time again for reading!
Sep. 3rd, 2014 07:53 pmWhat are you currently reading?
Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams. It appears to have no real connection with Hardwired, except for a similar cover style and being nominally set a hundred years in Hardwired's future. That's fine by me: VotW is a hard-sf amnesia noir, where a clone whose backed-up memories are fifteen years out of date tries to untangle what happened to his original against a space-cyberpunk-esque backdrop of corporation-states and unfathomable aliens. Good stuff, but then I don't think I've read any WJW that I wouldn't class as good stuff.
What did you recently finish reading?
Hmm. Pock's World by Dave Duncan, which was decidedly meh: it contained several interesting premises, none of which it followed through on in anything like a satisfactory fashion, and the prose was not so great either. As I recall I felt the same way about his Ill-Met In The Arena, which means I should stop buying his books.
Before that ... sometime before that I read Chris Moriarty's hard-SF Spin State. It's quite good. The first half or so felt very kin to the films noir I've been catching at the Cinematheque: a murder mystery that isn't really the point but just serves as an entry point to other interesting crimes, lots of people with their own agendas, corruption and power and hard edges. It felt like the SF was just there as a backdrop. Then the SFnality kicked into high gear. I felt like it ended a bit abruptly (odd, for a six-hundred-page book) but it was quite good.
I think I read something in between that I wasn't too impressed with, but if so I wasn't too impressed with it, so it can be safely forgotten.
Oh, and probably a bunch of RPGs, in PDF form, because the Bundle of Holding keeps putting together interesting bundles, and Pelgrane Press keeps shutting up and taking my money for 13th Age supplements and interesting smaller games.
What do you think you'll read next?
Either Growing Up Weightless, or John McPhee's book on the Merchant Marine. Whatever I feel in the mood for / grab off the shelf first.
Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams. It appears to have no real connection with Hardwired, except for a similar cover style and being nominally set a hundred years in Hardwired's future. That's fine by me: VotW is a hard-sf amnesia noir, where a clone whose backed-up memories are fifteen years out of date tries to untangle what happened to his original against a space-cyberpunk-esque backdrop of corporation-states and unfathomable aliens. Good stuff, but then I don't think I've read any WJW that I wouldn't class as good stuff.
What did you recently finish reading?
Hmm. Pock's World by Dave Duncan, which was decidedly meh: it contained several interesting premises, none of which it followed through on in anything like a satisfactory fashion, and the prose was not so great either. As I recall I felt the same way about his Ill-Met In The Arena, which means I should stop buying his books.
Before that ... sometime before that I read Chris Moriarty's hard-SF Spin State. It's quite good. The first half or so felt very kin to the films noir I've been catching at the Cinematheque: a murder mystery that isn't really the point but just serves as an entry point to other interesting crimes, lots of people with their own agendas, corruption and power and hard edges. It felt like the SF was just there as a backdrop. Then the SFnality kicked into high gear. I felt like it ended a bit abruptly (odd, for a six-hundred-page book) but it was quite good.
I think I read something in between that I wasn't too impressed with, but if so I wasn't too impressed with it, so it can be safely forgotten.
Oh, and probably a bunch of RPGs, in PDF form, because the Bundle of Holding keeps putting together interesting bundles, and Pelgrane Press keeps shutting up and taking my money for 13th Age supplements and interesting smaller games.
What do you think you'll read next?
Either Growing Up Weightless, or John McPhee's book on the Merchant Marine. Whatever I feel in the mood for / grab off the shelf first.