A Strike, A Hit, and Foul Balls

June 23, 2020

At bat:

A Fleet Action Spread Across An Endless Blue Sky by Steven Mohan Jr.

Image and text: Goodreads.

The Premise: The lion’s share of glory (and pages) belongs to Bob Hatchet, the long-suffering executive officer of the Leonine Navy battleship al Zubrah al Asad (the “Beard of the Lion”) Hatchet’s ship gets banged up severely in a well-written and gripping battle conducted in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant belonging to pseudo-Russians. Bob survives but his continued safety, moral purity and career are hanging by a thread as the story ends. There are also 19th Century Germans lurking, and a preface of sorts which explores why the Leonine task force is off smiting “Novorossiya Imperiya” and its space navy. This involves an enigmatic and homicidal Senator and an orangutan with a PhD who speaks with a Texas accent. They meet in a crater on one of Saturn’s moons. (Dude, it’s science fiction. What do you want?)

Foul Balls:

There were a bunch of little things which were jarring, but I wasn’t sure if they were serious or supposed to be funny.

  • The German bad guy has a sexy Turkish bodyguard? Um...gastarbeitern in space?

  • There is also some ethnic diversity, but they come with cheesy accents. (There is an Admiral Patel who speaks like Apu from the Simpsons: “It is vell you are here, Commander.”) It came across to me as needlessly cheesy and disrespectful, rather than colorful.

  • The title is less a title as such than a description of the story’s denouement. It’s pretty much literally what happens, yes. Easy to remember or say? Not so much.

  • Nomenclature and equipment: Mohan, a former US Navy officer, sticks close to what he knows. The “Leonine Navy” uses the same equipment designations as the late 20th/early 21st century US Navy. And the same ranks. And the same squadron designations for their space-going aircraft carriers. (Two pilots from VF-73 have a very rough afternoon outside Saturn’s orbit, for example.) The technology seems oddly retro as well--considering humanity can warp space and time, they’re using manned “fighters” firing missiles, all combat data seems to be fat-fingered in, and the space-going fleets exchange volleys of cruise missiles like it’s the North Atlantic on Day 1 of World War III.

Base Hit:

The fleet engagement is fought in all three dimensions, plus use of time and an element of deception. Bravo. It reminded me of a submarine engagement set in space. I liked the way he paced the battle, and it is distinctly more “real” than some of the other parts of the book (see below), if you can get past the fur hat Mohan plunks on the Novo-Pseudo-Russian commander’s head.

Strike 1: Oh, They’re Incompetent Secret Police?

The combat and routine on the battleship are rendered well. The rest of the story is not terribly strong.

Example with spoiler and an authentically German run-on sentence:

After being caught doing some after-hours welding on the top-secret Kaiser-super-weapon her father’s building for the Kaiser, and almost being killed by the maniacal bad guy’s sexy Turkish bodyguard because they have implausible and very lethal ideas about operational security—nothing says “nothing to see here” like leaving a trail of dead bodies behind an official delegation that’s not supposed to be somewhere—the heroine, who has the implausible given name “Moore” because that’s who builds the Kaiser’s super weapons in the future, is sent down from the space dock to safety on the surface to lower her profile or make her safer. I’m still confused. Anyway. She immediately becomes the token working class attendee on a flying safari to the “Broken Lands” full of mutants, where she will get the Mean Girls treatment from debutantes and be hit on by the Crown Prince, before they’re all shot down in the middle of a biology lesson/happy hour.

Wait, what? So she walks out of the super-secret space dock after...because...and then... Are we in the same book as the space battle?

Perhaps then it’s not a shock that the secondary characters have very little depth. Even the primary characters--with the potential exception of the same Cassandra Moore mentioned above--are generally one-dimensional. Moore has a little more depth, albeit in the vein of Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers. (There are actually a couple of male actual or potential sociopaths for her to team up with a la Christian Slater’s character in the movie, which could be fun.) Hatchet’s a plausible character, but same deal. For example, his stress reactions to the CHENG and the hitchhiker from the ruling caste offer so much potential but are very little explored. The story has potential to be very interesting; the people in it should be, too.

 Color Commentary:

I liked it enough to finish, but kinda wondered why afterwards.

 It’s a promising start to a series from the point of view of plot elements. Unfortunately everything seems slightly unfinished--it reads like something that’s a revision or so from being really ready. The problem’s not the writing--it flows well enough and it’s competently edited. Rather, Mohan’s trying something very complex here, there are a lot of threads, and they don’t all come together the way they should.

I raise this because the easiest and most interesting series to read all offer a blend of plot- and character-driven writing which carries the reader along. My sense is that this and future books rely too heavily on plot and that’s not strong enough yet to carry a series—at least for me.

At the risk of getting beaten for mixing baseball and baking metaphors, this needs to go back in the oven for a few more minutes.

 

Completed Books: Welcome To Summer! Edition

Cover is only tangentially related to the plot, as far as I can remember. Still, solid entertainment.

Off to a well-earned rest in Amazon’s cloud.

 June 22, 2020

 

A Fleet Action Spread Across an Endless Blue Sky, Steven Mohan Jr. Story Bundle. I finished this, but had a couple of strong reactions to it. This gets its own “Three Strikes” post. (Here.)

 Dieselpunk ePulp Showcase 2, John Picha, et al. Amazon freebie. The four stories were consistently good. A bit of a niche sub-genre, but very enjoyable. Favorite story was a tie: Storming Shangri-La or Bloom, both of which dealt neatly with dystopian themes. Read again quotient: Low but possible.

Extra big because now with even more extra-cheesy awesome!!!!

 Castaway Resolution, Eric Flint, Ryk E. Spoor. Baen monthly bundle I loved the parts I read, but it tried to be so many things. Interstellar detective/search and rescue stuff with Lt. Susan Fisher: great. Castaways surviving the weird planet: way, way too long. Fifth in a series starting in 2006; 50/50 on reading the rest. Read again quotient: Can’t see it.

 Forced Perspectives, Tim Powers. Baen monthly bundle. Surprisingly good! A secret history of a haunted Los Angeles teetering on the brink of spiritual annihilation. An Egyptian secret agent, weirded-out twins, and a host of other super-colorful characters swirl in a vivid and energetic mix. I’d read more “Vickery and Castine” stuff. Read again quotient: Higher than average.

 Man-Kzin Wars XV, Larry Niven ed. Baen monthly bundle. I was prepared to absolutely hate this when I realized there were really fourteen (14) earlier books, but it won me over. Stories jump around chronologically, which made it a bit hard to follow, but all were pretty sound. Singer of Truth and The Third Kzin were especially solid, but Brad R. Torgersen’s Scrith ends the collection by tying human-Kzin fear and cooperation into an artfully written bow. Read again quotient: Absolutely.

 Nevertheless, She Persisted, Diana M. Pho, ed. Tor special. Another book I wouldn’t have thought I’d have liked so much. A collection of female authors’ short speculative fiction pieces inspired by Elizabeth Warren. I loved exploring the varied perspectives in this short but powerful book. Read again quotient: Absolutely.

 

 

Reading Casualties: Spring Solstice Edition

More items recently defenestrated from my Kindle Paperwhite.

June 22, 2020

House of Assassins, Larry Correia. Baen bundle. This is fantasy, epic scale, won a best-novel award in 2019. Glacial plot development has leached away my attention span. I’ve read other things by Larry and liked them, so this was a surprise. 12% finished.

Someone paid for this cover art.

In The Empire of Underpants: A Scifi Story, Robert Jeschonek. Story Bundle purchase. This left me wondering if I have an irony deficiency. The self-aware underpants struck me as a bit too cute, and Messiah 2.0 was just too heavy a lift. Dropped this into the hamper 9% of the way through.

Raising Hell, Norman Spinrad. Story Bundle “outspoken author” bundle. Workers of the world, unite -- and read something more entertaining. Union organizers wind up in hell, unionize the demons. Leaden (asbestos-clad?) writing and, ironically, a preachy undertone. 24% finished.

Children of Arkadia, M. Darusha Wehm. I think I mistook this for Niven’s Ringworld. It’s closer to a mix of Bridge Constructor Portal (but voiced by an AI) and my grad school experiential group dynamics course. I’m stopping it before Wehm makes me write a long paper dissecting my thoughts, experiences and hidden motives. 12% done (but this is a giant civil engineering project in space, so probably closer to 4% done, three years late, and 5400% over the initial winning bid…)

Beowulf’s Children, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steve Barnes. More Baen goodness. Set in Camelot and Avalon, descendants of the heroic winners of the Grendel wars have forgotten the horror of their salmon-spawned foes. (No, seriously. “‘The salmon developed legs, and teeth, and a taste for human blood. They become…grendels.”) I’m finding myself sympathizing with the (putative) monsters because the humans are so insipid. 10%, maybe.

Carpe Diem, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Baen monthly bundle. Volume 10 in a series. The first two chapters were cryptic but promising. Then caromed directly into a concrete wall (the unintuitively-titled “LIAD: Trealla Fantrol”) which was suddenly Jane Austen mixed with a very early draft of Dune. Couldn’t do it. The FTL drive quit 567,643,800,000 kilometers into a light year’s worth of reading.i

 Voices of the Fall (Black Tide Rising #5.5), John Ringo, ed. Zombie anthology. Nothing wrong with this as such, just haven’t been in the mood since I put this on the triage list on June 1st. Off it goes.

On probation:

Til Valhalla, Richard Fox. I liked the Terran Armor Corps military space opera series well enough that I will try to tough this out. The PLA steam rolling over Australian local defense militia in the presumably near future, pre-xeno invasion Earth is a bit on the nose. That said, the novel--like the war it depicts--is early days. 4% through.

Angry Robot books updates Gibbon, apparently right down to the sword.

Angry Robot books updates Gibbon, apparently right down to the sword.

Empire of the Blood, Gav Thorpe. I know and love Gav from his Warhammer work, but am having some trouble engaging with this omnibus set. Writing’s fine, but Roman legions + Roman imperial politics + minimal character development isn’t...escapist? realistic? something...enough. The lead character has (literally) an unbelievable combination of terrible political instincts and naivete for someone who’s supposed to be a military genius. We’ll see. 17%.

 Bonus Post-Script:

One oddity with Carpe Diem is the cover art. Baen apparently stays afloat by using, ahem, either startlingly inexpensive artists or people who are blood relatives of one of the bosses. (See the first one here, for example.) Anyway, this is endearing—the one linked to above is at least funny.

But the current (2015) Baen edition is a shocking contrast with the 2003 Ace (paperback?) cover art. I would think that if I were going for the Fabio/bodice-ripper effect (wow, there’s something I never thought I’d actually put in writing) I’d possibly invest in a less vapid pair of models. Or not accidentally use the practice painting. Or something. Is the woman in the second cover perhaps looking for an escape route or is that my imagination?

Unimaginative. A solid ultra low-budget budget cover. If you’re going to not do frilly visual marketing, then really don’t do it.

The reviewer was mesmerized. Our heroes are…lightly stunned? Sedated? An early draft?

(All cover art from Goodreads; imagery doubtless copyrighted in a spirit of reckless corporate or authorial optimism someone might steal them..)

 

 

 

 

 

 

i  Roughly 6%

Completed Books Update for June 7, 2020

Working backwards again, still in my Kindle Paperwhite.

Low-budget art. This creature tries to seduce the protagonist. No, seriously. You’re welcome for the visual.

Ship of Destiny, Frank Chadwick. Baen bundle. The sleeper winner of the last few weeks, it wildly surpassed my expectations—which were lowered in large part by the unbelievably bad cover art. (Something about judging books and covers…) Decently-paced, strong writing for the genre and introduced some serious topics under the space opera fun. Read again factor: Fairly high.

Padre Prequel: Damascus Road, David Gatward. Free direct download. I’m not sure how I stumbled on this novella, but it was reasonably fun reading—think of it as horror for the religious. Entertaining but not compelling. Read again factor: Unlikely.

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Tour d’horizon of recent (2017) literature and research on human performance, resilience and related topics. Excellent and focused. Will be subject of a stand-alone article. Read again factor: About as close to certain as you can get.

Mr. Wells & The Martians: A Thrilling Eye-Witness Account of the Recent Invasion, Kevin J. Anderson. Another excellent read from the author of the two Clockwork Lives steampunk novels I read earlier this year. Frothy but oddly satisfying, quick and entertaining. Read again factor: Strong maybe.

Write Like Hell: Horror and Dark Fantasy, Vol 1., Mitchell Luthi, et al. Anthology of short pieces. None of it was great and none of it was awful, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. This is horror as light beer: less filling and tastes…”great” might be too strong. Read again factor: Surprisingly definitely maybe.

Gateway to Rust & Ruin (Empires of Steam & Rust), Robert E. Varedman. More steampunkery, this time in a clockwork-and-zeppelin infested alternate World War I world. Air pirates in dirigibles, Einstein’s evil brother, and a hole in the dimensional whatever that leads to a mirror universe that’s literally rusting away. I liked it enough to finish, probably not enough to read more of the series. Read again factor: Bottom of the stack.

Simple and effective. This is SO the cover the book deserves.

Come to Me, Sin Soracco. Fascinating story of santeria devotees in modern San Francisco. I expected to not like this after trying to read Edge City, but this was awesomely well done and, shockingly, very original. Read again factor: High.

Voyager, Harper Voyager USA. Excerpts from 15 upcoming SFF novels. The God Hunter andThe Witch With No Name were both good, but the strongest piece was Black Dog, about a collection agent for the Grim Reaper. The set was weighted down by several genre pieces I just couldn’t get into (faeries and the fae and a…bard?) but wasn’t a waste of time. Read again factor: Just north of zero, but not much.

Vows and Other Tales of the Macabre, Arjay Lewis. I wasn’t a fan of Lewis’ Fire In The Mind but this was a good read, and had some very creative stories. Very dark, in general, either in the setting or thematically. Read again factor: Strong maybe.

Reading Casualties (Summer's Coming Edition)

The continuing cull of the collection…

June 01, 2020

Updating from my May 1st list. The first two entries “graduate” from the triage list to abandoned status. I’ve had no desire to revisit Today I Am Carey and my attention span bounced off What’s For Dinner without making any new progress.

 Today I Am Carey, Martin L. Shoemaker, Baen monthly. One chapter (5%) into this story of an empathic android caring for an elderly dementia patient. Not badly written, but I’m still looking for the hook.

 What’s For Dinner? , N. Gray. Bookfunnel or some other freebie. According to Goodreads, it’s an anthology about meals and death. Or death as a meal. I’m not sure, and thinking that at 14% through, the main course and I are not going to make it each other.

 Midnight Visitors: A Steampunk Cat Novel, Kevin O. McLaughlin. Bundle purchase. Presenting the point of view as that of a cat is interesting. Unfortunately, I’m a dog person. 13% through.

 Mechanical Dragons: Fire & Water (Mechanical Dragons #1), Bobbi Schemerhorn. Bundled purchase? This may be more YA than adult. “Simple and clear” is a reasonable description of both the writing style and, less fortunately, the path of the plot and the characters. 15% through.

 Frenzy, Glenn Lazar Roberts. This is begging to be turned into a straight-to-Starz streaming feature. The plot and premise aren’t meant to be taken too seriously, but I didn’t find it all that much fun, either. Got to 7%.

 The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells. From the author of a series I absolutely loved, this one is having trouble leaving the runway. Strong candidate for a revisit later. Got to 23%.

 Fire In The Mind, Arjay Lewis. Gets great Goodreads reviews, but I’m finding the writing a bit flat. The pace so far--6% in--isn’t promising. Perhaps one to come back to but I can’t see reading an 8 book series based on this.

 Amena’s Rise to Stardom: Divine Warriors #0, Kristen S. Walker. More of a teen/YA thing, this so far seems like a recasting of Faust for children of the TV age--although perhaps there’s a happier ending when the goddess of the rainforest steps in for Mephistopheles? Got to 18%.

 Westward, Ho! (Golden West #1), J.R. Murdock. Airships and Clockwork bundle. I don’t think I’m the target demographic for this one, either. Plucky teenager battles mysterious forces in a Steampunk gold rush. Not bad, but not for me. Made it through 12%.

 Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton. This was a May free download from Tor’s website. The author described it as “a sentimental Victorian novel about dragons who eat each other.” And she’s not kidding. Well-written, well-paced, suffers from being Jane Austen meets I don’t know what--Anne McCaffery’s Pern without the dragon riders plus cannibalism…maybe? I’d have raved at a short story or even a novella, but this is 300 pages of an interesting premise and deadly dull period mores. Made it to 28% through.

 In triage:

 Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany. This is an esteemed classic, but is also a literary experiment. I am finding it exceptionally tough going. Will revisit this over the next few weeks. (Update: Zapped it on June 7.)

 Voices of the Fall (Black Tide Rising #5.5), John Ringo, ed. Zombie anthology. Nothing wrong with this as such, just haven’t been in the mood.

 Beyond Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. A Tachyon reissue of an 1831 original. Mary Shelley is an SFF O.G.

 

Three Strikes

At bat:

 Tenlyres (Bondmage, #1) by Tim Neiderriter

I’m doing this in a sort of homage to Jefferson Smith’s “Immerse or Die” challenge, which since late 2018 is defunct or on semi-permanent hiatus.

It occurred to me that I was spending enormous amounts of my limited pre-sleep time dutifully slogging through books I wasn’t interested in--mostly from bundles of various sorts. I had a moment of “what would happen if I just stopped reading?” The answer of course, is that I read more stuff I enjoy.

Mostly, the books just trail off. Now and again, though, there’s something so bothersome I find myself slipping into one of Jefferson’s “WTF” moments. One of those is presented here.

 I’m going with a baseball theme: three strikes and you’re out.

The Premise: Ilsa is a sort of warrior or mage or religious figure, or combination of the three, or some of the above, who travels with Blue, who is not well described. They live in a politically fractured land or world threatened by the possible outbreak of war, and are doing something to stop it. After visiting Ilsa’s mother, uncovering some tantalizing clues to Ilsa’s expulsion from “Saint Banyeen’s” along the way, they got street food. That’s as much as I read.

Strike 1: Descriptions

There is a recurring issue in the way things are described. There is detail, but not descriptions. It all seems weirdly unmoored from context, where we get lots of elements but they don’t really add up to a usable picture. I found this really hurt my ability to form a mental image of what the book was describing and thus my enjoyment of it.

For example, from the fourth paragraph:

“Fingertips brushed Ilsa’s arm as her traveling companion, Blue, sat forward and peered out the window past her. Black braids fell around Blue’s shoulders. Those braids shifted only a little as the train came to a full stop.”

This is our introduction to one of the main characters. We get nothing about Blue, except that she has black braids which respond more or less to gravity and she’s sitting inboard from the window next to Ilsa. Does she react to the sight of the city? Is she look at something specific? What does any of it mean?

I was already annoyed at this point. The previous three paragraphs described where they’re going. They were a collection of similar semi-detailed descriptions that never added up to enough information to help you build a good mental image of the city they were entering.

Strike 2: Water Torture

I appreciate the urge to not give a data dump outlining the whole fictional world and the characers up front. Unfortunately, Niederriter’s style is to drip out clues which--see above--don’t have a lot of context linking them to the story.

“She didn’t like pointing an open palm at her companion. For most people, the gesture meant resistance in peace, but for someone who knew Ilsa’s bond, the motion implied a threat. When she summoned the weapon bonded to that symbol, it would appear in that hand.”

Except we don’t know Ilsa’s bond, since it’s the first chapter of book 1. Also no idea what “resistance in peace” signifies. Several pages later, we hear Ilsa reconcile with an old enemy who tells her “be red” in reference to a proverb the old enemy has written. Nothing further.

I think this style is supposed to be mysterious or oracular, but it misfired.

Strike 3: General Lack of Polish

I don’t mean only proofreading, but genuine editing.

The main point: a lot of what I noticed about Strike 1 seemed to be details which weren’t descriptions, almost as if the author felt compelled to say something but wasn’t sure what. Okay, I can relate to that.

The problem is that over a book’s length, you get bogged down if there are too many constructions like this:

“Ilsa smirked at her companion, hoping it did not seem forced. She had ridden with Blue for so long, she did not know if she could really trust her as a friend. ‘Thanks, Blue.’”

 Ok, so: the smirk was supposed to seem genuine? And what does the next sentence even mean? The comment before this quote, Blue has compared Ilsa to a sister so this seems odd. Normally, if you can’t trust someone you spend less time with them in dangerous places, not more. Are the thanks ironic? Why?

 There is a lot of really good independent SFF. And there is a lot that could be really good, if someone dispassionate read, noticed, and questioned things like that.

 The breaking point for me was this sentence: “The wheels of the small transit car squealed, and it bobbed against the guidance wire overhead as the driver put on the breaks.” No, it’s a “brake”.

 Ugh.

 Final Score: Read to location 207 (Kindle), or 4% of the way through. The thought of a couple of hundred pages of the same avalanche of small but annoying pain points sent me off to the next one.

Completed Books Update for May 1, 2020

Working backwards through my Kindle Paperwhite:

Fritz Leiber Super Pack #1, Positronic Super Pack Book Series #33. Kindle. Stupid title, great book — possibly the best $1.99 I’ve spent in ages. I thought I knew Leiber from dozens of readings of his swords & sorcery figures Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but I didn’t know Leiber at all. His harder sci-fi, much of it from the depths of the Cold War, is grim and dark — not Warhammer grimdark, but showing a nuanced and deeply pessimistic view of human nature. It’s hard to say he was completely wrong, but on the bright side the collection never sinks so far into negativity that it was unreadable. Among my favorites: “Scream Wolf” is a hard-boiled detective story that’s well done, “Snowbank Orbit” had me sweating in sympathy with the character Grunfeld, and “A Pail of Air” wound up being a riveting read despite what the opening make me think was sure to be a relentlessly grim and dark destination. Read-again rating: Very likely.

Slipping, Lauren Beukes. Worth it for the dystopian futures it spins out, including the relentlessly bleak lives of the indentured peons in a literal corporate jungle. I didn’t care so much for the non-fiction essays, but that’s also not what I tend to want to read late at night when I’m trying to get to sleep. Took several tries to get through and almost fell into the “triage” list, but was worth it in the end. Read-again rating: Not likely.

Clockwork Angels: The Novel and Clockwork Lives, Kevin J. Anderson and Neal Peart. These do okay on Goodreads, but are among the very few books I thought were under-rated by reviewers there. I appreciated the evolution of the story along a long, subtle arc. A steampunk multiverse with dystopian overtones, this is as finely crafted as an old watch. Very entertaining, and solid writing. I will not be buying or streaming the accompanying Rush album (sorry, not my sub-genre) but it sounds like a neat idea—speculative fictional rock.Huh. Read-again rating: Perhaps someday.

The Monitor, Paul Heingarten. I would have had trouble finishing it if it had been longer. The story is…ok, the writing is…ok, it at least wasn’t long. Read-again rating: No need.

A Star Wheeled Sky, Brad R. Torgerson. Baen bundle. Alien artifacts of unfathomable complexity and power meet all-too-shallow human nature in a zero-sum collision in a post-Terran future. Will the generally dislikable antagonists and the tepidly positive protagonists figure out how to get along before both are doomed? I’m mildly interested in reading the rest of the series, particularly if it’s not expensive. Read-again rating: Not likely.

The Collapsium, Wil McCarthy. I enjoyed this quite a bit more than I expected, particularly given it comes with a set of long annexes necessary to explain the physics of the novel. I would have enjoyed this more without the super-cheesy faux-surprise romantic twist at the end, but we can’t have everything. To paraphrase the book’s last sentence, it all ended well enough. It’s a toss-up whether the rest of the series is worth investing time in reading, though. Read-again rating: No need.

Overruled, edited by Hank Davis. An anthology of speculative fiction of the legal/courtroom drama flavor. Generally quick and easy reads, although I did skip past a couple of stories. I think my favorite was Algis Budrys’ The Executioner, which was dark and moody in a Judge Dredd-meets-Handmaid’s-Tale way. Read-again rating: Unlikely

Reading Casualties (Early 2020 Edition)

A short list of books I’ve tried to read and abandoned. Most of these are from my Kindle Paperwhite, but future editions will hopefully also include physical copies as I move to clear out my logjam.

Stable Strategies and Others, Eileen Gunn, Tachyon bundle. I was sucked in by the William Gibson foreword, then let down by a writing style that I found simultaneously strident and self-satisfied. The tone didn’t carry the stories. Abandoned at 44% read.

Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen, Kage Baker, Tachyon bundle. Movie reviews of early SF. Not my thing, but it was in the bundle. Abandoned at 5%.

Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling, Tachyon bundle. I really, really want to like this, I remind myself every 2-3 pages. Almost dieselpunk, but a bizarrely limpid plot and I’m tortured by the idea there’s some deep meaning I’m just not quite getting. Or not. Abandoned at 43% read.

Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar, Tachyon bundle. I liked Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, about a mildly dystopian future Tel Aviv. Her alternate-Israel Zionist homeland on Lake Victoria is too heavy-handed and has too many leaden allegories for me to enjoy. Abandoned at 12%.

Taboo Special Interest Ebook, Morpheus Tales, Kindle. I hope I got this on very deep sale—as in, for free. Shock value should complement and build on solid writing, not replace it. Abandoned at 31%.

Starborn & Godsons, Niven & Pournelle and Barnes. Baen bundle. This is the third book in a series I haven’t read. I may return to this at some point, when (or if) I have the other two done. This is a technical drop, not the book’s fault. Abandoned at 1%.

Multireal, David Louis Edelman, Baen monthly. This is volume 2 in the Jump 225 trilogy. Although the series has good blurbs, after a few chapters I don’t see going back to part 1 or forward to part 3. Part of this is the byzantine plot structure and part of it is the writing style. The book is full of descriptive passages that are both long and vague at the same time. Bad combination. Abandoned at 8%.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia McKillip, Storybundle (?). This is a romantic fantasy, involving a collector of mythical beasts, a bad guy, a step-son, and a love interest. This is not a sub-genre I would normally read, but it came with a larger package. Turgid plot and I had trouble bonding with the severely-underdeveloped main character. There’s a lot of emotive moping. Or moping and emoting. And beasts. An epic struggle I kept coming back to without anything to really show for it. Abandoned at 44%.

In triage:

Today I Am Carey, Martin L. Shoemaker, Baen monthly. One chapter (5%) into this story of an empathic android caring for an elderly dementia patient. Not badly written, but I’m still looking for the hook. Maybe one-two more chapters.

What’s For Dinner? , N. Gray. Bookfunnel or some other freebie. According to Goodreads, it’s an anthology about meals and death. Or death as a meal. I’m not sure, and thinking that at 14% through, the main course and I may not make it each other.

Completed Books Update for April 14, 2020

Going through my Kindle Paperwhite, I’ve got the following finished books which I enjoyed enough to get all the way through:

The Wall of America, Thomas M. Disch — Tachyon bundle - Grim, but imaginative stories. Read-again rating: No hurry.

The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, Caitlin R. Kiernan — Tachyon bundle - Grim and dark. I loved The Ammonite Violin - not too hard to figure out where it was going, but very well done. Read-again rating: Maybe.

Apocalypse Nyx, Kameron Hurley — Tachyon bundle - Wow. WOW. Nothing uplifting or redemptive going on here, but straightforward dystopian fun. 100% read-again.

We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory — Tachyon bundle. Group therapy Lovecraft-style. Not the most imaginative thing I’ve read, but really solid. Read-again rating: Probably.

Meet Me in the Future: Stories, Kameron Hurley — Tachyon bundle. Murdered pet elephants, lots of death, plague, genderfluid meets grimdark. Read-again rating: Almost certain.

The Best of Michael Moorcock, Michael Moorcock — Tachyon bundle. A Portrait In Ivory was excellent, the Third World War stories were pompous but bearable, the rest was ponderous and self-important. Read again factor: Banished forever.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, David G. Hartwell, ed. — Tachyon bundle. This is the good stuff. I’d never read any Robert E. Howard or C.L. Moore, now I can’t wait. Some more good Moorcock, and stuffed with other interesting reads. Read again rating: Almost certain.

The Monstrous, Ellen Datlow, ed. — Tachyon bundle. A Wish From A Bone and Totals could carry the whole anthology, but don’t have to—it’s very strong. I want more Datlow collections! Read again rating: Almost certain.

Inside Job, Connie Willis — Subterranean Press. A novella, entertaining premise but I wanted to reach into the e-reader and pound the crap out of Rob, the obtuse main character. Still finished it, though. Read-again rating: Once was probably enough.

The Hayden War: Silver Wings Books 1-4, Evan Currie. Kindle. 1,047 pages of mostly good hard military sci-fi, the $2.99 cost covered for some underwhelming character development. Read-again rating: Possibly.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, Catherine Asaro, ed. Uploaded in 2017, it took awhile to get around to it. Strong stories included Ken Liu’s Paper Menagerie, The Man Who Bridged The Mist from Kij Johnson, and the oddly compelling Sauerkraut Station by Ferrett Steinmetz. Read-again rating: Parts, yes.

Heroes Wanted: A Fantasy Anthology, Ben Galley, et al. Kindle, free book. I remember enjoying the quite a bit while I was reading. Laura Hughes’ Ratman was super, Half-Breed by Joe Jackson was very strong, but the rest, while good, weren’t wildly memorable. Read-again rating: Unlikely.

Recce: Small Team Missions Behind Enemy Lines, Koos Stadler. Kindle. Part of a series of African military reading I started in 2019. Interesting guy, well-written and very tactically-focused memoir by a SADF veteran, but non-committal on the larger historical issues. Read-again rating: Unlikely.

Gardens of the Moon, Steven Erikson. Malazan Book of the Fallen #1. Whiskeyjack and Tattersail, classic sword/sorcery multi-volume set. Entertaining, above-average writing. The series is epic, not kidding: the omnibus edition on Kindle is 10,083 pages and costs an eye-watering $79.92. Read-again rating: Strong ‘possible’.

Skeen’s Leap, Jo Clayton. This was, again, entertaining but the premise and plot were hard for me to really get into. Cross-dimensional salvage/thievery? Read-again rating: No hurry.