I Knew Where it was Going when the Quantum Imbricator Failed
Recent reading: Carolyn Ives Gilman's Dark Orbit, highly spoken of in some circles, and actually pretty good. The main character, Saraswati Callicot (thankfully, mostly known as Sara) is a freelance scientist assigned to the exploration of the planet Iris, a habitable world with some unusual gravitational anomalies. She is also assigned, by a friend, to watch out for a colleague, Thora Lassiter, who's in a fragile state due to misadventures on a previous mission. When they land on Iris, pretty much the first thing Sara manages to do is lose Thora....
It starts out fairly standard stuff, on the face of it... and then it develops some serious themes, about vision - literally, culturally and metaphorically. The situation on Iris turns out to depend on people learning to see in different ways. I won't say any more than that, because going into details would spoil it, and it's worth reading. If it has flaws, they're generally involved with the "fairly standard stuff" aspects of it - the plot is pretty routine, and when the Macguffin mentioned in the title of this post failed, I could pretty much see what way the rest of the book was going to go. Still, I enjoyed the journey. Gilman has a notably plain, unornamented, matter-of-fact sort of style; while I'm a great admirer of literary pyrotechnics, a bit of calm, clear prose also goes down well. I'd recommend this one.
I'd also recommend Thing Explainer, another Randall Munroe offering - I got this one in hard copy (recent birthday brought book tokens in its wake), and, really, that's the best way, what with the big cartoons and the fold-out diagrams. This is pop-science with a self-imposed limitation - explaining a variety of technical and scientific concepts using only the thousand most common English words. (Or the "ten hundred" most common, since "thousand" itself doesn't make the cut.) I especially like the fold-out periodic table, where the names of almost all the elements have to be replaced by descriptive phrases.... yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium become "metal named after this tiny town", "another metal named after this tiny town", "another metal named after this tiny town" and "I'm sure it's a nice town, but come on". If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. And I suppose it has a serious point, about how much complex information you can express in very simple language. Best Related Work nomination? Very possibly. (It has an SFnal concept, it has articles about Up Goers and Shared Space Houses, what more do you want?)
Less sanguine about recommending Galaxy of the Lost, by E.C. Tubb, he of "Dumarest saga" fame... this is the first entry in his other lengthy series of pulp SF novels, dealing with Captain "Cap" Kennedy (if he has a first name, I must have blinked and missed it), a Free Acting Terran Envoy, basically a Grey Lensman without the designer jewellery. Spaceships are disappearing near the border with a foreign power, and it is up to Cap and his team (the tough one, the clever one and the sneaky one - there is no girly one, girls are unreliable as agents, Cap says so and he's always right) to solve the mystery. If you think the solution involves lots of Shooting Ray Guns and Being Tough, full marks to you. It's amiable enough stuff in its way - Cap is not quite as much of a pain in the bum as you might expect; when saddled with civilian survivors of a wrecked spaceship, for instance, he actually makes allowances for their lack of military-grade survival skills, and looks after them, instead of sneering at them. Puts him ahead of some Tough Omni-Competent Military Types, that does. Still, it's extremely minor stuff. There are another sixteen Cap Kennedy novels, with pleasingly lurid titles like Slave Ship from Sergal and Monster of Metelaze, but I'm not in any rush to seek them out. Heck, I remember seeing them in the 1970s when the paperbacks first came out, and being too embarrassed to buy them. (I can't think why. It's not like I didn't buy other lurid paperbacks in the 70s, some of them by writers a good deal worse than Ted Tubb.)
Also read The Bad Beginning, first in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by Lemony Snicket. I know I'm not quite in the intended age bracket, but I approve of this book anyway. I'm still catching up with these cultural phenomena, you know. I will get to grips with Harry Potter, any day now.
It starts out fairly standard stuff, on the face of it... and then it develops some serious themes, about vision - literally, culturally and metaphorically. The situation on Iris turns out to depend on people learning to see in different ways. I won't say any more than that, because going into details would spoil it, and it's worth reading. If it has flaws, they're generally involved with the "fairly standard stuff" aspects of it - the plot is pretty routine, and when the Macguffin mentioned in the title of this post failed, I could pretty much see what way the rest of the book was going to go. Still, I enjoyed the journey. Gilman has a notably plain, unornamented, matter-of-fact sort of style; while I'm a great admirer of literary pyrotechnics, a bit of calm, clear prose also goes down well. I'd recommend this one.
I'd also recommend Thing Explainer, another Randall Munroe offering - I got this one in hard copy (recent birthday brought book tokens in its wake), and, really, that's the best way, what with the big cartoons and the fold-out diagrams. This is pop-science with a self-imposed limitation - explaining a variety of technical and scientific concepts using only the thousand most common English words. (Or the "ten hundred" most common, since "thousand" itself doesn't make the cut.) I especially like the fold-out periodic table, where the names of almost all the elements have to be replaced by descriptive phrases.... yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium become "metal named after this tiny town", "another metal named after this tiny town", "another metal named after this tiny town" and "I'm sure it's a nice town, but come on". If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. And I suppose it has a serious point, about how much complex information you can express in very simple language. Best Related Work nomination? Very possibly. (It has an SFnal concept, it has articles about Up Goers and Shared Space Houses, what more do you want?)
Less sanguine about recommending Galaxy of the Lost, by E.C. Tubb, he of "Dumarest saga" fame... this is the first entry in his other lengthy series of pulp SF novels, dealing with Captain "Cap" Kennedy (if he has a first name, I must have blinked and missed it), a Free Acting Terran Envoy, basically a Grey Lensman without the designer jewellery. Spaceships are disappearing near the border with a foreign power, and it is up to Cap and his team (the tough one, the clever one and the sneaky one - there is no girly one, girls are unreliable as agents, Cap says so and he's always right) to solve the mystery. If you think the solution involves lots of Shooting Ray Guns and Being Tough, full marks to you. It's amiable enough stuff in its way - Cap is not quite as much of a pain in the bum as you might expect; when saddled with civilian survivors of a wrecked spaceship, for instance, he actually makes allowances for their lack of military-grade survival skills, and looks after them, instead of sneering at them. Puts him ahead of some Tough Omni-Competent Military Types, that does. Still, it's extremely minor stuff. There are another sixteen Cap Kennedy novels, with pleasingly lurid titles like Slave Ship from Sergal and Monster of Metelaze, but I'm not in any rush to seek them out. Heck, I remember seeing them in the 1970s when the paperbacks first came out, and being too embarrassed to buy them. (I can't think why. It's not like I didn't buy other lurid paperbacks in the 70s, some of them by writers a good deal worse than Ted Tubb.)
Also read The Bad Beginning, first in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by Lemony Snicket. I know I'm not quite in the intended age bracket, but I approve of this book anyway. I'm still catching up with these cultural phenomena, you know. I will get to grips with Harry Potter, any day now.