James Bond and the Half-Blood Prince
There's a recent young adult novel in the U.K. called SILVERFIN by Charlie Higson. Authorized by the Ian Fleming estate, it details a 14 year old James Bond's adventures while attending Eton in the 1930's.
That's so odd, that I'm going to have to read it.
That's so odd, that I'm going to have to read it.
Let's see, what have I read lately.
BELLA TUSCANY, sequel to UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. More of the same, but entertaining. She's fixing up a villa in Tuscany so that we don't have to! And certainly a book to make you hungry for Italian food.
ISLE OF DOGS by Patricia Cornwell, third in her increasingly bad "Cop Procedural comedy" novels. Her "Kate Scarpatta" novels have been getting worse and worse too. I don't know, a few years back, this author had a sea change for some reason. Bad book, bad writing.
MERCURY by Ben Bova. I never read his scifi as a kid, but in the last 10 years, he's been writing this interesting "The Grand Tour of the Solar System" series, fairly realistic nuts-and-bolts stories about exploration of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. It's fairly low-key (and thus believable) scifi; if they find life, it's just microbes, no mind controlling aliens or warp drive or anything. This latest one involves setting up a base on Mercury. As you'd imagine, hotter'n Georgia asphalt. Also there's a subplot about an Earth space elevator/beanstalk concept going very, very wrong.... like 20,000 miles of geosynchronous cable crashing down across 5000 miles from South America across the Pacific killing 4 million people in the process. I'm convinced. Vote no for space elevators!
I met Ben Bova about 10 years ago at DragonCon, he was MC'ing a live videolink with Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, and I got to ask my hero, Arthur, a question.
What else. Oh, got the latest by John Varley, MAMMOTH, which involves paleotologists finding a mammoth fossil....and beneath that, a human skeleton fossil... wearing a digital watch. So presumably a time travel yarn, I haven't gotten far yet. I like John Varley a lot, there was a great collection of his short fiction published last year, THE JOHN VARLEY READER.
I notice there's a new Joe Haldeman scifi novel, OLD TWENTIETH, so I'll have to read that. He's a great writer, though his novels of the last 10 years or so have suffered from seemingly two or three ideas that would all make their own books sort of grafted uneasily into an alliance in one novel.
Reply
Leave a comment