So I just read the most recently published (this year, I think) book in a series that was apparently started forty+ years ago, and then proceeded to reread the chronologically later but written forty+ years ago books that followed it. It's sort of surreal to see how the writing has changed -- not that the older books are bad, but the author is so ( Read more... )

Despite all my brilliant plans, I still didn't write commentary as I went, so . . . more short bits of babble and what I remember. Things which are not plot facts are of course subjective, and even plot facts may be misremembered, since I don't have the books in front of me. (This list does cut off a month after the last, even though I'm late ( Read more... )

I'm going to post this now, even though commentary on the books in question is incoherent to nonexistent in many cases, because I'm only going to fall further behind on writing commentary (and really, the commentary thing would be much easier if I wrote it just after reading the books, rather than waiting until I've forgotten everything I meant to ( Read more... )

I read Blindsight. And yes, it was hard sf with vampires, as advertised. I'm just . . . a little unsure why there were vampires. Did some Laurea-analogue rogue geneticist just decide "Hey, you know what I could do? I could clone some VAMPIRES!" and then do it, and then people realized they were useful and things escalated from there ( Read more... )