I just finished it last weekend. I’m not very familiar with Journey to the West, but absolutely agree that Zanj is the Monkey King in a very flimsy disguise.
In “False Value,” the new Aaronovitch urban fantasy, and it’s delightful as usual. Solid War40k joke out of nowhere in the middle of the book. Good times, good times.
I laughed out loud when I hit that part of the book. Overall, the book is a fairly solid one-off in the series. I also liked the “You’re nicked!” bit during the finale.
Just plowed through World War Z (still stuck in bed, good times). It’s a really well engineered book, and competently written. Breezed through it in like a 36 hour period. And still, it was…fine? Weirdly soulless, for all that I liked some of the storylines. Like a competent but predictable action video game story.
Holy smokes. For anyone who’s read The Peripheral and/or Agency by Gibson (and if not, why not?), you can actually buy a Wheelie Boy! Only $4k!
I am reading it now, and while each story is fine, its getting somewhat long in the tooth. And I am only about halfway through, according to kindle. Well written, but… I feel I am done with it now.
Yea, I would agree with you. A decent story with lots of things going on but something is just missing with it.
Well, I might, but since you just quoted it it’ll still be there.
You raise an excellent point. Fixing that. :)
I may need more coffee.
Just finished John M. Ford’s first Star Trek novel, How Much For Just The Planet? Goddamn, that was great. And easily the silliest story I’ve ever seen in authorized Trek. Comedic asides featuring malpractice by television scientists, computers driven mad by spilled milkshakes, a golf duel between Scotty and a Klingon, musical numbers (complete with backup dancers in at least one instance), blue orange juice, and a sustained sequence of manically paced farce involving mistaken identities and misplaced clothing and an honest to god pie fight among the highlights.
Just finished Providence by Max Barry and Holy Crap, that was good. In theory, a fairly conventional sci-fi story about the crew of a space battleship fighting nasty aliens, it features some interesting thoughts on AI and the value of human-centric stories, and the best use of multiple-POV I’ve ever read (and I am highly skeptical of multi-POV in most cases). Each character is fully developed, and yet also a stereotype/archetype at the same time. The story is interesting and surprising and had a highly satisfying ending. Highly recommended for sci-fi fans.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened to glance at this post by @Wendelius from the 2018/19 thread.
It’s about The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Tipton. I was intrigued by the idea of the novel, so I read it. And… wow. This book is weird. At its heart, it’s just a murder mystery, with all the requisite drama, backstabbing, violence, disordered personalities, and twists. But it’s also a novel with an accretive protagonist. The same personality re-lives the same day over and over again, but in the body of a different person every time. And over the course of several re-doings, is able to start to piece together the outlines of the mystery and what is going on. And if that wasn’t weird enough, there’s some metafiction going on regarding why this is happening, the rules for it, and the other players.
I’d say the murder mystery part of the novel works pretty well. It takes place on a decrepit old Victorian manor estate, with a bevy of guests attending a macabre gathering. Evelyn Hardcastle is the scion of the family who owns the estate, and she will be murdered every loop at 11pm. The protag’s task is to figure out who murders her. He gets a full day in every new body from waking to midnight to gather clues and observe events. The mystery is appropriately clever: slickly tied up, with subtle clues dropped throughout so that an astute reader (not me) might figure who the murderer is before the protagonist.
And I really liked the accretive protagonist; indeed it’s one of my favorite meta-devices in video games: Varicella, The Outer Wilds, The Sexy Brutale, etc. That’s done very well here, with the protag of the story taking on the personalities and abilities of the various people he inhabits. And the writing is strong, with the occasional startlingly good metaphor leaping out at me.
I think the metafiction falls a little flat here though: there’s an enigmatic plague doctor who delivers cryptic advice to the protagonist and seems to know what’s going on, and there’s an evil footman who stalks the protagonist with a gleaming knife. The way that situation resolves and ties itself into the murder mystery is not particularly satisfying, but it’s also not all that distracting, and at least remains interesting up until the end. The surrealism of the metafiction is what makes the novel so strange.
This is a bit of a slow read, but I found it compelling and fun: similar in tone and style to Knives Out.
Thanks, Sharpe, I was checking that out, sounds like I need to pick it up.
Yeah, I really enjoyed Lexicon and had actually just ordered Providence yesterday through Audible to read after finishing Evelyn Hardcastle, so thanks for the review!
I read John Scalzi’s Trek “comedy” and found it kinda meh. Is this one any better? And I assume based on your post that wasn’t truly an authorized book.
No, it’s an official Star Trek novel, #36 of the original Star Trek series, with the logo and the Enterprise and most of its named crew. I don’t think it was widely followed up in canon, though. For some reason. And yes, it’s better than Redshirts (though I liked that novel also). John M. Ford was an exceptional, one in a million talent. Scalzi’s pretty good, but he’s not that good.
Sorry, I meant Scalzi’s. I don’t remember if you used actual Star Trek terminology or if it was just done in a way where it was obvious what he was talking about.
Oh, yeah, Redshirts is clearly riffing on Star Trek tropes but it’s not a Star Trek novel.
Is there a Scalzi that I should read? I like his blog and all, but I’ve kinda bounced off a couple of his novels.
I feel Locked In is good, as is the first book in Old Man’s War