Our reads July 2019

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Our reads July 2019

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1dustydigger
Jul 1, 2019, 5:10 am

Another month,another pile of books. Tell us about your book plans for July

2dustydigger
Editado: Jul 28, 2019, 4:51 pm

Dusty's TBR for July
SF/Fantasy
Becky Chambers - Record of a Spaceborn Few
Charles Stross - The Jennifer Morgue
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Fighting Man of Mars
Paolo Bacigalupi - Windup Girl
William R Forstchen - Star Voyager Academy
Charlaine Harris - Midnight Crossroad
Charlaine Harris - Day Shift
Charlaine Harris - Night Shift
Robert E Howard - Red Shadows
John Maddox Roberts - Spacer: Window of the Mind

from other genres
Beverley Nichols - Down the Garden Path
Enid Blyton - Five Go To Smugglers Top
Mary Willis Walker - Zero at the Bone
Anthony Berkeley - The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Georgette Heyer - These Old Shades

3Shrike58
Editado: Jul 1, 2019, 6:36 am

My book group's choice for the month is Spinning Silver and I'm finally getting around to reading The Soldier and The Just City.

4RobertDay
Jul 1, 2019, 8:08 am

I've just finished Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and will go on to some Kim Stanley Robinson short stories after a break with a text on the Russian space programme.

5johnnyapollo
Jul 1, 2019, 9:07 am

Still reading Shift by Hugh Howey...

6ChrisRiesbeck
Jul 1, 2019, 1:03 pm

>3 Shrike58: I really liked The Just City. I expected a long debate about how society should be designed. I didn't expect how much I would enjoy that. I've not read the other two parts of the trilogy yet.

7Shrike58
Jul 1, 2019, 1:32 pm

I started it and had to set it aside after reading about twenty pages; should be fun.

8dustydigger
Jul 1, 2019, 4:04 pm

Bogged down,just inching forward with Windup Girl Its going to be a long slow task that one.I have started book #7 in ERBs Barsoom tales as a relief from it,Fighting Man of Mars. Nice to be back among the ruined cities with the green menbanths and white apes.
One of my fave Michael Whelan covers on this one.Michael says that he and Lester Del Rey had a bit of a dilemma as to whether the white lizard should have 6 or 8 legs.he went with six according to ERBs description. Now thats not something you see every day,an illustrator who actually ILLUSTRATES what's in the book! Most of the time there doesnt seem to be much connection between books and their illustrators! lol
After admiring it I just had to go over to my Pinterest page and check out my Michael Whelan covers,and ended up browsing them for ages!
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/dustydigger48/my-fave-michael-whelan-paintings/

10igorken
Jul 1, 2019, 5:21 pm

I am slowly making my way through the Other Worlds Than These anthology (2012), which is rather underwhelming so far, despite the big names that make up its TOC.

Unsure what my next sf read will be, probably more short stories.

11rshart3
Jul 1, 2019, 11:16 pm

I'm back in the gritty, dystopian future San Francisco with Lt Carlucci & others, in Carlucci's Heart. I've enjoyed the series, but then I like gritty, dystopian fiction. This has just the right mix of human virtues and darkness. I wish he would write more.

12iansales
Jul 2, 2019, 6:51 am

Just finished Time Was, which wasn't bad. I usually have a hard time with Ian's fiction, but this one only made me wince a couple of times. Now reading Lord of the Flies, which is totally science fiction, right?

13ThomasWatson
Jul 2, 2019, 5:09 pm

Enjoying a collection of short stories. The Pleiades and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson. (Apparently not in the lists here, since the touchstone system came up blank.)

14ScoLgo
Jul 2, 2019, 7:16 pm

15Sakerfalcon
Jul 5, 2019, 9:41 am

Still reading Double vision and enjoying it.

16seitherin
Jul 6, 2019, 2:37 pm

Finished One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence. Liked it well enough.

Next into the rotation is Happy Doomsday by David Sosnowski.

17melannen
Jul 6, 2019, 3:14 pm

Have to read because it's overdue at the library:
The October Man

Should read next, have checked out from the library:
Whiskerella
Prisoner of Midnight
Storm of Locusts

After that I'd like to keep working on the Hugo nominees.

SF-related nonfiction for the month:
Montaillou, an amazing study of a 14th century French village that has first-person life narratives of nearly all the peasants preserved because most of them were secret heretics who got interviewed by the Inquisition. Currently I am being amazed at how utterly casual they all are about doing things that will get them burned at the stake. "Dropped by my aunt's house and stumbled on a wanted fugitive camping out behind the wine barrel in the basement, brought him pie." It's definitely changing my ideas about all those banned magical and religious orders in high fantasy!

18RobertDay
Jul 6, 2019, 6:07 pm

A long enforced wait in a hospital queue waiting to have a retinal tear repaired saw me get about a third of the way into KSR's collection Remaking History. Amused by the description of John & Judith Clute's Camden flat in A History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations - an sf story where the science is history.

Of course, the problem is that KSR wrote so little short fiction that most of his collections have multiple apperarances of the same few stories. That won't bother completists, but casual readers should beware, or at least be prepared for a massive outbreak of deja vu.

19nhlsecord
Jul 6, 2019, 9:29 pm

I also love Whelan covers. They often were the reason I purchased those books.

20Petroglyph
Jul 6, 2019, 10:04 pm

I've just started House of suns by Alastair Reynolds .

21seitherin
Jul 7, 2019, 9:58 am

22ChrisRiesbeck
Jul 7, 2019, 12:18 pm

23Shrike58
Editado: Jul 7, 2019, 4:40 pm

Wrapped up The Soldier (A) and just when you would've thought that Asher had run out of things to say about his "Polity" universe it appears that this could be the start of a whole new cycle, not just another long novel masquerading as a trilogy. The question for me is that I'm not sure that any of the characters depicted are going to quite have the sustaining interest that Thorvald Spear had for me in the "Transformation" trilogy; we shall see.

24iansales
Jul 8, 2019, 5:21 am

Reread Dune Messiah, which was weaker than I remembered it, and now rereading Araminta Station before tackling the two sequels.

25vwinsloe
Jul 8, 2019, 7:20 am

Doing a reread of The Handmaid's Tale in preparation for the release of the sequel in September.

26seitherin
Jul 8, 2019, 6:04 pm

27dustydigger
Editado: Jul 9, 2019, 6:13 pm

Finished ERBs Fighting Man of Mars. Good fun,lots of adventures in new places,but the hero is not the sharpest knife in the drawer! lol.Still,I found it quite enjoyable.
I have put aside Windup Girl for the moment,but am now going to concentrate on Record of a Spaceborn Few and The Jennifer Morgue.

28SFF1928-1973
Jul 9, 2019, 11:22 am

I'm reading The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner. Not his best-known work, but Gollancz thought it was worth reissuing as recently as 2000. A few chapters in it could almost have been written by Philip K. Dick.

29Sakerfalcon
Jul 9, 2019, 12:50 pm

I finished Double vision and enjoyed reading it, but am still not quite sure what was going on. I have the sequel, Sound mind so will try and read that soon.

30Shrike58
Editado: Jul 9, 2019, 8:23 pm

Finished Spinning Silver (A) this evening, or at least as much as I'm going to this time around. The fast read meant that some of the plotting and atmosphere was lost on me but the climax is suitably epic. Having read all the 2019 Hugo nominees apart from Trail of Lightning I figure that Novik's book would be my third choice, though it probably has some of the best prose of the lot. I'd probably put The Calculating Stars at the top of the list. A lot of this is comparing apples and oranges so it'll be interesting to see how consensus shakes out.

31iansales
Editado: Jul 12, 2019, 2:25 am

>28 SFF1928-1973: I remember that being really dated. The Squares of the City was better.

32Stevil2001
Jul 10, 2019, 9:00 am

>30 Shrike58: Spinning Silver really won me over. Inventive and moving; it'll be at the top of my ballot. (Calculating Stars is second, and I expect it will win.)

33seitherin
Jul 10, 2019, 5:23 pm

34iansales
Jul 11, 2019, 2:16 am

>33 seitherin: I didn't like it much either. Felt there was a good story in there somewhere, but the way it was told didn't work for it.

35Shrike58
Jul 11, 2019, 7:51 am

Turns out I get to spend more time with the book than I thought I would so I'm going to read the portions I skimmed and see if my opinion goes up...though it is actually quite high. Keep in mind that I lost patience with Novik and the "Temeraire" series at a certain point; roughly where Lawrence was suffering from amnesia!

36seitherin
Jul 11, 2019, 3:23 pm

>34 iansales: I agree with you. The concept had potential but the execution failed. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay for it.

37iansales
Jul 12, 2019, 2:24 am

>36 seitherin: Neither did I :-) Didn't think much of any of the novellas or novelettes in the Hugo Voter Pack, to be honest. And one of them, the Zen Cho novelette, is missing. (Plus, it's really annoying that some of the novels were only available as PDFs.)

38iansales
Jul 12, 2019, 2:25 am

Read Permafrost, the new Al Reynolds novella. A polished piece, but I'm not sure I understand why it's set in Russia.

39Stevil2001
Jul 12, 2019, 8:34 am

I really liked The Only Harmless Great Thing; potent imagery, neat concept. I felt that the novelette list on the whole was really strong. Lots of cool concepts and moving writing across all six stories. ("If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" is linked to in the table of contents file for the novelette packet.)

The novella list, though, feels like hot garbage this year. I'll probably No Award the whole category, unless the one remaining story I have to read (the Kelly Robson one) really surprises me.

40iansales
Editado: Jul 12, 2019, 9:16 am

>39 Stevil2001: Ah, didn't see the link. Would sooner they had included it so I could read it on my Kindle. Some of the others were published on the web but they included those.

The novelettes: I liked The Thing About Ghost Stories a lot. That would take my top spot. The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections didn't work for me, nor did the Bolander. When We were Starless felt ordinary, and while Nine Last Days on Planet Earth had its moments, I didn't think it was that strong. Agreed the novelette was way better than the novella one, though.

41iansales
Jul 12, 2019, 9:18 am

>39 Stevil2001: Oh, and the only novella I thought halfway decent was The Tea Master and the Detective, although de Bodard has written better stories set in her Xuya universe. My thoughts on them here: https://iansales.com/2019/06/21/the-hugos-2019-novellas/

42Stevil2001
Jul 12, 2019, 4:23 pm

>40 iansales: I think that's down to the publishers/rights holder. I pasted the story into a .doc file and sent it to my Kindle.

I never got interested in the mystery in Tea Master and the Detective, and found it a pretty ambling story otherwise.

43dustydigger
Jul 13, 2019, 5:36 am

Star Voyager Academy was an amiable light young adult read,about space cadets at a military training school,very much indebted to our Ender's Battle School,but a pleasant enough quick read for a challenge of mine.

44SFF1928-1973
Jul 14, 2019, 5:13 am

>31 iansales: I'm sure I tried to read The Squares of the City back in my youth but I don't remember how far I got with it. Which aspects of The Jagged Orbit did you find dated?

45iansales
Jul 14, 2019, 8:39 am

Pretty much all of it.

46dustydigger
Jul 14, 2019, 7:03 pm

Sorry to say I found Record of a Spaceborn Few a bit ho-hum,just a bit too bland and understated (deliberately so perhaps?)considering some of the generational ship tropes being explored,and the ambivalences of second and third generation immigrants on planets once such ships have arrived at their destination centuries after leaving earth.OK,but nothing to set the world on fire.

47daxxh
Jul 14, 2019, 10:23 pm

Read Longer by Michael Blumlein. It was ok. Also read Atlas Alone by Emma Newman. That one was good. I finished Luna Moon Rising by Ian McDonald at the beginning of the month. I liked the first in the trilogy best, although I may not have given this one a fair read as I took forever to read it due to life interruptions.

48SFF1928-1973
Jul 15, 2019, 4:17 am

Yes, I'm finding that out on my way through. I don't mind though, that's part of the fun of reading the "classics". If I have any issue though it's mainly the weakness of the female characters.

49Lynxear
Jul 16, 2019, 10:21 pm

Starting to read Star Bridge by Jack Williamson... this is a 1982 reprint of a novel written in 1985. So far it reads ok, I don't think it is a classic but just looking for a decent read

50anglemark
Jul 17, 2019, 2:32 am

>49 Lynxear: a 1982 reprint of a novel written in 1985

Wow!

51iansales
Jul 17, 2019, 2:36 am

>47 daxxh: I have Longer on my TBR. Bought it at the SF-Bookhandeln on a visit to Stockholm last weekend. I've been a fan of Blumlein's fiction since first reading him in Interzone back in the late 1980s. I really should give Newton's books a go as I've seen lots of positive comments about them...

52RobertDay
Jul 17, 2019, 7:35 am

>49 Lynxear:, >50 anglemark: Puts a whole new meaning on the term "time travel novel"....

I've just started Justina Robson's first novel, Silver Screen. Only one and a half chapters in - OK so far but hasn't grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.

53seitherin
Editado: Jul 17, 2019, 8:58 am

Added Aftershocks by Marko Kloos to my reading rotation.

54Lynxear
Jul 17, 2019, 1:22 pm

>50 anglemark: Fat fingers sorry it was original written in 1955...:)

55pgmcc
Jul 17, 2019, 2:01 pm

>54 Lynxear:. I thought it was more interesting the way you originally wrote it.

56ScoLgo
Jul 17, 2019, 2:08 pm

>54 Lynxear: Too bad about the typo. Time travel would have been so much cooler.

57Lynxear
Jul 17, 2019, 7:13 pm

>55 pgmcc: >56 ScoLgo: Hahaha well you know ... as you get older, body parts have a mind of their own.

As far as the book goes, it certainly was written in the 1950's. It has good bones but could have been fleshed out a bit for my taste. Still I am only 50 pages in so it may get better.

I have another book in the wings A long Time Until Now.... I think I will like this book better...a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan is transported back to the Paleolithic period... it is written in 2015... I thought at first I had chosen 2 novels by the same author.... Same last name , different first name....{sigh} but I like this plot line...... getting old, I'm getting old.

58drmamm
Jul 17, 2019, 8:24 pm

FINALLY finished Neal Stephenson's Fall. I'm disappointed, because I am a huge Stephenson fan and this book seemed to have so much potential. Started out good, turned into a huge slog in the middle, and finished OK. I'll at least give him a few points for writing a decent ending for once.

59iansales
Editado: Jul 18, 2019, 2:44 am

Just started Red Clocks, which I think is genre albeit not published as such.

60vwinsloe
Jul 18, 2019, 7:05 am

>59 iansales:. Yes,Red Clocks is definitely dystopian. I thought it was a very good read, although there seemed to be too many perspectives crammed in. But I guess that was the point.

61iansales
Jul 18, 2019, 7:39 am

>60 vwinsloe: Dystopian doesn't necessarily mean genre, as the populations of the UK and US can currently attest :-)

62johnnyapollo
Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 am

Just started Dust by Hugh Howey

63Dr_Flanders
Jul 18, 2019, 4:36 pm

>61 iansales: Would it be fair to say that “dystopian” feels more like “current events”?

64vwinsloe
Jul 18, 2019, 4:51 pm

>61 iansales: >63 Dr_Flanders: Agreed. Sadly, horror is becoming the more apt genre.

65iansales
Jul 19, 2019, 2:23 am

Not impressed with Red Clocks so far. Second page introduces a character with a Faroese name... and gets the accent wrong on -dóttir. Consistently.

66seitherin
Jul 19, 2019, 5:03 pm

Finished Aftershocks by Marko Kloos. Enjoyed it. Just the kind of book I was in the mood for.

67dustydigger
Jul 19, 2019, 8:26 pm

Lay back and relaxed with a Solomon Kane story,Red Shadows.Solomon Kane,mystery man, dour relentless pursuer of evil men,a man in black armed to the teeth, is truly an iconic figure,plagiarised down the decades.Love the highly coloured prose too!

68ChrisRiesbeck
Jul 20, 2019, 2:04 pm

Finished Chindi, starting Psion.

69dustydigger
Jul 20, 2019, 4:32 pm

50 years since the moon landing. Seems like yesterday. I was a 22 year old college student,and I stayed up throughout the night. It was just before 4 am BST that we saw Neil Armstrong take that iconic step I was watching on a miniscule black and white TV,so blurred I could barely see it. Occasionally the screen would roll,and you had to thump on the top to stop that! lol.
It was so amazing and exciting,and we were so optimistic for a bright future in space.Its so good to see the BBC giving so much coverage to the occasion,its garnering a lot of interest among young people. But it makes me feel ancient :0)

70daxxh
Jul 20, 2019, 9:52 pm

>69 dustydigger:. I remember my parents sitting us down in front of the TV to watch. I was five. I have wanted to be an astronaut ever since. I applied for years. Still would do it if they would get rid of certain vision requirements.

I am almost finished with A Memory Called Empire. Excellent book. After that it will be either Relic or The Last Dog on Earth, both of which were randomly found on the new paperback shelf in the library. Hope they are decent. My random reads have been awful lately. (Refering to Tentacle, which I just couldn't finish.)

71rshart3
Jul 20, 2019, 10:53 pm

>69 dustydigger:
I also watched the landing with my parents & grandmother. I was 20, and very cynical/negative. I was scornful that they were so impressed with something everyone knew was going to happen. I failed to appreciate, among other things, that my grandmother (born 1891) was 20 before airplane flight was invented -- she was in her teens before automobiles became common. Certainly no TV and no computers! And there she sat, watching it. Things have changed so fast & completely in the last couple of generations.

72RobertDay
Editado: Jul 22, 2019, 3:16 am

>69 dustydigger: My thoughts on Apollo 11 here: https://robertday154.wordpress.com/2019/07/21/a-child-of-the-space-age/

Still on Silver Screen. I wasn't very impressed with the first four chapters - the central protagonist is introduced in Chapter One, only to be killed off at the beginning of Chapter Two, without saying a word. A lot of office politics ensues, together with a great wodge of exposition - telling, not showing. Only when we get to Chapter Five, about 100 pages in, and the protagonist's funeral, does the characterisation (of the remaining characters) begin to take off.

At one point we have a terrorist explosion at an unspecified railway station in Manchester. (Conflict between pro- and anti-AI factions is involved.) Although Robson wears her Brit credentials fairly clearly on her sleeve, I couldn't quite tell which Manchester station she was talking about, Piccadilly or Victoria. Or some unspecified, new facility not extant in our times? (The train is described as some sort of hovering/maglev system.)

So, warming to the novel a bit more than I started out doing, but still less than impressed.

(Edited to remove incorrect conclusions drawn from a misreading.)

73Sakerfalcon
Editado: Jul 22, 2019, 9:41 am

I read A matter of oaths last week which was a great read. It is deservedly back in print again after a long absence. I can see it appealing to fans of Small angry planet but it's less episodic and not such a feel-good story.

Now I'm trying Red moon, which I found at the library. Hoping it'll be more like 2312 and less like Aurora, which I couldn't finish.

74davisfamily
Jul 22, 2019, 2:33 pm

I am reading Skyward by Brandon Sanderson, this is such a young adult book and my old bones are just irritated.

75Petroglyph
Jul 23, 2019, 6:27 pm

Currently reading House of suns by Alastair Reynolds as a bedtime book. Perhaps it's just me, but it feels just a liitle bit too YA for my liking. At three quarters in, the book has yet to grab me, and that probably means it's not going to.

76dustydigger
Jul 24, 2019, 6:40 am

Finished the amusing (and completely bonkers when you think about it) second Laundry Files book,Charlie Stross's Jennifer Morgue.Last month i was reading HPLs Music of Erich Zann so was amused when Mo's soul eating violin ,made of human bone, turned out to be an electric version on a Zann fiddle. Cool!
I have Annihilation Scorecoming up now,but I will certainly be rooting around for the next Laundry File book for my reread in order of the series, The Fuller Memorandum
In my break from the so downbeat Windup Girl I have read Flat Stanley and am now reading Bunnicula,about a very sinister rabbit.Great fun.
More relevant here is Timegates,a selection of time travel tales.Looks interesting.

77Shrike58
Jul 25, 2019, 7:23 am

Finished The Just City (B) yesterday evening. Not as arid a thought experiment as I feared it would be, particularly when you know from the start that things are going to blow up real good, and I look forward to picking up the second book at some point.

78johnnyapollo
Jul 25, 2019, 11:21 am

Reading The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milan...

79iansales
Editado: Jul 26, 2019, 7:29 am

Finished Red Clocks. Not impressed. Now reading Breakwater. Suspect this one will be much the same.

80seitherin
Jul 27, 2019, 8:55 am

Adding Limited Wish by Mark Lawrence to my reading rotation.

81iansales
Jul 28, 2019, 5:00 am

Breakwater wasn't good. Now reading The Calculating Stars, which I'm enjoying.

82RobertDay
Jul 28, 2019, 4:11 pm

Just finished Justina Robson's 'Silver Screen'. Not blown away.

Up next: some early Charlie Stross, Singularity Sky.

83Sakerfalcon
Jul 29, 2019, 4:59 am

Finished There before the chaos, which begins where the Indranan war trilogy closed. Another exciting space opera with engaging characters.

Still plodding away at Red moon. It's not bad, just not exactly what I'm in the mood for right now. But it's due back at the library soon.

84richardderus
Jul 31, 2019, 1:20 pm

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang isn't off to a great start with me. "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" just ain't all that interesting a take on single-timeline time-travel fiction.

85sockatume
Jul 31, 2019, 4:47 pm

Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks. My newfound reading momentum had me pick up a copy of this on a whim at a market stall and re-read it (re-reading a novel!) for the first time in the best part of 20 years. It's still not quite my favourite Culture novel but in hindsight it really does have everything that defines the series: poetic prose, inventive action, vivid imagery, questions of human value in a postcapitalist society, and a weird fixation on physical torture.

Shortly before that I read The Atrocity Archives, and it pushed a lot of my buttons. I've always thought software development culture was a weird cult...

Next for SF, probably something from the recommendations I was given for relativity-busting SF. "The Wounded Sky" or one of the Stross ones.

86iansales
Editado: Ago 2, 2019, 4:13 am

>84 richardderus: I saw copies of that in SF-Bokhandeln a few weeks ago but decided not to buy it as I have the original limited edition novellas of 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate' and 'The Life Cycle of Software Objects', and had read all but one of the rest of the contents.

87iansales
Ago 1, 2019, 3:45 am

Now reading The Great Hunt, which is better than The Eye of the World - but that's a pretty low bar to clear and it only just scrapes over.

88Petroglyph
Editado: Ago 1, 2019, 4:46 am

Finished Every heart a doorway by Seanan McGuire, which I liked, even though it was too YA for my tastes at times. I also finished House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, where I felt the YA quality detracted from the book. So it goes.

89richardderus
Ago 1, 2019, 11:47 am

>86 iansales: It's wholly redundant for you to procure a hard copy, then; and honestly, it's not like his output is so vast that a record of what's best is significantly different from a record of what there is.

90drmamm
Ago 4, 2019, 5:00 pm

>87 iansales: Not trying to move your opinion on Wheel of Time (I really liked it, you may not and that's perfectly fine), but there is an interesting story about how it came about. When Robert Jordan pitched his agent/publisher on the story (which, at the time, was targeted as a trilogy, hahaha), his agent told him that nobody will buy high fantasy unless it looks a lot like Lord of the Rings. So, that's exactly what he did - for Eye of the World. Once he got traction with the first book, he felt safe enough to take the story in its originally conceived direction (which is a whole bunch of directions!)

91seitherin
Editado: Ago 4, 2019, 9:43 pm

Oops.

92vwinsloe
Ago 5, 2019, 7:44 am

I finished All the Birds in the Sky and found the most interesting thing about it was the author's apparent use of a device of starting a story about the two protagonists when they were children by using a very basic children's book writing style, and then using more verbs and adverbs and complex sentence structure and longer chapters as the characters age. I'm not certain that it was entirely successful, since reviews show that some readers bailed out in the early chapters due to the writing style.

93johnnyapollo
Editado: Ago 5, 2019, 10:26 am

vwinsloe Isn't that basically what JK Rowling did with the Potter books?

94ScoLgo
Ago 5, 2019, 2:47 pm

>92 vwinsloe: >93 johnnyapollo: Joe Haldeman also did that with the Marsbound trilogy - although I thought his approach was more subtle than CJA's.

95Sakerfalcon
Editado: Ago 6, 2019, 7:42 am

Mensagem removida pelo autor.

96vwinsloe
Ago 7, 2019, 7:44 am

>93 johnnyapollo:. If so, it wasn't obvious to me. But although I read most of them, I wasn't a big fan.

97Lynxear
Ago 9, 2019, 8:30 pm

I finished Star Bridge Actually after a very slow start it turned into a decent read.

I also read and finished A long Time Until Now. this is a book of time travel for 10 soldiers transported 15,000 years back in time complete with vehicles and their gear. I have mixed feelings about this book...on one hand I like books where modern man struggles to survive in prehistoric times. The Destroyermen series comes to mind in this respect though after 5 books I got tired of it.

In A Long Time Until Now, it is mostly about individuals dealing with the stress of leaving family... As far as dealing with the environment along with indigenous tribes and other peoples transported to that past, that was less than exciting. A few head shots seemed to settle issues with the neighbours. The building up of a settlement was interesting to read...of course there was a mixture of skills in the group. But the sexual frustration of the men and fear of rape by the women (even from their own group) got a little tiring because it was brought up over and over and over again... It also had a feeling of they did this, then that, tried this tried that... It is a long book too and I hate novels which give first and last names and then in the novel either by their first or last name. With 10 main characters that is 20 names and is often confusing...sometimes the author simply refers to he or she and it isn't clear who he or she is...

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