Booklog
drorzel | January 28, 2007Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is probably my favorite of his books. It is a silly book, about the romance between Tommy Flood, a naive would-be writer from Nebraska, and Jody Stroud, a young woman in San Francisco who finds herself turned into a vampire. It's an extremely funny book, with adventures involving homicide cops, the Emperor of San Francisco, and a manic team of late-night stockboys from the local Safeway, and everything just clicks.
I was a little nervous when I heard that he had written a sequel. Plenty of authors have gone back to follow up a beloved…
drorzel | January 25, 2007I picked this out of the to-be-read pile because it's specifically name-checked in the "SF and the History of Science" panel description on my Boskone schedule. I figure it's pretty likely to get brought up, and since we had a copy lying around, I might as well actually read it so as to be able to say something intelligent about it.
Lest Darkness Fall is the story of archeology student Martin Padway, who gets struck by lightning, and wakes up to find himself in sixth-century Rome. Armed with a slightly improbable level of knowledge regarding ancient history, society, and culture, he sets out…
drorzel | January 22, 2007The last booklog post was about an author who made a name writing urban fantasy, who is trying to write in a different subgenre, so it seems somewhat appropriate to have this post be about an urban fantasy by an author who made a name writing something else. OK, Charlie Huston might object to having No Dominion called "urban fantasy," as that carries some connotation of woo, but the science babble underlying his explanation of vampires is so dopey, it might as well be magic.
Huston made a splash with his dark and bloody noir series of crime novels featuring Henry Thompson (Caught Stealing,…
drorzel | January 21, 2007Jim Butcher's last few Dresden Files books (coming soon to a tv series near you...) have included little afterwords in which he tells the story of how he started reading SF, and urges readers to check out his new epic fantasy series (the "Codex Alera"). He explains that he's always wanted to write that sort of thing, since discovering Tolkien at age seven:
My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C.S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and…
drorzel | January 14, 2007Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman, the story of a fox in Heian-era Japan who becomes a woman for the sake of love, was a beautiful and moving book, so, of course, I bought her next book, Fudoki immediately. And then, it took me three years to get around to reading it... There's no real good reason for the delay-- I just kept passing over it for other things. Now that I've finally got around to reading it, I wish I had read it sooner. It's another marvelous book, and richly deserved its World Fantasy Award nomination.
Fudoki tells two stories. The first is the story of a cat who turns into a woman…
drorzel | January 9, 2007Noted travel writer Bill Bryson has a real gift for making entertaining anecdotes out of basically nothing. His travel books are frequently hilarious, but if you think carefully about what actually happens in the books, there's very little there. His gift as a writer is to inflate mundane experiences-- waiting on line at a train station in Italy, dining alone in a Chinese restaurant-- into vast epics of comic ineptitude. He really doesn't experience anything out of the ordinary, but he manages to make it sound tremendously entertaining.
This comes in handy for his new memoir, The Life and…
drorzel | January 8, 2007Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"-- basically, how do you account for the fact that the universe allows us to exist? A small change in the values of any of the constants of nature would very likely make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. And yet, here we are-- so how did that happen?
Though this book won't be released for a…
drorzel | December 31, 2006Having booklogged two heavy and confusing books already today, let's throw in something light. A. Lee Martinez's debut novel Gil's All Fright Diner is a comic fantasy featuring a couple of redneck-y guys named Duke and Earl, who stop by a diner in rural Texas for a quick bite to eat. Of course, Duke is a werewolf and Earl is a vampire, and when the diner gets attacked by a horde of zombies, they find themselves caught up in some odd and supernatural events.
There's really not a lot to say about the book other than that. If the idea of white-trash undead battling zombies to prevent…
drorzel | December 31, 2006Having finally posted about Gaudeamus, I might as well get the other great "WTF" book in the stack out of the way. Hal Duncan's Vellum has been described as "cubist fantasy," and while I'm not quite sure what that means, it's probably as good a description as any.
Vellum takes place in 2017, and also during World War I, and also in the distant past, and also a few worlds outside of time. It follows Thomas Messenger, who is sometimes a modern teenager, sometimes a young aristocrat in the trenches of the Somme, sometimes an angel, and sometimes the Sumerian icon Tammuz. Thomas has gone missing…
drorzel | December 31, 2006In some ways, John Barnes's metafictional novel Gaudeamus is the proximate cause of the huge backlog in my book logging. I was more-or-less caught up at one point, but then stalled on this book, unable to think of what to say about it. I'm still not entirely clear on it, but I'm just going to bang some stuff out so that I can finally get the damn thing off my desk.
I should start off by noting that Gaudeamus is definitely the work of the Good John Barnes, responsible for One for the Morning Glory, and not the Evil John Barnes who wrote Mother of Storms. That's a critically important…
drorzel | December 30, 2006I'm very angry with David G. Hartwell.
Hartwell, for those who don't know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He's also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to be the king of splitting long books in two. He's responsible for splitting Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds and Charlie Stross's The Family Trade and The Hidden Family, and also these two books, The Last Guardian of Everness and Mists of Everness. These are all long…
drorzel | December 30, 2006I actually read this months ago, but I'm only just getting around to booklogging it. Which is a problem, because I no longer remember it all that clearly...
Elizabeth Bear's previous books were a trilogy of competent neo-Heinlein adventure stories, so it's perfectly logical that her next book, Blood and Iron, should be a fantasy novel about the Sidhe in New York. Um, right?
Blood and Iron mostly follows three characters: Matthew Szczegielniak, a mage of the Promethus Club, an organization dedicated to fighting Faerie by any means necessary; and Seeker, a young woman taken as a changeling and…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Not long ago, I booklogged Odyssey, the latest of Jack McDevitt's Archeologists in Spaaaace books. When I picked that up, I also grabbed a paperback copy of Seeker, the latest in his other series of novels, these ones about, well, antiquities dealers in spaaaace. I don't believe I've booklogged the previous volumes, A Talent for War and Polaris, so we'll lump them all together here.
A Talent for War introduces the setting and main characters: Alex Benedict is a dealer in antiquities a few millennia in the future, when humans have discovered FTL travel and spread out among the stars. There…
drorzel | December 27, 2006I've been thinking about doing some best-of-the-year posts this week, and trying to come up with a reasonable list of best books. Frank Portman's piss-take on Catcher in the Rye, the much-praised-by-Bookslut King Dork is one of the books that might well figure in a "best books of 206" post, which made me realize that I never did get around to booklogging it.
So, King Dork. It's very up-front about being a response to The Catcher in the Rye, what with the big explanation of "The Catcher Cult" starting on page ten, and the fact that the plot is set in motion by the narrator's discovery of…
drorzel | December 21, 2006Charlie Stross is one of the current Hot Authors in SF, but he's been pretty uneven for me. I liked Iron Sunrise quite a bit, but thought the highly-regarded Accelerando was actually pretty bad, and I didn't care much for The Hidden Family, the second volume in the Amber-with-Usenet-economics series. The cover copy of Glasshouse was enough to get me to put it down and look for something else.
So, he's had a bad run of late. Still, when I heard there was a sequel to The Atrocity Archives, I knew I needed to get a copy, and made a special trip to Borders just to pick up a copy of The Jennifer…
drorzel | December 19, 2006That's Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, authors of the Mageworlds series of space opera novels, and a host of other books-- they're shorted on their first names, because I don't really want to test the character limit for titles in Movable Type.
Land of Mist and Snow has been in progress for some time-- I've heard them read from it at least twice at conventions-- but has finally hit the stores, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Run out and buy copies for those hard-to-buy-for relatives...
The book is a secret history of naval actions in the American Civil War, taking off…
drorzel | December 18, 2006The latest step in John "BaconCat" Scalzi's project of world domination (or, at least, domination of the SF corner of the literary world), The Android's Dream is set in an entirely different world than his Old Man's War and sequels. It's still very much a Scalzi book, though, insofar as the third published book by an author can really be said to fall into an established pattern. It's got a fast-moving plot, inventive aliens, and snappy dialogue galore.
After an opening chapter in which a disgruntled trade negotiator attempts to fart his way into a diplomatic incident, the book moves quickly…
drorzel | November 26, 2006Speaking of weirdly compelling reads (as I was at the end of the previous entry), Jack McDevitt has a new book out in what I think of as the "Archeologists in Spaaaace!!!" series (which starts with The Engines of God, and includes Chindi, Deepsix and Omega). Odyssey doesn't include any archeologists, but it has a very similar feel.
As with the Recluce books, these are very comforting to read, in an odd sort of way. The protagonists are most quiet technical types, who don't run around indiscriminately blowing stuff up, and mostly just work at being good at their jobs. And in McDevitt's world,…
drorzel | November 26, 2006Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you've read pretty much any of the previous books, you know what you're going to get here, and you either like it enough to be keeping up with the series, or you gave up a long time ago.
I happen to find these weirdly comforting reads, which is why I'm still reading them. It's sort of strange, because they're very repetitive: A…
drorzel | November 26, 2006To Ride a Rathorn is the fourth book in P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath series (the previous three are God Stalk, Dark of the Moon and Seeker's Mask), and as such probably wouldn't get to the top of the booklog queue-- there's just too much backstory, and the book wouldn't make any sense to a new reader.
However, the plot and structure of this one allow such a great one-sentence description that I can't resist posting it: This book reads like a cross between Harry Potter and the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
To do the backstory a grave injustice, our heroine Jame is one of the Kencyrath, a race…