I had a network maintenance from about 1 am to about 7 am this morning, which meant that instead of sleeping yesterday after work like i begged my body, it decided to sit there wide awake oblivious to the hell it would be putting me through say about now-ish.
however, in that time period i made it through Hull Three Zero by Greg Bear. Think Pandorum meets old school D&D. guy wakes up on a ship and is then lead through a series of trap filled “ancient” pathways meeting various demi-humans which made me think “dungeon in space.”
It’s not a bad read at all and I was really curious to see what would happen to both the ship and the characters. The ending was both telegraphed and a surprise; as in “that’s unexpected” until I thought about it a bit more.
H30 is not unique in either heroic quest literature nor in “hard” sci-fi literature, but manages to strike a wholly complimentary balance between the two.
I’m currently reading The House of Lost Souls which can so far be summed up as Heck House as it currently reads like a tame version of Richard Matheson’s Hell House.
That’s exactly why I hated that book. That wasn’t a spaceship, it was a haunted house. Nothing about the design made sense as spaceship. It was all Bear thinking “how can I scare the protagonist and confuse the reader next?”
Current reading Cook’s Surrender to the Will of the Night.
Good so far, though he’s increasing the breadth of the story yet again. I’m hoping there’s some closure at the end of this book…it’s been a fun ride but I’d like to know it’s going somewhere.
Okay, Generation A goes a bit…weird at the end. About half-way through it takes an odd turn in plot and in structure. I think there was just a bit too much made-up medical science for it to be effective speculative fiction and provide a reasonable warning.
Finished Faithful Place by Tana French, and while it’s not exactly a great mystery (I had it figured out about halfway through), it is a great portrait of a Dublin, working class neighborhood. The dialogue is just great, and the family dynamics just feel true and sad and… well, commonplace. This book was much better than her last one, which felt like it wanted to be an Agatha Christie set in the modern day.
Also, after coming off the two books by Connie Willis, I couldn’t help thinking that French was a much better writer than Willis, and I would say that Willis is one of my favorites, but not for her writing per se, but for her situations that ring true. French just has a way with words.
So picked up Day By Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile which is the second zombie book by that guy who wrote his first one entirely as a daily blog. I’m only five pages in and already I feel bad about the writing, which is barely literate. Eh, it’s short and it has zombies.
I thought the first book was enjoyable but the writing really started to fall apart in the second. Since you haven’t finished it I won’t go into details about it but the already-present military fetish is turned up a couple of notches and that’s not even the worst bits.
As for me, I’ve been reading Neuropath by Scott Bakker. This is what Bakker wrote after finishing the Prince of Nothing trilogy, which I loved. Despite being a clear departure from the fantasy genre to near-future crime fiction the themes in the novel of mind and consciousness are both thought-provoking and disturbing in a manner that directly takes me back to how I felt while reading of Anasûrimbor Kellhus in the Darkness that Comes Before.
The Argument that Bakker presents, with a capital A, isn’t new to me but Bakker approaches it in a much more scientific manner than how I was first introduced to it and even if you cut out the sci-fi trappings that make the story work it is still not something that can easily be refuted.
Almost done with Butcher’s “Side Jobs”, which are a bunch of short stories in the Dresden world. I’m not much of a short story person, but it’s been entertaining seeing gaps filled in here and there. The final novella is a nice lead in to the next book coming out relatively soon.
It’s also interesting to see how his style has changed and improved over the years. There’s a pretty clear difference in flow and story telling in the last couple stories versus the first few. I’d almost like to see a version with “commentary” like on a DVD to get some insight into what he personally didn’t like in his writing and what he did to change it.
Glad to hear that it’s better. I was feeling kind of mixed about The Likeness, though for the opposite reason. To me, Christie always feels like she came up with a cool idea, and the characters are really secondary (which is one reason I don’t like her books). But I felt that in The Likeness, French came up with these good characters and then had to go through all sorts of contortions to make a mystery plot out of them.
I’m about a third of the way through The House of Lost Souls and the opening of the book really really really does a disservice to the bulk of what I’m reading right now.
The tale starts off with a special forces soldier spying on his sister at a funeral when he sees a ghostly form of black horses rise out of the grave and charge into the night. I almost stopped reading right there. Special forces soldiers in my haunted house novel? Pass.
The book then goes on to a man basically being brought of retirement as some kind of operative as being the only man who can save the lives of these girls who’ve gone into an evil house as he was the only one who’d survived previously. I don’t quite follow the logic of that, but ok, I roll with it.
The house is Evil. Capital E Evil. So Evil it has a German name and ties to mid-1920s occult circles. Then the book goes into about how Dennis Wheatley wasn’t just an author of occult thrillers but also a practitioner (and a white supremacist. I’ve only read The Devil Rides Out which was so racist I stopped reading it so I don’t know if this thread continues or if this is artistic license on the part of the author.)
I’m in the middle of a flashback on our lead character and how he came to be in the house and so far the lead up is really well done. I hesitate to say more because it could go to hell, but I’m enjoying what I’m reading right now.
I’m also reading a bit of Last Argument of Kings here and there. There’s not much plot wise happening, as it’s all ramping up to the climax, but I’m enjoying the character development having finally gotten over the hump at the start of the tale.
