July:
Holly Fitzgerald - Ruthless River: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios: A very easy and compelling read about a real life survival ordeal. I have to say, though, that the author and her husband are just
clueless. Man, are they stupid. As someone with a modicum of outdoors experience, it's kind of painful to read about. Geeze. I guess that was the 1960s for you?
Chris Boyce - Catchworld: This is just awful. It was award-winning 1970s SciFi, but Bog only knows why. The writing is awful and the plot is completely disjointed and totally incomprehensible. It's five completely different stories slapped together into a single one by someone who was clearly on drugs when he wrote it. There's some boring katana-plonking, some mildly interesting suicide-mission-wrestling-against-the-computer stuff, obligatory 1970s ESP bullshit, a bad imitation of some movie or other, and then another incomprehensible imitation of something planetside (
2001?). It was totally nonsensical. Shit would happen entirely out of left field (e.g., Biblical demons manifesting--because the author was high and had seen
The Exorcist recently), and there's no explanation for it to be found anywhere. The best I was hoping for was that, at the end, it was all a simulation inside some AI. But it wasn't. The '70s had no standards. Ugh.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Doors of Eden: Sort of a mashup between Charles Stross's
Atrocity Archives, Robert J. Sawyer's
Neanderthal Parallax and Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's
Long Earth series (ugh), but better than both those last two. It was OK. I wasn't super into it, apart from the brief dinobits, but it was fine entertainment.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War: I didn't think I'd like this, but I did. It didn't hook me immediately, but it didn't take too long to do so. It's an unexpectedly good take on using tech to augment biological creatures in a near-future. There's a surprisingly nuanced and insightful overcurrent about abusive relationships, and about the use of negative reinforcement in animal training. It shifts from action to courtroom drama halfway through, then back to action, but I would have been down for a much more detailed and lengthy courtroom drama. I liked the wrongfooting, and it wouldn't have been a bad thing to stick to it.
I've been really enjoying the first two books of the Rook and Rose trilogy, by M A Carrick (the pen-name of Marie Brennan--whom I adore--writing with someone else I don't know.) It's rich, twisty fantasy, with very detailed city-building and descriptions of uneasy cultural amalgamation; a wonderful social-manners long-con, secret identities, crime and high society, magic, mystery, mayhem, and even a titchy bit of romance. The plotting is very elaborate and requires a deep understanding of the magic system and keeping track of a vast set of characters, so I'll need to read it again to fully appreciate how everything fits together, but it's such a good world that I look forward to doing that when book 3 comes out in the next year or so.
Sounds good! I'll check them out!
