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Post by wildfire2099 on Nov 29, 2018 0:16:04 GMT -5
Clockwork Angels by Neal Peart and Kevin Anderson
I love the concept of this book... take one of the most creative guys out there in one medium (Neal Peart) and have him try his hand at another. Who doesn't love the idea of a concept Rock album.. here's its taken to the next level.
Sadly, he hooked up with Kevin Anderson instead of a good author... the epilogue tells me they live close to each other, so I guess it was fate or something.
The story itself presents a world that is completely ordered by a leader named the Watchmaker, and a rebellious fellow named the Anarchist. Between them is Owen Hardy, a teenager who wants to see the life and excited from the picture books in his room.
Owen has a long series of adventures that show a bit (but not very much) of the world.. apparently only Albion (where the Watchmaker rules) is totally ordered.. the rest of the world is pretty normal, just with a bit more alchemy and a bit less science.
Owen continues to have his hopes crushed repeatedly, but preserves on until he ends up back where he started and has a happy life. No mention of what's going on with the great battle of polar opposites.. Owen doesn't care, and it's his book.
We get beaten over the head with the theme of order vs. chaos, then Owen settles happily in the middle, giving us no resolution at all... I guess extremes are bad? I didn't need 300 pages to tell me that. Peart in the epilogue says Anderson dictated several of the chapters while mountain climbing... I can tell. Some writers actually pay attention to what they are writing.
While it was a fun game to pick out the myriad of lyric quotes and song tiles stuffed (often inelegantly) into the text, it's sadly really not worth the time to read.
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Post by brutalis on Nov 30, 2018 7:57:46 GMT -5
Over the weekend and this week I spent time poring over some Two-Morrows Art books: Comics Gone Ape by Michael Eury. John Romita...and all that Jazz by Roy Thomas and Jim Amash. John Romita Jr. by George Khoury and Eric-Nolen Weathington. Mike Grell: Life is Drawing Without an Eraser by Dewey Cassell and Jeff Messer. Alan Davis by Eric-Nolen Weathington.
Comics Gone Ape is silly fun spotlighting the trend in comics for Monkey's and Gorilla's on covers and inside the funny pages. Lots of interesting facts and some short Q and A(pe) pages with some of the big name artists (Infantino, Oskner, Adams, Cho, etc) who have done their fair share of promoting Apes. Plenty of individual discussion of seminal Ape series like Tarzan, Angel and the Ape, Gorilla Grodd, Planet of the Apes and such. Pull up a palm tree, peel a banana and sip your coconut milkshake with this one.
I won't go into detail over the artist books other than stating they are stupendous! Each one gave due credit and consideration to the individual artists and discussed their starting and growth in comics. All the artists are outstanding in their styles and skills and these books really give you an impression of how much we take them for granted. They work hard and are very dedicated to the creation of comic books and these books showcase and promote why they really are STARS with all they have accomplished.
I can highly recommend ANY Two-Morrows art books as the pages are filled with scrumptious artwork that highlights the artist from their beginnings to current (when they book was written) and while sometimes the discussions with the artist's may be a little flat there is usually interesting moments and recollections to be enjoyed. If you watch the Two-Morrows internet site you can often find sales of past books (dagnabbit I missed out on a few early gems) in either hardback or paperback along with any pre-orders of upcoming books. The entire Modern Master series is quite good as the main series of books on artists and should be on anyone's shelf who appreciates the splendor of comic book artistry.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2018 16:14:19 GMT -5
I finished Ed McBain's The Heckler, the 12th book in the 87th Precinct series. Another good entry in the series. This one may have taken me a short while to get into, but once I did, there was no putting it down. What starts as a simple police procedural becomes something more along the way, as a simple robbery grows into acts of terrorism, and McBain gives us a better class of criminal in the Deaf Man. I am very interested to see him return to plague the 87th Precinct and most importantly, Steve Carella.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 2, 2018 22:38:32 GMT -5
Across Time by David Grinnell(Donald Wollheim) c. 1957 Interesting mix of hard sci fi and a basic romance novel plot (2 brothers fighting over the same girl and their own childhood issues). There were definitely problems of plot, but it kinda worked. I mean, the central conflict between the ex-humans and the fringe Quoxians was never described, or resolved, but just gave us who the 'good guy' and who the 'bad guy' was, it was enough of a framework to tell the romance story and give us some fun science. I liked the way the far future was handled, it made sense and was kinda unique. The real star of the ship EPL (the Ever-Perfect Lieutenant)... he was hilarious in a basic, 50s British soldier sort of way.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Dec 3, 2018 3:34:47 GMT -5
That's a great cover, though.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 3, 2018 11:18:33 GMT -5
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty I've been trying to read some more contemporary SF (along with my re-reads and first reads of older stuff). I had no idea who this author was but the book kept getting recommended by Amazon and Goodreads and it was nominated for some serious hardware. And it turned out to be a pretty fine read. This is essentially a locked room mystery in space. A six person crew is piloting a generation ship to a new planet. The crew can do that because cloning is a common thing and "mind-maps" of the individual can be imprinted on the new clone. Crew member dies from old age or misadventure...bring forth a clone with the most recent mind-map and carry forth. The cargo is a large number of humans in cryo-sleep and a databank full of mind-maps for clones. But the entire crew wakes up to a scene of incredible carnage as they come out of the clone banks to find their previous bodies have been murdered, the ship's AI is out of order and large swathes of data have been wiped. Oh...and the mind-maps they've been imprinted with are from the beginning of the voyage...24 years before. Beyond the fact that this is a pretty nifty mystery, Lafferty raises some issues about cloning, immortality, business ethics (and the lack thereof), genetic manipulation and others I'm blanking on right now. The characters are generally well realized and have individual voices. A high quality SF mystery. Give it a read. You'll be glad you did.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 9,545
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Post by Confessor on Dec 3, 2018 21:26:31 GMT -5
I've been reading Neuromancer by William Gibson recently, but I'm really struggling to get through it. I've gotten about half way through and, so far, it's veered from utterly gripping to interminablely boring. I like the cool, "from-the-hip" way it's written, but it's not holding my attention consistently. I haven't picked it up for two weeks and I'm wondering whether I will again.
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Post by berkley on Dec 3, 2018 22:38:10 GMT -5
I've been reading Neuromancer by William Gibson recently, but I'm really struggling to get through it. I've gotten about half way through and, so far, it's veered from utterly gripping to interminablely boring. I like the cool, "from-the-hip" way it's written, but it's not holding my attention consistently. I haven't picked it up for two weeks and I'm wondering whether I will again. I didn't have as bad a time with it as you are when I read it years ago, but I do think it's pretty over-rated. Still, it's one of things I'm glad I've read since it's been such an influential book n science fiction the last 30 years or more. So I'd say keep going, since you've already made it half-way.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 4, 2018 21:24:24 GMT -5
The High Rocks Loren Estleman (1979)
I grabbed this thinking it would be Page's 'origin' story, but instead it's just one of his many adventures... written at the end of his career (which I just read about in reading the last book of the series on a lark).
This one was jam-packed with action from beginning to end, as Page's simple run to pick up a captured prisoner puts him in the middle of a war between the Mountain that Walks- Bear Anderson (an old friend with a vendetta against the Flathead Indians) and the tribe in the area. Add in a government bounty hunter looking for Bear to stop the Flatheads from going to war and his prisoner escaping, and it's a crazy 3 way fight through a Montana blizzard with shifting alliances and no shortage of bloodshed.
Estleman isn't shy about killing his characters, which added realism, but was a little sad. While some of the characters were a bit too good at things, and Page himself FAR to resilient even for Captain America, never mind a plain ole Deputy marshall, the book was a great classic western.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Dec 6, 2018 7:37:48 GMT -5
I am grateful for Robert Sawyer’s Hominids. After several books that were a chore to get through, here’s at last a novel I am eager to get back to!
I love the small details Sawyer puts in there, regarding the way a modern-day society developed by Neanderthals might be like. Without slowing the pace down, these sociocultural bits and pieces really enrich the story.
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Post by Jeddak on Dec 9, 2018 21:54:45 GMT -5
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis So with Bellwether we had a cover promising SF on a mainstream novel. Here we have a cover seeming to promise a regular, maybe even literary novel. Nothing to suggest it might be that dumb SF stuff. So of course, it's science fiction. Specifically, time travel. An operative of a temporal agency has been making too many trips, and is given a nice, simple assignment to help him unwind. Of course, nothing is that simple. There's an incongruity, disruptions of the timeline, and the whole space-time continuum could be at stake. To say nothing of the dog. The mechanism of time travel isn't explained, so in that sense it's not hard SF. But the consequences and mechanics of their travel are worked out, and do play a part in the resolution, so it's not strictly soft SF either. What it is, is smart, and fun, and observant, and well worth reading.
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Post by berkley on Dec 10, 2018 5:15:30 GMT -5
I am grateful for Robert Sawyer’s Hominids. After several books that were a chore to get through, here’s at last a novel I am eager to get back to! I love the small details Sawyer puts in there, regarding the way a modern-day society developed by Neanderthals might be like. Without slowing the pace down, these sociocultural bits and pieces really enrich the story. I'm too far behind in 21st and late 20th-century science fiction to have read anything of Sawyer's yet, but several of his books, including this one, have caught my eye for similar reasons to what you say here: they seem not only to be inspired by an interesting science-based idea - almost the least you could expect from any work of science-fiction - but also to pursue the implications of that intriguing premise, as opposed to just building a basically conventional story on top of it: something less common than you might expect or even hope to see in SF.
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Post by berkley on Dec 10, 2018 5:48:48 GMT -5
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis So with Bellwether we had a cover promising SF on a mainstream novel. Here we have a cover seeming to promise a regular, maybe even literary novel. Nothing to suggest it might be that dumb SF stuff. So of course, it's science fiction. Specifically, time travel. An operative of a temporal agency has been making too many trips, and is given a nice, simple assignment to help him unwind. Of course, nothing is that simple. There's an incongruity, disruptions of the timeline, and the whole space-time continuum could be at stake. To say nothing of the dog. The mechanism of time travel isn't explained, so in that sense it's not hard SF. But the consequences and mechanics of their travel are worked out, and do play a part in the resolution, so it's not strictly soft SF either. What it is, is smart, and fun, and observant, and well worth reading.
I haven't read anything of Willis's yet, for the same reasons I haven't yet read anything of Sawyer's (see previous post), but I've heard this wasn't one of her best. At the same time, I'm both interested in and afraid of it - but for reasons that have nothing to do with SF.
It's more to do with my love for the book the title references, Jerome K. Jerome's late-Victorian (1889) classic Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). I read this when I was a teenager, so it had a formative influence, and I was so captivated by it at that impressionable age that it's retained a kind of near-divine status in my internal world.
What a long-winded way of saying - but my excuse is that I just clued into this myself - that you should read JKJ's Three Men in a Boat, and then re-assess.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Dec 10, 2018 6:43:17 GMT -5
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis So with Bellwether we had a cover promising SF on a mainstream novel. Here we have a cover seeming to promise a regular, maybe even literary novel. Nothing to suggest it might be that dumb SF stuff. So of course, it's science fiction. Specifically, time travel. An operative of a temporal agency has been making too many trips, and is given a nice, simple assignment to help him unwind. Of course, nothing is that simple. There's an incongruity, disruptions of the timeline, and the whole space-time continuum could be at stake. To say nothing of the dog. The mechanism of time travel isn't explained, so in that sense it's not hard SF. But the consequences and mechanics of their travel are worked out, and do play a part in the resolution, so it's not strictly soft SF either. What it is, is smart, and fun, and observant, and well worth reading. I haven't read anything of Willis's yet, for the same reasons I haven't yet read anything of Sawyer's (see previous post), but I've heard this wasn't one of her best. At the same time, I'm both interested in and afraid of it - but for reasons that have nothing to do with SF. It's more to do with my love for the book the title references, Jerome K. Jerome's late-Victorian (1889) classic Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). I read this when I was a teenager, so it had a formative influence, and I was so captivated by it at that impressionable age that it's retained a kind of near-divine status in my internal world. What a long-winded way of saying - but my excuse is that I just clued into this myself - that you should read JKJ's Three Men in a Boat, and then re-assess. To say nothing of the dog ? It is one of my favourite books! No need to be wary: I have read Three men in a boat (actually after reading To say nothing of the dog, because I had enjoyed it so much) and the SF version is not found wanting in the comparison. The closest story I can think of, in terms of zaniness, is Michael. Moorcock’s An alien heat. Not that Willis’s novel has anything to do with Moorcock’s, but both books indulge in uproarious fun by going around the genre’s tropes and by embracing their comedic nature. Highly recommended!
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 9,545
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Post by Confessor on Dec 10, 2018 7:20:18 GMT -5
Big fan of Three Men in a Boat too. It's just a fantastic book. The places along the Thames estuary that are mentioned in it are close to where I live.
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