Fuckity fuck fuck. A major Russian publisher publishing a SF anthology with some of the major Russian SF writers... on the theme of 'dystopia set in the world of total political correctness'. Editorial blurb talking about 'the world where the aggressive incoming cultures and ideologies stomped all over the friendly host culture' and 'traditional ( Read more... )

After finishing all the Marjorie Liu books I could find (far from all of them) I didn't risk picking other paranormals, since I wasn't sure how far my tolerance for the genre would go. So I went on to fantasy (and SF) - after taking a long break from the genre, it's going well. Though I am still in a weird mood and trying to pick books that won't ( Read more... )

Nasty weather we're having. Well, not nasty per se, but it's supposed to be spring. Everybody says 'Hurrah, spring finally came!'. But it very clearly didn't. I dislike February and March more than any other time of the year: these months feel like emptiness for me. Like a bad dream. I want real spring, not occasional snow and cold wind and ( Read more... )

I've been thinking for a while about two books I read recently, one after another; but I refrained from writing anything about them here because I did not feel I had something worthwhile to say. But there's some sort of a rule about quoting someone else if you don't know what to say, and someone else's post made me think about those books again.

( Read more... )

I have a cold again. A week after the last one. I haven't done that since I was nine. I need my brain functioning, dammit ( Read more... )

My reading bent of late seems to be rather classical. Now, I started it for various reasons mostly involved with clearing my mind, but it proved to be fun. And I am apparently not the one to think so. Because "firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire" ( ( Read more... )

Am reading To Say Nothing of the Dog and it makes me full of squee (thanks again, calanthe_b!). So much fun and meta - at least, if I'm not mangling terms and this thing where the author supposes the reader has read the same books and will get the jokes and recognize names is called meta. Though I'm not yet sure I already have the sense of the protagonists' ( Read more... )

Continuing the experiment along the lines of "Why I don't like books I don't like", I've read Shadow of Saganami, side novel to the Honor Harrington series. I've read a bunch of Harrington anthologies before and more or less liked them - a couple of stories even entertained me a lot, but they (a) had no Harringtons whatsoever and almost no Manties ( Read more... )

For the reasons not fully clear to myself I went and read the latest Honor Harrington book. Well, tried to, at least. I honestly managed about half of it, and then reverse-browsed the rest to learn how things ended and how it all came by ( Read more... )

Well, my brain's melting, and I mix up all the German emperor. I hope they *do* ask mainly about your particular sphere...
And I finished "Stars and Stripes in Peril", but did not like it much. Too much American patriotism and not enough human interest. Though the alternative history idea is cool...