I haven’t actually read Martha Wells’s All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries yet. Every body keeps telling me to read it, though, so this is to remind me. I do that, from time to time. I’m not sure if that stategy actually works, though.
#commissionearned
Ah, Conquistador. Picked it up to look up something about farming, reread the whole thing. Alternate history, in which an officer (and Virginian fighting-man) discovers in 1946 a stable dimensional portal to a North America undiscovered by Europeans. It’s a great book, visibly showing the influences of Silver Age science fiction (particularly H. Beam Piper), but it’s also telling that S.M. Stirling needed to quote Niven’s Law* in the foreword. I imagine some of the hate mail was epic.
#commissionearned
*Well, one of Niven’s Laws:
There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author.
The term is ‘idiot.’
Happy birthday to me!
Although there’s a problem. Silverlock, Including the Silverlock Companion is pretty. In fact, it’s too pretty. I don’t want to actually open it, it’s so pretty and clean. It has glossaries. It has commentary, including by John Myers Myers himself. It has a bibliography. It has sheet music. Let me repeat that, to anyone who cares: IT HAS SHEET MUSIC.
I almost shudder at the thought of using this book. I may end up only reading it while wearing gloves.
#commissionearned
Because I’m pretty sure that the book I was going to choose has an AI cover. It’s more annoying when a big publisher does that, for some reason. I mean, geez, they’re supposed to be the ones to have money to burn.
Anyway: SM Stirling’s THE WINDS OF FATE is on Baen as an E-ARC, and you can preorder it here. Continues the Roman time-travel story without sentimentalizing the Romans at all. I pretty much read it at one sitting. Check it out.
#commissionearned
Kthulhu Reich isn’t half bad! It’s Japanese Mythos Nazi/World War 2 fiction by Ken Asamatsu, translated by Jim Rion. I mention this because the translation is particularly good. I’ve had to read some clunkers in the past, and this isn’t one of them. Check it out.
#commissionearned
I didn’t even know Michael Z. Williamson was writing the on-order The King of FLORCUBATAMP, which will be based on one of the more interesting, and eventually tragic, characters in John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising zombie apocalypse series. The dude’s interesting because he’s actually turning out to be a pretty good king: honest, charismatic, makes good decisions, looking to improve the lives of his people, hard when he has to be but doesn’t enjoy cruelty.
He’s ultimately going to be tragic because his kingdom is smack dab in the middle of Florida, and the reconstituted USA is gonna have a problem with that. And Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution is inflexible on the subject.
#commissionearned
Today was not a great day. Books are typically my friends, but even friends occasionally have fights. You tell me what a good book is right now.
This is the illustrated Francois Baranger At the Mountains of Madness, and the only reason I haven’t bought it yet is because I am trying to keep a reasonably up-to-date wish list for friends and family members trying to figure out what to get me. That can be a problem, especially when you have odd tastes. The more information, the better.
…Which is the opposite of the received wisdom of the Cthulhu Mythos, huh?
#commissionearned
Sorry: I have gotten hit with the cold my youngest has, only it’s a hacking cough and I’m kind of miserable. Frozen Dreams is about as well as I can track right now.
#commissionearned
