[The E]

It's March. Time to get reading again.

So, here's what got my attention so far:

Linda Nagata - The Red
A trilogy of near future milSF (Component books are First Light, The Trials and Going Dark). It starts off very archetypical -- A squad of cybernetically enhanced, quasi-posthuman soldiers wreaking havoc in a third-world country -- but gets very subversive very fast. There's good action bits, and the background is well thought out, but there are layers to this that elevate it beyond your standard Baen fare.

Allen Steele - Arkwright
This is one I hadn't had on my radar until Tor.com published an excerpt of it. It's the tale of Nathan Arkwright, late SF author and creator of the immensely successful Star Patrol franchise, who is seemlessly inserted into the Big Three of classic SF, who dedicates his massive estate to the successful colonisation of another planet. It's a stitch-up novel made up of four distinct stories, each following one descendant of Nathan Arkwright as they try to make his dream a reality. While some of the writing is clunky (I get the distinct impression that Steele isn't that good at characterisation), there's still a grandeur to this kind of future history stories that I have missed.

[Scotty]

So far this year I've read Wolves on the Border and Wolf Pack by Robert N. Charette (both BattleTech novels), and will be continuing to Double Blind by Loren Coleman (also a BattleTech book) next week.

[StarSlayer]

 Brandon Sanderson's Final Empire

[Scotty]

Oh, for anybody interested, there were a number of BattleTech books republished in e-book format for the first time in decades.  I'm really excited, since I started the game long after these books were out of print and hard to find.

[GhylTarvoke]

This year, I've only read Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". One of my favorite "what's going on??"-type stories. Clearly written while he was on drugs.

A couple months prior, I read William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land". It's often tedious and shockingly sexist, but the good parts are unique and worth it.

Also, anything by Jack Vance. He could write about paint drying and I'd still enjoy it.

[Mammothtank]

I've just finished my 5th Reread of Peter Watts Blindsight and I've been trying to get into H.P Lovecraft's "The Mountains of Madness" but damn. I dunno it's just so slow and boring. I hope it picks up soon.

[GhylTarvoke]

That's par for the course with Lovecraft. It picks up when the real enemies appear, but I prefer "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward".

[Phantom Hoover]

I love The Night Land, even if it's almost totally unreadable wank. I've been reading So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, which should be required reading if you enjoy telling people how **** they are on Twitter.

[Scourge of Ages]

Speaking of Lovecraft, I'm reading the collected works of his. Recently finished The Mountains of Madness, actually. It does pick up! Eventually.

[Mongoose]

I've had a certain Baru Comorrant sitting around since Christmas, but I've yet to find the time to crack it open.

[Mammothtank]

Speaking of Lovecraft, I'm reading the collected works of his. Recently finished The Mountains of Madness, actually. It does pick up! Eventually.

Hey that's what I have too! I guess I'll have to knuckle down and get through it then!

[The E]

I should mention another book I've read:

John Sandford and Ctein - Saturn Run
Now, this one made all the right noises prior to its release. There was an article about it in Scalzi's Big Idea series which intrigued me, so I checked it out. Turns out, this is a book to skip. It's about a mad race between US and China to Saturn, where suddenly aliens have appeared. So far, so good. The problem is that the overall plot is squarely out of the cold war; you can basically take all the cliches out of cold war spy fic that could be applied to the basic plot and assume they're present here. This is what playing it safe looks like.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't anything interesting in here. The spaceship and the mechanics of the titular Saturn run are certainly cool and novel (assuming you haven't read Project Rho), but it's definitely not enough to make this worthwhile.

[GhylTarvoke]

Wow E, you're a hardcore SF reader. 

[NGTM-1R]

So far this year I've read Wolves on the Border and Wolf Pack by Robert N. Charette (both BattleTech novels), and will be continuing to Double Blind by Loren Coleman (also a BattleTech book) next week.

Speaking of Loren Coleman: he wrote a novelization of MechWarrior 3. I've only recently located and read it, as it was distributed in Ebook form with some version MechWarrior 4.

I...well I suppose it's okay but it doesn't feel like there was much heart in it. It's not a particularly great adaption in several senses. It does mean, however, that MechWarrior 3 is effectively fully canon to BattleTech rather than "if it doesn't contradict anything else" because it was novelized.

[Colonol Dekker]

Jam.

By yahtzhee.

As well as the traitor.... again.

[Scourge of Ages]

Jam.

By yahtzhee.

It's quality book! Also check out Mogworld, too.

[Colonol Dekker]

I did mogworld back when it released. Meryl is Meryl from metal gear in my head.

[StarSlayer]

Wrapped Up:

Isaac Asimov's The God's Themselves

Howard Coyle's Team Yankee 
-Do you like the tanker bits in Red Storm Rising?  Want more?  Look no further.

Brandon Sanderson's Final Empire

Starting:

Brandon Sanderson's The Well of Ascension
-Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy is pretty cool so far, the characters are great and the mechanics of the "magic" is very interesting and stands out.

[The E]

If you're like me and are reading SF blogs like io9 or file770, you may have come across

Becky Chambers - The long way to a small angry planet
This book was also hyped a lot on these publications. To its credit, it is well written, well plotted, and it has interesting characters and settings.

It is also a very safe book. The question it asks is "Do you like Star Trek? Would you like Star Trek more if it was more like Firefly with a dash of Farscape?" That's what this book delivers (and it does deliver it well; It's structured a lot like you would expect a TV show to be structured), but if you're not looking for any of those things, well, you're outta luck. While I don't regret reading this, it was very much fast food fare. Good fast food, but fast food nonetheless.

[The E]

I just finished

W. C. Bauers - Unbreakable

The Weber is strong in this one.

Stop me if you heard this: Lt Promise Paen is a rising star in the Repulic of Aligned Worlds' Marine Corps. She is sent to Montana, a backwater planet on the RAW's borders, one which has been plagued by pirate strikes, and one which the RAW's major competitor, The Lusitanian Empire, has an interest in. She has to make do with an understrength command, has to establish a rapport with the locals, and generally show the Montanans that the RAW are the good guys.

Oh yeah, she also has persistent and so far unexplained visions of her long-dead mother, carries around an ancient Glock handgun and has a fondness for 20th century Earth entertainment.

So yeah. The Weber is strong here; Plot elements from Weber's Honor Harrington and In Fury Born are present and recognizable. Like The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, it's a fundamentally safe book: There is nothing here that would challenge someone who knows Baen fare; and while it is better written than latter day Weber (Bauers manages to do infodumps without hurting the flow of the novel, for one) and I am definitely going to look into the rest of this series (its next installment, Indomitable, is scheduled for a late July release), this is not going to blow anyone's minds.