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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 15, 2024 23:09:41 GMT -5
Red Sister
Mark Lawrence
Read this for book club.. I'd seen the cover before but it wasn't really on my radar. It did sound good though, so I dove in with decently high expectations.
I really like the concept of a dystopian world that is dying not due to any ma made problem that can be fixed, but rather just the the sun has faded. The impact that would have on the world, and on society is immense and very much worth exploring. Then we have 'the corridor' where it seems it is still a bit warmish, and 'the ice' where some sort of barbarians live, but lots of old world technology seems to be.
Unfortunately, that unique and interesting set up is the backdrop for what feels like a fan mashing together their favorite books into one story because they think it will be cool.
We start out with Name of the Wind (dirt poor main character with amazing power if only someone trains them, and their travails of dealing with the rich kids).. but it quickly falls into Harry Potter tropes (not that those are all that different, to be honest. Then there's 'the path' which needs 'serenity' to find, unless you get there by 'anger' (sounds a bit like that other 'force' with the big light swords, doesn't it?). Oh, and the main character also seems to also be Wolverine.
There was what I hope wasn't supposed to be a shocking twist that I was only surprised that it too so long to happen... then there is a sometime in the future prologue and epilogue that tease what might happen next but neither really fits with the story.
I think if the author focused even a bit more on the unique parts of this world, it would have been an amazing story. Instead, we get a run of the mill 'school' story that has been done a million times, and honestly there were not really any characters to really latch on to for the good feels that alot of these books seem get readers with. There are just too many characters and way too much time spent on the minutae of the Abbey and the training of the novices that would have fit better in the RPG handbook after the story because a massive franchise (oops).
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Post by majestic on Oct 17, 2024 18:42:34 GMT -5
Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey I've been intending to read this for a while... and the APL finally talked me into it.. book 2 of the series was on a display, and this one just around the corner, so I grabbed it. I'd watched a couple Episodes of the Expanse on TV, and while it seemed decent, it got me more to want to read the book than continue watching.. it seemed a decent riff on Babylon 5 (no aliens, but a similar political drama). THe book starts out that way, too.. with different parts of the solar system at odds a bit due to different ways of life... the consistent metaphor for our own class struggles exaggerated by distance and even, in the case, a bit of evolution. Then, about 1/2 way through, the book turns from a mystery in a unique setting to a hard core sci-fi first contact... which was a bit shocking, but worked amazingly well. The 2nd half of the book, where they deal with Eros and the 'protomolcule; felt like an episode of Star Trek:TNG... a weird mix, but it totally worked and told a very clear, cohesive story. The main characters were great as well.. Jim Holden is one of the coolest guys I've read about... just superhero enough to root for all the time, but realistic enough to not just be a cypher. His 'crew' (seems weird to refer to it that way when there are only 3 of them) were not quite as interesting, but all filled familar sci fi rolls well. Miller was a little too mopey for my tastes, but certainly was a well developed, interesting character that I hope we haven't seen the last of. I also really felt like the science made sense.. there was really a feeling that living in space was HARD.. and dangerous. Too often sci fi makes light of it, as if clearly, once we're able to get out to Mars, it'll be easy (unless the book is actually about getting there). Here, we're there, and we have been for a while, but it's still hard. Water gets mined from Saturn, and supply disruption causes riots. It all makes alot of sense, and gives the book a feel of realism that is hard to do when you star talking about colonies on asteriods and magic alien viruses. I will most definitely be getting the next one (hopefully today!) THe one thing I didn't get though.. why 'The Expanse'? Perhaps it'll become clear later. I get calling the space virus a leviathan, but also a bit weird no one in the book ever uses that term. Just finished book one and started watching season one. Loved the book. The TV show isn't holding my interest as much. |
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Post by majestic on Oct 17, 2024 18:44:25 GMT -5
Killing Floor Lee Child There's something about archetypal characters that make a good story.. I guess that's why they become archetypes in the first place. That's what Jack Reacher is... you can find a guy just like him in 1000 other stories, a big, tough loner with a sense of justice and honor... the kind of character that defined 'hero' for quite a long time in fiction. There's nothing complicated or fancy about this book, just a straighter forward one about a guy righting wrongs buy beating up the bad guys. It totally works. I agree with Lee Child in his forward (at least sometimes)... it's good now and then to not have to cheer for the underdog, but rather have a hero that you just KNOW is going to win.. it's just a matter of how. That's exactly what happens in the book (and most of the series, really). The story is decent, if not spectacular. I definitely found myself figuring out the clues before the characters in the book did, but I'm not sure if that's because they were a bit obvious or if perhaps I read this at some point in the past and didn't realize it was the first one. The nice thing about these novels is, while Jack Reacher is pretty much invincible, he's invincible in a believable way... he doesn't take loads of damage and work through it, or perform impossible feats of strength or accuracy.. he does what you'd think a ex-military cop that's built like a tank would do. That's why it works well. As many books around this time do, this one definitely feels more dated than it should.. it was written in 1997, but has alot more in common with 60s pulps than a current novel.. very liitle computer stuff... no cell phones (one of the cops has a pager, but that's it)... Reacher uses a map and a phone book at different points. Pre-9/11, so he goes to the airport and pays cash to get on a plane, and talks about how it's a pain (but not impossible) to get his weapons on with him. I can't really picture reading a bunch of these back to back, but every now and then they're a fun read. Read a couple of these books and really enjoyed them. Love love the tv show. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 18, 2024 11:08:52 GMT -5
 Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen
My second book by Hiaasen and the second one that vaguely disappointed me. It wasn't bad...it just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. I had this niggling thought in the back of my noggin that...damn it...this could easily be so much better. R.J. Deckard is a news photographer turned private investigator who is hired by billionaire Dennis Gault to bust open a cheating ring in world of bit-time bass tournaments. The alleged perpetrator has his own TV show on the Outdoor Christian Network which is owned by a faith healer turned televangelist. Along the way Deckard picks up help from Skink, a half-crazed hermit with a deep secret. All those elements point to something pretty good. And...there's something pretty good in there. But it just seems to drag on and on and on. There are so many different threads and so many characters that seem somewhat extraneous that it becomes something of a jumbled mess. To me it felt like you could have excised about a hundred pages and had a pretty tight neo-noir novel. Or you could have excised a different hundred pages and had a really funny crime comedy. But the issue, to me, was that the two kind of coexisted in a not particularly comfortable way. Don't get me wrong...I didn't ever feel like giving up on the book. I just wanted it decide what it wanted to be and then lean in to that instead of meandering between genres. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 18, 2024 12:29:53 GMT -5
Darker Than You ThinkJack Williamson, 1948  The members of an archeological expedition return after spending two years on a dig in Mongolia, and its leader, eccentric scholar Lamarck Mondrick, calls the press at the airport to make an earth-shattering announcement. He warns about an evil presence among humanity’s own ranks, and the pending arrival of a new leader of these dark forces, the so-called ‘Child of Night.’ However, before he can divulge any further details or reveal the contents of a chest containing some means of combating this menace, he has a seizure and falls dead. Will Barbee, a local reporter who once studied under Mondrick, is disturbed by these events and begins to investigate matters on his own – all the while distracted by an apparent cub reporter for a rival paper, an alluring green-eyed redhead named April Bell, who seems to know more than she’s letting on. Will soon finds himself entering a half-waking nightmare, in which he seemingly turns into an animal – wolf, sabretooth tiger, python – at night and kills off Mondrick’s surviving assistants, his former college buddies... This is a really well-conceived horror but also science fantasy story. Basically, Williamson makes use of many insights from psychological, ethnographic, anthropological and paleontological research of the late 19th and early 20th century to create a more or less sciency explanation for werewolves and witches, while also telling a pretty gripping and suspenseful story.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 18, 2024 14:48:36 GMT -5
The Rotary Club has its yearly book fair around here and I made the mandatory pilgrimage. No old Marabout paperback with a Henri Lievens cover this year, as per the last few times... Those books weren't that sturdy to begin with, and I fear that they are already pretty scarce.
There was an overabundance of books by Daniel Steele, Dan Brown and Clive Cussler but very few SF books. I thought I'd go home empty-handed when I saw two thrillers that seemed worth the while: Neanderthal by John Darnton, and End of Days by Robert Gleason. Never heard of either of them, but I could use a little thrillin'.
I was almost through the French language section when I spotted a sickly green spine that reminded me of something... and sure enough, it was a pristine Book Club edition of Dune from 1965! For only five bucks, it'll make a great addition to the bookshelf!
I didn't find what I was looking for, but am still a happy camper.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 18, 2024 14:51:50 GMT -5
I was almost through the French language section when I spotted a sickly green spine that reminded me of something... and sure enough, it was a pristine Book Club edition of Dune from 1965! For only five bucks, it'll make a great addition to the bookshelf! I didn't find what I was looking for, but am still a happy camper. I'm a sucker for book club editions of classic SF. |
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Post by berkley on Oct 18, 2024 18:42:38 GMT -5
Darker Than You ThinkJack Williamson, 1948 The members of an archeological expedition return after spending two years on a dig in Mongolia, and its leader, eccentric scholar Lamarck Mondrick, calls the press at the airport to make an earth-shattering announcement. He warns about an evil presence among humanity’s own ranks, and the pending arrival of a new leader of these dark forces, the so-called ‘Child of Night.’ However, before he can divulge any further details or reveal the contents of a chest containing some means of combating this menace, he has a seizure and falls dead. Will Barbee, a local reporter who once studied under Mondrick, is disturbed by these events and begins to investigate matters on his own – all the while distracted by an apparent cub reporter for a rival paper, an alluring green-eyed redhead named April Bell, who seems to know more than she’s letting on. Will soon finds himself entering a half-waking nightmare, in which he seemingly turns into an animal – wolf, sabretooth tiger, python – at night and kills off Mondrick’s surviving assistants, his former college buddies... This is a really well-conceived horror but also science fantasy story. Basically, Williamson makes use of many insights from psychological, ethnographic, anthropological and paleontological research of the late 19th and early 20th century to create a more or less sciency explanation for werewolves and witches, while also telling a pretty gripping and suspenseful story. I've been thinking about reading this myself sometime in the next few months as it's listed in the Moorcock/Cawthorn "Fantasry: the 100 Best Books" that Ive been using the last year or two to help me choose some 20th-C fantasy to read. I hadn't yet made up my mind but I skimmed your post just enough to see you had a positive reaction, so that's tipped the scales for me and I should get to it soon. |
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Post by majestic on Oct 19, 2024 8:07:47 GMT -5
Haven't read anything by Lovegrove, yet, but he's an incredibly nice and intelligent guy. I attended a few of the talks he gave at the SF convention here in Zagreb about 2 years ago - one about all of the Holmes pastiches following Doyle and another about comic book heroes. He's also a very engaging speaker. He has a bunch of regular Holmes pastiches that aren't mash ups, too. I'll definitely try one of those at some point. highly recommended if you like steam punk styled fiction. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 21, 2024 10:30:21 GMT -5
Conjure WifeFritz Leiber, 1953  ( not the cover of my edition, but hey, nothing beats Jeff Jones cover art and it complements the cover to the Jack Williamson book reviewed above) It should be noted that the novel was in fact originally published – as a novella – in the pulp magazine Unknown Worlds in 1943, but then the expanded and revised version that most people have read was released in 1953. Anyway, it’s already been briefly reviewed in this thread a few years ago by MRP. As he noted, it’s a tale of witchcraft with campus politics mixed in – because the main chacter, Norman Saylor, is a sociology professor at a small, conservative, likely private college in an equally small, conservative, stuffy little town somewhere on the East Coast (probably in New Jersey). Basically, Saylor discovers that his wife Tansy has, among other things, all manner of talismans and charms hidden about the house, as well as a notebook full of formulas for incantations, etc. He confronts her about these ‘silly superstitions’ and convinces her to get rid of them all and forsake her magical activities. She acquiesces to his demands, but then his, but also her, life gets turned upside down. As MRP noted, the story is really well plotted and written and the characterization is very strong; my main criticism would be the suggestion that pretty much every woman on the planet engages in witchcraft, which is tied to this gender essentialist view about how they’re more in tune with the irrational side of life. Nevertheless, I found this a rather enjoyable horror story.
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Post by Rob Allen on Oct 21, 2024 12:02:29 GMT -5
Conjure WifeFritz Leiber, 1953 I should read this someday. I went to a small, conservative private college in a small, conservative, stuffy little town in New Jersey. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 22, 2024 19:57:48 GMT -5
Tyrant's Throne
Sebastien de Castell
I'm a bit sad this is the end of the series (hopefully the author's promise to revisit the characters holds true)... I could read swashbuckling adventures of Falcio, Kest and Brasti all day long. The first section of the book was exactly that, and it was great. The ending was perfect. The middle 300 pages had a whole lot of torture for the main characters, which I don't love, but I suppose that was necessary to make the ending feel properly earned.
I think this was the best use of Bards in the history of fantasy fiction... I LOVED how they were able to impact the story, and it worked in a way that wasn't really magic. There was really only a small bit of magic in the story overall, which I thought was very good... you could pretend it was all real if you squint a bit, and assume some of the weird parts were the result of far too many concussions.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 23, 2024 10:22:14 GMT -5
 Sugar on the Bones by Joe R. Lansdale
Hap and Leonard are back after a five year hiatus and I was able to work this in to my reading schedule a mere three months after publication. I've said before and I'll say again that Joe R. Lansdale is one of my favorite current authors and that I really love the characters of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. That said, some of the later novels in the series have been hit and miss. I felt that the last entry, Elephant of Surprise, was one of the weakest in the series. Unfortunately, this one wasn't much better. There's a bit of a feeling of closure in this one as we get most of the supporting characters from the series showing up and active. Brett, Hansen, Jim Bob Luke, and Vanilla Ride are here. But Chance and Reba, while mentioned, aren't. So if this is a closure, it's not full. I'll admit, I've never liked the character of Vanilla Ride. I've never felt she really fit the feel of the books and this time, as is often the case, she acts as a deus ex machina and I don't need that. There are things to like here. Hap and Leonard feel much more in character than they did in Elephant, where they were seldom funny and suffered from late-stage John McClaneism. They're much more vulnerable here. They acknowledge they are aging and probably too old for this shit. Leonard wants to get out of the private investigator thing and marry Pookie. Hap wants to get out too, but he won't because it's Brett's business. I love that. But it still suffers, as the series increasingly has from escalating threat syndrome. It's even mentioned that the villains here are almost cartoonishly supervillainously evil. It's too much. Hap and Leonard are just guys who get stuff done because it needs done and nobody else is going to do it. They aren't superheroes and shouldn't be. They have native intelligence and are well-trained and experienced martial artists...but they also just kind of muddle through in spite of themselves. The escalating threats have never set well with me. All this seems pretty negative. And I guess it is. This is pretty easily in the bottom third of the books in the series. It's worth a read but it's weak Hap and Leonard and weak Lansdale. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 24, 2024 8:48:23 GMT -5
Haunt of Horror, v1 (June, 1973)  ( cover by Gray Morrow) Through the Curtis imprint that it used to publish b&w comic magazines, Marvel also made a few forays into prose fiction digest magazines in the early-to-mid 1970s. Haunt of Horror is the one that interested me the most and about a decade ago I landed reasonably priced copies of the whole whopping 2-issue run. This spooky season, I decided to finally pull them off of the shelf, dust them off and give them a read. First I read the novel, Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, that’s serialized in both issues (reviewed upthread - just scroll up a bit), and then went back and read all of the shorter pieces, which is a mix of (mainly) short stories plus some non-fiction essays and reviews. What follows is a rundown of volume 1. It kicks off with an introductory editorial, probably written by editor Gerry (excuse me, Gerard) Conway. The other non-fiction content includes an essay by Denny (excuse me, Dennis) O’Neal on modern horror novels (“Lurker in the Family Room”), focusing on The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, and The Other, in which he ponders how the genre reflects the times. Nothing terribly original or ground-breaking. The other main non-fiction contribution is the Boo Kreviews sections, written by Baird Searle, who covers Robert Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside, and Michael Moorcock’s The Dreaming City and The Sleeping Sorceress. Searle liked Moorcock’s output more than Silverberg’s. Since I’ve read none of those books (although I have read and enjoyed other stuff by both authors), I can’t really comment one way or another.  ( uncredited illustration for the boo kreview section) The fiction opens with the first half of Conjure Wife (again, already reviewed). I’ll just highlight the accompanying illustrations here, such as the opening splash by John Romita...  ...and one of the many inside the story by Gene Colan:  The rest of the fiction consists of two ‘novelettes’ (basically slightly longer short stories): “The First Step” by George Alec Effinger writing under the pseudonym ‘John K. Diomede’ – which is a character in and narrator of the story. The conceit is that these are like the Holmes stories as recounted by Watson, with Diomedes recording his adventures with his employer Dr. Warm, an eccentric sleuth living in New York in the 1930s. Here Dr. Warm and Diomede encounter some unspeakable horror in the form of a pet chimpanzee while vacationing in rural Ohio. It’s a kind of muddled story, honestly.  ( illustration by Frank Brunner) The other ‘novelette’, which bookends this volume, is Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu mythos tale “Usurp the Night,” which I liked quite a bit. Next, the standard short stories include “Loup Garou” by SF writer A.A. Attanasio, which is a pretty good werewolf/voodoo tale set on Haiti, and “Ghost in the Corn Crib” by R.A. Lafferty, which I thoroughly enjoyed (not least because it’s more humorous than scary).  ( illustration for "Loup Garou" by Mike Ploog) Finally, there are three ‘short shorts’: “Seeing Stingy Ed” by David R. Bunch, “A Nice Home” by Beverly Goldberg and “Night Beat” by Ramsey Campbell. The first two are very modern, non-supernatural horror stories, both suitably disturbing, while the third is another werewolf tale that’s solid but unremarkable.  ( creepy illustration for "A Nice Home") All in all, I have this first volume a pretty solid package. Most of the fiction was quite good, and as you can see, it’s very nicely illustrated.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 24, 2024 10:21:16 GMT -5
 Death Comes Too Late by Charles Ardai
Short story collections are hard to review. That's particularly true given the way I tend to read them, which is generally one or two stories (depending on length) between novels. So by the time I get to the end of a collection or anthology the earlier stories tend to have faded into vague memories unless it's just a stand-out collection (or one I've read a number of times). This wasn't a stand-out collection. Which isn't to say it's bad...it just isn't on that level that it's going to burn holes in my memories. Ardai is probably best known as the co-founder and editor of Hard Case Crime. And for that I'll always been grateful. He's definitely been on the cutting edge of the neo-noir renaissance. He's also published novels under his own name and under the alias Richard Aleas. And a number of short stories in the few remaining magazines and digest that print them, in anthologies and in a number of late, lamented e-zines. This is a nice collection of neo-noir short stories. None are actively bad. A few are quite good. I never felt compelled to toss it aside and move on to something else. But I also never felt compelled to just keep plowing through the stories. They were just fine. Ardai is in no danger of being a short story writer on the level of Hammett or Chandler. But then, who is? He does a nice job at that page level and sometimes that's enough for a breather between long works. I recommend it as long as you've already read the best works available. |
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