There was one year in which the alt-right rabid and sad puppies messed up the nominations for some of the major awards, but the actual awards didn’t go to their choices because people voted “no award” over their rancid selections. None of the major award winners for novels and stories are slate choices in any year so far as I know. This year the puppies only manifested in the form of a pathetically small protest outside the convention center orchestrated by Jon Del Arroz, who blew off attending his own event with the claim that his child was having a health emergency (the next day he tweeted a selfie from his cabin cruiser, giving himself the lie).
Thanks all, I’ll check out that trilogy next time I’m at Amazon…
I wishlisted the trilogy. Much backlog though.
Another writing group buddy from @ChristienMurawski and my writing group published a book of short satire:
Superversive Press just released 28 Minutes Into The Future, Chrome Oxide’s first collection of nine humorous short stories. It is now available as both an eBook and print book at Amazon.com
This guy is probably crazy but he’s hilarious if you like puns. Check it out!
I just finished Daniel Kraus’s Rotters, which was just as much fun as I hoped. It’s a story of a boy whose mother dies unexpectedly and is shipped off to live with a father he’s never met. It’s a familiar enough trope, except that the father is not quite the withdrawn alcoholic living in a shack on the edge of town that he appears to be. He is, in fact, a grave-robber.
The result is a young-adult coming-of-age story that Tim Powers could have written. It’s full of mud and vermin and liquefying corpses, rat kings and resurrectionists, secret histories, and the like. As well as the humiliations of being the weird new kid in a small-town high school who smells really bad.
OK, I wasn’t too interested until I got to that sentence. I might have to take a look.
I picked up Blindsight because you guys said it was super scary. I think I didn’t get it because it wasn’t that scary. Echopraxia is scarier. Maybe because it spells things out? I’m still working on it.
Very good btw. Vampires. Aliens. Post-humans. Weird philosophy. Evolutionary theory. Hacking. All mixed up.
Not scary. Scary intetesting, maybe.
Not to mention what it has to say about determinism. I’d agree that it wasn’t what I’d describe as terribly “scary”, but had that cool feeling of existential dread that seems to grip me more as I get older.
Andddd I finished Echopraxia. Now I spent an hour googling WTF happened in the end.
I am not a parasite!!! I exist. My choices… matter? Oh. I get what you guys are saying now.
In the shower this morning, for no particular reason, I started remembering a fantasy series I read in the 80s as a youngster, written by Paul Edwin Zimmer, (younger brother to Marion Zimmer Bradely). The series is The Dark Border and my initial google efforts don’t seem to turn up any ebook versions. I can get it in used paperbacks from several sources, and I was thinking of doing that. However, I realized that I’ve completely switched to Kindle reading in recent years such that I don’t have any setup for reading paper books anymore. In the areas I read, the lighting is dim to facilitate my Kindle Paperwhite, and to get good light for reading paper books I would need to rearrange furniture and probably buy a lamp or two. Does anyone know if these are available in ebook form somewhere? They don’t appear to be on Kindle…
I read the first two books long, long ago. I never new there were more books in the series.
I just finished Immortalists and The Poppy War. Immortalists was good, but the second part of the book dragged and was predicable.
The Poppy War is a brilliant debut from R.F. Kuang. Fantasy book with Asian mythology and has a female protagonist.
Man, I love that Chinese Sci-Fi and fantasy novels are now becoming a thing. I might have to check this out, I’m always interested in a book with a different cultural touchpoint. The fact they do not share the same literary assumptions can make them extra interesting to me.
If you like Asian fantasy books, I also recommend Jade City by Fonda Lee. It is kung fu, gang war, and is book 1 of a planned trilogy.
I have seen good reviews for The Three-Body Problem by by Cixin Liu with Ken Liu as Translator, but have not read it yet. Have you read this book yet, Craig?
The Three Body Problem has been on my wishlist forever but it never seems to go on sale, and seems like too much of a gamble to buy full price. Unless you guys sell me on it.
I do recommend it. The cultural aspect informs the story in ways I appreciated. But it’s exactly the kind of high concept work I am an easy mark for.
As for Asian fantasy, I can’t say I have much exposure to it, at least with books. If you start talking cinema, more so due to my love of Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, or Jet Li movies having exposed me to much of the tropes. So I might have to keep an eye for that, thanks!
I am pretty sure I’ve said I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem (or at the very least, this translation of it), but it does have some interesting things to say about the Cultural Revolution, even if I found it underwhelming as a story.
Seconded.