How is it that Stephen King’s The Gunslinger wasn’t already done by now? While I personally think that maybe The Dark Tower ran out of steam eventually, the first one was brilliant. Western, magic, myth-making… good, tasty, and not bloated beyond all belief. Can’t wait to see it on the big screen.
And so, adieu to American Gods.
How did I miss making American Gods Book of the Week? It’s a great book! Any week! Maybe I just assumed that you all read it already? Anyway, if you haven’t read it it’s a book that assumes that all gods are real if you believe in them, and stay real even after you stop believing in them. …It’s an excellent example of a Neil Gaiman novel, in other words. You know how those go.
And so, adieu to The Last Centurion.
As per the comments section… I really don’t understand why The Last Centurion hasn’t been done already: I’ve read it several times. Basically, imagine a future with a combination mini Ice Age and a really, really, really bad flu epidemic. Then toss a bunch of American troops in the middle of the collapsing Middle East who are trying to get out of there. Now have John Ringo write it, as only a right-of-center dude who knows that he’s selling the book to Baen can do. That’s this book.
And so, adieu to For Love of Mother-Not.
This is kind of supposed to be an encouragement to me: For Love of Mother-Not is the first book in Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx series of alien world exploration adventure, and I should reread the whole thing to catch up before I go get the last book in the series. It’s a good series. I’ve always like the central idea of Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth (short version: giant alien bugs! …Hey, these guys are pretty chill. We should hang out). I should get caught up with it.
And so, adieu to Live Free or Die. Continue reading Book of the Week: ‘For Love of Mother-Not.’
I’ll be honest: it’s been a bad week for reading books for me. Although I’ve spent a few days rereading Norman Spinrad’s intensely insane The Iron Dream (which is written as if it was a lurid and somewhat alarming 1950s American novel written by longtime artist and pulp SF novelist Adolph Hitler*). It’s an interesting book on the meta-narrative level, and I plan to do a critique of Spinrad’s message once I’ve finished with the intensely lurid prose – but Book of the Week it ain’t.
Moe Lane
*In that timeline, he emigrated. As I said: intensely insane.
Blipping well TOOK the Post Office long enough to get me Genevieve Cogman’s first novel The Invisible Library; mind you, I had to special-order the sucker from England. You would think that, in these halcyon days of digital inter-connectivity, we could dispense with the ridiculous notion that the British and American editions of a book cannot be published simultaneously. You would be wrong. Continue reading Book of the Week: The Invisible Library (cc @GenevieveCogman).
Poul Anderson’s classic science fiction novel The Winter of the World is melancholy, of course. Books written by Poul Anderson tended to be; and books about the civilizations that arose thousands of years after a new Ice Age crushed ours also tend to be. Combine the two, and you get almost crystallized sadness. But it’s a good story for all that; action, statecraft, Thieves’ Guild, a battle or two, and evolutionary biology.
As I said: classic science fiction.
And so, adieu to Hawksbill Station.
I’m not sure why I picked Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station, actually. It’s a quirky time travel novel expanded from a short story about a political prison set up in the Precambrian Era – the ultimate in no-escape scenarios, really – and how the people in it react when someone new shows up. It’s not the greatest time travel novel ever written, but it’s worth your attention, not least because Silverberg did not romanticize the protagonists. You can get pretty quirky yourself when you’ve been sentenced to that kind of exile.
And so, adieu to the Peter Grant series.
Seriously: I’ve been binging this series
And so, adieu to Every Inch a King.
Continue reading Books of the Week: Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series.
Every Inch a King is not Harry Turtledove’s weightiest work; but it’s entertaining. It’s only technically fantasy: basically, real life created a story so absurd that Turtledove had to add fantastic elements to it. Nobody would have believed that it happened, otherwise.
There’s a lesson, there.
And so, adieu to Binscombe Tales – The Complete Series.
Continue reading Book of the Week: Every Inch A King.
