Book Thread 2018^H9

My Hugo nominations for best novel, in no particular order:

Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker
Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee
Jade City by Fonda Lee
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

Of the Nebula nominees, I also read Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty but thought it was only okay.

Huh. I hadn’t heard word one about this one before your post, but it looks super intriguing. On the list it goes.

Recently finished Metro 2035, what I believe is intended to be the final Metro book. After telling a largely unrelated story with 2034, this one returns to the protagonist of Metro 2033, a while after he defeats the Dark Ones and realizes they were never the enemy he thought they were. Uncomfortable with being regarded as a hero for doing so, he’s become obsessed with a signal from other survivors he thought he heard during the climactic events at the end of 2033 and makes regular trips to the now mutant-free but much more radioactive surface to try and make contact with someone, anyone managing to live on the surface of the ruined world, much to the chagrin of his adoptive father and wife. Then Homer (one of the main characters of 2034) turns up looking for him to try and get his take on the story of his defeat of the Dark Ones, and instead precipitates another perilous journey across the whole of the Metro, to find a radioman who also supposedly heard from the outside. It’s an incredibly dark and cynical book and there are some revelations in it about what’s actually going on that are staggering. And yet, not transformative.

One thing’s for sure, the FPS series has completely parted ways with the books.

Amberlough is very depressing, if that causes anyone pain, but it’s probably the best written of all those books. It recounts the collapse of a secondary world Weimar-type republic into fascism, as well as a gay state security officer’s fall from grace. But a sequel is coming out, probably a trilogy in the end, so there’s always the chance that nazis will eventually wind up getting punched.

I finally, FINALLY finished Fire and Fury. It was good, but I read non-fiction so. Very. Slowly. It just took me forever to get through.

So thanks to email newsletters and the like, I’ve got TOOOONNNS of books in my backlog. Thankfully I can arrange Kindle books in collections, so I’ve got one called “To Read Next” with the most interesting-looking stuff.

So this morning I chose The Ember War, the first book in the Ember War Saga by Richard Fox. Yes, Dick Fox.

The book starts off with a probe coming to our solar system and checking us out, to see if we have the potential to deal with this massive oncoming alien threat. Once it determines that we have a slim, but slightly positive chance of success, it contacts a human that it uses to grant us with marvelous technology, and in the sixty years before the invasion, we advance technologically a LOT, but not really in any other way. There’s still infighting and sabotage and espionage and the like, even though we apparently know the threat is coming.

So yeah, pretty fun so far.

Exactly why I stopped reading this series. Mo’s character changes into a harpy so quickly it made my head spin. Poor Bob.

Just started reading Blindsight by Peter Watts. It has thoroughly sucked me in.

So the first book was a sheer delight. Very fast, yet still dense with action and character. Will definitely be continuing the series.

I wanted something else epic, but a break from sci-fi, so I remembered I still had two more books to read in the amazing Temeraire series. Therefore I just began reading Blood of Tyrants, and wow is it good.

RichVR, Blindsight is one of the best sci-fi books of the last decade. Please post once you’ve finished.

Hard to believe it’s available for free online under Creative Commons. I can already highly recommend it. I’ll be buying the sequel, Echopraxia, as well.

Have I mentioned that I love your avatar? :)

Some person on another forum posted “What’s happier than a cockatiel with a french fry?” and I of course responded with Pinkerton the cockatoo chowing down on a nice hearty Wendy’s fry.

Huh, I put that book on the backburner when I got to the part of the background story where America launched a literal Christian crusade to save the Swedes from their Muslim overlords. It’s a very interesting premise though!

Yeahhhh I kinda brushed over that quick.

I’m trying to think of an author whose style reminds me of Watts. Maybe John Varley crossed with Mervyn Peake? Or maybe Gene Wolfe?

Blindsight is magnificent. The sequel not so much. It’s ambitious, but perhaps too ambitious and it loses track of itself.

As for other similar authors, I agree about Gene Wolfe. Acelerando, by Charles Stross, shares a lot with Blindsight, but the language and tone is somewhat lighter (the plot is not).

Well, maybe I should get back to the book if that sort of stuff isn’t too distracting on the whole. But my queue is really long right now.

Started reading The Sudden Appearance of Hope. It’s about a woman who no one can remember an hour after meeting her. The affliction she suffers from, and the types of situations she finds herself in, are well-detailed. It would suck if it happened to me! I got bored with the actual story, though, and quit reading at about the 30% mark.

Started reading The Bear and the Nightingale. It’s a fantasy novel set in medieval Russia. I like it a lot, but it’s about to become depressing I think, so I set it aside for the time being.

I read the second and third novels in the Swords of Riverside series. They’re both pretty enjoyable, though short. I liked book 2 more than book 3.

Started two books, but neither are new.
Borrowing from Amazon Prime reading When I’m Gone by Emily Bleaker. Wasn’t sure what it was at first but it’s about a guy that starts receiving letters from his dead wife.

Also pulled up from my back log The Bridge at Dong Ha by John Grider Miller, about a bridge taken down by US Marine advisor John Ripley near the end of the Vietnam war.

I like those too. You can subscribe to the Tremontaine serial over at Serial Box if you want more. Each “season” has an episode by Kushner with others by collaborators in a tightly plotted series that is basically a lengthy prequel to the solo novels. By “tightly plotted” I mean they plan out the full sequence of events and work together to come up with a coherent arc, as opposed to just writing independent stories in a shared world.

Oh hell. Now I know who Peter Watts reminds me of. Peter Watts. He wrote The Rifters Trilogy, which I also loved.

BTW, The Rifter Series is also available for free download. If you haven’t read it, do so.

Edit: His blog. And other stuff.

I can post a single word now, even though I’m not finished yet. Mindfuck.