Booklog
drorzel | June 9, 2008I've gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert's Final Theory is the first time that I've been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I've gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I've specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.
David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been…
drorzel | June 4, 2008This is a review way in advance of the publication of the book-- it's not due until August, or thereabouts-- but I got an advance copy of Tobias Buckell's forthcoming Sly Mongoose, and read it at DAMOP. You might think this is an odd venue-- wouldn't the exhausting nature of the conference tend to make it difficult to get any reading done? How could a novel really hold my attention? Well, here's an excerpt from the first chapter (which I heard Toby read at Boskone):
A tiny buzz in Pepper's ear got his attention. He yawned, eardrums popping. His dreadlocks, bunched up inside the helmet,…
drorzel | May 29, 2008If you're reading this shortly after it's posted, you may notice ads for this book popping up in the sidebar and on top of the page. This is probably not entirely a happy coincidence-- I was offered a review copy in email from the author and his publisher, and I suspect that they had ScienceBlogs on their radar as a likely forum for web publicity.
With a title like The Drunkard's Walk, the book could be about one of two things, and the subtitle "How Randomness Rules Our Lives" pretty much rules out any Hunter S. Thompson style gonzo ranting. This is a book about probability and statistics,…
drorzel | May 28, 2008A little while back, Matthew Hughes offered a free copy of his forthcoming novel Template to online reviewers via his web site. I wasn't able to read it fast enough to get in on James Nicoll's review-a-thon, but I finished it a few days ago.
Template is set in the same basic world as Majestrum, a human civilization many millennia in the future, where Old Earth is ruled by an Archonate, and the high aristocrats have worked so hard to refine their perception of rank and status that they have difficulty even noticing the presence of ordinary citizens.
The new book doesn't start off on Old Earth…
drorzel | May 16, 2008Matthew Yglesias's first book arrives burdened with one of the longest subtitles in memory ("How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats"), which is a little off-putting. Of course, it also features a back-cover blurb from Ezra Klein calling it "A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." So there's a little in-jokey blog reference to lighten the mood.
I'm not a big reader of political books-- I don't even care for excessively political SF novels-- but I enjoy Matt's blog a good deal, and met him…
drorzel | May 6, 2008The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in which a woman called Djan Seriy Anaplian and her drone companion Turminder Xuss disrupt a medieval-level army with very little effort (she's an agent of the somewhat disreputable Special Circumstances, the group within the Culture that meddles in the affairs of…
drorzel | March 27, 2008This is the second Takeshi Kovacs novel, sequel to Altered Carbon. Kovacs is a former UN Envoy, a generally amoral individual loaded up with a bunch of sophisticated mental conditioning, and sent out into the world to troubleshoot problem spots for the world government. And he's a guy who really puts the "shoot" in "troubleshoot"...
In Kovacs's universe, humantiy has expanded to the stars using dribs and drabs of technology gleaned from the leavings of an alien race, known colloquially as "Martians," because their first ruins were discovered on Mars. When the book opens, he's working for a…
drorzel | March 27, 2008Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is part of a linked series of novels and stories set in a distant future in which the rational rules of logic and science governing our universe are beginning to weaken and give way toa new age goverened by "sympathetic association," better known as magic. He's been writing these for a while, and they've been bouncing around from one publisher to another, trying to find a home. He may well have found a niche at Night Shade Books, one of the high-quality small presses that have sprung up in recent years. It's not clear that what Hughes is doing will appeal to a…
drorzel | March 26, 2008I tried to get a copy of this at Boskone, but Larry Smith's whole stock sold out on Friday, before I hit the dealer's room at all. I'm not sure how many copies there were originally, but Melko was doing the Happy Dance at the Tor party, and deservedly so. I had to wait to get my copy until we got home, and hit a regular bookstore.
Singularity's Ring is the story of Apollo Papdopulos, who is actually a "pod," a group of five genetically engineered humans who bond together (via visual and chemical signals) to form a single individual. Each of the five has been engineered for a specific task:…
drorzel | March 26, 2008Returning to logging the books next to my computer in the order in which they were read, Matthew Jarpe's Radio Freefall was one of the few books I picked up at Boskone (I think I got Larry Smith's last copy). I read most of it during our trip to DC a little while back, and I'm only just getting around to writing about it. (Which makes me officially a Bad Person, as he mentioned my talk at Boskone as part of the inspiration for his new book, which is way cool.)
Radio Freefall has some very odd jacket copy that gives a decent idea of the feel of the book, but a slightly skewed idea of the…
drorzel | March 26, 2008It's been ages since I did a booklog post here. I've been reading lots of stuff, I just haven't been blogging it. I really should do something about the books in the stack by my computer, though, so I'm going to try to write a short post about each, and then shelve them before they topple over onto the keyboard and break something.
Paul Shirley's Can I Keep My Jersey? gets to be first, because it's from the library. I picked it up as seasonally-appropriate reading material-- it's subtitled "11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond," and is about, well, it's…
drorzel | March 2, 2008Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order.
If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it.
And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…
drorzel | November 7, 2007I really, really did not like Glasshouse, Charlie Stross's Hugo-nominated novel from last year. I enjoy his "Laundry" books, though (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue), and at Worldcon I had a conversation with Robert Sneddon, who recommended the forthcoming Halting State as closer in tone to those, so I picked it up a few weeks ago.
Halting State carries back-cover blurbs from three people: 1) Vernor Vinge, 2) John Carmack, lead developer of Doom and Quake, and 3) Bruce Schneier, the noted security expert. That pretty much tells you what you're going to get right there: a highly…
drorzel | October 28, 2007Back in August, somebody from Night Shade Books contacted me and asked if I would like a review copy of the forthcoming book by Nathalie Mallet, The Princes of the Golden Cage. I almost never turn down free books, so I said yes (actually, both Kate and I were contacted, and she replied first, so we just got the one copy sent to her). I then proceeded to spend two months not gettingaround to reading it, despite carrying it to Japan and back.
The book is a quasi-Arabian fantasy novel, set in the "Golden Cage," the palace where the adult sons of the Sultan of Telfar are kept in luxurious…
drorzel | October 25, 2007This was a topic yesterday on Mike & Mike, but I already had a full slate of blog posts. I like the question, though, so I thought I'd put it up here:
If you're a fan of a team in a sport with a championship playoff, who do you root for when your team is out?
This was brought up because some New York tabloids were calling Rudy Giuliani (a noted Yankee fan who used to avoid scheduling city business in October so he could attend playoff games) a traitor for saying that he was rooting for the arch-rival Red Sox in the World Series. The argument in Giuliani's favor is that he's rooting for…
drorzel | October 21, 2007I appear not to have booklogged Naomi Novik's earlier books, which is something of an oversight. I think they got lost in the transition between the old booklog, and posting booklog entries here.
At any rate, Empire of Ivory is the fourth book in the Temeraire series, which starts with the Hugo-nominated His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire in the UK). These are set in a fantasy version of the Napoleonic wars, and follow the adventures of William Laurence, the captain of a ship in the British Navy who comes into possession of a dragon egg. When it hatches, and the dragon inside bonds with…
drorzel | September 27, 2007Steven Gould's 1992 YA novel Jumper is one of my favorites in the category, a story about an abused teen who discovers that he has the ability to teleport, and how he uses that power to make a better life for himself. It's very much in the tradition of the famous Heinlein juveniles, though with much more realistic characterization and darker subject matter.
It took until 2005 for a sequel, Reflex to appear, so I was very surprised to walk into Borders a week or so ago and see Jumper: Griffin's Story prominently displayed. Even more puzzling was the cover note: "Based on the film Jumper, soon…
drorzel | August 12, 2007I first encountered Matt Ruff on Usenet, as a poster on rec.arts.sf.written. When I found out he had books published, I picked up Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which was good enough to put him on the buy-immediately list. Of course, that hasn't cost me a great deal of money, as he's only written two books since then, Set This House in Order back in 2003, and the new Bad Monkeys, which I bought and read on the way to St. John.
Bad Monkeys is the story of Jane Charlotte, a woman who is in prison for a murder that she cheerfully admits committing, who has a remarkable story to tell. She claims to be…
drorzel | July 23, 2007Kate was out of the house around nine on Saturday morning, which usually only happens if we have a plane to catch, which should tell you the importance Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had for her. She tore through it by dinnertime.
I'm not that big a fan, but I hate missing out on a Cultural Moment, so I picked it up yesterday, and finished it tonight. Kate's spoiler-free booklog entry has it about right: it's a Harry Potter book, no less, and no more. She also has a spoiler-laden review post, if you'd like more details.
If you throw a rock into the air, it will land on a blog featuring…
drorzel | July 16, 2007This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared.
Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…