![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dies The Fire
Feb. 13th, 2005 11:04 pmThe last time I updated my fiction books(which was before we left for Christmas vacation), I was about to read Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. I'd have to say that I didn't like it quite as much as The Truth or Thief of Time, but I liked it better than Carpe Jugulum or The Fifth Elephant. Takes place entirely outside of Ankh-Morpork, with brief appearances by Vimes and William De Worde, in a country that manages to feel Eastern European, or possibly even Central American, while everyone still acts pretty much British. I'm still holding out on buying him in hardcover, so Hat Full of Stars and Going Postal are not on my shelf, but I've still got The Wee Free Men, not to mention The Dark Side of The Earth(an early one), plus bits of the Bromeliad and the Johnny series. Once I've finished his other works, then maybe I can buy Discworld books in hardcover. Until then, I can wait. ...I'm even feeling like rereading the series, or at least the first few books, mostly as a result of playing the Discworld computer game. I have reread The Colour of Magic once or twice, but the rest only once, and there was a long gap between my reading Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters. But anyway, moving along...
Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap Into Conflict:The Real Story was one of the books I read over Christmas, and doesn't it fit the cheery mood of the season? It's another reread, but I just felt it was time to start rereading the Gap series. This time through maybe I'll try to pay more attention to the supposed parallels to Wagner's Ring Cycle. Or maybe not.
Next was New Voices In Science Fiction, edited by Mike Resnick. I picked it up mostly because of our friend Barb Galler-Smith's story in it, as well as her late friend Robyn Herrington's. I wish I could say that I liked Robyn's, but I didn't. It was...well, it was a month and a half ago, and I don't have the copy to hand, but I remember the quality of the stories being uneven, but with some good ones. Unhelpful. Don't you wish I wasn't so lazy, or had written this closer to the time?
I've been reading the Lemony Snicket series from the library, and it seemed like time for the next one(it's been a while since The Wide Window, actually), so next up was The Miserable Mill. It was a fast and easy read, but I don't think I liked it as much as the first three.
After that I read The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. Of course Bujold is a crackerjack science fiction writer, with the incredibly likable Miles Vorkosigan, but this is fantasy. With, perforce, a whole new main character. Thankfully, she rises to the occasion, with the tormented(figuratively, and also literally, for the most of the book)Cazaril. I gather that the next book, The Paladin of Souls, features a different main character, but now I'm sure she'll pull it off. And one of these I'll have to try The Spirit Ring.
Knock Down by Dick Francis was decent enough, but a bit too short. This time he approaches the British horse-racing industry from the point of view of a bloodstock agent, and once again manages a healthy dose of suspense and mystery...but, as I said, too short. At this point I'm catching up on his earlier books(when I started reading him, Hot Money was his newest one, I think), but there's not many more of his latter-day ones that I haven't read, unless he someday manages to come out with another one.
I felt like I should be getting on with Diana Gabaldon's series, so next I read The Drums of Autumn. I found this one a little bit annoying in places, mostly because of the whole Brianna-Roger plotline. The incessant conflict between Jamie, Brianna, and Roger really got on my nerves, and the huge misunderstanding at the heart of the plot made me want to pound that huge, tall, burly Scotsman with a shovel. Preferably one attached to a bulldozer or something. But I finished the book, and may someday continue the series. I mean, there's lots of fantasy series I want to read less...
Since the delights that were Big Trouble and Tricky Business, I had been waiting for the next prose offering from Dave Barry. What I was not expecting was a prequel to Peter Pan, cowritten with his fellow Rock Bottom Remainder Ridley Pearson. But that's what Peter And The Starcatchers is. It's mostly a straight-ahead adventure story, with occasional Barry touches(like the primitive tribe who call themselves the Molluscs), and it doesn't quite join up with the Peter Pan story as I understand it(or at least there's a loose plot thread or two), so it's not impossible there could be another book in between. It's pretty thick, but with plenty of short chapters, so it moves quickly.
It's always nice when I can actually finish a series, especially one that I started a long, long time ago, which is why I chose next to move on to Mistress of The Empire by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts. I got a four-book set of Feist back in high school as a birthday present, before which I'd never read the guy. Magician didn't much impress me, but Silverthorn and A Darkness At Sethanon had their moments. This series always seemed much better, for which I generally credit Wurts, though maybe Feist just works better in the pseudo-Oriental milieu. This book seemed to drag more often than the second book, unfortunately, and took me a long time to get through. For parts of the book, Mara(our heroine)didn't even seem to be the main character, but frankly those weren't the parts that dragged, generally. She did succeed in turning the hidebound Tsurani empire into a model of enlightened monarchy, and I'm sure the Magna Carta wasn't that far off. And everybody who didn't die honourably lived happily ever after.
That brings me to Conquistador by S.M. Stirling, which I just finished reading. This was supposed to part of last year's Aurora Award reading, but I only made it through The Peshawar Lancers. I'm divided about whether this is a better book or not. It's a semi-alternate history, with a dash of near-future near-alternate history. See, it's like our timeline, except 1)a WWII veteran accidentally produces a gateway to an alternate world in his San Francisco basement in 1946, and 2)by 2009, the U.S. has been involved in a lengthy war in central Asia. The alternate world is one where Alexander the Great lived to ripe old age and founded a dynasty, and the authorial fiat this led to a history where nobody thought to sail across the Atlantic, leaving Americas unblemished by European colonization.
Naturally, our veteran colonized it in secret, and brought over as many people as he could find that wanted a bolthole in another world--which meant a lot of unsavoury types like ex-Nazis, ex-Boers, ex-Mafia, and ex-Soviets, as well as a bunch of people who probably think just like S.M. Stirling(who are, thus, the Good Guys). Cut to 2009, where there's a conspiracy afoot to overthrow our veteran's benevolent oligarchy, and two California Fish & Game people get sucked into it and end up shanghaied into New Virginia(the incredibly original name given to the colony world), where they eventually find out that everything is great except for the nasty bad guys.
That makes it sound worse than it is, I imagine. I could wish that Stirling was a little less blatant about making this seem like his own personal Utopia, and that all of this characters weren't quite so taken with it. At least his founding veteran guy does do some stupid stuff, like in his choice of recruits, and his preservation of the prevailing sexist attitudes(except for his spunky granddaughter). And it does have its rip-roaring adventure moments, and lots of things blowing up at the end. It also leaves things open for a sequel. But it doesn't measure up to his Nantucket series, I'd say. I'm also looking forward to his Dies The Fire, which finally tells us what happened in the world Nantucket left behind...
Next up I guess I'll read Time's Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer. I may seem to be reading a lot of Farmer recently, but it's mostly that I bought a lot of his books in second-hand stories over several years, more or less indiscriminately, and they're beginning to pile up. I'm not sure, but I suspect this one might be similar to his Dark Is The Sun, the far-future apocalyptic novel I reread most recently, so I tried to space them out a bit.
Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap Into Conflict:The Real Story was one of the books I read over Christmas, and doesn't it fit the cheery mood of the season? It's another reread, but I just felt it was time to start rereading the Gap series. This time through maybe I'll try to pay more attention to the supposed parallels to Wagner's Ring Cycle. Or maybe not.
Next was New Voices In Science Fiction, edited by Mike Resnick. I picked it up mostly because of our friend Barb Galler-Smith's story in it, as well as her late friend Robyn Herrington's. I wish I could say that I liked Robyn's, but I didn't. It was...well, it was a month and a half ago, and I don't have the copy to hand, but I remember the quality of the stories being uneven, but with some good ones. Unhelpful. Don't you wish I wasn't so lazy, or had written this closer to the time?
I've been reading the Lemony Snicket series from the library, and it seemed like time for the next one(it's been a while since The Wide Window, actually), so next up was The Miserable Mill. It was a fast and easy read, but I don't think I liked it as much as the first three.
After that I read The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. Of course Bujold is a crackerjack science fiction writer, with the incredibly likable Miles Vorkosigan, but this is fantasy. With, perforce, a whole new main character. Thankfully, she rises to the occasion, with the tormented(figuratively, and also literally, for the most of the book)Cazaril. I gather that the next book, The Paladin of Souls, features a different main character, but now I'm sure she'll pull it off. And one of these I'll have to try The Spirit Ring.
Knock Down by Dick Francis was decent enough, but a bit too short. This time he approaches the British horse-racing industry from the point of view of a bloodstock agent, and once again manages a healthy dose of suspense and mystery...but, as I said, too short. At this point I'm catching up on his earlier books(when I started reading him, Hot Money was his newest one, I think), but there's not many more of his latter-day ones that I haven't read, unless he someday manages to come out with another one.
I felt like I should be getting on with Diana Gabaldon's series, so next I read The Drums of Autumn. I found this one a little bit annoying in places, mostly because of the whole Brianna-Roger plotline. The incessant conflict between Jamie, Brianna, and Roger really got on my nerves, and the huge misunderstanding at the heart of the plot made me want to pound that huge, tall, burly Scotsman with a shovel. Preferably one attached to a bulldozer or something. But I finished the book, and may someday continue the series. I mean, there's lots of fantasy series I want to read less...
Since the delights that were Big Trouble and Tricky Business, I had been waiting for the next prose offering from Dave Barry. What I was not expecting was a prequel to Peter Pan, cowritten with his fellow Rock Bottom Remainder Ridley Pearson. But that's what Peter And The Starcatchers is. It's mostly a straight-ahead adventure story, with occasional Barry touches(like the primitive tribe who call themselves the Molluscs), and it doesn't quite join up with the Peter Pan story as I understand it(or at least there's a loose plot thread or two), so it's not impossible there could be another book in between. It's pretty thick, but with plenty of short chapters, so it moves quickly.
It's always nice when I can actually finish a series, especially one that I started a long, long time ago, which is why I chose next to move on to Mistress of The Empire by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts. I got a four-book set of Feist back in high school as a birthday present, before which I'd never read the guy. Magician didn't much impress me, but Silverthorn and A Darkness At Sethanon had their moments. This series always seemed much better, for which I generally credit Wurts, though maybe Feist just works better in the pseudo-Oriental milieu. This book seemed to drag more often than the second book, unfortunately, and took me a long time to get through. For parts of the book, Mara(our heroine)didn't even seem to be the main character, but frankly those weren't the parts that dragged, generally. She did succeed in turning the hidebound Tsurani empire into a model of enlightened monarchy, and I'm sure the Magna Carta wasn't that far off. And everybody who didn't die honourably lived happily ever after.
That brings me to Conquistador by S.M. Stirling, which I just finished reading. This was supposed to part of last year's Aurora Award reading, but I only made it through The Peshawar Lancers. I'm divided about whether this is a better book or not. It's a semi-alternate history, with a dash of near-future near-alternate history. See, it's like our timeline, except 1)a WWII veteran accidentally produces a gateway to an alternate world in his San Francisco basement in 1946, and 2)by 2009, the U.S. has been involved in a lengthy war in central Asia. The alternate world is one where Alexander the Great lived to ripe old age and founded a dynasty, and the authorial fiat this led to a history where nobody thought to sail across the Atlantic, leaving Americas unblemished by European colonization.
Naturally, our veteran colonized it in secret, and brought over as many people as he could find that wanted a bolthole in another world--which meant a lot of unsavoury types like ex-Nazis, ex-Boers, ex-Mafia, and ex-Soviets, as well as a bunch of people who probably think just like S.M. Stirling(who are, thus, the Good Guys). Cut to 2009, where there's a conspiracy afoot to overthrow our veteran's benevolent oligarchy, and two California Fish & Game people get sucked into it and end up shanghaied into New Virginia(the incredibly original name given to the colony world), where they eventually find out that everything is great except for the nasty bad guys.
That makes it sound worse than it is, I imagine. I could wish that Stirling was a little less blatant about making this seem like his own personal Utopia, and that all of this characters weren't quite so taken with it. At least his founding veteran guy does do some stupid stuff, like in his choice of recruits, and his preservation of the prevailing sexist attitudes(except for his spunky granddaughter). And it does have its rip-roaring adventure moments, and lots of things blowing up at the end. It also leaves things open for a sequel. But it doesn't measure up to his Nantucket series, I'd say. I'm also looking forward to his Dies The Fire, which finally tells us what happened in the world Nantucket left behind...
Next up I guess I'll read Time's Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer. I may seem to be reading a lot of Farmer recently, but it's mostly that I bought a lot of his books in second-hand stories over several years, more or less indiscriminately, and they're beginning to pile up. I'm not sure, but I suspect this one might be similar to his Dark Is The Sun, the far-future apocalyptic novel I reread most recently, so I tried to space them out a bit.
