The Sword and Laser discussion

Jenny (Reading Envy) wrote: "I always see Valerie Valdes used as a comp for Chambers ."

Actually, it was this and a Firefly comparison that had me pick up Chilling Effect, but I didn't really like it either. To me, I'd say Valerie Valdes is maybe more similar to the K. B. Wagers book I read. I think I'll try You Sexy Thing too - could use a pick-me-up book. That's partly because I just finished The Ministry for the Future. It does have some hopeful parts, but doesn't hesitate to point out our current crappy climate position and it didn't make for a fun read.

Genesee wrote: "2022 was NOT my year for reading."

When are you posting this from?

Trike wrote: "Genesee wrote: "2022 was NOT my year for reading."

When are you posting this from?"

A busy day in 2022, apparently :). 2021* was not my reading year.

Seth wrote: "Jenny (Reading Envy) wrote: "I always see Valerie Valdes used as a comp for Chambers ."

Actually, it was this and a Firefly comparison that had me pick up Chilling Effect, but I di..."

Maybe it can become an unofficial alt pick in the near future!

Genesee wrote: "Maybe it can become an unofficial alt pick in the near future!"

What month in 2022 did it happen?

C’mon, we already know you’re a time traveler. Hit us with the spoilers.

Trike wrote: "Genesee wrote: "Maybe it can become an unofficial alt pick in the near future!"

What month in 2022 did it happen?

C’mon, we already know you’re a time traveler. Hit us with the spoilers."

I can't, I've already said too much!

Trike wrote: "...

Elder Race, a novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky, was also very good. 4 stars."

That man is unreasonably prolific! I've enjoyed a few of his novels and novellas but can't get around to them as fast as he is writing them.

Working on She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. Took me a bit to get into it, but am enjoying now.

Read the third Time Police book by Jodi Taylor, Saving Time. Was a pretty good adventure despite drawbacks. The three finally determine who is the Big Bad they've been chasing throughout the trilogy. There's some shenanigans around the building of the Acropolis that involve St. Mary's.

Jodi Taylor is pretty much phoning it in on these books, yet it was still a good read. Head hopping so egregious I had trouble following the action. Taylor breaks faith with some of the tenets of time travel as set out in her earlier books. And, at the end, the MCs don't solve the problem so much as go along for the ride.

Even with these drawbacks I found it a page turner. Maybe it's that Taylor has built up the universe in a way that I find enjoyable even with writing issues.

There's a hilarious bit where one of the characters tries to make a to-do list for a date. Let's just say things don't go according to plan.

Matthew Farrell's mom, the Max of the main St. Mary's series, acts even louder and brassier than usual. There's a silly point at the end with a kicker and I realized she reminded me of Donna Noble and the whole book was like a Dr. Who serial. Some of the silliness in writing was to introduce spectacle like you would use in a TV show.

Welp, I didn't love that aspect but it had its moments. Or as my wife said, "just enjoy it and don't worry."

Still reading Aurora Rising because things were crazy when it was the pick and it still is crazy. I'm enjoying it and need to make more time to read it but work is killing me.

Also listening to A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking when I drive around long distances (doctor's appointments and what not). I only just noticed it in audio in the US, I feel like it's relatively new here in audio. I remember looking for it before and not finding it.

Whenever I finish Aurora Rising, I'll dive into Light from Uncommon Stars. I would have done it in audio in parallel but I sampled the audio and decided this would be better for me to read with my eyes.

The new Stross, Quantum of Nightmares is very weird off the wall fun in a corner of the Laundryverse. Also finally grabbed Scalzi's The Dispatcher which was a nice, quick read. Did The Maleficent Seven which was grimly enjoyable.

I finished the third book in the Old Man's War series:


The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Rating: 3 stars
Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

and I started reading the second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:


The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

In hardback, I’ve just finished Sistersong by Lucy Holland which was a gripping retelling of the Twa Sisters folk ballad, with a dash of Arthuriana. I’m now on to The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, the fourth book in the loosely defined Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers.

In audiobook, I’m continuing my Holmes fest with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

And in kindle, I’ve just finished the beautifully written Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo and I’m still reading Ha'penny by Jo Walton.

So, I read the Strange Dogs Expanse novella, which explored a couple of interesting ideas, but then didn't really go anywhere as a stand-alone. I'm trusting that it'll pay off in the subsequent novels.

Now reading Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner, which could at best be described as SF-adjacent, being set in a fictionalised version of the Star Trek actor's life when he was working on The Next Generation. Lots of cameos from other members of the cast.

Colin wrote: "So, I read the Strange Dogs Expanse novella, which explored a couple of interesting ideas, but then didn't really go anywhere as a stand-alone. I'm trusting that it'll pay off in th..."

There is a definite payoff going forward. Consider the novella an introduction to the idea and filling out the Expanse universe.

Reading Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden and Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

Genesee wrote: "Seth wrote: "Genesee wrote: "I just started She Who Became the Sun on audio and I'm completely hooked! I've been wanting to read it for months, I wish I hadn't waited. But better la..."

Glad you enjoyed it!

I'm finally reading The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina after being on the holds list forever and quite enjoying it. I've also read the first two books in The Vampire Knitting Club series by Nancy Warren. Cozy mysteries with a paranormal twist.

Colin wrote: "So, I read the Strange Dogs Expanse novella, which explored a couple of interesting ideas, but then didn't really go anywhere as a stand-alone. I'm trusting that it'll pay off in th..."

My problem with Strange Dogs is that it's a total rip off of the idea in King's Pet Sematary

Just finished listening to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and now I'm moving on to a classic novel of the 1920s: The Great Gatsby

I just finished Cry Pilot and loved it so much!
A platoon of lovable misfits fighting against the rogue bioweapons of wars past that have been resurrected as a side effect of restoring Earth's ecosystem. Fun futuristic tech. A dystopian setting, with some amazing worldbuilding. And a diverse cast of characters you can't help but root for.

Qukatheg wrote: "I just finished Cry Pilot and loved it so much!
A platoon of lovable misfits fighting against the rogue bioweapons of wars past that have been resurrected as a side effect of restor..."

I liked that one, too. I thought the worldbuilding was the real star of the show, but the story itself was solid. Good news is that he has a couple sequels out.

Recently finished The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod
The book is set in 1940 in an alternative Britain where the 1918 Lundendorf offensive succeeded and Britain and France sued for peace with Germany.
Instead of Hitler coming to power in Germany, a British Corporal comes to power in Britain.

I was left wanting to read more Ian R MacLeod which is probably a good thing.

AndrewP wrote: "My problem with Strange Dogs is that it's a total rip off of the idea in King's Pet Sematary"

No problem for me. I never read it!

I'm not sure I would agree...okay, I read Pet Cematary some 30+ years ago, but IIRC one of central premises is that (view spoiler)[the returnees came back mean. Essentially possessed. The people in Strange Dogs look odd with the black eyes but are essentially the same people. (hide spoiler)]

Just finished The End of Everything by Katie Mack. (Non fiction. I know I saw it on a fiction author's social media somewhere but I can't find it to confirm. I thought it was Mary Robinette Kowal.)

I'm in the process of finishing The Bone Shard Emperor by Andrea Stewart in audio, and The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow in text.

Finished Legends II and decided it was time for some Murderbot, so on to Rogue Protocol.

Finished Ha'penny by Jo Walton and I’m now onto Half a Crown, the third book in the Small Change trilogy.

I recently got into audiobooks (after years of resistance) through my local library, so I have almost filled up my holds with fantasy and scifi that I've meant to get to. I finished Light From Uncommon Stars a bit ago, in between The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore (I have Tehanu on hold.) And I'm currently reading American Gods. I also read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, which is a great read just to understand how utterly insane mythology can be.

Reading from the Overdrive app is an interesting experience. I don't always know when a hold will be available, so I can't really plan to read a whole series back to back. But usually one comes up by the time I've finished the last book, and if not, I have fiction podcasts to listen to while I do the dishes.

Just finished The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Enjoyed it a lot.

It's likely to be my March Madness pick

Finished The Great Gatsby which was good in a pretentious litfic sort of way. Now listening to The A.I. Who Loved Me which is a science fiction romance by Alyssa Cole

I recently finished Ice Planet Barbarians (yes, the TikTok one with alien sex). I've also started Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Fortuna. I'm considering doing an alt read in March, not sure I'm interested in a big ass book (especially when it ends on a cliffhanger). Not that Pandora's Star isn't good, I just have a lot of books I'm interested in. I'm thinking of reading The Luminous Dead.

Genesee wrote: "I recently finished Ice Planet Barbarians (yes, the TikTok one with alien sex). I've also started [book:Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhaus..."

Yeah, I understand- I wish I had known about the cliffhanger before I started it.

When it was first announced several people pointed out that Pandora's Star is only the first half of the story.

AndrewP wrote: "When it was first announced several people pointed out that Pandora's Star is only the first half of the story."

Tom should have given us 12 months notice to get through the two books.

So... there's no Feb book? And no March Madness this year?

Rick wrote: "So... there's no Feb book? And no March Madness this year?"

I think there should be a Feb book announcement soon, and March Madness will go ahead as usual to select the book for April.

Ruth wrote: "and March Madness will go ahead as usual to select the book for April."

doh. Um, yeah, I knew about how March Madness works. No really! *cough* (slinks away...)

Thanks Ruth! I don't listen to the podcast - why was the March book selected so early?

Rick wrote: "Ruth wrote: "and March Madness will go ahead as usual to select the book for April."

doh. Um, yeah, I knew about how March Madness works. No really! *cough* (slinks away...)

Thanks Ruth! I don't..."

Tom selected the March book and announced it early because it’s so long he wanted to give everyone a head start at reading it, otherwise quite a lot of people probably wouldn’t have been able to finish it inside the month.

It is going to be hard to stop at just Pandora's Star. The second book "Judas Unchained" is needed for a complete story.

PA is the set-up and JU is the pay-off to the story.

Pandora's Star: 37 hours 22 mins
Judas Unchained: 40 hours 41 mins.

Total: 78 hours 3 mins

or a total of 1595 pages (approx)

For those on the fence, Pandora's Star is a great book. Yep, it's a cliffhanger so you'll want to go on to Judas Unchained soon after.

It's a definite commitment for 2,000 pages of slowly-unfolding space opera. The payoff is commensurately great. There are plot points that literally take 1800 pages to completely unfold. Character development that's not just a portion of an arc, but a full unfolding.

The unnamed supporting character in all of this is the Commonwealth itself. It's a place you'd want to live, well worth visiting in fiction.

I agree it is definitely a big 2 thumbs up. I gave the series an average of 4.5 Stars

Characters you think are throwaway background characters become very important characters, that you will grow to love by the end of the story.

Highly recommended. Even if you split it up over a few months.

John (Taloni) wrote: "There are plot points that literally take 1800 pages to completely unfold."

Ozzie's walk in the forest for example

I don’t plan to read the 2nd book. I didn’t know it was a 2-parter - I must have missed that part of the discussion somehow, and I felt ripped off at the end, like “Are you f—g kidding me?”

Tassie Dave wrote: "It is going to be hard to stop at just Pandora's Star. The second book "Judas Unchained" is needed for a complete story.

PA is the set-up and JU is the pay-off to the story.

Pandora's Star: 37 hours 22 mins
Judas Unchained: 40 hours 41 mins.

Total: 78 hours 3 mins

or a total of 1595 pages (approx) "

So basically the length of a Brandon Sanderson prologue.

Tina wrote: "I don’t plan to read the 2nd book. I didn’t know it was a 2-parter - I must have missed that part of the discussion somehow, and I felt ripped off at the end, like “Are you f-I get kidding me?”"

Veronica and Tom were, more than likely, not aware that it is really a 2 book story, much more than it is the first Book of a series.

Tina wrote: "I felt ripped off at the end, like “Are you f-I get kidding me?”"

Yeah, that ending is the epitome of cliffhanger. The second half is definitely worth reading tho, if you can get the mojo for it.

Same thing happened with Magician: Master. That was only half a book too.

AndrewP wrote: "Same thing happened with Magician: Master. That was only half a book too."

Magician was, for many of us, a single book.

Only in the US was it split into 2 separate books Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master

Ah, the Magician books! That reminds me. (I'll get there, just long winded as usual...)

Finally picked up David Brin's "Earth." I'd read some Uplift books and not been particularly impressed. "Sundiver" was cool, but then he seemed to throw away the premise in the next book. There was all this going to the library and an extended bit about a spider queen who wanted her daughter to kill her and take command. Brin apparently is proud of his "interesting aliens" and while that was certainly unusual I'm not sure it was interesting. Then there was one book where a human and a humanoid female get marooned in, I think, a forest. She's a mild shapeshifter and changes her anatomy so they can have sex. Er, okay. No weirder than Heinlein's later stuff but that isn't exactly a selling point.

"Earth" is, to my surprise, much better. A freaky not quite black hole, quantum sized, menaces Earth. But is the Earth even worth saving? Humanity has been laying waste to it. This is the most extreme of the climate groups' worst predictions. Should they even bother? And given the opportunity, should one of the MCs wipe most of humanity out?

There's plenty of introspection on the nature of consciousness, our stewardship of the Earth, and the utility of space travel. To my amusement Brin, with a PhD in Astrophysics, postulates science on about the plausibility level of the Event Horizon movie, or maybe Saturn 3.

Perhaps my favorite part is when the bad guys (view spoiler)[turn out to be not all that bad after all, and are working towards the same end as the good guys. (hide spoiler)] Of course power always corrupts and friends may not stay friendly.

So, decent book, and there's a great short after all the outro stuff. Well, it's an idea that's been done many times, but worked well here.

As for where I started....apparently I missed a whole SF hotspot of the 80s/90s in San Diego. Brin is mentioned in the "thanks" section of Magician, apparently having mentored Raymond Feist. Vernor Vinge wrote around the same time, as did Joan Vinge, and in the post-college turbulent years I kinda missed all of them.

Welp, they've done well. Funny to finally notice this, decades later. I think this likely makes me the LAST to figure it out.

From there I wanted something shorter and durned if there wasn't an old Arthur Clarke book available. Islands in the Sky, a boy's tale of adventure on a close satellite of Earth. The MC is sixteenish and wins a contest that eventually places him on a month-or-so trip there. This is the book in which Clarke develops the idea of the geosynchronous satellite. The book is dated in style and has no overarching plot, instead making up a travelogue of mini adventures. It was fine for the length, about 150 pages.

Parts of this were trope city but in ways that rubbed me the wrong way. The MC gets bullied high school style on his arrival. Bleah. Then apparently he earns the respect of the younger apprentices and they give him a gift on the way out. Yeah, I'm not sure what that says about the British schooling system but I wasn't impressed. Then there's the space tropes like the legless person getting around just fine in zero G. Also, the humans took the poor helpless native Martians under their wing, you know, as the superior civilization does. (I hope the sarcasm comes across there but if not, I am rolling my eyes to the point of dizziness at this plot point.) Well, Clarke was sticking to adventure tropes in his desire to tell a technological story. He did succeed at that. It's worth reading, but with a boulder of salt.

And then, with nothing else on the TBR, I picked another Clarke book: Expedition to Earth. It's a collection of shorts. I've apparently read it before, because I recognized some of the stories. Not all. The stories are of uneven quality and some of them involve tropes long since fallen into disuse. It opens with a really good case study of three alien races cooperating, but nothing really happens in that story. In another, a thinly disguised Hitler goes to the future. There's a galactic civilization visiting ancient Earth in which I suppose we're supposed to be shocked that the primitives are us. A war story that "humorously" tells the story of scientific research gone wrong, glossing over the many deaths in war.

In all of it though, Clarke's attention to scientific detail stands out.I can see why he was so well loved, even as his stories have become dated.

The collection ends with The Sentinel, the short story that eventually developed into 2001. It's worth a read for that one alone.