williamjm

My main memory of Dune Messiah is that there are a lot of people having meetings, I think it gets a bit less dull towards the end but it's still nowhere close to the original book. Children of Dune was better than Messiah but still not at the same level as Dune.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

I liked it, even if it felt slightly odd to have an underdog story where the underdog is the Ford Motor Company.

Presumably even before that arrives the Ukrainians might be able to use more of what they already have since they will know that there's less need to ration it if replacements are about to arrive.

I saw an article saying that Truss' advance for the book was £1500, which somehow seems both embarrassingly low and also unreasonably high.

I think The Heroes is probably my favourite, although I did like Best Served Cold.

I watched Suzume, which I thought was very good. There are parts of the premise which are sometimes a bit reminiscent of Makoto Shinkai's previous films, but while there are certain themes he's obviously keen on there's also a lot of new ideas here. The thing that happens to one of the two protagonists early in the film is definitely unusual and memorable. It also did a good job of hiding some twists about some of the characters until near the end of the story. I thought Suzume and Souta were both good characters, but felt that some of the supporting characters' actions felt a bit implausible at times. I also thought it was effective in tying together the fantastical parts of the plot with more mundane concerns about Japan's propensity for natural disasters. As ever with his films the animation was gorgeous.

I just finished Blade of Dream. I've been reading through the posts in this thread about it and I saw Karsen being brought up several times as a character who is still quite mysterious. I agree that he seems an obvious choice for one of the viewpoint characters in the third book. One theory I had when reading Blade of Dream about him was... Do we know whether there's a confirmed date for book 3 yet?

I finished Daniel Abraham's Blade of Dream, the second book in his Kithamar trilogy. I think that the trilogy's unusual structure, where each book is telling the story of the same year in the city of Kithamar, does have some strengths and some drawbacks. It does mean that for the first part of the book we know more than the characters do about some of the city's secrets, so some of the things they discover that are revelations to them are anticlimactic to the reader. On the other hand, seeing the events from a different perspective does add extra depth as we find out more about some of the events and also some things that were unknown in the first book. Seeing some of the conversations again from a different perspective also makes it clear that sometimes characters can take completely different conclusions from a conversation. The conclusion of the book is particularly strong, partly because the characters in the first book were ignorant about what happens at the end of this one. While I thought the first book was interesting, I did struggle a bit with some of the characters, particularly Ash's storyline where it was hard to care too much about whether she succeeded or not since what she was trying to do was clearly a bad idea. I did like the characters more in this one, while Elaine and Garreth can be naive or foolish at times they can also be a lot more determined and capable than they appeared in their brief appearances in the first book. I thought there were also a number of good minor characters in this. I've now started Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which I am enjoying so far and I definitely already feel sorry for Fat Charles.

Out of recent shows I think Andor definitely stands up to those three. I don't know if I'd say Jupiter Ascending was a good film necessarily, but at least it had some imagination and I'd rather than watch it than something turgid like Rebel Moon. If you're going to make a daft space opera why not do crazy things like have Sean Bean play a bee? I thought John Carter did manage to capture some of the spirit of pulp science fiction. It's also a bit silly, but if your pulp science fiction about travelling to Mars isn't a bit silly then you're not doing it right.

It is a bit lacking in gravitas. We do have a few billion years to come up with a good name for the merged galaxy, hopefully we can manage something better than Milkdromeda or Andromeway.

The Andromeda Galaxy is heading towards us at about 300 km/s and the prediction is that it will collide with the Milky Way in about 5 Billion years.

I liked it. I think saying that Ancillary Justice is still her best book is accurate, but I thought Translation State was the best book she'd written since the Ancillary trilogy. I think it's perhaps inevitable for an award like the Hugos that the nominations won't necessarily represent the full breadth of the genre because most of the nominators probably only read a limited number of new releases in a year and they are likely to prioritise books by authors they are already fans of.

10 years would be enough time for Liz Truss to be Prime Minister 81 times.

Flying across the Atlantic to a convention without already having a membership for it is definitely suggesting he was more interested in making a scene that actually taking part.