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First Quarter 2021 Reading


Plessiez

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As well as creating compelling fictional characters within nuanced, detailed locations, Ian Rankin appears to be a very good father too.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/17/ian-rankin-hits-out-lack-covid-jab-advice-people-learning-disabilities

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"Ian Rankin hits out at lack of Covid jab advice for people with learning disabilities
Crime writer accuses governments in UK of ignoring people like his 26-year-old son, who is in a care home"

Hmmm, it seems the UK has an issue around Do Not Resuscitate for people with learning disabilities who contract covid-19?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties

 

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On 2/17/2021 at 12:41 PM, Inkdaub said:

I really liked this one.

It was good. I'll definitely carry on with the series.

Next up I'm going to read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space. I've never read one of his books before but I was thinking it should be good. I just had a look to see if there were any opinions on the board though and the reception seems decidedly mixed. Oh well, I've already bought it so I might as well give it a try.

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I finished Mordew by Alex Pheby today. It has been a long, long time since I read any fantasy by a new author but while I was shopping for some completely unrelated non-fiction, I came across the marvelous cover of Mordew, picked it up and read the following description:

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GOD IS DEAD, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew.

In the slums of the sea-battered city a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns. Until one day his desperate mother sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. 

The Master derives his magical power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength – and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. If only Nathan can discover how to use it. 

So it is that the Master begins to scheme against him – and Nathan has to fight his way through the betrayals, secrets, and vendettas of the city where God was murdered, and darkness reigns…

Naturally, I was intrigued. Bought the book and finished it. There is a lot people will find familiar in there (There is some Dickens in there and I assume some Peake as well, but the latter I can't say for I have yet to read Gormenghast) but it is presented in an energetic and very imaginative way.

The world-building is very intriguing and I'm curious to see where it goes. If it builds further on the strengths of this first book it might be a trilogy that can stand the test of time :) 

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On 2/18/2021 at 8:45 PM, ljkeane said:

Next up I'm going to read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space. I've never read one of his books before but I was thinking it should be good. I just had a look to see if there were any opinions on the board though and the reception seems decidedly mixed. Oh well, I've already bought it so I might as well give it a try.

 

Revelation Space has its issues but it's definitely worth a read. I can't speak for everyone but a lot of people I've seen who had problems with Reynolds were more out of frustration that it had so much that was great but some janky pacing and plot-planning issues let it down rather than it being a bad series.

Me personally I think it's a really good series even though the third book in particular makes some absolutely baffling choices and the real ending being in a short story not included with the trilogy is taking the piss.

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I read Ursula Le Guin's Tales From Earthsea. I thought it was a good collection of stories, they worked both individually and despite the time gaps between them and the lack of direct links between the plots I thought they did compliment each other well. One example would be The Finder and Dragonfly showing how dramatically some things had changed on Roke between the founding of the school and the time of the novels. I thought those were probably also the two strongest stories, although Dragonfly did take some time to get to the main point of the story.

I've now started The Other Wind, the final book in the series. It seems interesting so far, although I got the impression it was one of the less popular books in the series.

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I spent the end of December and a lot of January reading Bujold's Vorkosigan saga. As a result, I can now spell the word Vorkosigan without needing to check where the s, g and k go first. I missed out a couple of the early ones, and haven't read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen yet, though I'm sure I'll get around to it fairly soon. It's a pretty nice fictional universe to spend time in, provided you avoid the horrible stuff people seem to be doing continually in Jackson's Whole. The sci-fi equivalent of cosy crime. (Not to imply that it's badly written - it's not; the characters are distinctive and sensitively drawn, and the various civilisations are often based on quite striking concepts). 

I've also just finished Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins. Not cosy at all, but very readable, and featuring a couple of horrifically believable characters (Nick and Mariah, aargh!), and sketching out the darker side of Oxford. Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series makes me want to visit Oxford, and stay at The Trout Inn. Reading Magpie Lane made me want to plan any future trip to the south-east to take a wide loop around the city. I suspect that Atkins's Oxford is much closer to the reality of the city than Pullman's, and not just because the latter is in an alternative world. My one gripe with the book was that it didn't quite seem to integrate the gothic tropes it'd been drawing on, and the ending seemed a bit abrupt. I know that a lack of resolution is the modern thing to do in literature, but I could have done with a couple of threads being developed just a tad more.

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4 hours ago, dog-days said:

I spent the end of December and a lot of January reading Bujold's Vorkosigan saga. As a result, I can now spell the word Vorkosigan without needing to check where the s, g and k go first. I missed out a couple of the early ones, and haven't read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen yet, though I'm sure I'll get around to it fairly soon. It's a pretty nice fictional universe to spend time in, provided you avoid the horrible stuff people seem to be doing continually in Jackson's Whole. The sci-fi equivalent of cosy crime. (Not to imply that it's badly written - it's not; the characters are distinctive and sensitively drawn, and the various civilisations are often based on quite striking concepts).

I think it might have taken me a few books to be able to remember that Miles' surname wasn't Vorkoskigan.

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1 hour ago, williamjm said:

I think it might have taken me a few books to be able to remember that Miles' surname wasn't Vorkoskigan.

I've been seeing the name mentioned for years and years - I think never being able to remember if it was Vogorsikan or Vorkoskigan or Vorsgokigan may have put me off reading the series till Bujold's fantasy stuff prepared the ground.

But now I definitely have it right - all hail the Vorgoksigan saga!

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When the first Vorkosigan Saga stories were published, they stood out significantly from the other things published, especially in the 'zines, because of the ethnicity and culture that Bujold wrote about.

A lot of stuff in Analog et al of the early 80s was "Southern California in SPAAAaaaace!", so Russian / French / Greek cultural touchpoints made it very different, and for me, anyway, quite attractive.  It was time to explore new worlds while we explored new worlds, so to say.

Today a first-time reader will probably feel the Bujold cultural furniture is pretty tame, but once upon a time it was hot stuff.

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Yeah - I can see how when the series first started coming out, it would be seen as radical. I mean, there are sub-cultures/places in Britain and the USA where I'm sure it still is radical, thinking in particular of Beta Colony, and what it represents. 

I think my view of the novels as cosy (nicely so - cosy was all I could cope with in January) is because the main character is an aristocrat with huge wealth, a good family, and very well-connected in the society of his conservative home planet. Plus, with Bujold I tend to get the feeling that she isn't going to let anything unbearably unfair happen to the main characters; they might suffer, but they'll come through it stronger, and their friendships will survive too. 

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On 2/16/2021 at 6:59 PM, aceluby said:

Finished up the extended version of The Stand last night.  Can see why it's so highly regarded.  The first half of the book talking about the virus and the characters was engrossing.  Definitely goes a bit downhill once it gets into the God vs Devil stuff, but it was still good given all the ties to The Dark Tower. 

I'm re-reading it once again. Though in a post-covid world, I'm not sure about some of the details about the superflu. I think it should be asymptomatic for longer, because most people show cold symptoms in less than a day and are in deep shit in less than 2 days - both Covid-19 and Ebola tend to show this isn't the best way to propagate a virus. The thing seems to be suspiciously contagious as well, way beyond any known disease, I'd say. Last but not least, I'm doubtful about the "lethal in 99.5% cases, the 0.5% aren't hit at all, they don't have any symptom, nothing", because in cases like Black Death and all the plagues of old (Athens, Antonine, Justinian), a lot of people died, but a lot of the survivors were exposed to the disease, got it, had it rough, and survived. Of course, that's nitpicking. I'd love to hear King's take on his virus now, and if he'd change some of its features.

I said "re-reading", but that soon will be just "reading". I got the extended version and began to read it 25 years ago, assuming it was basically how a deadly virus kills nearly everyone, how it occurred first, how the pandemic happened and killed billions, how survivors fared and how they reacted and lived once it was over. Then after a few hundreds of pages, it began painfully obvious that the pandemic wasn't the story but was merely an extended setup, and this annoyed me to no end. When the whole story was basically groups of survivors peskering each other with some magical dudes manipulating them, I kid of lost interest and stopped halfway through. (something else also should've caught my mind at the time, otherwise I would've read it to the end, most probably that was when I entered university and had access to the insane amount of books in the uni's library).

That said, the first part is impressive, and specially eery now, when reading how people have common symptoms and don't react until they're awful, how it spread across the US, how people and officials react ("oh gee a nothing-burger, I just got a stupid cold" for most of the former / "Oh shit, we're fucked, no one will notice this is bad until it's too late, thinking it's just the common cold" for the head of project Blue), how weird is the city when most things are closed and there aren't people left in the streets, and specially the chapter that tracks down contacts across a dozen individuals, from the initial spreader to people far away.

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Just finished City of Stairs.  Very enjoyable.  My favorite character was Sigrud.  I wish he had more screen time.  I was happy to discover that apparently he is the main character of City of Miracles, book #3 of the Divine Cities series.

Just started City of Blades.  The opening sequence between Mulaghesh and her new neighbors was a fun place to start.

 

Also, I always envisioned Sigrud as looking like the comic book version of Sabertooth.  However, I recently noticed that the author, Robert Jackson Bennett, has artistic renderings of his main characters on his website.  Evidently, Bennett thinks that Sigrud looks more like Ragnar Lothbrok from Vikings.

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A couple of days ago I finished Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan. I didn't know until after I finished the book that the author died at the end of January at age 68. That is a shame because I thought this was an extremely good book. It's a future science fiction world where a combination of a quasar destroying radio and TV communication along with an out-of-control nanotechnology has created a very different world where nano-controlled cities are isolated in the middle of huge swaths of a USA which has been returned to early 19th century conditions. It's incredibly inventive. The plot reminded me a bit of both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and all the "young peasant is discovered to be the royal heir" fantasies, but done in a unique and fascinating way. The main character is a Dorothy-like young woman who even has a pet dog who ends up in a Cincinatti which is a nanotech version of The Emerald City. I really enjoyed it.

Today I finished Breadfruit by Celestine Vaite. This is a modern "realistic" semi-comic novel written by a woman who is a Tahitian who married an Australian and now lives in Australia. It is set in Tahiti, and I learned a lot about how early 21st century Tahitians live, with their original Polynesian culture still influencing them along with the modern world of service in France's military, paying the electric company, the Roman Catholic church, etc. The viewpoint character is a woman who has been in a relationship for at least 15 years with a man she has three children by, and who is only now planning her wedding. The characters are almost all definitely working class or at best lower middle class. The writing style is extremely accessible -- except for a few Tahitian words that occasionally appear, it has what seems to be a simple vocabulary, but uses this to great advantage in telling its story. Both Breadfruit and its sequel, Frangipani, won literary prizes, and I would recommend the book to anyone who likes to read modern novels from other cultures. 

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So I finished Revelation Space. It's a decidedly mixed bag. There's a lot of interesting ideas but some of the plot is fairly clunky and a lot of the characterisation is actively bad. Volyova and Khouri aren't too bad, Sylveste is pretty thinly drawn for a major character and the rest are even worse. I might carry on at some point to see were the series goes but I'm not desperate to read the next book.

Next up I'm going to read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

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34 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

So I finished Revelation Space. It's a decidedly mixed bag. There's a lot of interesting ideas but some of the plot is fairly clunky and a lot of the characterisation is actively bad. Volyova and Khouri aren't too bad, Sylveste is pretty thinly drawn for a major character and the rest are even worse. I might carry on at some point to see were the series goes but I'm not desperate to read the next book.

It's been a long time since I read it so I can't remember which character is which but I do remember thinking some of the characterisation was quite weak.

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I (finally) finished Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust a couple of days ago.  As I said in an earlier post, I struggled with this quite a lot (and only really perserved with it because it's fairly short).  Don't think I ever really got what the point of the whole thing was supposed to be.

I took a break part way through to read Aliette de Bodard's In The Vanishers' Palace.  I'd read On A Red Station, Drifting by the same author some years ago and found it to be ... well, not bad, as such, but pretty abstruse.  But this book was a lot more accessible and I quite enjoyed it.

Now I'm about halfway into Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and The Light.  Liking it a lot so far (but then I'm pretty sure I was always going to: I've been a big fan of Mantel since I first read A Place Of Greater Safety.)  One thing I've noticed is that my memory of the first two books has blured slightly with my memory of the early Shardlake books by C. J. Sansom (which are set in the same time period and which, I think, I first read around the same time as Wolf Hall).  This has definitely coloured my impression of some of the minor characters (Richard Rich, for example, is much more of an outright villain in the Shardlake series than he is in Mantel's series, at least so far). 

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I read Ursula Le Guin's The Other Wind. I thought it was a good conclusion to the series that brought in a lot of characters and plot threads from the previous books. In one of her comments in the omnibus edition I'm reading Le Guin said a lot of previous collections had omitted it or put it in the wrong place in the series and I think that does seem like a mistake since apart from the first couple of books (which were fairly standalone) I think the others would have left something unresolved without this. Although it does seem an appropriate conclusion I think the very end of the story way maybe a bit abrupt.

It is interesting reading all six books together to see how Le Guin's writing and her ideas about how her world worked evolved over the decades that it took to write them. I think the Le Guin of the 90s and early 2000s would not have done plenty of things differently if writing the early books of the series again, but despite that they are still recognisably part of the same series as the later ones. Overall I found the plots more interesting in the early books, although I think the characterisation perhaps had more depth in the later books, particularly for characters other than Ged or Tenar.

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I recall some years back someone (not on this forum - thread) mocking the very idea of Afrofuturism as something that never has and did not exist -- simply because he, who was very well versed in the fiction of sf/f had never heard of it (meaning stuff mostly published before 1985 it seemed), so called me a liar for referencing it.  Among the reasons were 1) Black people had nothing to do with sf/f and didn't care about it, while I referenced this:, which became outrage #2 I'd committed -- for one thing it seemed uncertain he had any idea who any of these three musicians are / were

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Jazz musicians Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis also explored Afrofuturism through music.

It was such an odd thing that I still remember that, trying to figure out wtf??????

Anyway, the latest in Afrofuturism:

https://www.axios.com/afrofuturism-black-science-fiction-212fda33-59f1-4139-a1eb-228fc766eab5.html

 

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The big picture: Afrofuturism was long an underground movement. Its roots date back to W.E.B. Du Bois, though its name wasn't coined til the 1990s. But it has been gaining a bigger mainstream profile in recent years with the blockbuster movie "Black Panther" and the HBO series "Lovecraft Country" and a national racial reckoning.  

 

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