Onefinemess

Posted By onefinemess on May 18, 2013

(Temeraire book 7)
by: Naomi Novak

OHhhhh YOU wacky Napoleonic/Victorian dragon alt-history thing.  I like you and hate you.  Not quite love, because the annoying parts are really annoying (to me).  The way people act drives me right fucking crazy.  BUT I think it’s a setting thing, not a bad writing thing.  This is pretty much the only exposure I have to the whole Victorian gentleman/woman thing, but I can already tell you that I hate it.  Even dragons make it only barely tolerable.  Because everyone acts like a goddam idiot.

Novak’s take on how dragons affected the cultural progress of the various countries and continents IS really fascinating and seems decently researched and thought out.  I didn’t like her take on Australia (not many interesting local dragon species), but that’s a taste thing, not a quality thing.

So we started with the various European takes on dragons, then on to China, Africa and Australia and now we’re hitting South America.  I would have expected North America next, but it looks like they’re heading back to China at the end of this one.    With all the interminable bits of time these books spend on really slow boat travel and how terrible it was (really terrible) and how often things went wrong (always), you’d think she’d at least finish up the world tour while they were CLOSE to NA and not have to make the epic trek back later.  Maybe they’ll get waylaid/derailed again…since that happens pretty much every book.

Hmm, also there are apparently only 2 more books, so I AM really curious how she’s going to work North America into this.  I mean, why hit every continent but one?

I dunno. Final thoughts… a close to my ramblings?  I enjoy the setting more than anything done within it, I guess. The progress of the war, the way the countries interact with each other, Novik’s take on a way to get at an earlier abolition that works within her world, the different ways in which each culture deals with its dragons (which feels convincing enough to me as a reader – although I have no idea how well they would hold up to a discerning reader with a relevant educational background), dragon breeds and interbreeds.  All that stuff is great.  But most of the time when someone opens their mouth …….. *shakes fist*

So, a very subjective

THREE STARS

I think someone who likes all this Victorian bullshit would really dig these books.
Oh, and there is some off-camera dragon sex in here, followed by what really seemed to be some dragon morning sickness …

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Tags: Naomi Novik, Temeraire

Posted By onefinemess on May 15, 2013

by: David Brin

Mystery in space!

Clues!

Motivations!

Characters!

OK, that’s a crappy review.  Let’s try again.  Well, not entirely again.  Don’t forget about those things I said before, they are totally relevant.

SO.  I really liked this book.  I don’t think it was necessarily the best written book ever – there were some odd stylistic tics – like Culla’s monologue at the end explaining what he had done… the main character had some kind of internal episode during it and we, as readers, missed the entire thing.  You get kind of filled in later but… it was an odd choice.  Not bad, just odd.  There are a couple things like that, mostly having to do with Jacob and his “dark passenger” (haa haa).

I really liked the worldbuilding/universe setup.  Almost everything about it just plain worked.  I can’t wait to read the next book just like I couldn’t wait to read each new chapter.  Having to put this down at the end of a lunch break at work as I neared the end was painful.

I think I have a sense of where the series is going, but I’m still really excited to see it and how we get there.

I really liked the way the characters (the supporting cast, especially) all felt like individuals with clear (clearly existing, not clearly discernible), independent motivations.

It felt like thriller pacing done right.  Hmm.  Yeah, this book was basically a thriller in space with aliens.  Which is fine with me.  Because SPACE and ALIENS.  You know?

FOUR STARS

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Tags: David Brin, Sundiver, Uplift

Posted By onefinemess on May 7, 2013

by: Ursula K. LeGuin

A 130 page book!   Back in the day (1966) this was much more of a thing than today, or something.  I think it was initially published as half of one of those flipbook deals – you know, where you finish the first book and then flip it over upside down and read from the other side?  Yes, there’s a technical term for that (hence my wiki link).

My copy was a single – exactly matching the image there – not that you care.  But I’m kind of an old book geek (among other geekeries), so I CARE.  Love the smell of 60s & 70s pulpy paperbacks.

This was one of LeGuin’s first books – and it shows.  It’s not bad in any sense, but I can definitely see how she started with something like this and refined her craft.  Still, there’s something to be said for cramming an entire epic journey style story into 130 pages.  So much that would have been sooo decompressed in a current work.  But man was it nice to know that say a kidnapping scene (one of my pet peeves, which may or may not have happened in this book) isn’t going to last 40 fucking pages – instead it’s more like 3.

I don’t have much to say about this… it was simple and fun and threw out some interesting ideas and then BAM done.

THREE STARS

Because it’s simple and fun and a nice example of the early genre, especially the SF/F overlap, but nothing awesome.

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Tags: Rocannon's World, Ursula K. LeGuin

Posted By onefinemess on May 6, 2013

OK, so I guess the series is over (thanks Google!).  So I might as well get out some general thoughts while they’re still rambling about in my cavernous skull.

The series has a lot to say about “being human” and the concept of a soul – most of the “fi” in the sci-fi here revolves around mental technologies.    It seems like much of my favorite sci-fi is sci-fi of the mind and soul: the Dune books, Night’s Dawn, etc., so it makes sense that I would like this.  In some series, the focus in on the tech for bridging world or making spaceships or mining the center of stars, etc.  Here, the tech focus is mostly at the base of the skull, where the well, let’s just call it “the soul”, where the soul is stored.

The big advance here that drives the series is the technology (implanted at birth) that archives and stores your I dunno, brainwaves or something.  Your personality, memories, etc.  Everything.  So if the body dies and this piece (called the “cortical stack”) can be recovered… BAM! new body (if someone can afford it).  And of course there are some neat advances you can buy built into these new bodies, but the meat of the story is about a society living and coping with functional immortality.

Many of the interesting angles that you’d expect crop up:

• “real death” vs. temporary death while your stack waits for a new body.
• People who are massively, massively, older than the majority of the population (unsurprisingly, also addressed by Hamilton & Herbert).  A subset of that is “making marriage work over the centuries”; there’s a creepy-ish take on that (or failing to do that) in the first book.
• If the soul is data, it can be copied.  So what happens when you have 2 copies?  It’s illegal of course, but people do it for various reasons.  The first book has some interesting stuff on this angle but it comes back in the 3rd as well with a twist: a younger version of yourself thawed out of backup and sent to kill the new version.    What do these kinds of things mean for identity?
• Loaner flesh and body swaps.  Heavily addressed in book 1 when Takeshi is “sleeved” (the term for loading your personality into a new body, bodies are “sleeves”) in the body of someone that had a relationship with another character in the book.  Also briefly address in book 3: you pay someone to live in your body for say, a couple years and teach it how to surf.
• The bonds between flesh and mind and the differences between them.  So say, you drop into a body that had a relationship with another person – the way your body reacts to them independent of your mind.  Similarly, if you drop into a new body how difficult it can be to resume a physical/emotional relationship with someone else.  Or say you and someone else drop into cloned bodies that are basically genetic siblings (I wish there had been more on this angle).
• Multiple “souls” stored in one body:  briefly touched on in the 3rd book.
• Data corruption – only briefly mentioned but yeah, if your stack is stored in a facility that gets corrupted… well, there’s death and there’s real death, right?
• Loading yourself and the person stored on a stack into a virtual space to allow conversing with people without bodies.

Fascinating shit, right?  These are the kinds of things I like to sit around thinking about.  I’m not sure I have anything to actually say about them, either out loud or in text… yet.

Not that the books are entirely cerebral – lots of times they feel like violencep#rn (explicit sex scenes and the amount of violence you’d expect when people need to frequently get to something stored in the spinal column…) – but I found lots of quality mindp#rn in there too.

I’d really love to see some more books set in this world, sans Kovacs (he is kind of a dick, you know?), focusing on the more cerebral aspects of the universe Morgan has laid out… but alas.

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Tags: Richard K. Morgan, Takeshi Kovacs

Posted By onefinemess on May 5, 2013

by: Richard K. Morgan

Takeshi Kovacs is getting old.  Or some kind of equivalent.  … or maybe just outgrowing his conditioning?

Never explicitly said, but foreshadowed all over the place with the failings of his envoy conditioning.  And emotional outbursts?  Anyway… he’s getting old.  Older.  Changing. Not young, you know the drill.  3/4 through the book he even stops punching anyone and everyone that looks at him wrong, kind of.  OK, maybe not.  That will take a bit longer.

So, let’s be short about it:  This was a really good book.  It also ended like 6 times.  In the sense that you keep thinking “Welp, that was it.” (Yes, I know you think with ‘welp’s, we all do it), but it wasn’t.  Instead there was moarrrrrr.  You kind of expect it, because in these Kovacs books even the double crosses have double crosses.  There’s some relatively rare kind of angled-cross that I’m not sure what to call yet where a friend accidentally helps you by doing something you thought they were going to do anyway but the situation has changed and what they do doesn’t really fuck things up in way that you (the MC) can be mad at them… but it sure leaves them different.

So yeah, this is the writing 101 of “try, fail, try, fail” taken to what felt like absurd extremes… at times it showed, but I still enjoyed the ride.

Much of what was awesome here doesn’t work in a stand-alone.  I LOVE ME SOME SERIES.  SERIES-LY.  (Can’t believe I just typed that.  Whatever.  Move on.)

I hope there are more books, but I can see how this would be an end.

FOUR AND A QUARTER STARS

Because it was pretty damn good.  Definitely better than book 2 (which wasn’t bad).   And new science and things and stuff (which tied into book 2)!

Aside: WTF happened to the surviving cast of book 2??

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Tags: Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies

Posted By onefinemess on April 28, 2013

by: Gene Wolfe

People really seem to love these books.  I haven’t let myself read any of the reviews yet (I don’t read content reviews until after I’ve read a book….), but I can see all the 4-5 stars.

And I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because it kind of feels like a literary fiction version of fantasy/sci-fi and people like that?

Things were definitely dressed up and intentionally vague – however, at the core, it’s still your a pretty basic womanizing-guy-with-a-big-sword-and-big-heart-somehow-becomes-rules-of-everything.  I mean, that’s a thing, right?

There were lots of really neat ideas in this series, but for the most part the execution and I just didn’t get along.  Maybe after I read some critical analysis or something and they “explain the genius to me” (this does happen).

So.  The last book (of the first series).  Dude gets to trip a horse (I think it’s a horse), which is cool.   This may be the only thing I remember of the book, and I just finished it today.  Of course, given that they offhandedly explain that these horses can run faster than the motorized vehicles of our day (like turbo-cracked-robo horses)… I dunno, I just wonder about those leg muscles, you know?  Then again, maybe it makes them easier to trip.  I think after that he made sweet heroic love to the woman he knocked off the horse.  Like I said, lots of retro-fantasy stuff in here amidst all the high fallutin’ descriptions time travel and what not.

I get that much of the weirdness of the book is done on purpose.  It’s still not working for me.

I *might* continue reading the follow-up series, mostly because I’m really curious what the author is going for here, and if he can pull it off in a way that makes me give a damn.

TWO AND A HALF STARS

Because big dreams, but I must have been on the wrong channel.

[edit: So I read a bunch of commentary and reviews after the fact, and it's pretty much what I was expecting.  Wolfe was doing some big awesome thing that I just don't care enough (because nothing really jumped out to me as interesting?) to dig into.  Maybe when I'm 60 and time grows on trees.]

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Tags: Gene Wolfe

Posted By onefinemess on April 21, 2013

by: Max Gladstone

It was too short.

I mean, what’s this going to be in paperback? 300 pages?  Does it count as “urban fiction” (it does have a vampire)?  Maybe that’s why – those tend to be shorter.

I love the way the world’s laid out.  Magic/god system, etc.  Some of the pieces were really similar to ideas I’ve had myself, so I’ll just take that as a compliment.  OR maybe Max should.  <.<

So.

It had a lot in common with the parts I like about detective fiction – clues! – and the rest felt mostly like urban fantasy, even though the environment is pretty much steampunk+magic.  Which …well maybe that is just urban fantasy?  People felt very “modern”, at least Tara and the folks from outside Alt Coulumb – business suits and all that.  Although the knives stored in(side?) their collarbones weren’t exactly that.  I really wanted more meat about the world, but I think I get the whole “make it feel fast” that pushes a lot of modern fiction.  Me, as a more patient reader, would have loved for things to slow down a bit and flesh out the world more.

Well, sequel fodder, right?  Well, it looks like there kind of is a sequel on the way (looks like it’s set in the same world but with totally different characters…nooo!  Needs more Tara.).  October eh?  Bummer.

The clues were mostly well done and quite clever – at least one of them was something I noticed early – one of those “Why is X character even HERE?” type things.  I loved that you were maybe supposed to feel that way.

I won’t mention another thing I particularly liked, because it might be something that would turn others off and I wouldn’t want to do that.  Let me know if you figure out what it is ;).

FOUR STARS

This is maybe a tiny bit generous, because it was really too short, but I loved pretty much everything about it.  However nothing really blew my mind, and that’s usually required from > four.  So.  Four is good!  READ THIS BOOK.

Category: Book Review, Books | 1 Comment »
Tags: Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead

Posted By onefinemess on April 16, 2013

by: Richard Morgan

I would put a cool image here, but I can’t find the cover of my copy because a) I’m too lazy and b) It’s a shitty book-cover edition. I HATE it when you buy used books online and they aren’t labeled as book cover editions.  Pet peeve #84.

So.

Good book.  Slow burn, gripping in the end, at least in the sense that I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to finish it.  The initial sex scene seemed unnecessary BUT it did at least have a couple purposes with respect to the plot so it’s not like it was just jammed in there.  <.<  The second one well… that just kind of finished telegraphing who would be the first to die, didn’t it?  Saw that coming a mile away, still pissed about it.  Also, falls neatly into a present day cliche.  SIGH.  Someday I will find a sex scene in a book that works for me.  And hopefully whatever sex scenes I may someday write and publish when my awesome or not so awesome self is a published author (it could happen) will sit better with readers than they generally sit with me.  I say that because I’ve already written one…so I know they “have to” happen (from a writers perspective) sometimes.  So.  Yeah.  Totally not gonna build a glass house. Or have I already done that?

Moving on.

The last book was kind of a retro-future pulpy detective thing.  This one was a lot more standard sci-fi-future-archeology-thriller (yes, this is a thing), and not in a bad way.  Double crosses pretty much every 50 pages or so – even a couple of internal (ie, the lead double crossing himself to a degree) double crosses.  Maybe that won’t make sense, but I mean that in the sense of acting against his best interests, actively.  Maybe.  And not in the standard heroic life sacrifice way.  But maybe-sorta-kinda-roundabout-therapy.

I hope the next (last?) book gets to some of the answers to the future archaeology questions that were raised here, but I have a feeling they’re not really important in the context of what Morgan is doing here.  Rather the Martian civilization and humanity’s true or false beliefs about it are as much scenery as anything else.  You know, in the sense that scenery drags you into the scene.  Or some junk.

THREE AND A HALF STARS

Because it wasn’t the best thing ever, but it was pretty good.

Also, the title totally works, on a couple levels.

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Posted By onefinemess on April 9, 2013

by: Gene Wolfe

There is some seriously funky unreliable narrator shit going on here.  Especially in the beginning, lots of details are missing and filled in afterwards in strange ways.

Perhaps more funky: that’s one of the more interesting parts of the story.  I’m wondering why the fuck he’s doing this.  Beyond that, I’m really bored.  But I’m going to push onward.  This may wind up being one of those series I read just I’ve got that under my belt.  Classics and all that.

Many of the descriptions are vivid and wonderful but I just can’t decide if these books are terrible or just too artsy for me.  I’m going to have to actually read some criticisms after I finish the next one.  Because I want to know what the hell the intent here is.

Yeah. I don’t… it’s kind of a classic wanderers tale type deal but I dunno, maybe it’s that there’s so little sense of agency in Severian’s actions.  He just moves from bizarre scene (two headed man dessicated in space-ship, wakes up to be previous king of the world or something) to bizarre scene (pick any scene from the book).  Reading these books makes me feel drugged.  I need a nap.

There’s lots of neat things going on – but most are just hints and never really fleshed out enough to make me care.

TWO AND A HALF STARS

Because I just don’t know.

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Tags: Sword of the Lictor

Posted By onefinemess on April 3, 2013

by: John Scalzi

I’m in the middle of a sequel bender.  I’ve got 4 sequels (one technically a 3rdquel and 4thquel or whatever the hell) to stuff from my pile of reading that was supposed to last me maybe the year but only lasted to March.  Stuff I liked. Obviously in italics. Duh.

Good luck so far too.  Although I’ve already forgotten the book I finished reading yesterday…wow that’s depressing… *goes to check shelf*  OHHHH, RIGHT.  *facepalm*  Forever Peace – I loved that book.  And I loved this one too.

If you liked Old Man’s War – what what sci-fi fan doesn’t (shut up, I know there must be thousands, I just wanted to make a sweeping gesture of a statement) – you’ll like this.  There, now that that’s out of the way.  I love me a good sci-fi sequel.  Seriously.  That’s one huge advantage that I think genre typically has over fiction & non-fiction.  You can let shit BOIL.  BOIL.   You can pull something out of your ass in book 2 or 3 that really wouldn’t have been that interesting or surprising at all in the context of a single book but just BLOWS THE SHIT UP because you’ve really sunk into the series.  OK, that’s why a good series in general is good.  But, you know.  Lots of good genre series (does it bother anyone else that “series” cannot be further pluralized?).  Ugh.  I can’t… series-Z.  THERE.

This book gets in there good with milking the pre-rendered universe.  Lots of stuff that would have been kind of cool in a one off (and has been done to varying degrees elsewhere) worked even better for me in this series.  The role of the main character as a main character was well done.  That line won’t make much sense without reading the book.  So… hey, read it?

I hope he gets to the Consu thing before the end of the series.  That seems like the real meat to me.  Lots of things are teased but… I dunno, maybe it’s just the Peter Hamilton lover in me that want to know more about this uber-species.  Plus, I mean… they are so fucking weird right?  As far as uber-species go (gotta be a better name for ‘em… I suck at the making of the upness), the Consu are just bizarre.  Which is good.

THREE AND TWO THIRDS STARS

OMGCOUCHCOBRA WHY NOT FOUR STARS?  Gut thing.  I mean, it kept me reading like crazy – I started this morning & was done by 9:30 on a work day (wee the bus is good for something besides learning new smells!) BUT… hmm.  Well, I dunno.  It’s a feeling.  Don’t take this the wrong way though – three stars is a “buy me!!” book in my rating system.  Over 3 and a half is probably something I’ll re-read.  Four is generally a definite…and I can’t say I’ll definitely re-read this.  We’ll see how the rest of the series goes.

Plus, if I had to find something to bitch about, I’d say that he could have worked in more about the galaxy and other races as a whole, how things fit together… more hints (or specifics) at the underpinnings of things.  But that would just be a petty bitch and hey, who knows – maybe he did and I’ll see it in retrospect.

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Tags: Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi