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Abaddon's Gate by James S. A. Corey. I enjoyed the first two books in this series, but this one felt much weaker. Not a whole lot actually happens in the book, and only two look like they'll have any lasting consequences. The main conflicts of the book also feel very weak despite an excellent premise, and the weird/creepy stuff lacks the gravity it should have had and that it had in the previous two books.
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Jun 30, 2013 00:10
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Off Armageddon Reef, by David Weber. Weber's always been very hit-and-miss for me, but I enjoyed this one. It's a novel setting, and I enjoy stories set in times of intense technological change, examining to some extent the relationship between technology and society. The villains were more cartoonishly evil than I was expecting, and the good guys are of course as pure as the driven snow and always super-attractive, but most of the characters managed to be likeable and the story pretty interesting. I found the battle sequence where galleys go up against cannon-armed galleons in the Age of Sail mold to be downright chilling. I hope the rest of the series holds up and doesn't go into a tailspin up Weber's rear end like the Honor Harrington series did.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:06
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Just finished The Unremembered Empire today, part of the Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy series. If the ultimate fate of the series wasn't predetermined, I think it would have been a very interesting plot development and a good look at the politics of the Imperium. As it is, I feel it adds little to the series and the action plot feels very dumb and tacked-on for the sole purpose of adding some action no matter how nonsensical. Not the worst book I've ever picked up, but I recommend skipping it if you're reading the series.
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Mar 25, 2014 04:49
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Silent Victory, by Clay Blair Jr. Recommended to me by the military history thread, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're really interested in the US submarine campaign against Japan during WW2. It's an extremely dense play by play account of the submarine campaign, naming seemingly every US submarine, submarine skipper, and mentioning every last patrol and reported kill during the entire Pacific war by US subs. Very detailed, very thorough, but a slog to chew through. Writing is very dry and the meat of it is just "This happened then this happened then this happened." The book also has Opinions about the conduct of the submarine war, and almost every chapter ends with a paragraph or two about what the author thinks should have been done. Exclusively focuses on the US side of the campaign, probably owing to a lack of good translated Japanese primary sources at the time, and in my opinion it provides a poor overall sense of the submarine campaign, instead offering an extremely in-depth review of US submarine operations in the Pacific. Still, I learned quite a lot. I had no idea that one of the major non-offensive jobs of US subs was "lifeguarding" air strikes throughout the Pacific - rescuing downed aviators in the water. I was also surprised to learn how few fatal friendly fire incidents there were involving US submarines throughout the Pacific war, considering the scope of the conflict, though it seems like just about every US sub got bombed by American airplanes a few times. My favorite incident from the book was the sinking of German submarine U-168 by Dutch submarine Swaardvisch, operating under American strategic command, in October 1944. In the end, a British-built submarine in the Dutch navy under American task force command sank a German submarine in Japanese waters and returned to an Australian base where the feat was celebrated with Canadian booze.        
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Aug 12, 2015 14:51
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The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 by John Darwin The British Empire often features prominently in the history books I read, so I found what promised to be a good, thorough look at the empire from its apex through its decline. What I got was interesting. I'm an American and inevitably the vast majority of the history books I've read have been by American authors assuming an American audience or at least a reader familiar with the American perspective on history. The Empire Project is a work on British history by a British author for an audience already familiar with the major events and figures of the British Empire's history, so while the change of perspective was very interesting and I appreciated seeing a non-American historical view of the United States' intrusions into British history, I frequently found myself clearly missing a familiarity with certain events and figures the book assumes. Likewise, I'm not familiar with the historiography of British history and this is the first book I've ever read dedicated to the history of the British Empire, so I can't comment on the work's scholarly impact. Still, there was a lot of interesting stuff in here, particularly if you're more interested in the diplomatic and economic aspects of British imperial history than the social or military elements. The writing is relatively engaging for an academic history book, and while it clearly expects the reader to already be broadly familiar with the topic I found it nevertheless an interesting and highly educational read that dramatically expanded my knowledge of the British Empire's history and through it also the histories of many British colonies, notably Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, which feature prominently in the book as one might expect. I already had a pretty good understanding of India's history so those sections were less novel.
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Aug 19, 2015 04:47
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Just finished The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 by John Clark. The Guns of August is usually regarded as one of the best books out there for understanding the scope and nature of WW1, but in my opinion The Sleepwalkers solidly displaces it and many of its now outdated conclusions. In short, this is the most thorough and definitive book on how and why WW1 happened currently published. The book stops with the beginning of the actual war, but instead follows the people, events, and geopolitical forces that created the war in the first place. Personally I found it a highly enlightening read, particularly the pivotal role Russia played in starting the war, a role I'd previously seen heavily downplayed in every history of the war's origins I'd read. The Sleepwalkers is perhaps somewhat narrow in scope, looking only at the events directly leading into the war rather than the much longer geopolitical evolution that created the circumstances thereof, but if you want to understand why the First World War happened this book would be at the top of my list to read.
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Aug 24, 2015 16:50
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To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, by Arthur Herman. It's a history of the British Royal Navy with an emphasis on the geopolitical impact of the navy's history and its interactions with the rise, preeminence, and eventual decline of the British Empire. Recommended to me by the history book thread and well worth the read if you're interested in the subject. The history of the Royal Navy impinges on a lot of historical periods and events and this book does take time to at least briefly consider most of the non-British events and perspectives involved, though the only extensive review of non-British perspectives come with Napoleon and 20th century Germany. I found the book accessible and enjoyable to read, if perhaps a touch hagiographical for my taste - the book does not like to linger on the Royal Navy's defeats and miscalculations except as part of a slide into bitter melancholy about history once the book hits World War Two and beyond. Still, it's a good overview of a broad subject from its beginnings to ending with the Falklands conflict, and I found it very readable and accessible. Recommended.
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Sep 3, 2015 19:51
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Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 by D. M. Giangreco. A popular derail in many subforums on SA is the morality/justification of the atomic bombing of Japan, and one of the most common arguments in favor of the bombing is that Operation Downfall, the planned Allied (primarily American) land invasion of the Home Islands. This is perhaps the most involved and in-depth look at Downfall and its opposite number Operation Ketsu-Go (the planned Japanese defense of the Home Islands) yet written. As you might expect, this is not a happy book. Operation Downfall would have been one of the largest and most complex military operations in human history, as evidenced by the amount of time this book spends covering the mammoth scope of the logistics Downfall would have required. While I try to refrain from offering judgment about the atomic bombing due to its tendency to spark massive derails, this book provides a thorough look at a closing chapter of World War Two that I think everyone, regardless of nation, should be glad never happened. Hell to Pay is meticulously researched and includes a wealth of information from primary sources both American and Japanese. The writing is nothing special, but there's lots of detail about everything that would have gone into Downfall, especially if logistics (for example, the largest and most complex military blood supply network in history was established for Downfall) are your thing. Recommended if the subject is of interest to you.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:57
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The Depths of Time, by Roger MacBride Allen. Sci-fi book with one of the more unusual forms of interstellar travel I've ever read about : wormholes through time, so slow-boating ships travel back in time before continuing onwards so that they arrive at their destination in time. Most of the book is wrapped up in the personal quest of a military officer who witnesses a bizarre incident at one of these wormholes to put the pieces together and solve a centuries-old mystery that may doom the entire human race. Pretty clearly the start of a series, and Amazon tells me it's a trilogy altogether, but it's an interesting setting and antagonist. The end of the book left me wondering what will happen next and what's really going on, but none of the characters themselves are very memorable so I dunno whether I'll get the sequels or not.
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Sep 30, 2015 03:24
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Solar Express by L. E. Modesitt Jr. A sci-fi novel by an author mostly known for fantasy, but Solar Express is my favorite kind of first contact story: one without any aliens whatsoever as humanity encounters an artifact that defies our understanding of science, and the majority of the story focuses on the humans trying to piece together what they can. Everything dealing with the discovery and exploration of the artifact is good, but the bulk of the story rests on the relationship between the protagonists - a relationship that falls flat in my opinion, as both protagonists are very flat characters who don't grow or change over the course of the book. The other major story beat, one of international tension and crisis between Earth governments in response to the discovery, is if anything even less interesting. The bad guy of the book is sci-fi China, which proceeds to go down a checklist of villain stereotypes without ever providing a hint of motivation or characterization beyond "bad guys." It's not an actively bad read, and the regular interjections of media news stories helps flesh out the setting a little better, but I regret buying this in hardback. The end of the book also hints at some weirdness that makes me wonder if Modesitt isn't coyly hinting at this book being related to one of his other series.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:34
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I just finished an interesting little history book: Hidden Warships: Finding World War II's Abandoned, Sunk, and Preserved Warships by Nicholas Veronico. The book covers the history and current status of quite a few ships sunk during and after the war. The history part of the relevant battles is pretty short and simple, more time is spent on the search for and review of the wrecks and preserved ships themselves. In order, the ships covered are: The five Japanese midget submarines from the Pearl Harbor attack. USS Arizona, with bits on USS Utah and the three American ships at Pearl Harbor that are still around today. HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales. Admiral Graf Spee U-550 Surviving intact u-boats in museums around the world. Truk lagoon The ships sunk in the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests (particular attention paid to Saratoga and Nagato). USS Grunnion The I-400 class Japanese aircraft carrier submarines (and a few other Japanese submarines discovered during the searches) PT 658, a fully restored US motor torpedo boat. USS Iowa The surviving Victory and Liberty ships. The book closes out with a beginner's guide to anyone interested in diving on shipwrecks or seeing them without the need to dive. Pretty interesting little book if the subject matter interests you.
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Feb 18, 2016 20:48
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The Fold, by Peter Clines. In short, the plot of this book is vastly more interesting than the characters. It's a sci-fi book in the vein of Half-Life as a sci-fi game: set during the present day, but the protagonist is sent by DARPA to a top-secret research installation in the desert that's made a fantastical discovery which turns out to not be what it seems. It's an interesting mystery with a pretty good and intriguing explanation, but the characters have the depth of cardboard and the book expounds at great length on how special the protagonist is ad nauseam. The other characters aren't much better, and there's little to any of them besides one-note descriptions like "pretty secretary" and "implied lesbian." I'm torn between liking and disliking what happens when poo poo goes completely bananas in the last few chapters, and the ending comes completely out of left field and implies that this is the start of a new series. I want to like this book. It has a good mystery, an interesting answer that not only raises many questions it actually answers the original question, but the characters are incredibly dull. Maybe the implied sequel will fix things.
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Mar 10, 2016 19:23
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Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor A colleague lent this to me, and the premise is a fun one on paper - a bunch of eccentric historians with access to time travel and their quirky adventures through history. Unfortunately, the book reads like escapism for middle-aged women in academics. The protagonist is one of those clumsy, introverted, "plain" middle aged women who the story and characters completely revolve around as the most amazing person ever and is lusted after by almost every male character given a personality. Which there aren't many of, as everyone is quickly sorted into good guys (eccentric) and bad guys (evil and bitchy) and no actual historical work is performed at any point in favor of explosions, dinosaurs, and a predestination paradox/conspiracy that makes no sense. The protagonist also is pregnant for twenty minutes and miscarries for no reason but angst and more contrived conflict. I give it a firm pass - even Michael Crichton's Timeline is better at the "historical" time travel adventure schlock.
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Sep 27, 2016 21:17
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Beyond the Ice Limit by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I stopped reading these authors years ago, but I loved some of their early books including The Ice Limit, a very creepy and suspenseful maybe-supernatural-or-sci-fi-maybe-not thriller. When I saw a sequel in my local library, I checked it out. All things considered, I'm disappointed. Beyond the Ice Limit suffers from most of the things that turned me off Preston and Child, and while things are creepy and suspenseful at first the book doesn't take terribly long to degenerate into a zombie action story. As a standalone horror/suspense thriller, I feel Beyond the Ice Limit is mediocre. As a sequel to a book I enjoyed a lot when I was younger, it was a serious disappointment and I'm glad I didn't pay money for it.
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Dec 14, 2016 04:05
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Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor I'd never heard of the podcast until I finished this book, so I went into the weirdness that is Night Vale fresh. All things considered, Welcome to Night Vale reminded me a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There probably is an internal and consistent structure to this setting, but gently caress if I know what it is and it mainly serves to make the plot hard to follow because it's never clear what balls-out weirdness is actually relevant to the story and what's just Night Vale being weird. At heart, the book is about two women coming to terms with human, personal problems in their lives, but there's so much weirdness for weirdness's sake that I found the core plot hard to follow and hard to care overly much about. Becoming invested in a story is somewhat difficult when for all I know the protagonists are going to be devoured by a demon-possessed child's drawing of a Muppet and it wouldn't jump out at me as being particularly strange or inconsistent with the rest of the book. There's a lot of wit and charm to the book and its setting, and I appreciate how the book handled the protagonists' relationships with the two main antagonists, but it's a tough nut to crack. Maybe if you're already invested in the series it's an easier read, and I suspect a second read down the road will be more productive.
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Jan 27, 2017 04:00
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Passing Strange, by Ellen Klages. Short book, knocked it out in a few hours, and not my usual fare but good and enjoyable all the same. The book's back had me expecting urban fantasy in 1940 San Francisco with a female protagonist. Ended up reading a lesbian love story in 1940 San Francisco - and a look at minority cultures in that time and place in general, emphasis on LGBT and to a lesser extent Asian-American (in the years right before the US entered WW2) experiences - where magic only plays a significant role at the end. Interesting book, if short - online reviews consistently call it a novella - and left me wanting more. I like well-written romance in books, and although actual romance as a genre has never been my thing Passing Strange sold me on its interesting characters, choice of setting, and how everything comes together at the end. I'm not sure whether to file this book as "lesbian couple dies at the end" or "lesbian couple lives happily ever after." It's a strange mix of both. I found the ending decidedly bittersweet, but your mileage on the unusual ending may vary. I give it a solid recommendation if the premise appeals to you and you don't mind the presence of magic being very low-key until the end.
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Feb 10, 2017 03:27
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The Eternity Artifact by L. E. Modesitt. I'm a sucker for the specific subgenre of sci-fi revolving around an isolated expedition to the first alien ruins/artifacts humanity has found that has the aliens themselves absent, but dear Lord the constant "religion is bad, especially Islam" preaching got old fast and distracted from some reasonably interesting characters and plot. Not bad on the whole, but the villain having no character beyond "hates women and freedom because Muslim" was tedious and always skippable.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 04:12
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ulmont posted:The best part is that you no longer have to read any Modesitt. I mean, you can if you want, but each book reads like an expy of the ones before (it was China before it was Islam, and evangelical Christianity before that, fyi). Minor differences between the sci-fi and fantasy lines, but only minor. I've enjoyed a few of Modesitt's books, notably The Magic Engineer, but Eternity Artifact is just blah. The actual core plot isn't bad and the three main good-guy protagonists are decently interesting, but my God all everyone feels the need to constantly preach about why religion in general and especially Islam are evil and incompatible with freedom and democracy and science and respecting women.
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Mar 1, 2017 16:47
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The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. Advertised as "An exciting new epic space opera!" but a more accurate description would be "A prologue to maybe an exciting new epic space opera" given that 75% of the book is people talking and very little actually happens. Season to taste with libertarian masturbation about how religion and government are scams to keep the masses in line, complete with the founders of the setting's government and religion explicitly creating them to be such and every subsequent ruler of both being in on the scam, and of course all the characters of note are fabulously wealthy and influential. All the time spent fleshing out characters is also kind of wasted, given that if you're familiar with sci-fi space feudalism stories you know all these characters already. The only weird thing that sticks out to me about this book is how multiple characters spontaneously note that it's completely okay to be gay and no one would mind if the empress married a woman, but every character is straight and only ruminates on same-sex attraction to confirm that no they're straight.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:47
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All Systems Red by Martha Wells. Tiny little novella at 149 pages, but mostly fun. A secretly free-willed combat robot is assigned as security to a scientific expedition and poo poo starts going wrong but the self-proclaimed Murderbot would rather watch soap operas. Not much of a plot and most of the characters are thin on the ground, but it's the closest thing to a novella from the perspective of HK-47 that I've ever seen. Worth a checkout from the library, imo, but I chewed through it in a couple of hours.
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May 14, 2017 02:29
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General Battuta posted:Cyberpunk describes life on the margins/underclass of a world transformed by networked computers, machine intelligence, and super powerful corporations. In the Gibson mold it's characterized by noir influences, glossy detached prose with an eye for beauty in the action of machinery and contrast between the ultratechnological and profanely ordinary. The guys who make the Deus Ex series of computer games talked about this a year or two back. It was hard to market a cyberpunk RPG because pretty much everything that distinguishes cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction has become a part of real life.
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May 18, 2017 01:52
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Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that in the West at least, we tend to look for clear culpability and victims or heroes in times of crisis and tragedy. We as a society seem uncomfortable with moral ambiguity and circumstances where every active player is guilty of horrors. We like having a good guy to root for, and a bad guy to cheer about when they're handed their just desserts. In American history classes below the college level, WW2 has been adapted into this style of narrative for decades. America good, Germany and Japan bad, occasional guest appearances by the British and French as other good guys. World-shaping powers like the Soviet Union tend to be glossed over, or excised completely. Far less players in the war whose lives and actions had little impact in America, like China. The truth about China in WW2, which began there years before panzers rolled into Poland, does not fit that sort of narrative. Coming away from this book, the only people I felt unambiguously sorry for were the Chinese peasants. Every player in China in the first half of the twentieth century had unclean hands. The Nationalist government. The CCP. The warlords. The collaborationist state. The Japanese. The British. The Americans. The Russians. All of them did good, even great and heroic things. All of them did awful things, even if their actions didn't directly produce thousands of dead people in China. All of them had reasons for what they did, in their own minds even sound and rational reasons. None of the leaders of these groups acted with wanton malice. Not Chiang Kai-Shek, not Mao Zedong, not the Guangxi Clique, not Wang Jingwei, not Prime Minister Tojo, not Winston Churchill, not Franklin Roosevelt, not Iosef Stalin. But people died by the thousands because of what these men decided all the same. In my opinion, this book does a terrific job of explaining a major part of WW2 that's largely unknown in the West. This knowledge is not comforting, and does not make me feel better about my country's actions or indeed those of anyone but the Chinese peasants and commoners who feature in this book mainly to die by the tens of thousands. If you'd like to learn about China in WW2 - which began for China in the 1930s, not the 1940s - then I can give this book a solid recommendation. If you'd like to be depressed, well, this will do it for you.
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Jan 12, 2018 22:48
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The Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan Book three in Riordan's Norse series, and I enjoyed it pretty well. Not sure it's the strongest of the series, though, this book goes a mile a minute with barely a chance to breathe at any point along the way. It's nonstop adventure, and while I think the book could have stood to slow down - the encounter with Aegir in particular served no point - the characters and relationships were charming enough that I don't mind. Still, I get the feeling this book was planned to be far more ambitious than it ended up being. The end of the last book teased Percy Jackson coming over for a Greek/Norse crossover book, but Percy and Annabeth disappear after the first chapter and have no impact on the plot. The end of the book also resets events in the trilogy mostly back to the status quo, with the only lasting changes being the advance of the Magnus/Alex romantic subplot and the reveal of the Irish girl einherjar's parentage. It's a brisk, enjoyable, self-contained read that I suspect can be safely skipped once the rest of the series is out and done.
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Feb 11, 2018 05:14
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Hull Zero Three is a weird, weird book. It's Greg Bear so you know it's going to be a little strange, but this book uses some standard sci-fi twists in rather creative ways. It's a short read, I read it start to finish in an evening, but by the end I enjoyed it well enough, it's just hard to say anything about the plot because of how heavily it relies on twists and mind screws. All in all, I think it's an alright read from the library. I've read all these ideas before, and read them in better stories. But for a four-hour read picked at random from the library, not bad. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 03:20
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Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Random sci-fi book by an author I'd never heard of that turned out to be a pretty interesting read. It's the best kind of global disaster story, one where the disaster is (very well researched and explained) window dressing to a story about people and society, and how they respond to and change in times of crisis. Mother of Storms was written in the early 90s, and has a cyberpunk-ish view of the future that may have seemed far-fetched at the time but is now horrifyingly plausible. Well, maybe not the UN being a world superpower. One of the big things this story deals with an evolution of the internet that lets you tap into peoples' brains, seeing what they see, hearing what they think, feeling what they feel in real time. Hands up if anyone would be surprised that one of the main uses for this technology is porn, bringing all the intense unrealisms of existing porn to a whole new level - and it's relevant because one of the main characters is a porn star, who dwells heavily on the idea of performance versus reality, a stage persona versus who you really are, and what that means when the performance goes on inside your own head. More salacious than it needs to be for the story? Probably, but it's an interesting thought, and the book also dwells at great length on other implications of this technology, like how riots can become communicable diseases as people around the world tap into the thoughts and emotions of people in violent protests or how, ultimately, this technology can be used for good as the most powerful instrument of empathy ever devised. The book's inside cover compares this book to The Forge of God and Lucifer's Hammer, and I agree with the comparison. Not as good as those two, I think, but an interesting read all the same.
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Jun 7, 2018 21:56
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And knocked this out in a day. Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller is a weird one. Show of hands, everyone who wanted Inuit cyberpunk. No one? How about a badass lesbian Inuit grandmother with a pet killer whale? Blackfish City is cyberpunk with a distinctly modern bent, set on a floating city in the arctic, in a bleak future rather different from traditional cyberpunk in that it's heavily informed by more modern events and fears, and switches regularly between four main protagonists: a wealthy young gay man, a gender-fluid street criminal, a modern-day gladiator tied up in organized crime, and a local politician with a shady past. All the while, the city is being ravaged by a mysterious disease that causes people to have strange visions and remember events they couldn't have seen. Into this mix comes a mysterious woman with an orca and a polar bear and a bladed staff she's frighteningly skilled with. I was not expecting the book to lean so heavily on Inuit culture, and that most of the protagonists end up tying into it in some way, but it helps Blackfish City stand out. I don't know if Miller is Inuit himself, but the book dwells on what might happen to that culture in this kind of dystopian future, and what their relationships with the rest of North America would be like. The breaks, the mysterious disease of the book, also end up being rather fascinating once the book reveals the origin of the disease and what exactly it does. Blackfish City ends on a remarkably hopeful note, and the promise that in this floating arctic city, at least, the world might be starting to change for the better.
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Jun 11, 2018 03:39
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tuyop posted:I’m so into indigenous futurism that I don’t even care if that book is any good, I want to buy it. I thought it was good cyberpunk. Not great, but good. Ends on a hopeful note, prominent and positive portrayals of LGBT people of various stripes (again: badass lesbian Inuit grandma), and I felt the Inuit aspects and the reveal of what the disease is added some nicely original flavor. Been on a spree of sci-fi books I've never read from my local library.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:20
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Rolling Thunder by John Varley is a sci-fi novel that doesn't know what kind of story it wants to be. On the one hand, it has my favorite kind of sci-fi aliens: incomprehensible and so far beyond us no communication is possible and they're probably not aware we exist at all. I'm a sucker for big dumb object stories, and this... wasn't that. There's no awe or wonder about it, just a little bit of pretending there's a mystery to the story before going "gently caress if we know, next." There's a novel idea for a protagonist in a sci-fi book, a singer who serves her military tour as part of a military band to tour the outposts and put on shows for the garrisons, but the book never does anything with it beyond making the protagonist a huge celebrity through no particular effort of her own. Plot devices are wheeled in and out without foreshadowing or remembrance, and there's a ten year time skip in the book for seemingly no reason but to abruptly change the direction of the book. Cardboard thin characters (everyone from Earth is stupid, religious, and greedy, everyone from Mars is smart and driven and kind), a protagonist with no discernable personality, and it all just adds up to a waste of time. Also, male writers: women don't think about their breasts as much as you guys seem to think.
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Jun 16, 2018 03:21
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The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. I don't say this much, but I truly have no idea what the gently caress I just finished reading. The Gone World starts with an intriguing premise: a time-traveling detective who can jaunt forward and backward in time to solve cases. Then it gets really, really crazy and the time traveling detective is trying to stop an apocalypse. By about two thirds of the way in, The Gone World had completely lost me, I had no idea what was going on, when anything was happening, or what the unfolding plot was. It's always a hazard of books where time travel is a central premise, and doubly so when you start invoking alternate realities and potential futures, and triply when duplicates from alternate timelines start bleeding over: it is incredibly easy for things to get so convoluted that you completely lose track. And that's what happened to me with this book. And the central apocalyptic threat, the Terminus, in my opinion was never really explained. I came away with no idea of what it was doing or why. There's some good ideas here to be sure, I liked the strained relationship the protagonist had with her mother because the protagonist kept seemingly aging at an unnatural rate, from time passing while she's in the future. The effects of the Terminus are creepy as hell. I thought there was a couple of good twists with the protagonist before things went completely batshit. But the whole mess was so hard for me to keep track of that in the end I stopped trying. If you think you can figure out what's happening in this book, I recommend it. As for me, my head hurts.
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Jun 18, 2018 04:29
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The Chronoliths by Robert Wilson is another ho-hum book about time travel, and not significantly less confusing than the last one I read. Here at least the author has the decency to not even pretend to try to explain how the time travel works. The premise, and one of the main ideas of the book, is nevertheless interesting: around the world monuments begin erupting into existence, each commemorating a victory by "Kuin"... twenty years in the future, leading to the question: who or what is Kuin, and is Kuin created by the monoliths that announce Kuin's victories? Who knows, the book declines to give a clear answer and the protagonist is in no position to see what all's happening in the world despite being vitally important to it because, more or less, destiny says so. Most of the characters arcs, such as they are, are predictable and the book has little in the way of surprises - the story of the chronoliths ends with a whimper rather than a bang. I am not impressed with my batting average of going to my local public library and just browsing the fiction shelves for the sci-fi spine label.
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Jun 22, 2018 23:00
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Ice Hunt by James Rollins is, well... go read Ice Station by Matthew Riley instead, it's the same book but better. Despite the science fiction spine label my local library slapped on Ice Hunt, it's nothing of the sort. It's a pretty generic techno-thriller set in the Arctic centering on a mysterious and long-abandoned research station that discovered something mysterious that governments will kill for and both the Americans and Russians send in black ops teams to secure the discovery and silence all witnesses with a brave crew of regular American military personnel and civilian scientists caught in the middle. Blah blah blah it's decent but nothing special for the genre, the characters are the interchangable archetypes you always see in these kinds of books and you can tell which lady scientist is going to be the first victim of the inevitable monsters because the first two sentences describe her as hot and having an affair with a married man - the adulterer is naturally the second victim.
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Jul 7, 2018 02:34
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Nighteyes by Garfield Reeves-Stevens. A story about UFOs, alien abductions, and abductees that ultimately ends on a hopeful note and tries at the end to portray the aliens as ultimately benevolent is pretty novel, but I find that a hard pill to swallow when much of the book is filled with the usual alien abduction stuff including sexual experimentation on humans and coercing humans into having sex with each other, and then a sixteen year old girl being pregnant at the end by a forty year old guy the aliens drugged her into being in love with being presented as the hope of all mankind is... unfortunate. I'm still chewing on how exactly I feel about the book, but I think the book suffers badly from cramming too many twists and revelations into the last couple of chapters, only one of which had been visibly foreshadowed, and one of the book's major subplots has no purpose except to waste time on conspiracy techno-thriller stuff that has no impact or relevance to the main plot beyond the first couple of chapters. There's a lesbian couple that spends most of the book doing nothing in particular while vaguely orbiting the protagonists until all of a sudden they do something the book seems to think is momentous and huge but no explanation is given for what they're doing or why. The punch of this book, though, is looking at the psychology of the abductees and their responses to what's been happening - in every case, throughout their lives. The sixteen year old girl has long had an imaginary friend. Her mother keeps seeing her cat that's been dead for years. The FBI agent regularly deals with shadowy figures in the course of his job. The hard-charging businessman refuses to acknowledge that anything at all in his life has ever been even slightly out of the ordinary. Another character notes that when they were six Santa took her to visit his workshop at the North Pole. Everything dealing with the psychology of the abductions and its trauma on the abductees felt much more compelling to me than the intrigue and thriller nonsense. Still, I thought some of the twists at the end genuinely were clever and create a pretty novel context for UFOs and abductions and whatnot, they just weren't given a chance to breathe, just implications for the reader to ponder. On the whole, a mixed bag. UFO stories have long been one of my mildly embarrassing pet interests, and the interesting twists, dwelling on the psychological trauma of abduction, and genuinely creepy writing in the first few encounters with the aliens (things get vastly less atmospheric once the book moves onto the actual ship) all let down heavily by pointless subplots, a creepy fixation on the teenage girl's sexuality (which began before she was a teenager), and the book presenting all the usual nightmarish UFO stuff then assuring you that it was all justified and necessary and they're really good guys.
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Jul 7, 2018 19:11
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Moving Mars by Greg Bear. Bear can be a weird guy like most sci-fi authors, but Moving Mars was less so than usual for him up until the last couple of chapters. I'm still not sure what exactly he was going on about beyond that I recognized a few of the same terms and concepts as things he also used in The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. This book is not set in the same universe as those, but Bear was clearly thinking in certain technological and scientific directions for both. I like Moving Mars, but I'm not convinced it was good. About the first third of the book ended up not mattering at all, all the complexities and history of Earth - some of which were quite interesting - ended up being irrelevant when Earth became faceless bad guys and the Martians either aw-shucks salt of the earth (well, mars) heroes or traitors in league with Earth. I was expecting something more interesting than what I got, and in my mind I'm going over possibilities of what could have been happening in the background but there's not really a point to it. I've been reading a number of these "Humans settle Mars, Mars makes remarkable technological discoveries, Earth declares war on Mars out of fear and colonialism, Mars effortlessly wins via those technological discoveries" books from my library lately, but none of them have been very good.
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Jul 13, 2018 04:43
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The Book of M by Peng Shepherd. Well, that was a weird one. The first half of this book is genuinely interesting and creepy, introducing a post-apocalyptic setting where the world's gone down to a very, very unusual apocalypse that's genuinely like nothing I've seen or read before. It might as well be introducing magic to the world, but the magic works like nothing I've seen before in fiction and there's a lot of really creepy bits that the book never deigns to explain - presumably it's the same effects that have destroyed the world, but just maybe not. Then the book starts getting into Hindu mythology and there's a guy with an elephant's shadow (it... makes a degree of sense in context) and any connection to the real world just seems to fly out the window. The Book of M wants to be a book about human identity and relationships, and our relationships with memories - the thin, fuzzy line between fact and fiction. But in my opinion, it gets so weird and out there that I think the intended bittersweet message falls flat.
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Aug 12, 2018 14:30
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Zola posted:You will probably enjoy it, all of his stuff is fine, not exciting, not fantastic, but solid writing and a minimum of pretentiousness. Sort of like fantasy cotton candy The Belgariad was also written for a young adult audience, and I consider it basically the ideal series to introduce someone in middle or late elementary school to the fantasy genre.
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Aug 31, 2018 04:31
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The Darkest Time of Night by Jeremy Finley. Was on my local library's new book shelf, so took a chance. All told, a run of the mill UFO conspiracy story, lent a bit of originality by the protagonist being a grandmother and the story working with that unconventional choice of protagonist. That's about the only originality to the book, though, as the plot stays in comfortable, well-trod territory for this kind of story. It's a well executed example of the breed, so a definite thumbs-up for being this guy's first novel, but if you've read a UFO conspiracy book before where a person's [grand-] child is abducted and their relentless search for truth brings them into the crossfire of ?kooky? UFO researchers, a secret military organization covering up the aliens, mysterious men in black, grey aliens, and people being abducted for nefarious purposes, this brings nothing new to the table.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:29
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Golden State by Ben Winters A noir detective story with a genre twist: it's set in a dystopian vision of the future, and while the protagonist is certainly hardboiled he's an officer of a government agency charged with upholding the objective truth at all costs. Definitely a book with a message, and that message is to ask yourself what the truth is. Actually a pretty enjoyable detective story, I feel the book's climax is the weakest part of the book where Winters drops the hardboiled detective story to engage fully with the sci-fi dystopia plot. Generally not a good sign for me when a detective mystery has a very predictable ending. If, Then by Kate Day This book is part of what you might call suburban fantasy: a quiet, pleasant suburban town filled with quiet, pleasant people living quiet, pleasant lives suddenly starts to encounter supernatural phenomena that reveal to the protagonists how their lives weren't as quiet and pleasant as they thought. I want to like this book, it strikes a good atmosphere early on and the mystery is intriguing: people start seeing visions of alternate versions of reality - both of themselves and others. The book clearly wants to be about the importance of our choices in life, but most of the characters are shallow and I found the ending unsatisfying. This is the author's first book, and I certainly see promise in her writing if she continues and improves. The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead A mediocre techno-thriller filled with one-dimensional characters and a poorly explained central plot device you've seen done better.
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Apr 28, 2019 22:39
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Through Fiery Trials by David Weber. I long since stopped buying the Safehold series, but I'll check them out from my local library. With the big war ending at the end of the previous book and this one starting with a time skip I thought hey, maybe Weber will take the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and get back to actually using the whole book to tell a story. Why do I let myself hope? This book is immense, and is about 45% how wonderful and perfect the protagonist nation (and the designated other-nation-who-is-good of the book) and everyone in it are, 45% how terrible and problematic and awful the villain nations of the book are, and about 10% actually interesting world development. Also, I'm starting to get really tired of Weber every so often bringing up homosexuality only for every character involved to say it's totally okay and not wrong but they're heterosexual like everyone else, and not a single notable character in this drat book escapes without picking up a spouse and at minimum two (and on average, about six) kids.
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Oct 11, 2019 03:21
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Last weekend I went down to my local library and took a stroll down the sci-fi/fantasy shelves. Came away with: The Magic Engineer by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Back of the blurb promises a story about a Leonardo da Vinci born into a world of magic and the revolution he brings with him. This book is not that, and is instead about the rather boring adventures of a wunderchild and his friends, and the protagonist is easily the least interesting person in the book (aside from maybe the villains). I found it to be a quick read, and most of the characters basically likable but shallow and the plot very basic. Not a bad read, I enjoyed it okay, but it was a crushing disappointment from what the book advertised itself to be. Indigo Springs by A. M. Dellamonica So as it turns out you don't need to be straight to write a book full of offensive LGBT stereotypes! There's a fairly interesting, and even vaguely original, system of magic here, but the characters are so shallow and such terrible people (even when they're meant to be heroes) that getting through this book was a chore. Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill I can name the exact moment I stopped liking this book, and that moment was the Big Twist. Big Twists, in my experience, come in two flavors: the ones that make you suddenly rethink everything you've read until that point and make perfect sense while throwing everything beforehand into a whole new light, and the ones that come out of left field and just leave you confused while making the preceding drama and events feel cheap. This book has one of the latter type. Funnily for a book about robots, I thought the book's great strength was the humanity of its characters, I was invested in seeing what would happen to everyone until the author decided the stakes weren't big enough. Pity.
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Nov 2, 2019 21:58
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Timediver's Dawn and The Timegod by L. E. Modesitt Jr. A duology in one volume I picked up from my local library, Modesitt does what seems to be his usual thing: an interesting setting filled with lifeless, shallow characters where the protagonist is utterly devoid of personality or motivation and the plot is mostly an arbitrary series of events with no particular connection. And for a writer who so likes to stress how important strong, smart, independent, capable women are in his stories, Modesitt sure doesn't like to include any strong, smart, independent, capable women in his books.
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Nov 23, 2019 16:03
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