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April 2010 Reads


Myshkin

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I decided to break off from Moorcock's writings for a time and gave The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt a go. Not good, and not bad. It's really just 100 % pulp fantasy including the traditional good and bad things that go with the genre. Chracter development was inconsistent and the plot was a bit hard to follow since Merritt's treatment of human emotions and desires are both alien and exaggerated. Racism, sexism and other problems from the 1920's marked the pages like pox scars. Howard, Lovecraft and Smith have some trouble with this too but I've found it within myself to forgive them since their writings were superb but Merritt's is just good enough to not be considered a "waste-of-time-book". It doesn't stand out by yesterday's or today's standards and I would only recommend it to someone interested in it for a more historical perspective of pulps. When all is said and done, I'm still curious about Merritts' Moon Pool one day.

Starting on a much better note is Robert McCammon's Swan Song. I'm always relieved when I start a book that's fricking massive and find that each page is going by with clusters of it's brethren between time checks. Even better is when I can tell that the book already stands head and shoulders above many of it's peers which McCammon's is doing. His writing is a bit nostalgic, to me, favorably resembling writers like King and Bradbury. It seems that I've got yet another wonderful new writer to catch up on. Boy's Life looks extremely interesting and I've already bought the mmpb edition..

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I finished The Reality Dysfunction last night.

Did anyone else feel that:

The absolute best part of the book was when no one quite knew what was going on, such as the Kulu/Marine attempt to get a prisoner? Knowing nothing about the enemies, save that they were ridiculously powerful, made that part one of the most intense reading experiences I can remember. Once you learn what they were it was still good (save the ending medieval army; that was just too cheesy for me to really buy), but it was never quite as terrifying.

Yes, I really liked that section of the book as well with neither the reader or the characters knowing exactly what is going on, just knowing things are going badly. Similarly, in his next big series I liked the section in Pandora's Star when the expedition is exploring the Dyson Alpha star system and it is obvious that something bad is just about to happen but had no real idea what is was going to be.

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I finally got to McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy, but unfortunately, it seems I've just been too distracted lately to follow closely, and I got to the end feeling quite unsure about what happened or why I should care. The prose is pretty though, and since I bought the omnibus, I'm holding on to it for when I can give it closer attention, before giving a final judgment.

I read Cyteen by Cherryh, which was alright. I think I really like her stories, in plot summary, but I'm not feeling her prose style. Plan to read some more Cherryh though.

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Yes, I really liked that section of the book as well with neither the reader or the characters knowing exactly what is going on, just knowing things are going badly. Similarly, in his next big series I liked the section in Pandora's Star when the expedition is exploring the Dyson Alpha star system and it is obvious that something bad is just about to happen but had no real idea what is was going to be.

Yeah, I definitely agree.

Spoiler for the series in general:

In my opinion, the horror elements die out at that point almost completely. Even accepting the main plot as pretty scary as a general matter, it was still largely too bogus to have a real horrifying mood for the rest of the series. For example, Al is too silly, and Dexter is too super villainy to create the same mystery...

Ultimately that's why the series gets weaker and weaker. Its sci-fi elements and its horror elements are replaced by, I don't know, epic quest elements(?), without keeping all of them going strong.

I still think Hamilton is the best science fiction writer since Heinlein, however.

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I finished up The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas last week and finally wrote up my review. Ultimately, it doesn't really stand out, but I guess I'm curious enough to see what comes next.

I'm reading Kraken by China Mieville now - I hope to finish up in the next day or two. Good, good stuff.

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I'm in the middle of Elizabeth Bear's new book Chill, the second in her "Jacob's Ladder" trilogy of generation starship-style SF. Like a lot of Bear's work, it mixes the feel of the ancient sagas with high technology with non-traditional gender and sexual roles; like a lot of generation starship stories, it mixes in religion and science-that-feels like fantasy. The first book in the trilogy, Dust, was very distant and austere...this one is closer in, there are more descriptions, a more detailed sense of what characters are thinking and feeling. It's being sold as "Chronicles of Amber, in Space" although so far that's come mainly from the family dynamics. What the series does seem to be doing, so far as I can tell, is recapitulating a story of human history: the first volume is a sort of plucking the fruit of knowledge from the tree and subsequent expulsion from Heaven(s); this volume is a spin on an idea of humanity in prehistoric times. I'm not totally convinced by the books yet, but they're interesting.

Really enjoyed Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. Good clean fun.

Really? I thought it read like fourth-rate Zelazny fan-fiction. That said, I was never entirely sure how it was meant to be read: did you read something like the Control-Alt-Delete War as meant seriously, or a wink at the use of war to "reboot" the world in so many SF books?

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Really? I thought it read like fourth-rate Zelazny fan-fiction. That said, I was never entirely sure how it was meant to be read: did you read something like the Control-Alt-Delete War as meant seriously, or a wink at the use of war to "reboot" the world in so many SF books?

Yup, really. It was quick, it was fun and it had lots of little plot twists. He's not Zelazny, but who is? It did what it did well IMHO.

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I finished The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett. It still has some of the same flaws as The Warded Man such as use of cliches and annoying character relationships. On the other hand, the writing is great and the world and scope are expanded significantly. Spear also felt a little more integrated than the first book with the only major time jump being flashbacks into Jardir's life. While some of the characterization was inconsistent, there are flashes of complexity so I think once Brett gets a little writing under his belt he could end up being a really good writer. I will definitely pick up the third book.

I was going to read The Gone-Away World, but I woke up with a hankering for Christopher Priest so I'm going to read The Affirmation instead.

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I was going to read The Gone-Away World, but I woke up with a hankering for Christopher Priest so I'm going to read The Affirmation instead.

I recommend you get to the Harkaway soon after you finished the Priest. TGAW is a somewhat divisive book, but I liked it a lot. What a wild ride.

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I am currently reading Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle and I am totally blown away! Even though I am only 1/10th into the book, I can tell this is going to be a sweet read, in a good/bad/weird kind of way.

The beginning of it (which is the only part I have read for now) is mind-bogglingly horrific. It's almost like torture porn (not helped by the fact that the narrator is an actual porn actor/producer) but the writing is so good that I *must* keep on reading.

I will post again when I have finished.

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Over the last few days I've read Tom Holt's 'Blonde Bombshell', a comedy that didn't make me laugh once, Alden Bell's 'The Reapers are the Angels', utterly superb, and Charlie Huston's 'Sleepless', heavy going in places but worth sticking with. To finish the week on a bit of a bang I'm working my way through 'Helsreach' (Aaron Dembski-Bowden).

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