[Scotty]

I'm probably going to go read On Basilisk Station again now that Kara has me going back to remember how a couple of the conversations in that book went.   At least that one is from before Weber outgrew his editor, and long before battles started being measured in 'hundreds of thousands dead'.

[The E]

What I find fascinating is that Weber clearly still knows how to write a good, contained story in that universe with relatable scales and good drama (Or, at least he did in 2004 when he wrote Shadow of Saganami). Were it not for his obvious desire to end this sooner rather than later, and thus the trainwrecks that I could swear are just his plot notes spruced up a bit, the series could still be rather good.

Oh well, at least the first Haven war arc is still perfectly readable.

[Scotty]

A couple of the newer ones are also pretty good, particularly the ones that stay as far away from Honor Harrington as it's possible to be, either in space or in time.

I get the distinct impression that this is his revenge for his fans demanding Honor survive her Trafalgar.  "You wanted it?  Fine!  Have this ****ty thing."

[StarSlayer]

Wrapped Up:

Brandon Sanderson's Hero or Ages

Brandon Sanderson's Alloy of Law

Brandon Sanderson's Shadows of Self

Brandon Sanderson's Bands of Mourning

Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander

Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain

Patrick O'Brian's HMS Surprise

Patrick O'Brian's The Mauritius Command

Patrick O'Brian's Desolation Island

Patrick O'Brian's The Fortune of War

Starting:

Patrick O'Brian's The Surgeon's Mate

[NGTM-1R]

I am going to read the last Classic BattleTech book I have never read.

Falcon Guard

[Scotty]

One of my favorites, and in an amusing twist of irony, the first Classic BattleTech book I ever read.

[The E]

What I have to write next saddens me immensely.

The latest book I've been reading has been Invisible Planets by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Now, Rajaniemi may not ring any bells with you. He's a very new author, with only three novels and a couple short stories out there. Invisible Planets is an anthology of all his short fiction to date, and it's ... unflattering. This is very unfortunate, as his Jean le Flambeur trilogy (The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, The Causal Angel) easily ranks among the best SF of the decade (IMHO, of course). At his best, Rajaniemi writes prose that requires an incredible amount of knowledge to actually parse but told with a poetic lightness that is very hard to emulate. Even if you do not get his references, the imagery he can weave can carry you along just fine until you find something recognizable again.
His short fiction, as collected here, is unfortunately uneven. A lot of it is probably down to Rajaniemi finding his voice (For example, several short stories show signs of aving their beginnings engineered to fit a formula intended to quickly set up a place, time and cast of characters), some of it is down to my personal hangups as a reader (Rajaniemi is a Finn, and there are several stories here deeply steeped in finnish folklore), and as a result, a few stories do miss the mark a bit.

That being said, when the prose shines, it absolutely shines: Stories like Skywalker of Earth, which draws a lot of comedy and drama by taking a modern protagonist and dumping her into a Lensman-ish setting, the Server and the Dragon, a story about a lonely server at the edge of the milky way, or His Master's Voice, about a cat and a dog trying to free their master by becoming the hottest music act in town, really show Rajaniemi at his best.
Overall, if you want to read some experimental stuff (in my previous reviews, I have ragged on novels for being safe; this is decidedly unsafe literature), I recommend this highly. If you really want to experience true greatness though (and aren't afraid of not understanding everything right off the bat), jump into Quantum Thief instead.

[Phantom Hoover]

your mixed-to-positive review there did not live up to its opening at all tbh

[The E]

I have been posting mixed-to-positive stuff too often in here. I'd really like nothing more than to recommend something without caveats, and I was really hoping that this collection would be that.

[The E]

In my continuing exploration of the MilSF space, I have come across

The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

This novel is a delight. Not because it's in any way light reading or particularly cheerful, but because it's a novel that (like Hannu Rajaniemi's or Battuta's best stuff) trusts you that you are able to infer the rules of its universe by experiencing them, not through infodumps. What is it about, you ask? Well. The Hexarchate (formerly the Septarchate) is an interstellar society governed by the Calendar. Not your basic Tuesday-follows-Monday sort of affair, but an intricate system of traditions and observances that empower the state, for this is a universe in which belief (and mathematical formulations of belief) is a powerful force. Captain Kel Cheris is a soldier of the Hexarchate, remarkable because of her grasp of the higher mathematics that govern the Calendar and her ability to adapt to changes in them, and is thus the first choice to deal with an outbreak of heresy in one of the Hexarchates' fortresses. To aid her, the animated spirit of the traitor general Jedao is bound to her as an advisor.
Most of this book is about the interplay between Cheris and Jedao; it is not entirely clear why Jedao turned traitor (and why he massacred the Hexarchate troops assigned to him), and the assumption that he will turn again is always there.

As I said in the beginning, this novel is a delight. It is profoundly weird in a way that most MilSF isn't; the form is not generally known for its beautiful language. Most MilSF authors tend to keep their language simple and direct so as to better emulate the clipped tones and no-nonsense communications discipline most militaries expect from their soldiers. Yoon Ha Lee, thank god, does not feel the need to dress his prose down for the occasion, as it were. His writing is evocative more than it is descriptive, the deliberate use of a different vocabulary underscores that this is not a Weber- or Heinlein-alike, but very definitively its own thing, and I for one love it. I have not finished the book yet, but I feel confident in my assessment of it; should it not stick the landing, I will update this post. Until then, do yourself a favour and check it out (Battuta also tells me that Yoon Ha Lee has quite a good thing going in his short fiction, maybe give that a try too?).

[TechnoD11]

Just finished reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant after seeing it was written by Battuta.


Still haven't come to terms with the ending.

[NGTM-1R]

Fortress Rabaul, by Bruce Gamble.

This book is both useful to the historian, and terrible.

It is an excellent overview of the early days of the Rabaul campaign and the initial Australian loss of the island, and provides greater insight into Fifth Air Force in 1942 than any other book I've yet read. It has an excellent discussion of the mission to kill Yamamoto and the controversies around it. It akes care to emphasize the Australian contributions, positive and negative, to the campaign. Finally it challenges the traditional Japanese assertion about the discovery and condition of Yamamoto's body, which, it points out, is incredible and seems contrived. (The point that a .50 caliber M2 round entering the left jaw and exiting behind the right eye would have blown away most of his skull, yet all Japanese reports do not describe his injuries as nearly so severe, is well-made.) These are all good things.

But it cuts off before the campaign for Rabaul properly began with the Cape Torokina landings. In fact it cuts off well before that, in early 1943; April at the latest. Fortress Rabaul is telling only half the story, if that much, of the campaign for Rabaul. Gamble has apparently separated his Rabaul work into three books, Fortress Rabaul being the middle one. I admit I'm curious what could possibly be in the first considering Fortress Rabaul covers the initial Japanese invasion of the island, but at least Target: Rabaul will hopefully correct what was missing from this one.

[The E]

And I thought sequel hooks were a thing that is done in fiction writing, not in the more scholarly sections....

[StarSlayer]

Wrapped Up:

Patrick O'Brian's The Surgeon's Mate

Patrick O'Brian's The Ionian Mission

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Footfall

Starting:

Patrick O'Brian's Treason's Harbor

[The E]

One of my reading goals for this year was to try out more works by debut novelists. Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, as written about above, was a stellar example of the sort of unexpected delights one can find when doing this.

Unfortunately, not every such novel is like that. Sometimes you come across something like

Lightless by C. A. Higgins


The story of this book is quickly told. Somewhere in the solar system, the research ship Ananke is travelling around, its crew of three preparing for a series of experiments designed to test a piece of technology that the overbearing authority in the system (Called "the System") is banking a lot on. This well-ordered plan of action is disrupted however when a pair of pirates/terrorists enter the ship and mess up its main computer. One of the terrorists is captured, and the System sends out one of its interrogators to get to the bottom of it all. There are three story threads in here, the Ship's Engineer's struggle to fix her vessel, the interrogator's quest to find incriminating evidence on the terrorist, and the terrorists' attempts to conceal what he knows (There's also a background thread where the terrorist group the terrorist belongs to starts an insurrection against the System, culminating in a devastating strike against Earth).

The problem here is that, as written, this story has just about enough content for a short story. There just isn't enough meat here to carry a reader through 300 pages of prose, and Higgins is unfortunately not a gifted enough storyteller to make her characters memorable or more than two-dimensional.

[The E]

I have been reading

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Another really good one. Three Body Problem won last year's Hugos, with everyone seemingly in agreement that this is really good SF.  And it is! It's a first contact story, although that is not immediately apparent; It starts off (after a prologue set during the cultural revolution) as a mystery about a bunch of theoretical physicists comitting suicide apparently connected to an organization of scientists; as the police is unable to properly infiltrate that org, they recruit a nanotech researcher to act as a spy. During his spy work, he comes across a game called Threebody, a VR experience with a couple very interesting quirks.

What I found interesting here is that this is a very different experience to reading western SF: There are a lot of references to chinese history and PRC idiosyncracies that go uncommented (aside from a couple of helpful footnotes), sentences that a native english speaker just plain would not write. Also interesting, and I would really like to know how this plays in China (or played, rather; TBP was published some years ago there and only recently made the jump to the english market), is that one of the reasons why the story is going relatively dark places (There's a sequel, and things start to get apocalyptically worse in it) is lingering traumas of the cultural revolution.

[karajorma]

I had a friend randomly buy a book for me two weeks ago. They bought the book Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Apparently they just picked up a sci-fi book without knowing much about it but figured it would give me something to read on the plane ride back to China. Don't know anything about it nor have I started it yet but I'll probably give it a try in a bit.

Funnily enough though I went into the Waterstones that they picked it up from today. Apparently they missed one of the most awesome random buys ever by one book.



I've been meaning to read The Martian and Hunger Games for ages!

[Scourge of Ages]

Anybody read Armada? I'm curious, but not enough to actually buy it.

(also: yaay, Authortutta!)

[Mongoose]

Someone get me off my ass and force me to read Bookttuta already.  It's been gathering dust on my shelf for half a year.

[karajorma]

I did actually tell my friend that if she'd bought Battuta's book she would have freaked me the **** out. So it's probably a good thing she didn't.