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