home. tired. books.
Nov. 26th, 2014 06:58 pmGot in after midnight on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Slept a lot, and did very little yesterday. Today I feel more like a human being.
What are you currently reading?
John Brunner's A Maze of Stars, hard(ish?) SF about a ship that's visiting every world colonised by humans... over and over and over again, at different points in the timestream, for reasons that are obscure even to the ship. It's good, I think. I'm enjoying it but finding it difficult to really get into.
Also, the Atomic Robo RPG. I am enjoying it enough that it's likely to be the next thing I want to run, whenever the current LG&S game finishes up. It's a much more coherent introduction to the FATE system than whatever other things I've read have been.
What did you recently finish reading?
Howard Waldrop's collection Howard Who?. The first story in the book, "The Ugly Chickens," is one of my favorite things I've read this year. The next couple of stories didn't grab me but "'...The World, As We Know't'" (nineteenth-century alchemy!) and "Heirs of the Perisphere" (Disney animatronics awaken in a post-apocalyptic wasteland) were quite good. Odd, and recommended.
Also the first three volumes of the collected Atomic Robo comic, about the adventures of Nikola Tesla's, er, atomic robot scientist. When I was working at Waldenbooks I was a big fan of Hellboy (this is about when the first movie came out): wisecracks, weird magic, Nazis getting beat up, and good art. Atomic Robo is a lot like Hellboy except with weird science instead of the weird magic, and a lot less dark. In the intro to volume 3 the creators compare Robo to the Muppets: lots of fun, lots of snark, and when they can't figure out how to end a scene they blow something up. That works, too. I like Robo a lot, and it doesn't seem to be going down the grim-and-angst-and-poor-characterization path that later Hellboy / BPRD books took.
What do you think you’ll read next?
My copy of Gene Wolfe's The Land Across came in shortly before we left, so, that. Either it will be minor but good (like Pirate Freedom or The Sorcerer's House) and worth the wait, or it will be terrible (like Home Fires) and I will give up on new Wolfe because two terrible books in a row is quite enough. I'm obviously hoping for the former but I have my fears.
What are you currently reading?
John Brunner's A Maze of Stars, hard(ish?) SF about a ship that's visiting every world colonised by humans... over and over and over again, at different points in the timestream, for reasons that are obscure even to the ship. It's good, I think. I'm enjoying it but finding it difficult to really get into.
Also, the Atomic Robo RPG. I am enjoying it enough that it's likely to be the next thing I want to run, whenever the current LG&S game finishes up. It's a much more coherent introduction to the FATE system than whatever other things I've read have been.
What did you recently finish reading?
Howard Waldrop's collection Howard Who?. The first story in the book, "The Ugly Chickens," is one of my favorite things I've read this year. The next couple of stories didn't grab me but "'...The World, As We Know't'" (nineteenth-century alchemy!) and "Heirs of the Perisphere" (Disney animatronics awaken in a post-apocalyptic wasteland) were quite good. Odd, and recommended.
Also the first three volumes of the collected Atomic Robo comic, about the adventures of Nikola Tesla's, er, atomic robot scientist. When I was working at Waldenbooks I was a big fan of Hellboy (this is about when the first movie came out): wisecracks, weird magic, Nazis getting beat up, and good art. Atomic Robo is a lot like Hellboy except with weird science instead of the weird magic, and a lot less dark. In the intro to volume 3 the creators compare Robo to the Muppets: lots of fun, lots of snark, and when they can't figure out how to end a scene they blow something up. That works, too. I like Robo a lot, and it doesn't seem to be going down the grim-and-angst-and-poor-characterization path that later Hellboy / BPRD books took.
What do you think you’ll read next?
My copy of Gene Wolfe's The Land Across came in shortly before we left, so, that. Either it will be minor but good (like Pirate Freedom or The Sorcerer's House) and worth the wait, or it will be terrible (like Home Fires) and I will give up on new Wolfe because two terrible books in a row is quite enough. I'm obviously hoping for the former but I have my fears.