Reading
Finished:
* Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima - Lone Wolf & Cub vol 21
* Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima - Lone Wolf & Cub vol 22
Slowly winding up to an ending.
* Ernest Cline - Ready Player One
Jolly, geeky, wish-fulfilment fluff about a retro-gaming competition in a world which has a massive parallel online universe attached. Eminently readable and if you're a child of the 80s you will feel smug about getting the references.
* Wiebe/Fowler/Bonvillain/Brisson - Rat Queens vol 3: Demons
I still love this fantasy series, which is full of characters with depth and complexity.
* Neal Stephenson - Seveneves
I read this over referendum week and it was kind of a consolation in that they're having a really seriously giant disaster and it put ours into perspective. Basically, something explodes the moon and it's going to shower down onto the Earth and turn the atmosphere into a burning, unsurvivable mess.
Most of the book follows humanity's attempts to build up the ISS into something that humans can survive a thousand years in. The first 3/4 of the book follows this, and is excellent, similar to _The Martian_ but slightly less geeky and with a hell of a lot more in-fighting and a highly precarious end. I read this part avidly.
The last quarter of the book is concerned with the civilisation that arises from these beginnings. It has seven races of humans, one descended from each of the seven Eves of the title (I only worked out why the book was called _Seveneves_ a couple of weeks later. However I can now reliably spell it correctly) plus a few extras for various reasons. This bit of the book is much less good. I found it dragged terribly and the story in it noodled around confusingly through complex multi-racial politics to no real end. I think the book would have been much improved by cutting this section down drastically, maybe to a set of encyclopedia entries or such about the new state of the world.
Also, despite hints at the start of the book, no-one ever works out *why* the moon just ups and explodes, or if they do, they don't tell us.
* N K Jemisin - The Fifth Season
Another book of Impending Doom, this time set in a fantasy world which experiences seasons of Disaster caused by geological action. There are various sub-types of human in this world who can do magic; the ones we see most of have the power to control geological phenomena and are hated and feared by basically everyone. It's not a pleasant world; disaster seasons aside it contains an awful lot of discrimination and abuse. But the story is good, the characters are nuanced (and the author does some clever things with them), and there are some beautiful moments of triumph and hope in among the awfulness.
The thing I liked best about this book is the description of senses. The protagonists are geo-magic users and the things they can sense and do, though foreign to us, are very evocatively described. But there are other people with different senses that are unfamiliar to both us and the protagonists, and the protagonists find them scary and unpredictable. I found the difference in the way the two are described fascinating.
I will definitely be looking out for more from N K Jemisin.
* Sebastian de Castell - Traitors Blade
One of the Campbell nominees. Our protagonists are three bros whose order of Special Knights has been disbanded and discredited, and who are forced to travel the country having lovingly-described fights and trying to win back their honour. If that sounds like your kind of thing then this is reasonably fun to read, the writing's pretty good and fun on the sentence level though there are occasional clangers and I wouldn't like to stand the plot up to too much scrutiny.
It was killed for me by the women. There's (1) Fridged Wife (not technically in the book because she came pre-fridged) and (2) Magic Guru Woman. Every other woman in the book is referred to all the time as either "girl" or "bitch" depending on her current standing with reference to the rather black-and-white moral spectrum everyone (everyone important, i.e. non-peasant) in the book subscribes to. Really it gets pretty confusing at times. Part way through there's a switcheroo and the two characters involved go from "girl"->"bitch" and "bitch"->"girl" without anyone so much as blinking. The only actual girl in the book is consistently referred to as "little girl" (she's 13 for chrissakes), presumably to distinguish her from all the 30-year-old "girl"s. Really I would like this aspect of the book (and pop culture in general) to die in a fire. I read to the end but mostly so I could be justifiably annoyed.
comments at Dreamwidth
* Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima - Lone Wolf & Cub vol 21
* Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima - Lone Wolf & Cub vol 22
Slowly winding up to an ending.
* Ernest Cline - Ready Player One
Jolly, geeky, wish-fulfilment fluff about a retro-gaming competition in a world which has a massive parallel online universe attached. Eminently readable and if you're a child of the 80s you will feel smug about getting the references.
* Wiebe/Fowler/Bonvillain/Brisson - Rat Queens vol 3: Demons
I still love this fantasy series, which is full of characters with depth and complexity.
* Neal Stephenson - Seveneves
I read this over referendum week and it was kind of a consolation in that they're having a really seriously giant disaster and it put ours into perspective. Basically, something explodes the moon and it's going to shower down onto the Earth and turn the atmosphere into a burning, unsurvivable mess.
Most of the book follows humanity's attempts to build up the ISS into something that humans can survive a thousand years in. The first 3/4 of the book follows this, and is excellent, similar to _The Martian_ but slightly less geeky and with a hell of a lot more in-fighting and a highly precarious end. I read this part avidly.
The last quarter of the book is concerned with the civilisation that arises from these beginnings. It has seven races of humans, one descended from each of the seven Eves of the title (I only worked out why the book was called _Seveneves_ a couple of weeks later. However I can now reliably spell it correctly) plus a few extras for various reasons. This bit of the book is much less good. I found it dragged terribly and the story in it noodled around confusingly through complex multi-racial politics to no real end. I think the book would have been much improved by cutting this section down drastically, maybe to a set of encyclopedia entries or such about the new state of the world.
Also, despite hints at the start of the book, no-one ever works out *why* the moon just ups and explodes, or if they do, they don't tell us.
* N K Jemisin - The Fifth Season
Another book of Impending Doom, this time set in a fantasy world which experiences seasons of Disaster caused by geological action. There are various sub-types of human in this world who can do magic; the ones we see most of have the power to control geological phenomena and are hated and feared by basically everyone. It's not a pleasant world; disaster seasons aside it contains an awful lot of discrimination and abuse. But the story is good, the characters are nuanced (and the author does some clever things with them), and there are some beautiful moments of triumph and hope in among the awfulness.
The thing I liked best about this book is the description of senses. The protagonists are geo-magic users and the things they can sense and do, though foreign to us, are very evocatively described. But there are other people with different senses that are unfamiliar to both us and the protagonists, and the protagonists find them scary and unpredictable. I found the difference in the way the two are described fascinating.
I will definitely be looking out for more from N K Jemisin.
* Sebastian de Castell - Traitors Blade
One of the Campbell nominees. Our protagonists are three bros whose order of Special Knights has been disbanded and discredited, and who are forced to travel the country having lovingly-described fights and trying to win back their honour. If that sounds like your kind of thing then this is reasonably fun to read, the writing's pretty good and fun on the sentence level though there are occasional clangers and I wouldn't like to stand the plot up to too much scrutiny.
It was killed for me by the women. There's (1) Fridged Wife (not technically in the book because she came pre-fridged) and (2) Magic Guru Woman. Every other woman in the book is referred to all the time as either "girl" or "bitch" depending on her current standing with reference to the rather black-and-white moral spectrum everyone (everyone important, i.e. non-peasant) in the book subscribes to. Really it gets pretty confusing at times. Part way through there's a switcheroo and the two characters involved go from "girl"->"bitch" and "bitch"->"girl" without anyone so much as blinking. The only actual girl in the book is consistently referred to as "little girl" (she's 13 for chrissakes), presumably to distinguish her from all the 30-year-old "girl"s. Really I would like this aspect of the book (and pop culture in general) to die in a fire. I read to the end but mostly so I could be justifiably annoyed.
comments at Dreamwidth