General reading, possibly the last such I shall comment on before buckling down to the Hugos... and starting off with Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a selection of the best short fiction of James Tiptree Jr ( Read more... )

Recent reading: Trafalgar, by Angelica Gorodischer (tr. Amalia Gladhart).  This came through following up one of James Davis Nicoll's reviews, and he's already been more articulate about this one than I will be, but what the heck.  Trafalgar Medrano (and, really, his name is the least unlikely thing about him) is an Argentinian businessman who ( Read more... )

Right, then.  When last seen, I was donning my exploring trousers and setting off into "Science Fiction Novel Super Pack #1", which sort of implies that a #2 is at least being considered....  Dirt-cheap compilations of last century's sci-fi are OK by me, but - now I've emerged from the other side of it - I might as well report my impressions ( Read more... )

Starting with the back half of Brian Stableford's "Emortality" series, comprising The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat and The Omega Expedition.

Having taken us to the verge of the 31st century in The Fountains of Youth, Stableford then backtracks all the way to the mid-21st for The Cassandra Complex, with a story involving the beginnings of the ( Read more... )

Well, I've been caught up in SF/F, so it's hardly surprising that I forgot about one recent read that's not even remotely SFnal, Laurent Binet's HHhH, the story of "Operation Anthropoid", the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich during the Second World War ( Read more... )

Obviously, I'm still doing reading for the Hugo nominations thing - thoughts on this are collected at my Wordpress thing here: https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/ . (Why Wordpress instead of LJ?  Made it easier to coordinate with the recs blog I was contributing to, mainly.  A fair amount of stuff here made it over to there, anyway ( Read more... )

I've been off on a horror and weird fiction kick lately, starting with F. G. Cottam's The Colony, a cheerful tale of a newspaper magnate who sends a team of self-described "experts" to a remote island whose inhabitants all vanished in the 19th century.  There is a mystery, and all the various experts have their own ideas - natural causes, alien ( Read more... )

Or, at least, the 2016 (and 1941) Hugo nominations are open.  I got my login and my PIN and everything, and they work.

Now I am confronted with a lot of blank boxes to fill in, and I am determined to have a stab at filling them.  In some cases, this will be easy... in some cases, alas, too easy, because there are quite a few new novels I've read ( Read more... )

Recent reading: Railhead by Philip Reeve. YA stuff, but I'm young at heart, so that doesn't matter. In a setting where artificially intelligent trains travel interstellar distances via a gimmick called a "K-Gate" (apparently a sort of wormhole you can safely install underneath a viaduct, which is a pretty neat trick when you think about it), ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )