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alfvaenTime for another book update.
The last time, I kind of skipped over the non-fiction books I read. For instance, I got The Guinness Book of Records, the 2003 edition, out of the library. It's been a while since I last looked at a Guinness Book of Records, and things have changed. The one I remember was probably about 1980 vintage, or a little older, and it was chock full of text, with a comprehensive list of records, including both World and UK records. (I can't remember the term they used for the UK ones--it wasn't a straightforward one, but maybe it would seem more so to me now than it did as a kid.) The more recent Guinness Books of Records have shiny, iridescent covers, are chock full of pictures, and feel much less comprehensive. So it was interesting, but a little disappointing. And I skipped over almost all of the Sports section.
I think there's one I've forgotten in here...curses! Anyway, now I'm reading Mark Kulansky's Salt: A World History, which I found recommended on Janet Kagan's web site. It's a bit slow going, partly because I keep running across interesting facts that I then have to share, but partly because there is a certain amount of sameness to the history, and the "recipe" bits don't interest me. Still, it's useful, if only as a reminder that, until the 20th century or so, salt was one of the most important resources, and its production and trade were major economic factors. Now that we have refrigeration, salt is just something we use to season things, but it used to be one of the few reliable methods of preserving food--especially fish, which widespread Catholicism in Europe made a necessity. Something to think about when worldbuilding. (And as Janet pointed out, when making a space colony.)
As far as fiction goes, at last news I was reading Sharon Shinn's Archangel. I thought it worked quite well, and look forward to reading more books in the series, though Nicole says that there is some time-lapse between some of the books. Still, the dynamic between the main characters is something what I want to achieve in the eventual rewrite of The Shadow & The Flame. After that...
Orson Scott Card:Capitol. One of his first books, actually, a collection of stories in the "Worthing Chronicles" universe. I read Hot Sleep, another set of stories more closely linked by the character of Jason Worthing, some years ago, but I've been putting off this one, sort of. I wasn't sure how much overlap there was going to be between the two collections, or between this one and Maps In A Mirror.
I needn't have worried too much--this one is very separate from Hot Sleep, whose stories are more closely linked. There are some recurring characters, but mostly these are just set in the same alternate history, which features the title planet, Capitol, the very Trantorian capital of a Galactic Empire. Card takes it in different directions than Asimov did, though, and focuses a lot on the effects of somec, the drug that allows suspended animation(though your memories have to be stored while you sleep). Rich people use higher ratios of somec, living, say, one year out of every ten. I wasn't quite sure that would be universally accepted as being a good thing, though.
The one story that did overlap from Maps In A Mirror was one of my favourites of Card's stories anyway--"A Thousand Deaths", which I first read in Omni when it came out, and stuck in my mind for years before I rediscovered it and found out that Card had written it. It's an unforgettable story, if you've ever read it.
Tom Henighan:The Well of Time. Tom Henighan is a Canadian author, which was where I first discovered him, on the Aurora eligibility lists, when I was trying to read as much of them as I could. That fervour had died a bit by the time I picked up this one, but I felt it was time to get around to it anyway. It's set in Viking-occupied North America--and thus has a touch of alternate history, because I don't believe they actually had settlements as from the Atlantic as Manitoba. I found it interesting that they called the native inhabitants "Skraelings"(which apparently means "poor ones"), because of course they had no reason to call them "Indians"...
Anyway, the story was sort of a revisionist heroic quest, with a girl named Ingrid sent on a quest by Odin to relieve her village of the curse which plagues it--"grey men", zombie-types plaguing the countryside. But it deviates from the plan when Ingrid encounters an incestuous brother-sister pair, and comes to realize that she doesn't need Odin to solve her problems for her. She also spends time among Skraelings, meets Morrigan, and journeys mystically to(and from)Iceland. Interesting, but slow-moving.
Dave Duncan:The Jaguar Knights. Dave Duncan's "King's Blades" series examines a bit more of his world, leaving Alternate Europe to visit Alternate Mesoamerica, as well as examining the Inquisitors, one of his society's institutions he hadn't spent much time with before. The plot itself is not as cheerful as some of Duncan's books, and I'd go so far as to say that it's downright bitter. You can't help but get the impression that, when you get right down to it, the Aztecs were not nice people. I'm almost a bit relived that he'll be moving on to a different series with his next books, because after six books, it feels like he's mined this one out. (Though it's one of those worlds that would make a great fantasy game setting...)
Alan Sillitoe:The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner. I picked up this book, I think, at a university library "buck-an-inch" book-sale, mostly because I'd seen the title before, as an Iron Maiden song(on "Somewhere In Time"). It's a short-story collection, completely mainstream, set among the lower class in England. The title story, about a juvenile offender given some freedom to practice long-distance running, is the strongest, but the book contains other memorable stories, too.
Gordon Korman:Son of The Mob 2: Hollywood Hustle. I don't think this book has the charm of the first Son of The Mob, but it's just nice to see Gordon Korman turning out more books for the older teen market, rather than the more middle-school levels he tends to do. Most of my favourites of his books are the high-school ones, but with this one he heads for the first time into college-age territory. It doesn't have as much of the humour, even the black humour, he's managed in many of his other books, though.
Dean R. Koontz: The Door To December. This was a rewrite of one of his earlier books published under a pseudonym. It's a quicker read than its thickness would suggest, because it's been padded with large margins and large type to be "the right thickness" for a Koontz book. I guessed at the Sekrit Plot Twist before the characters did--it does have supernatural elements. Despite its rewrite, and almost gratuitous usage of more recent cultural references, it still feels a little bit dated, because it hearkens back to the days when research into out-of-body experiences, ESP, and other "psychic abilities" was considered almost legitimate science. Now it's only science fiction that still seems to include it under the aegis of science, and even that may be declining.
Roger Zelazny: The Courts of Chaos. I didn't remember this book much at all, but considering I last(and first)read it close to 20 years ago, I'm not that surprised. Most of it probably went over my head back then, too. Now I think that the entire first five books of the Amber series could get published in one volume and nobody would consider it unusually long. Now I can actually move on to the second Amber pentalogy, which I've never read before at all. I think I'm still missing one of those books, though, and I don't have their order straight in my mind.
Steven Erikson: Memories of Ice. It's possible that all ten Amber books could be put together and still be shorter than this book. At 1180 pages, it's up there in the War & Peace league, but with fewer Russian names. (None, in fact, that I've noticed.) This is the third book of his "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series, but in actual fact it follows immediately after the first, Gardens of The Moon, and in parallel with the second, Deadhouse Gates. An interesting technique.
I'm only 238 pages into it so far, after three or four days. It reminds me of a cross between Glen Cook and Michelle West. It's got some of the tone and style of the former, and I would recommend the series to any fans of the Black Company series with stamina. Like Michelle West, though, the series features many high-powered characters with histories going back thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. The two prologue chapters occur at about 300,000 and 100,000 years before the present, respectively, and yet some of the characters mentioned there will likely show up in the story, if they haven't already. And some of the more mundane characters introduced in the first book have gone through changes to make them into near-demigods, though in general they are not comfortable with these changes, because of their suddenness.
At this point, we're not that close to figuring out what, if anything, is the overarching plot for the series. I feel like we're getting glimmerings of it in this book, but for all I know they'll resolve it in the next 942 pages. A lot of what's happened so far has been a gathering of the aforementioned high-powered beings, of old and new vintage, and subgroups of them sizing each other up. I'm beginning to get antsy for something to actually happen. But I haven't been reading it that fast, either.
Still, this is a good book to end on, because it may well last me to the end of the month, at the rate I'm going.
The last time, I kind of skipped over the non-fiction books I read. For instance, I got The Guinness Book of Records, the 2003 edition, out of the library. It's been a while since I last looked at a Guinness Book of Records, and things have changed. The one I remember was probably about 1980 vintage, or a little older, and it was chock full of text, with a comprehensive list of records, including both World and UK records. (I can't remember the term they used for the UK ones--it wasn't a straightforward one, but maybe it would seem more so to me now than it did as a kid.) The more recent Guinness Books of Records have shiny, iridescent covers, are chock full of pictures, and feel much less comprehensive. So it was interesting, but a little disappointing. And I skipped over almost all of the Sports section.
I think there's one I've forgotten in here...curses! Anyway, now I'm reading Mark Kulansky's Salt: A World History, which I found recommended on Janet Kagan's web site. It's a bit slow going, partly because I keep running across interesting facts that I then have to share, but partly because there is a certain amount of sameness to the history, and the "recipe" bits don't interest me. Still, it's useful, if only as a reminder that, until the 20th century or so, salt was one of the most important resources, and its production and trade were major economic factors. Now that we have refrigeration, salt is just something we use to season things, but it used to be one of the few reliable methods of preserving food--especially fish, which widespread Catholicism in Europe made a necessity. Something to think about when worldbuilding. (And as Janet pointed out, when making a space colony.)
As far as fiction goes, at last news I was reading Sharon Shinn's Archangel. I thought it worked quite well, and look forward to reading more books in the series, though Nicole says that there is some time-lapse between some of the books. Still, the dynamic between the main characters is something what I want to achieve in the eventual rewrite of The Shadow & The Flame. After that...
Orson Scott Card:Capitol. One of his first books, actually, a collection of stories in the "Worthing Chronicles" universe. I read Hot Sleep, another set of stories more closely linked by the character of Jason Worthing, some years ago, but I've been putting off this one, sort of. I wasn't sure how much overlap there was going to be between the two collections, or between this one and Maps In A Mirror.
I needn't have worried too much--this one is very separate from Hot Sleep, whose stories are more closely linked. There are some recurring characters, but mostly these are just set in the same alternate history, which features the title planet, Capitol, the very Trantorian capital of a Galactic Empire. Card takes it in different directions than Asimov did, though, and focuses a lot on the effects of somec, the drug that allows suspended animation(though your memories have to be stored while you sleep). Rich people use higher ratios of somec, living, say, one year out of every ten. I wasn't quite sure that would be universally accepted as being a good thing, though.
The one story that did overlap from Maps In A Mirror was one of my favourites of Card's stories anyway--"A Thousand Deaths", which I first read in Omni when it came out, and stuck in my mind for years before I rediscovered it and found out that Card had written it. It's an unforgettable story, if you've ever read it.
Tom Henighan:The Well of Time. Tom Henighan is a Canadian author, which was where I first discovered him, on the Aurora eligibility lists, when I was trying to read as much of them as I could. That fervour had died a bit by the time I picked up this one, but I felt it was time to get around to it anyway. It's set in Viking-occupied North America--and thus has a touch of alternate history, because I don't believe they actually had settlements as from the Atlantic as Manitoba. I found it interesting that they called the native inhabitants "Skraelings"(which apparently means "poor ones"), because of course they had no reason to call them "Indians"...
Anyway, the story was sort of a revisionist heroic quest, with a girl named Ingrid sent on a quest by Odin to relieve her village of the curse which plagues it--"grey men", zombie-types plaguing the countryside. But it deviates from the plan when Ingrid encounters an incestuous brother-sister pair, and comes to realize that she doesn't need Odin to solve her problems for her. She also spends time among Skraelings, meets Morrigan, and journeys mystically to(and from)Iceland. Interesting, but slow-moving.
Dave Duncan:The Jaguar Knights. Dave Duncan's "King's Blades" series examines a bit more of his world, leaving Alternate Europe to visit Alternate Mesoamerica, as well as examining the Inquisitors, one of his society's institutions he hadn't spent much time with before. The plot itself is not as cheerful as some of Duncan's books, and I'd go so far as to say that it's downright bitter. You can't help but get the impression that, when you get right down to it, the Aztecs were not nice people. I'm almost a bit relived that he'll be moving on to a different series with his next books, because after six books, it feels like he's mined this one out. (Though it's one of those worlds that would make a great fantasy game setting...)
Alan Sillitoe:The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner. I picked up this book, I think, at a university library "buck-an-inch" book-sale, mostly because I'd seen the title before, as an Iron Maiden song(on "Somewhere In Time"). It's a short-story collection, completely mainstream, set among the lower class in England. The title story, about a juvenile offender given some freedom to practice long-distance running, is the strongest, but the book contains other memorable stories, too.
Gordon Korman:Son of The Mob 2: Hollywood Hustle. I don't think this book has the charm of the first Son of The Mob, but it's just nice to see Gordon Korman turning out more books for the older teen market, rather than the more middle-school levels he tends to do. Most of my favourites of his books are the high-school ones, but with this one he heads for the first time into college-age territory. It doesn't have as much of the humour, even the black humour, he's managed in many of his other books, though.
Dean R. Koontz: The Door To December. This was a rewrite of one of his earlier books published under a pseudonym. It's a quicker read than its thickness would suggest, because it's been padded with large margins and large type to be "the right thickness" for a Koontz book. I guessed at the Sekrit Plot Twist before the characters did--it does have supernatural elements. Despite its rewrite, and almost gratuitous usage of more recent cultural references, it still feels a little bit dated, because it hearkens back to the days when research into out-of-body experiences, ESP, and other "psychic abilities" was considered almost legitimate science. Now it's only science fiction that still seems to include it under the aegis of science, and even that may be declining.
Roger Zelazny: The Courts of Chaos. I didn't remember this book much at all, but considering I last(and first)read it close to 20 years ago, I'm not that surprised. Most of it probably went over my head back then, too. Now I think that the entire first five books of the Amber series could get published in one volume and nobody would consider it unusually long. Now I can actually move on to the second Amber pentalogy, which I've never read before at all. I think I'm still missing one of those books, though, and I don't have their order straight in my mind.
Steven Erikson: Memories of Ice. It's possible that all ten Amber books could be put together and still be shorter than this book. At 1180 pages, it's up there in the War & Peace league, but with fewer Russian names. (None, in fact, that I've noticed.) This is the third book of his "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series, but in actual fact it follows immediately after the first, Gardens of The Moon, and in parallel with the second, Deadhouse Gates. An interesting technique.
I'm only 238 pages into it so far, after three or four days. It reminds me of a cross between Glen Cook and Michelle West. It's got some of the tone and style of the former, and I would recommend the series to any fans of the Black Company series with stamina. Like Michelle West, though, the series features many high-powered characters with histories going back thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. The two prologue chapters occur at about 300,000 and 100,000 years before the present, respectively, and yet some of the characters mentioned there will likely show up in the story, if they haven't already. And some of the more mundane characters introduced in the first book have gone through changes to make them into near-demigods, though in general they are not comfortable with these changes, because of their suddenness.
At this point, we're not that close to figuring out what, if anything, is the overarching plot for the series. I feel like we're getting glimmerings of it in this book, but for all I know they'll resolve it in the next 942 pages. A lot of what's happened so far has been a gathering of the aforementioned high-powered beings, of old and new vintage, and subgroups of them sizing each other up. I'm beginning to get antsy for something to actually happen. But I haven't been reading it that fast, either.
Still, this is a good book to end on, because it may well last me to the end of the month, at the rate I'm going.
