Finished Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson. Started it quite a while ago, but it ended up at the bottom of the reading pile for various reasons. Basically the book follows a shaman’s apprentice sometime during the last Ice Age. It is not bad, and it is certainly something different. However, it did feel somewhat slow and a bit too long for what it was. I’ve not read anything else by KSR, but I certainly will.
I think you may have just read KSR’s worst book, so that’s a good sign! I couldn’t quite get through Shaman, and I adore his other work. The Mars trilogy and The Martians are fantastic, and The Years of Rice and Salt is / will be a timeless classic. The Forty Signs of Rain trilogy may be aging fast, but it was good for its time and still may turn out quite prescient.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Not sure how far into Shaman you got, but the I think it is worth finishing. The last section might have been one of the better ones.
I read a bit about KSR after finishing the book last night, and I wonder how I have managed to not notice him before. Seems like he writes about a lot of themes that I find interesting.
Finished League of Dragons and enjoyed it. It’s funny that this is advertised as the “last Temeraire novel” when the alternate-historical-event-sequence ends with Napoleon going to St. Helena. This looks like a signal that there will be at least one more book to wrap up Waterloo. Perhaps she is just leaving it open for a popular-demand sort of thing. Anyway, I like the idea of Temeraire in parliament.
I once tried really hard to re-work the bad fantasy novel I’m writing, The Dying Lands of Laria into a psuedo-play on The Histories by having it all told from the perspective of a fictional historian following along in the footsteps of the “RPG party”-style heroes of the actual story, piecing together the events of their lives that changed the world from those they met and interacted with, the damage they left behind, the legends that arose around their endeavors among the commonfolk, etc.
Turns out that was really hard, and I wound up tossing out that draft. But I still think it was a super cool idea.
Napoleon didn’t escape from St. Helena, he escaped from Elba pre-Waterloo (and was supposedly poisoned on St. Helena). Novik wraps up the book hinting that the Incan(?) Empress will have Napoleon poisoned as well.
I like the way it all ended, and the series as a whole was solid. If I could have cut one book it would have been the second-to-last; between Laurence’s amnesia and Novik’s take on Shogun, it was relatively poor, but the first five books more than make up for any mis-steps on the back end.
Oh yeah, good point, got Elba and St. Helena backwards. I blame the palindrome.
I just finished Abercrombie’s First Law series. What a great series. Some of the best fantasy writing I’ve read.
Read Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie. I liked it. The structure is a bit different than the previous book, but it works well. The plot is surprisingly confined, considering how Justice ends, but I think it manages to expand upon the universe and deal with some of the broader topics in a focused way. There are some plot threads that seemed to be left hanging, though. Looking forward to reading Mercy.
Though, to be honest, while I like the series I do sometimes ask myself why I don’t rather read one of the Culture books I’ve not read yet. But then again I can do that afterwards.
Just finished The Hatching (A Novel) by Ezekiel Boone.
OK, I enjoyed it just fine, but I do take exception to the parenthetical – it is not, actually, a novel. What it turns out to be is Book 1 of a larger story broken into some currently unknown number of parts.
Here’s the dust-jacket summary: A voracious species of killer spiders erupt upon the word, devouring everything in their path. China is nuking their own soil to stop the advance; parts of India are gone; and now the threat has arrived in the US…
The writing is good, but not exceptional. The characters are interesting, but not fascinating. The subject-matter is fun. It’s basically a good “beach read”.
I “read” this as an audiobook, and one of the down-sides of that medium is that you don’t really have a feel for how much book you’ve got left. Today, I was throwing a shovel-full of dirt back into a trench in the scarred wasteland that was once my backyard, listening to the narrator. The story had quite obviously reached the end of “act one”: all the (many, many) characters had been introduced and the threat had been introduced and temporarily beaten back. Things were obviously set to get much worse for humanity. Pausing to wipe the sweat off my brow (a mistake because the back of my hand was covered in dirt), I thought wow, I’ve been listening to this book all week and we’re only at the one-third mark! It must be a thirty-hour audiobook in total! And then it ended.
No real character growth, no actual climax and no one solved anything… the entire “novel” was basically a setup for the follow-ons. And given that this is right now the only book in the series, I would recommend to others that they wait until the author had proven that he’s going to write the other ones before diving in.
[quote=“Jorn_Weines, post:29, topic:120012, full:true”]Though, to be honest, while I like the series I do sometimes ask myself why I don’t rather read one of the Culture books I’ve not read yet. But then again I can do that afterwards.
[/quote]
Ah, yes, the Ancillary series works as a substitute of the Culture novels for me too.
Just finished the first two books in Tom Pollock’s The Skyscraper Throne trilogy. They’re urban fantasy, I think (because the protagonists are teenagers) probably YA urban fantasy. But where that commonly invokes visions of some riff on feuding vampires, werewolves, faeries and/or wizards (many of which I have enjoyed a great deal), Pollock’s fantasy is literally constructed out of the city (London, in this case), in a way that feels more like Gaiman’s Neverwhere or Mieville’s Un Lun Dun. The first book, The City’s Son, follows the teenage son of the god of London, Our Lady of the Streets, long abandoned by his mother and raised by a garbage spirit known as Gutterglass, as he confronts the enemy god Reach, the Crane King and his brutal, all-extinguishing agenda of demolition. He’s aided, despite his protests, by a female graffiti artist who’s inadvertently stumbled into the weirder side of things by taking a ride on a Railwraith, the electrical spirit of a passenger train, and there’s a bit of a romantic subplot there, of course, made a bit weird by the fact that his skin is grey like concrete, he sweats oil, he’s powered by the energy of the city and its inhabitants, etc. The worldbuilding is super vivid and unusual, and really feels magical and otherworldly despite being located in our own, more or less. And there are some surprising and heartwrenching revelations and weighty decisions to be made.
The second book, the Glass Republic, touches on what happens to the artist and her best friend in the wake of these events and a huge chunk takes place in the titular Glass Republic, the mirror realm of London’s reflections, which is strange in many magic-logical ways and fucked up in some very human and very inhuman ways as well. I can’t say too much more without spoilers for both books.
Highly recommended. Don’t get book two without also getting book three, because there’s a heck of a cliffhanger at the end.
Just finished the 4th Agent Pendergast book. Good stuff!
Guy is kinda a quirky Sherlock Holmes type…
The Black Lung Captain is next.
Reading Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. This is a seriously flawed book, possibly the best SF of the year anyway. Palmer is brilliant but the book may be too ambitious even so.
That’s a sweet cover. I had to check if the artist was John Harris (the cover artist for Ender’s Game and the Ancillary series). It’s not but it’s still damn good.
Just finished up Ancillary Sword, second in the Imperial Radch trilogy (that started with Ancillary Justice). I can certainly see why it’s considered a weak follow-up, but I think that’s largely because it’s serving to set up the third novel. Wrote a blog post about it. We’ll see if I feel the same after reading the third.
I’ve heard several people say they think it is a weak follow-up, but it didn’t feel like that for me. Been a while since I read the first, though. It doesn’t escalate the plot in the way one might expect, and I can see how that might disappoint some. I’ll pick up Mercy soon, so I too will see if my feelings change.
Halfway through Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross now. Interesting concept, and it has me wondering where it will go next. Parts of it remind me about some of the ideas from Accelerando, but Stross is doing different things with them here.
I loved Saturn’s Children, and if you like it then I recommend also checking out the two followups: Bit Rot (short story) and Neptune’s Brood (novel). Neither continue the story of the characters in the original directly, but are set in the same universe.
Finished Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. Volume one of a duology, I believe. Deeply and pervasively flawed, but still an enormously impressive novel. It’s very easy to spoil it, so I won’t say too much about it. The cover blurb makes it seem kind of twee and abstract, but it’s really very gritty.