format. I never associated Anne McCaffrey with sexual fantasies but her relationships are always handled well. I was almost a McCaffrey completist prior to the 1980s.

giving The Lives of Tao a go...

Just picked up The Vorhh by Brian Catling and looking forward to getting into it. Not sure if it'll make this month's reading but it might just squueze in if I hurry up with The Uncommercial Traveller, a volume of Dickens' non-fiction I'm enjoying immensely.

>28 GuillermoStitch: I've had that one sitting on my shelf for a while, but I've yet to read it. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts once you get into it.

Finished The Long Cosmos, into Crazy Time by Wilhelm.

Finished Simak's Time and Again,which was as ever with Simak enjoyable and thought provoking,redolent with loving descriptions of the Wisconsin setting.I did find there was rather a lot of philosophical musings which slowed down the tale,and it was a little too long,but still a good read,as ever with Simak.
Having a rather dull time of it with KSRs 2312,every ''i'' is heavily dotted,every ''t'' meticulously crossed. In other hands it could be a nice adventure/mystery,but KSR must have a deep ponderous theme,maybe worthy but not scintillating for me! lol
I do like the descriptions of the varied habitats set up by mankind in the solar system,and like the male protagonist,but as usual I dislike KSRs female characters,and the heroine in this book is particularly irritating.
210 pages down (picked up and put down over a fortnight) still 350 l to go........sigh.....

Finished City of Blades (A+) this evening; the climax is deranged, raw, tragic and cathartic. And to think I didn't imagine this novel could be as good as City of Stairs.

>32 Shrike58: Loved the whole series, should have had more recognition.

Reading Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill for a book group. The first 100 pages are like the most tedious Holywood action movie shootout you've ever seen, and the protagonist is written like the world-weary and hardbitten characters so prevalent in those type of movies, so I'm not hopeful.

For assorted reasons this book hit me somewhat harder then it might otherwise have but it's very, very good.

Just finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers after noticing it on an "ebooks available" page at a local library. I believe classified as "space opera" Chambers incorporates several current social issues on sexuality and different cultures into the story which is an ok read {3 of 5 stars?}. I think the science is kind of weak {could just be over my head} with algae in pipes used to power a space ship? - for example.

The background story for the book is probably more interesting and many here are most likely aware of the crowd sourcing , reader feedback, origin.

>32 Shrike58: I saw The City of Stairs at the same site as Angry Planet & might have a look now.

Sons of the Ocean Deepsby Bryce Walton was a rather cute little tale,one of the Winston Classics juvenile SF series of the early 50s.A young man has washed out of space training and halfheartedly goes off to join a deep sea diving expedition intending to go into the Mindinao Trench to set off atomic bombs to ease pressure on the earth's crust. The obligitory bully is there of course and its a difficult coming of age story,where the hero's bravery and principles win the day after alot of suffering.But the extrapolation of man's exploration of the seas in the future is well done and exciting.
I couldnt quite grasp what was slightly askew in the tale till it became clear that the tectonic plates theory hadnt percolated into junior fiction yet,the whole story depended on the idea of the earth's crust being a solid thing,with volcanoes merely vents to ease pressure. Anyway yet another enjoyable entry in the series..

>37 dustydigger: A book from the 1950's would've been quite prophetic to include plate tectonics. That didn't be a real thing, scientifically, until the mid 1960's. Continental drift and such were theorized before then.

I've started A sense of shadow by Kate Wilhelm. Apart from the appeal of the opening (a group of people gathering to low-key celebrate the death of a hated relative), I'm not sure what to expect. At forty or so pages in the book feels like horror more than the SF I was expecting, but we'll see. I hope it gets past its crush on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House soon.

I'm almost halfway through the third Terra Ignota book, The Will to Battle. I loved the first one, but found the second focused too much on the aspects of Palmer's world that didn't interest me. The third one is somewhere between the two, though I find it hard to track the large cast of characters.

>36 DugsBooks: No, you're right, the science is absurd. The sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit, has a particularly bad howler, where we learn a robot can be powered by its own movement!

>39 Petroglyph: Wilhelm wrote a number of mysteries -- maybe that's one of them?

>34 SChant: Terrible book. Totally unconvincing robot characters and technology. No idea how it made the Clarke shortlist.

>36 DugsBooks: The science is crap. In deep space there is insufficient sunlight to keep algae alive. At that distance a sun would be just another star.
I thought the book was pretty derivative and pedestrian too.

Reading Scott Westerfield's Leviathan (for some reason the touchstones aren't working). Interesting alternate-history young-adult novel set in WW1....

Touchstone fairy : Leviathan

Finished Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, which I found occasionally dense but ultimately very prescient over the implications of the wired world and where it could go. I shall take a break from sf withthe last of Patrick Leigh Fermor's accounts of his tramp across pre-war Europe, and then dive into the last of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X novels, Acceptance.

(Hmm, title touchstones not returning any results, so edited to link via authors instead.)

I just started reading Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made. I'm only about 40 pages in but it is intriguing so far. It should be a pretty quick read. I have hit a lot of PKD's highlights over the years, but I am trying to start with his early novels and fill in the gaps now. I read Solar Lottery last month, and I enjoyed it.

Finished Annex (The Violet Wars) by Rich Larson. Meh.

Next up is Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells.

>47 Dr_Flanders: Some of Dick's early work is a bit rough around the edges, but still fun. He really hit his stride with Time Out of Joint.

Finished reading Sword and Citadel by Gene Wolfe this afternoon. This is a story that takes patience and paying attention to details, and is worth it with every page turned. If you enjoy a richly detailed story, you should check out Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel.

And now a quandary. The next three or four books in the queue are likely to be, by comparison, light reads. It might be something like going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I may need to let the spell of this book fade a bit before going on. Whatever I read next, pretty sure I'll pick something shorter.

I have thyroid trouble,and at the moment my stupid body is attacking itself - hands curled up like talons with a painful fully fledged arthritic outbreak,infections in both itching ears so I feel as if I am under water,(so listening to the TV is problematic)hives all over my thighs stomach and chest which are itching like mad,(so hard not to scratch!) and mouth ulcers so I cant eat.Charming But there's always a silver lining,I am lolling around reading like mad! :0)
I had a fun reread of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.The 1964 TV version blew me away,all that scintillating poetry,and I revisit every decade or so,always finding something new.What struck me this time is the love/hate relationship Thomas had with the close claustrophobic way of life in a tiny traditional community.Perhaps he wrote this radio play as a catharsis?
Charlie Stross's The Nightmare Stacks was very enjoyable,funny but with numerous sly jabs at the military and intelligence communities. A rip roaring adventure,but as ever Stross gets bogged down in excessive descriptions of action scenes. A bit editing of the final 100 pages would have improved it. But still a fun read.
All the way through N K Jemison's The Obelisk Gate I was racking my brain ,certain that I felt connections with some other author at least thematically. I try not to read about books and authors till after I have formed my own opinions. It was only on completion that I discovered Jemisin is Afro-American,and then of course the light bulb finally flashed on - Octavia R Butler's Parable series! 20 years apart and from women of very different experiences, but the apocalyptic background and cultural oppression themes are common to both.Jemisin however is much more subtle and multi faceted.Butler just hammered away at her theme without any shading whatsover,so Jemisin is more effective to my mind Both very harrowing though. And Jemisin's world setting is awesome.Will look out for The Stone Sky to finish the series.
This makes 59/66 Hugo winners read.
Now enjoying Jim Butcher's sop to the Harry Dresden fans,Brief Casesshort stories. Fifth year coming up soon Jim,we fans are being so patient waiting for the next Harry Dresden novel,but enough is enough!
I have about 60 pages of Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud left to read. I am not sufficiently mentally acute enough to read KSRs 2312 (well thats my excuse!lol) so I'll put it off for now. I do have some lighter SF that look like fun,such Simak's Ring Around the Sun and Andre Norton's Sargasso of Space,plus some crime fiction.
Hope by next weekend I am improving,but for now I'm off to loll on the couch with the last 80 pages ofAndrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book.those early versions of fairy tales were pretty harsh and gruesome at times!

Finished up Skirmishes (B-) this morning and while it had its moments my overall impression is of a series that has been stretched out too long; not that Rusch was done any favors by the original publisher of the series cutting her loose.

>49 SFF1928-1973: Yeah, I'd agree that Solar Lottery definitely felt rough around the edges, that is a good way to describe it. Though at the same time, it still felt like a Philip K. Dick novel. I mentioned that I had hit the high points with PKD before, meaning that I have read most of the most well known stuff. Specifically Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and my personal favorite so far, Ubik. I also read A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said when I was in high school. I remember enjoying both, but barely remember the novels now. I'll probably reread those as I go.

Finished Brief Cases by Jim Butcher, a short story collection set in the Dresden storyline.

Followed with Starless by Jacqueline Carey, a stand alone fantasy book. I liked it but to me the final third seemed a bit rushed compared to the rest of the book.

Also saw that Doug Grindstaff, the guy responsible for the sound effects in Star Trek, died last month.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/doug-grindstaff-dead-star-trek-sound-effe...

Finished Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells. Still liking the Murderbot.

Just finished a book that was an LTER win. Water & Glass by Abi Curtis was a well-wrought post-apocalyptic tale sort of based on the biblical story of Noah's Ark. Curtis is a published and prize-winning poet but this is her first novel.

Resolved the next read quandary by starting a reread of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm.

Added The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton to my reading rotation.

Having finished a re-read of Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archive I've now started Hannu Rajaniemi's Summerland, which is in a similar vein.

>42 iansales: You were right. I couldn't finish it. The cover is cool, though.

I'm almost done reading Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon.

Finished Crazy Time, about to start The Wailing Asteroid.

Reading the latest Jack Reacher book.... The Midnight Line

Added One of Us by Craig DiLouie to my reading rotation.

I thought Semiosis by Sue Burke was a pretty interesting colonization story. Are we controlling the plants or are they controlling us?

Finished a reread of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm yesterday. I'd forgotten what chilling tale it is. An interesting examination of the needs of the individual vs. the needs of the group or community. And of the danger to be found in conformity. Tightly and beautifully written, as well. Highly recommended, if you haven't already read this one.

Next up, short stories by Neal Asher, The Gabble and Other Stories.

Much more fun was Andre Norton's Sargasso of Space' about a young man going into space on a trading spaceship and finding danger on a mysterious planet. Probably would have been classed as a juvenile or YA book today,but a typical exciting competently written Norton adventure- in- space story,a nice relaxing short Sunday read.
I have started KSRs 2312 and Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky but they are another kettle of fish altogether. I dislike the protagonist in the KSR and as usual the first 100 pages of the Vinge are complicated and demanding. These I think will be pick up and put down for a while reads,spread over a long period. And both are huge.....(sigh)........
Still working my way through Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book and am starting Cherie Priest's Nor Flesh nor Feathers.but my main focus is plodding through Qiu Xiaolong's Red Mandarin Dress a Chinese detective story so offbeat and unlike an English crime story that I feel as if I am on another planet! :0)Interesting,but very slow going. I may have to refresh myself with Charlie Stross's The Delirium Brief,just received from the library and sitting there looking very seductive though I have so much heavy stuff needing my attention! :0)

>66 dustydigger: Interesting comment on the Qiu Xiaolong. It reminds me of when James Clavell's Shogun came out and a lot of the sf fans I knew were reading it and even declaring it to be an sf novel, "because it's about a man adjusting to an alien culture".

>67 RobertDay: EEK! that was a really terrifying book! The man cooked in a pot...(shudder)....But I think Clavell did a brilliant job of explaining that, to us, exotic world,by having a European character new to the culture experiencing and learning on our behalf. Xiaolong makes no attempt to explain the culture,we are just tossed in,sink or swim! I get rather queasy every time food is discussed,such weird (to me) concoctions,not in the least bit like my dear old local takeaway.:0)
Co-incidentally when I was reading The Three Body Problem a little while ago I was reading one of Xiaolong's Inspector Chen novels where the murdered woman had been persecuted during the cultural revolution,and the books were very similar in style and tone when looking at the subject.But the reaction of the character in Liu Cixin's book was very different from the other book,but each shone light on the other.Terrible times......
I was about 20 when Mao's revolution began,and I still remember being stunned by the fanatical crazed behaviour of the young reds on the news..Two years before there had been youth riots and protests across the US and Europe,but it all looked child's play when compared with the Chinese!
Interesting how Chinese authors of both SF and crime are still trying to make sense of that desperate and cruel past. It seems to loom over society very much like the Bomb dominated western fiction for years.

Speaking of things Chinese I finished The Poppy War (A) this evening and came away very impressed...however, not quite as impressed as I was with City of Blades. Despite the awful things happening and the awful choices being made in Kuang's story the climax just isn't as visceral as Bennett's work and it could be that this is because we're barely meeting some of Kuang's characters before they're carried away from us; not to mention that some of the stakes involved in the conflict have not been made clear yet. A further thought on the morning is that I'm so saturated in World War II history that it's hard to surprise me once I got into the rhythm of the story.

Currently reading The Rise of Nine by Pittacus Lore (these are pretty bad YA novels but as I was given the entire series I'm trying to see if the conclusion is worth it)...

>69 Shrike58: I read Bennett's American Elsewhere a couple of months ago and thought it was pretty good. I see Overdrive has The Divine Cities trilogy available so I will likely dig into those soon. Have you read the whole trilogy?

I'm halfway through the third Wayfarers/Galactic Commons book, Record of a Spaceborn Few. Kind of aimless, even moreso than The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I like how every one of these books has a completely nonsensical bit about how some piece of technology is powered; in this one, a spaceship is powered by extracting energy by the movement of wastewater from its pipes. But surely that would be less than whatever energy is expended pushing the water through the pipes! But after the robot powered by its own motion in A Closed and Common Orbit, I'm convinced she's just trolling us now.

re: Becky Chambers et al.

I dunno, I have flexible standards for accuracy in books, even the science bits, partly from reading so many books over time. Then again, I grew up reading both good and bad science (James Blish's spindizzies in Cities of flight, anyone?), and some fantasy is just silly. It helps to figure out which belief(s) to suspend ahead of time.

In one of my book groups, we have designated subject-matter experts to help debunk/verify the physics, the zoology, other biologies, the computer stuff, etc. After many years, it's just part of the discussion.

>73 karenb: Normally this kind of stuff doesn't bother me, but it's so self-evidently nonsensical here it throws me out of the story. I'd rather she just didn't explain where the Exodus fleet's power came from; I wouldn't have thought about it if she hadn't brought it up!

Just finished Frankenstein (1818 ed.). I may have read it many years ago, but don't remember. Much more complex & nuanced than the movies, esp. the depiction of the monster -- who is very articulate and makes a legitimate case for himself. The book deserves its reputation.

>73 karenb: There's made-up science, like FTL, and then there's getting science wrong, like having the Earth spinning the wrong way. One is acceptable, the other isn't.

Dear >76 iansales: I always remember the discussions I had with other SF fans (about 50+ years ago) about how SF gets around "Einsteins Speed of light" limit.
Thus we had Generation ships, Hyper Space, a straight out denial - as in A. E. Van Voght, and I do believe a few allusions to a rather modern idea of sheaths (I will have to look that up)

But if you love SF, what ever the mechanism, is never a problem :-)

>77 guido47: Sometimes I just read an sf story as a western in disguise. (I'm currently reading Insomnia by Stephen King. The book is hard to read because of the large number of extra senses and powers King gives the protagonists. Suddenly everyone can see auras, use mindcontrol, throw light rays, move between astral planes, see angles, ...Yeah, right.)

>71 ScoLgo: The trilogy is consistently good, the world building is excellent and unique in it's cultural mix and the characters compelling. Highly recommended.

>72 Stevil2001: The crap science isn't the only problem with Chamber's books. Her galactic culture seems lifted straight from the bar scene in Star Wars. Totally unoriginal and derivative.

>79 justifiedsinner:. "The crap science isn't the only problem with Chamber's books. Her galactic culture seems lifted straight from the bar scene in Star Wars. Totally unoriginal and derivative."

And yet.... the books are highly enjoyable to large numbers of people.

Isn't a lot of science fiction derivative? One idea builds on another; authors lift each others' ideas all the time.

You don't have to like everything. It's okay. In an alternate universe, it could be perfectly good science!

It was interesting to note that when N K Jemisin's The Stone Sky won the Hugo on 20th August it was the first time ever to have won 3 years back to back.
I have it on order,but am not holding my breath,as it is located in only one library,the central library,one out of 39 branches! :0(

>80 vwinsloe:
I live in New Jersey home to thousands of real Italian restaurants and thousands eat at Olive Garden. Many thousands of people enjoy reading Dan Brown and James Patterson. Donald Trump is President and the UK will soon leave the EU. A lot of people like Becky Chamber's books. Chacun a son gout and Gott hilf uns.

>Have not posted much lately but have been consistently reading. Too many titles to list individually but here are my most recent completions:

- Raising the Stones by Sherri Tepper. 4 stars. Difficult to keep track of things at the start but turned out to be another good read from Tepper.
- Hammerfall by CJ Cherryh - 3 stars (Good book but there was a lot of traveling through sandstorms and setting up and tearing down of tents along the way.
- Forge of Heaven by CJ Cherryh - 4 stars (I enjoyed the sequel quite a bit more than the first book)
- The Colony by Jillian Weise - 4.5 stars. Weird, acerbic. I found the style a bit reminiscent of Palahniuk.

Tonight, I am starting The Secret Ascension by Michael Bishop. I bought my copy direct from the author & he signed the title page with, "I prefer Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas as the title for this book."

(Edit: Title fix)

>79 justifiedsinner: Thanks for the feedback. I will move book #1 up the list. American Elsewhere reminded me somewhat of an area Tim Powers might dabble in. It was playing more with an inter-dimensional conceit as opposed to the secret histories on which Powers likes to elaborate, and it also was not as 'weird' as Powers can get - but the feel of it was familiar to me. I am a huge Tim Powers fan so am always happy to find other authors that ply similar waters so to speak.

>79 justifiedsinner: I read the first Chambers and was unimpressed. Each of the alien races has a single attribute, and each of the characters has a secret back-story that is explored in a chapter. It reads like television writing.

>80 vwinsloe: Yes, a lot of sf is derviative, and rightly derided for it. The good stuff isn't. Jemisisn's award-winning trilogy isn't derivative. I admit I'm baffled by the success of Chambers's books, although I suspect some of that success was due to some very vocal championing by a person who went on to edit a new sf imprint in the UK...

Still in the Liaden Universe, reading Balance of trade.

>85 iansales: I think that A Closed and Common Orbit is better than A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Sometimes lately I have found that I enjoyed the second volume of a trilogy more than the first. For example, The Obelisk Gate and Golden Son. It may be a new paradigm for an author to establish the world and the characters in the first volume and then develop character and/or plot arcs in the next.

Personally, I couldn't imagine what readers saw in Red Rising. Talk about derivative!! And repetitive. And such choppy, uneven writing. But as I look back I see that I rated each book in that trilogy with an additional star.

Sometimes good books only have one or two aspects that are admirable. Great books can have just about 100%. We agree about The Broken Earth, although sadly I know discerning readers who DNF'd the first book!

>83 ScoLgo: You mean Forge of God by David Brin, I assume?

>82 justifiedsinner:, >85 iansales:, >87 vwinsloe: By definition, those of us who are signed up to LT and are participating in this forum take our reading Very Seriously Indeed and long may that continue. Some of us also write. All this means that we have earned the right through practice to be hyper-critical of what we read.

It also means that we have the ability to pick and choose what we want to read and why we want to read it. And we can identify things that are good about a book and at the same time be critical of a range of issues relating to the same book.

Ian has been critical about (for example) Isaac Asimov in recent weeks, and I can understand why. At the same time, I still have some Asimov in my collection and acknowledge that his work at its zenith was typical of the output of the genre at the time. I can still appreciate it on that basis, as long as I a) am selective about what titles I pick up, and b) remain mindful of the period it was written. (And I also like hats.) On this basis, I was able to advise someone recently who had read and enjoyed 'Foundation', recognised some of the things about it that made it a period piece, but was concerned about committing to reading a long series and, crucially, did not know the history of sf magazines, serialisation, the change from short stories to novels as the dominant form of the genre or the fact that Asimov had left 'Foundation' fallow for umpteen years before engaging in an appalling outbreak of profitable hackwork, that they only really needed to commit to the next two books if they wanted to and should really avoid anything else from Asimov much later than 'The Gods Themselves'.

But where I agree with Ian is that the quality of writing in the genre has moved on massively in the past twenty years or so, and so holding up any "Golden Age" sf as exemplars of the genre is doing sf itself no favours whatsoever. That doesn't stop me re-reading some Golden Age stuff and finding myself saying "That was better than I expected". That's my choice and My Mileage Varies. But I would warn anyone else away from doing that unless they had become as steeped in the genre as we are.

>88 RobertDay: Or do you mean The Forge of God by Greg Bear?

>89 seitherin: Doh!

>88 RobertDay: >89 seitherin: Whoops! Good catch! No, not Brin or Bear. Cherryh's sequel to Hammerfall is Forge of Heaven. I fixed it in the earlier post.

(edit: Interestingly, I didn't catch my typo when first entering the comment partly because the touchstone pointed to the correct Cherryh title)

Finished One of Us by Craig DiLouie. Disturbing social commentary.

Possibly...but there are a lot of people who like crew/team-based stories and I can see how this series scratches that itch. On the other hand I have a forced-march non-fiction agenda to go with my fiction reading and have concluded that I'm in no real hurry to get back to Chambers; we'll see if I still care when 2020 rolls around.

Speaking of non-fiction, and considering the issue of how real the science has to be in SF, I just finished Mankind Beyond Earth which deals with issues of life support and is written by a medical doctor who does NASA consulting and who started out his medical career working with USN divers.

Finished The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton. Not bad but not a favorite.

>88 RobertDay: It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of us read outside the genre as well, and to readers who have only read sf... Well, let's just say their quality meters might be slightly skewed :-)

>95 iansales: Indeed. If you want an illustration of this, you only have to look at a cross-section of the self-published sf that gets promoted through social media.

Finished The Wailing Asteroid, started Double Star

Finished Record of a Spaceborn Few. I hadn't really enjoyed The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: I love stories about teams of disparate people on adventures, but geeze, it felt like absolutely nothing was ever at stake. But I did read A Closed and Common Orbit because of its Hugo nomination, and I surprised myself by really liking it. I even teared up! So I decided to give the newest one a chance, and I found it somewhere in between the two. Some of the subplots had their moments, but a lot of the characters were just kind of there. I get what she's trying to do, by telling small-scale stories in an sf world, but there's not enough to those stories.

Now I've started The Forever Machine, the second winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. And legendarily the worst winner!

Because I haven't got enough to read, I added The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction January/February 2018 to my reading rotation.

Dont quite know what to make of Clifford D Simak's Ring Around the SunFirst half was just pure exciting action stuff then it became a bit choppy and going off at tangents. Alternate earths, androids,robots(Hezekiah out of City even makes an appearance!) all mixed together with Simak;s usual gloom with humans inability to live in peace or be tolerant.Seemed to be in the shadow of McCarthyism too,and as is common with Simak the solution seems to be to leave earth altogether! Normally the philosophizing is neatly merged with the action and plot,this time Simak seemed to be hammering home his points repeatedly as if we couldnt grasp it all,and the plotting was often a bit bizarre,with some clumsy coincidences or unlikely events to make the story progressbut we had the usual nostalgia for the old pastoral life.But for me the protagonist is less sympathetic than usual. Perhaps a minor Simak but still interesting and thought provoking.
That makes 4 Simak's this year,and every one of them worth reading.....and short! Amazing how much he put into these short 200 pages

So, vacation over and time to start posting a bit again. Got a lot of good reading done over the summer, finished these in July/August up until now:

Austral by Paul McAuley - Excellent climate change story with a really flawed and lovable protagonist.
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar - I've mentioned this before, the non-sf parts were great, the sf seemed bolted on and unnecessary.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado - Like most short-story collections I loved a few, didn't like a few, and then some were obviously good but not written for me.
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee - Already fading from memory, and I think I liked the first two better.
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers - I can see why a lot of people don't like it, and I can see why some people love it. I liked the parts about identity and belonging.
2084 by Boualem Sansal - This one was a little disappointing, the writing seemed stilted and it became a slog. The protagonist was dull and his sidekick just fell out of the story.
Shelter by Dave Hutchinson - A post-apocalyptic Western set in rural England. A very well done and fun post-apocalyptic Western, but still.

Plus some not-sf, the very best of which was A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.

Future reading is a bit up in the air atm.

I just finished reading The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville. I'd never read anything by Mieville before, and this was a pretty trippy but enjoyable read. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I had a better understanding of art history, but it was fun anyway. I'd be open to any suggestions for where to start if I'd like to read more Mieville.

>102 Dr_Flanders:

My Mieville favourites are Embassytown and The City & The City, but a lot of people seem to prefer the more fantasy ones, like Perdido Street Station

Oh, and Railsea is super fun and probably the easiest read of all of them(?)

>102 Dr_Flanders:
>103 pan0ramix:
I though Kraken was also a lot of fun, but then again, I love the Kraken.

>102 Dr_Flanders: There are illustrations of the works mentioned in the book here.

>104 divinenanny:

I've not read Kraken but I probably should.

>103 pan0ramix: >104 divinenanny: >106 pan0ramix: I have read three Mievilles so far: Embassytown is my favorite to date. Perdido Street Station was fun and crazy and interesting but, plot-wise, a bit of a mish-mash. Kraken was a fun romp. I enjoyed that one a lot.

>105 SChant: Fantastic! Some of those images might be NSFW tho... ;)

>103 pan0ramix:, >107 ScoLgo: The Scar was my personal favorite.

I'm currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Only a few pages in but I'm already hooked.

>105 SChant: Thanks for that link. As I was reading, I found myself looking up a number of the works referenced in the novel on my phone. That link certainly would have made things easier!

Mieville is one of those authors I need to start reading again...so many books so little time! I mean I liked Perdido Street Station well enough but I've never gone back to that well.

RE: Mieville, the fun thing about him is, that if you don't like (the genre of) one book, just try another one. I read somewhere once, I believe it was an interview with him, that he wants to write one book in every genre.

Yes, I interviewed him a few years ago and he said just that.

>112 anglemark: name-dropper :-)

>113 iansales: Funny, that's exactly what George RR Martin accused me of, when I told him about interviewing Iain M Banks!

(Well, that could have been true...)

>104 divinenanny: Kraken is great!

>108 vwinsloe: I enjoyed Traitor Baru Cormorant; the sequel will finally be out in two months!

>115 Stevil2001: That's great news! I really liked the first volume.

The only books I read in August that could be considered sci-fi are zoo and zoo 2.

Mindless fun.

>115 Stevil2001:, >116 anglemark: I read recently that a third Baru Cormorant book has already been written, and that a 4th is planned. Apparently, the author submitted a huge manuscript for The Monster Baru Cormorant, so it was split and expanded. I hope that the rest of the series is as intriguing as the first book.

Reading The Fall of Five by Pittacus Lore...

Finished Double Star. I can see why it's popular as a "Heinlein" book, but I found it surprisingly weak as SF. In the middle of Ancillary Mercy.

I've just started in on The Cassini Division.

The September thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/295689