Third Quarter 2020 Reading is a Joy

[Peadar]

I loved This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I have just started The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag. Only 50 pages in, but it's very promising so far. It's a murder mystery set in Stockholm in 1793.

[ithanos]

Lucky I checked this thread. Just reserved a copy of Shorefall with my local library. Hope we don't go into lock-down before I can pick it up. Now to look for a summary recap of Foundryside.

BTW anyone know when Josiah Bancroft's finishing the Books of Babel series? I really enjoy the series, even after the surprise of The Hod King not being the end.    

[Caligula_K3]

10 hours ago, ithanos said:

BTW anyone know when Josiah Bancroft's finishing the Books of Babel series? I really enjoy the series, even after the surprise of The Hod King not being the end.    

The plan was always for book four to come out in 2021 (and it was always planned to be a tetralogy). The last update I saw was from April, and it seems like the writing has gone well and 2021 is still the plan. Who knows if COVID or life has interfered since then, but we can hope not!

https://www.tor.com/2020/04/29/josiah-bancroft-reveals-books-of-babel-book-iv-is-titled-the-fall-of-babel/

[Durckad]

Finished up both a reread (more like a skim) of Crossroads of Twilight and my first read-through of Knife of Dreams.

Crossroads was, as remembered, pretty much an unnecessary book, BUT it does have some good moments, and skimming it makes the book largely tolerable. I was dreading my reread but I got through it fairly quickly and it didn't leave me wanting to drop WoT again like I did when the book first came out.

Knife of Dreams, on the other hand, was pretty damn good. I'm not sure I'd call it one of the best in series but it's certainly pretty close. The shift in pacing is so noticeable it's rather jarring. We go from 100 page prologues where nothing but endless setup with a sea of secondary and tertiary characters to a prologue where multiple story-shifting events happen in quick succession. It's a really welcome change of pace from what had been established as far back as Lord of Chaos. I finished it and I wanted to jump in to The Gathering Storm almost immediately, which I consider the sign of a pretty good book.

The biggest negative I have about the book is, oddly enough, the quickened pacing.  Several fairly major story threads and plot-points are resolved so quickly and some seemingly offhandedly that the resolutions kinda feel... unsatisfying. It's a minor complaint but I think a legitimate one.

Nest up is The Gathering Storm (of course) and Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis.

I've read a little bit of both of them so far and on The Gathering Storm, I can definitely tell that someone else wrote it other than Jordan. To me, Jordan never had the strongest voice in his writing, but it was pretty unmistakable in its style.  Sanderson's prose, at least in the prologue, feels very... workman-like in comparison: to the point and not much else. I haven't read anything else by him so I have no idea if that's his style or if it's the result of him trying to fill Jordan's shoes.

Axiom's End, so far, is... alright. It's interesting but not particularly great yet.

[Darth Richard II]

6 minutes ago, Durckad said:

Finished up both a reread (more like a skim) of Crossroads of Twilight and my first read-through of Knife of Dreams.

Crossroads was, as remembered, pretty much an unnecessary book, BUT it does have some good moments, and skimming it makes the book largely tolerable. I was dreading my reread but I got through it fairly quickly and it didn't leave me wanting to drop WoT again like I did when the book first came out.

Knife of Dreams, on the other hand, was pretty damn good. I'm not sure I'd call it one of the best in series but it's certainly pretty close. The shift in pacing is so noticeable it's rather jarring. We go from 100 page prologues where nothing but endless setup with a sea of secondary and tertiary characters to a prologue where multiple story-shifting events happen in quick succession. It's a really welcome change of pace from what had been established as far back as Lord of Chaos. I finished it and I wanted to jump in to The Gathering Storm almost immediately, which I consider the sign of a pretty good book.

The biggest negative I have about the book is, oddly enough, the quickened pacing.  Several fairly major story threads and plot-points are resolved so quickly and some seemingly offhandedly that the resolutions kinda feel... unsatisfying. It's a minor complaint but I think a legitimate one.

Nest up is The Gathering Storm (of course) and Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis.

I've read a little bit of both of them so far and on The Gathering Storm, I can definitely tell that someone else wrote it other than Jordan. To me, Jordan never had the strongest voice in his writing, but it was pretty unmistakable in its style.  Sanderson's prose, at least in the prologue, feels very... workman-like in comparison: to the point and not much else. I haven't read anything else by him so I have no idea if that's his style or if it's the result of him trying to fill Jordan's shoes.

Axiom's End, so far, is... alright. It's interesting but not particularly great yet.

I think other people may know for sure, but I was always under the impression that the Prologue for The Gathering Storm was written by RJ.

[Gigei]

On 7/26/2020 at 4:39 PM, Maia said:

And on to another series with an unsatisfying conclusion - "The Books of the Raksura" by Martha Wells. Consisting of "The Cloud Roads", "The Serpent Seas", "The Siren Depths", "The Edge of  Worlds", and "The Harbours of the Sun".  I blew through them in a little more than a week, enjoying the journey nearly the whole way, until the series just abruptly ended, without resolving the mysteries that have been building up for the last 3 books. Huh? Was the final duology supposed to be a trilogy and then the third book was suddenly  cancelled and the author had to quickly wrap up somehow?  

Anyway, I can still highly recommend the first 3 books, which are written in a self-contained manner, with each offering a complete story. They are set in a colorful and highly original world inhabited by multitudes of different intelligent species. The protagonist and sole PoV for the first 4 books is a shape-shifter who got separated from his people and is searching for somewhere to belong.  Adventures and drama ensue.

 

Finally, "The Empire of Gold" by S.A. Chakraborty. It decently concluded her Daevabad Trilogy. It was not as great as it could have been, IMHO, but neither did it drop the ball in the ways that I most feared. I loved certain new revelations

  Reveal hidden contents

about the fall of the Nahids, the role of the Marids in it and the role of Peris in everything from Suleiman onwards. It never sat well with me that Zaydi al-Qahtani somehow just knew how to get the Seal, fortuitiously had exactly the weapons needed to overcome their powers, etc.

and how deep down  the rabbit hole they went.  All in all, a satisfying conclusion, which counts for a lot with me, as few authors manage to create one for their series, IMHO. "The Kingdom of Copper", the second book with all it's intrigue and character complexity was the high point for me, but all in all I'd still say that the trilogy is very good.  I'll post some more detailed thoughts on "The Empire of Gold" in the dedicated thread when I have time.

 

 

I love the Raksura books. At least the first three ones were great with unusual non-human characters and a mostly tight story. IDK why the other books became boring.

I like the last book of Daevabad and I can't wait to reread the trilogy now that I know what actually went on behind the scenes.

[Durckad]

8 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I think other people may know for sure, but I was always under the impression that the Prologue for The Gathering Storm was written by RJ.

That would really surprise me if so, it seems so differently written than everything else in WoT.

[Darth Richard II]

This seems like a @Werthead or @fionwe1987question

[Kyll.Ing.]

I recently finished Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, years after reading the first book. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not really sure what to think of the story.

In parts, it is very flowery with its descriptions, using a lot of time to describe stuff, usually how awful life (and death) on the moon is. And I'm not sure if I find it very believable. In this setting, society on the moon has taken libertarianism to its full extent: everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden, the only law is contract law, and it appears absolutely everyone is screwed over by this. People literally have to pay for every breath, while doing hazardous work in awfully cramped conditions. There is no police, only contracted security. The mega-rich families have their luxurious habitats and are constantly trying to out-maneuver each other with assassinations and sabotage, while everyone else have to scrape together a living while evading the constant danger of death. It seems like a society that would fall to revolution within a week.

And I think that might have coloured my reading experience slightly. McDonald's moon is described in great detail, but it's never presented as an appealing place to be. It seems like the only thing anyone outside the main characters could hope for is "not dying", a feat for which the success rate is abysmal at the best of times. Working on the surface? Even if your gear somehow doesn't malfunction, you could be run over by a rover just for being an asset of somebody's rival company. Working in the cramped underground cities? Lunar dust could still destroy your lungs, if radiation doesn't get you first, your apartment is likely not to be bigger than a closet, and there's no police to protect you from crime. Innocent bystander in the streets? The assassins don't care if somebody is in the way of their target, and unless you have a contract with them it's not illegal for them to kill you anyway. Not working? Now you can't afford to breathe. I kept asking myself "what is everybody getting out of these conditions?" and the only answer I found was "it makes for a nice setting of political conflict". Had not the uncaring companies at the core of the story required manpower for their operations, nobody would have had any reason to even be on the moon in this setting.

The books are exciting, but the illogical moments keep popping up. There's a huge subplot about a guy who's basically described as a werewolf - a strange physiological condition that makes him behave all weird. There's a lot of focus on knife fighting, even though more efficient methods of violence seems to be ubiquitous. The large families appear to all do everything their own ways, with nobody even agreeing on something as basic as family structures. Large corporations exist, but they are all family-owned which really complicates matters for everyone. And at the end of the trilogy, there were still quite a lot of loose ends or plot elements that got no satisfactory resolution.

I think I liked the series, but am not in a hurry to read it again, as everything depicted in it was shown to be quite unlikable.

[Poobah]

10 hours ago, Durckad said:

Nest up is The Gathering Storm (of course) and Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis.

I've read a little bit of both of them so far and on The Gathering Storm, I can definitely tell that someone else wrote it other than Jordan. To me, Jordan never had the strongest voice in his writing, but it was pretty unmistakable in its style.  Sanderson's prose, at least in the prologue, feels very... workman-like in comparison: to the point and not much else. I haven't read anything else by him so I have no idea if that's his style or if it's the result of him trying to fill Jordan's shoes.

Axiom's End, so far, is... alright. It's interesting but not particularly great yet.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on Axiom's End since I was thinking of picking it up.

10 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I think other people may know for sure, but I was always under the impression that the Prologue for The Gathering Storm was written by RJ.

On the whole they've been rather cagey about who wrote what but Sanderson has stated (here, warning spoilers throughout for the entire wheel of time) that at least some of the prologue was Jordan, here's a quotation from the relevent section so @Durckad can avoid the other spoilers:

Quote

"Scenes he’d finished, mostly finished, or had a loose first draft of include: the farmer watching the clouds approach in The Gathering Storm, the scene with Rand seen through the eyes of a sul’dam from the prologue of The Gathering Storm"

 

[Plessiez]

Inspired to try Chakraborty's The City Of Brass by this thread and I thought it was pretty good.  Will probably move on to the rest of the trilogy soon.

(Still haven't ordered the new Kate Elliott; probably going to wait for the UK release now.)

[Starkess]

I finished The Three-Body Problem, and my ultimate opinion was similar to what I stated previously--and interesting premise and plot, but the writing and characters got in the way of me enjoying it too much. Not sure how much is from the translation, how much from different literary cultures and conventions, and how much is just a matter of taste. In any case, I definitely intend to continue the trilogy whenever my hold from the library comes in.

I'm halfway or a little more through my listen of The Starless Sea. It's okay. The meandering purple prose is getting on my nerves a little bit, and the scattered fairy tales and vignettes are hit or miss for me. But overall I am enjoying it, it's a fun enough story and world to get lost in, and it's clearly written by and for people who love books (which I do).

Next up I'm reading The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. I have a vague notion of seeing a trailer for a movie based on this, but I don't recall much so we'll see.

[Werthead]

22 hours ago, Durckad said:

That would really surprise me if so, it seems so differently written than everything else in WoT.

Robert Jordan wrote a mega-prologue for "the last Wheel of Time book" which then got divided between the prologues for The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight. Other parts of the prologues were written by Sanderson.

The very start of the TGS prologue, with the farmers looking at the approaching storm, was written by RJ. Most of the epilogue to AMoL, a key Mat sequence in Towers of Midnight and most of Rand's concluding chapters in The Gathering Storm were also written by Jordan. I believe a lot of Egwene's chapters in TGS were actually held back from Knife of Dreams.

All of Jordan's material for the last book (bar Egwene's chapters, which were more polished) that were divided between the three concluding volumes was at a much earlier stage of polish than was his norm, though. He normally went over each chapter several times before moving on, but for the that book he knew time was of the essence so pressed on and left things in a less refined state than he would have done normally. This might be why those chapters read a bit differently.

[williamjm]

1 hour ago, Starkess said:

I finished The Three-Body Problem, and my ultimate opinion was similar to what I stated previously--and interesting premise and plot, but the writing and characters got in the way of me enjoying it too much. Not sure how much is from the translation, how much from different literary cultures and conventions, and how much is just a matter of taste. In any case, I definitely intend to continue the trilogy whenever my hold from the library comes in.

I did wonder the same about whether the characterisation had lost something in translation.

I'm halfway or a little more through my listen of 

The Starless Sea. It's okay. The meandering purple prose is getting on my nerves a little bit, and the scattered fairy tales and vignettes are hit or miss for me. But overall I am enjoying it, it's a fun enough story and world to get lost in, and it's clearly written by and for people who love books (which I do).

I did think it was a bit ironic that the biggest problem with a book about the power of storytelling was that it didn't have a strong central narrative.

[Astromech]

Finished Stefan Zweig's memoirs of the turbulent early 20th C.,  The World of Yesterday. It's both interesting and terrifying reading first-hand accounts of such tragic times. 

[RedEyedGhost]

On 7/27/2020 at 2:49 AM, Peadar said:

I loved This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

 

I thought about buying this the other day, but couldn't justify paying $10 for a 200 novella.  Will watch for it to go on sale.

 

8 hours ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

I recently finished Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, years after reading the first book. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not really sure what to think of the story.

In parts, it is very flowery with its descriptions, using a lot of time to describe stuff, usually how awful life (and death) on the moon is. And I'm not sure if I find it very believable. In this setting, society on the moon has taken libertarianism to its full extent: everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden, the only law is contract law, and it appears absolutely everyone is screwed over by this. People literally have to pay for every breath, while doing hazardous work in awfully cramped conditions. There is no police, only contracted security. The mega-rich families have their luxurious habitats and are constantly trying to out-maneuver each other with assassinations and sabotage, while everyone else have to scrape together a living while evading the constant danger of death. It seems like a society that would fall to revolution within a week.

And I think that might have coloured my reading experience slightly. McDonald's moon is described in great detail, but it's never presented as an appealing place to be. It seems like the only thing anyone outside the main characters could hope for is "not dying", a feat for which the success rate is abysmal at the best of times. Working on the surface? Even if your gear somehow doesn't malfunction, you could be run over by a rover just for being an asset of somebody's rival company. Working in the cramped underground cities? Lunar dust could still destroy your lungs, if radiation doesn't get you first, your apartment is likely not to be bigger than a closet, and there's no police to protect you from crime. Innocent bystander in the streets? The assassins don't care if somebody is in the way of their target, and unless you have a contract with them it's not illegal for them to kill you anyway. Not working? Now you can't afford to breathe. I kept asking myself "what is everybody getting out of these conditions?" and the only answer I found was "it makes for a nice setting of political conflict". Had not the uncaring companies at the core of the story required manpower for their operations, nobody would have had any reason to even be on the moon in this setting.

The books are exciting, but the illogical moments keep popping up. There's a huge subplot about a guy who's basically described as a werewolf - a strange physiological condition that makes him behave all weird. There's a lot of focus on knife fighting, even though more efficient methods of violence seems to be ubiquitous. The large families appear to all do everything their own ways, with nobody even agreeing on something as basic as family structures. Large corporations exist, but they are all family-owned which really complicates matters for everyone. And at the end of the trilogy, there were still quite a lot of loose ends or plot elements that got no satisfactory resolution.

I think I liked the series, but am not in a hurry to read it again, as everything depicted in it was shown to be quite unlikable.

That's how I felt about the first book, I did enjoy it quite a bit while reading it, but haven't had any desire to finish the trilogy.  And now that you mention it I seem to recall that McDonald is quite libertarian personally.

[Galactus]

I've started Miles Cameron's Masters and Mages series. Thus far it looks... Kind of interesting, but then again, that's what I thought about his other series too, and then it turned into mush. That said, he really does seem to love cod-medieval occultism and academia, and it's fun when he touches it. 

[Kyll.Ing.]

10 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

That's how I felt about the first book, I did enjoy it quite a bit while reading it, but haven't had any desire to finish the trilogy.  And now that you mention it I seem to recall that McDonald is quite libertarian personally.

I didn't really get the impression that he was promoting that type of society, since he goes to pretty great lengths to show how crummy the moon is for the people who live there. The lack of laws makes it easy to be screwed over, and the physical conditions are so harsh on top of that that I can't see how the majority would accept that lifestyle. A few families make trillions, while their workers die in the vacuum on a daily basis or barely survive in cramped quarters underground? And all their security is engaged on a contract basis, with no police? Doesn't seem like conditions fostering any kind of stability to me. The worldbuilding was neat, but I felt that it lacked in positive aspects. A reason for anybody to want to live there, or to be so fanatically loyal to their employers.

EDIT: Another thing that I think I want to get off my chest about this series. Spoilers because it's about the last book and the ending:

Spoiler

When the ending of the book came, it felt like so many plot lines had been set up without paying off, as if the author had a look at the manuscript one day and said "yeah, we might as well end now" and then wrote the last chapter while many plot lines were still mid-arc. A few examples:

• The Suns implant false memories in Lucasinho (long story). They get found out. Someone is killed, humiliating the shrewd Lady Sun. In a later scene, she loses her composure and throws a hissy fit. We don't hear from the Suns again. For essentially being one of the main villains of the series, her conflict doesn't get a whole lot of resolution.
• Darius Mackenzie is trained to be an assassin under the Suns. The last we hear from him is when he fails to take over the business of his uncle (or was it brother?), because he is out-maneuvered by Danny Mackenzie. We never see him do anything with that assassin training, except snippets of the training itself.
• Marina Calzaghe is the star of a long side plot where she decides to go back to the Moon. We last see her on the way to the launch site. She does not interact with any of the other established characters throughout the entire novel. At one point, the government attempts to recruit her as a spy. That goes nowhere. 
• It's mentioned throughout the entire book that "nobody knows what the Asamoahs want". Aptly enough, we never find out what their grand plan is, or if they ever had one. Then why allude to it so much?
• Bryce Mackenzie has João de Deus mined, rigging all the air locks to blow. When the moment comes when it seems like this could become a mighty disaster, somebody off-handedly remarks "oh, we dealt with those mines months ago" and nothing of the sort happens again.
• An Earth-based coalition was behind a rather sinister genocide plot, seeking to depopulate the moon after making its entire economy automated. I think this was thwarted, but it's not made very clear what the coalition will do next.
• The mysterious super-computers that can predict the future. We see them being pretty obnoxious to interact with, at some point they seem to spawn a sentient agent to help a character out of a sticky situation, and then ... nothing more. I think the implication was that their predictions, which spawned several plot developments in the earlier novels, were never that useful in the first place, but it still feels like a bit of an anticlimax.
• Lucasinho Corta is demoted from main character to MacGuffin after suffering brain damage after the climax of the last book. He spends this book recovering, including the aforementioned "false memories" thing. The court case over who gets to have stewardship of him while he recovers is the central conflict of the last book, but Lucasinho himself doesn't have much agency in this book. 
• There was an army of killer robots. In the end, it doesn't do anything. At some point, Lucas Corta manages to seize control of the army, and I guess he uses that control to prevent them from attacking the Cortas at the end of the book - except there is a squad of an older, non-hacked model of robots that attacks the Cortas anyway.
• Farside University ... exists. That's about as far as it goes.

In short, it kind of feels like every character should have had a chapter or two more. There were so many plot threads that didn't go anywhere. I enjoyed reading the book, but at the end, I sat there with so many thoughts of "... but what was the deal with ____? Why spend so much time setting it up with no payoff?"

 

[Peadar]

18 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

That's how I felt about the first book, I did enjoy it quite a bit while reading it, but haven't had any desire to finish the trilogy.  And now that you mention it I seem to recall that McDonald is quite libertarian personally.

I'm lucky enough that I get to chat with him about once a year -- I love his work. To me, he comes across as quite left wing. As @Kyll.Ing. says above, I don't think he's endorsing the society he's describing, but he clearly loves writing about its food, fashions and its many beverages.

[Caligula_K3]

20 hours ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

I didn't really get the impression that he was promoting that type of society, since he goes to pretty great lengths to show how crummy the moon is for the people who live there. The lack of laws makes it easy to be screwed over, and the physical conditions are so harsh on top of that that I can't see how the majority would accept that lifestyle. A few families make trillions, while their workers die in the vacuum on a daily basis or barely survive in cramped quarters underground? And all their security is engaged on a contract basis, with no police? Doesn't seem like conditions fostering any kind of stability to me. The worldbuilding was neat, but I felt that it lacked in positive aspects. A reason for anybody to want to live there, or to be so fanatically loyal to their employers.

EDIT: Another thing that I think I want to get off my chest about this series. Spoilers because it's about the last book and the ending:

  Hide contents

When the ending of the book came, it felt like so many plot lines had been set up without paying off, as if the author had a look at the manuscript one day and said "yeah, we might as well end now" and then wrote the last chapter while many plot lines were still mid-arc. A few examples:

• The Suns implant false memories in Lucasinho (long story). They get found out. Someone is killed, humiliating the shrewd Lady Sun. In a later scene, she loses her composure and throws a hissy fit. We don't hear from the Suns again. For essentially being one of the main villains of the series, her conflict doesn't get a whole lot of resolution.
• Darius Mackenzie is trained to be an assassin under the Suns. The last we hear from him is when he fails to take over the business of his uncle (or was it brother?), because he is out-maneuvered by Danny Mackenzie. We never see him do anything with that assassin training, except snippets of the training itself.
• Marina Calzaghe is the star of a long side plot where she decides to go back to the Moon. We last see her on the way to the launch site. She does not interact with any of the other established characters throughout the entire novel. At one point, the government attempts to recruit her as a spy. That goes nowhere. 
• It's mentioned throughout the entire book that "nobody knows what the Asamoahs want". Aptly enough, we never find out what their grand plan is, or if they ever had one. Then why allude to it so much?
• Bryce Mackenzie has João de Deus mined, rigging all the air locks to blow. When the moment comes when it seems like this could become a mighty disaster, somebody off-handedly remarks "oh, we dealt with those mines months ago" and nothing of the sort happens again.
• An Earth-based coalition was behind a rather sinister genocide plot, seeking to depopulate the moon after making its entire economy automated. I think this was thwarted, but it's not made very clear what the coalition will do next.
• The mysterious super-computers that can predict the future. We see them being pretty obnoxious to interact with, at some point they seem to spawn a sentient agent to help a character out of a sticky situation, and then ... nothing more. I think the implication was that their predictions, which spawned several plot developments in the earlier novels, were never that useful in the first place, but it still feels like a bit of an anticlimax.
• Lucasinho Corta is demoted from main character to MacGuffin after suffering brain damage after the climax of the last book. He spends this book recovering, including the aforementioned "false memories" thing. The court case over who gets to have stewardship of him while he recovers is the central conflict of the last book, but Lucasinho himself doesn't have much agency in this book. 
• There was an army of killer robots. In the end, it doesn't do anything. At some point, Lucas Corta manages to seize control of the army, and I guess he uses that control to prevent them from attacking the Cortas at the end of the book - except there is a squad of an older, non-hacked model of robots that attacks the Cortas anyway.
• Farside University ... exists. That's about as far as it goes.

In short, it kind of feels like every character should have had a chapter or two more. There were so many plot threads that didn't go anywhere. I enjoyed reading the book, but at the end, I sat there with so many thoughts of "... but what was the deal with ____? Why spend so much time setting it up with no payoff?"

 

Yeah, structurally, the plot of this trilogy was a mess. I really enjoyed book 1 but thought book 2 was pretty much unnecessary along with most of book 3, which then was forced to rush to a climax out of nowhere at the end. And that's not even getting started on the werewolf plotline, which I thought was just.. really, really weird. And not in a good way.