Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: The E on March 07, 2016, 01:39:57 pm
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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.
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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.
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Brandon Sanderson's Final Empire
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Oh, for anybody interested, there were a number of BattleTech books republished in e-book format (http://www.catalystgamelabs.com/2016/03/01/shadowrun-battletech-legends-fiction-returns/) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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Speaking of Lovecraft, I'm reading the collected works of his. Recently finished The Mountains of Madness, actually. It does pick up! Eventually.
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I've had a certain Baru Comorrant sitting around since Christmas, but I've yet to find the time to crack it open. :(
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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!
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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.
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Wow E, you're a hardcore SF reader. :yes:
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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.
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Jam.
By yahtzhee.
As well as the traitor.... again.
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Jam.
By yahtzhee.
It's quality book! Also check out Mogworld, too.
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I did mogworld back when it released. Meryl is Meryl from metal gear in my head.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. :P At least that one is from before Weber outgrew his editor, and long before battles started being measured in 'hundreds of thousands dead'.
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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.
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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."
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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
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I am going to read the last Classic BattleTech book I have never read.
Falcon Guard
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One of my favorites, and in an amusing twist of irony, the first Classic BattleTech book I ever read.
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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.
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your mixed-to-positive review there did not live up to its opening at all tbh
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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.
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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?).
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Just finished reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant after seeing it was written by Battuta.
Still haven't come to terms with the ending.
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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.
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And I thought sequel hooks were a thing that is done in fiction writing, not in the more scholarly sections....
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
(http://fs2downloads.com/Misc-Pics/IMG_20160819_132024.jpg)
I've been meaning to read The Martian and Hunger Games for ages! :p
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Anybody read Armada? I'm curious, but not enough to actually buy it.
(also: yaay, Authortutta!)
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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.
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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.
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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.
Okay Mongoose, either read it or I'll steal it from you.
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"Leviathan wakes" part1, by James S.A Corey.
Went quickly through first 50 pages and I really enjoyed it. My plan is to read all the books available and then watch "The Expanse" series.
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So I recently got struck by the MilSF bug again, and decided to go back to the subgenre's beginning. Specifically, Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
This is a book I last read more than 20 years ago, long before I started to read fiction in english. Let me tell you, reading MilSF in german is supremely weird. In english, military speak (i.e. the particular tone and vocabulary soldiers adopt) doesn't carry strong moral connotations, and if they do, they're mostly positive. When translated into german however, that tone takes on an extra, nazi-flavoured dimension. As a result, while I do remember liking the book and even finding some of its politics reasonable (hey, I was 12, give me a break), I have soured on it considerably since.
So I tried reading it again. And it's immediately apparent why this book was so formative, and why it is so revered among certain groups of readers and writers. It is very well written, and because Heinlein never succumbs to the temptation of going into too much detail about the technology of his universe, it has not succumbed to zeerust as much as most works from its time period have (well, apart from the way characters talk, of course; the vernacular is distinctly 50s american, and thus comes across as a bit weird in this day and age). The book adopts a distinct tone, that of the veteran dictating his memoirs or talking about what he did during the war in a bar or something. It's a very good choice, allowing Heinlein the freedom to jump from anecdote to anecdote (and back and forth in time) without really breaking the flow of the story.
The books' major theme is that of command responsibility. Over and over again, the question of what it means to have power over others is brought up, as is the question of what the moral implications of that power are. Starship Troopers offers us a world in which the military's sense of responsibility is held as superior over what a mere civilian can aspire to; indeed, to be a citizen in full command of all the rights and responsibilities a citizen in a democratic society has requires that one serves in the armed forces for at least 2 years. Veterans, we are told, are innately more aware of the moral implications of having authority, and are thus able to govern more responsibly.
To say that I have issues with that concept now would be an understatement. But this book is helpful in understanding the points of view of so many modern conservative-flavoured authoritarians (like, for example, the (Sad|Rabid) Puppies crowd or the Baen people): To them, the idea that political power isn't a priviledge that is earned (as power in a military setting is), but rather one that is considered innate to each citizen is abhorrent. In Starship Troopers, putting the military in charge works out just fine: Civilian life seems pretty utopian and peaceful (at least, what little we know of it), assuming one can get over the judicial system having switched from a rehabilitation-based one to one based on swift and brutal punishment (public flogging being the go-to punishment for pretty much anything, we are told at one point that someone getting 10 lashes for insubordination and assaulting a superior officer is less than what someone caught speeding gets).
So, overall, what do I take away from this? Well, I am still pretty much convinced that the book's morals are firmly rooted in a vision of humanity that is deeply negative, deeply misanthropic. A good society, it tells us, is one that is fascist; Only when the welfare of the individual is subordinated to the welfare of the state does the individual prosper. It describes a world in which violence is a necessary tool not just in terms of violence against other states (the very first scene describes a raid against a civilian city the protagonist takes part in, ordnance flies freely, and at one point, our hero uses a flamethrower to incinerate someone who made the bad choice of stepping on the street), but also as a tool to teach people to be good citizens.
It's still a well-written book. It's still definitely worth reading and discussing. But as a vision of the future, it is something to be avoided.
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Starship Troopers is a classic no doubt about it. (I'm sorry to say I've not read more of Heinlein's work, apart from Stranger in a Strange Land.) It's one of those books I pick up and reread about once a year, hoping for the day when my kids will be interested in reading it with me. (Ender's Game and LoTR are also on this list.)
Meanwhile, Dune!
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I always felt that by incentivizing military service as the only rout towards political power you degrade the very values that Heinlein felt made veterans uniquely suited towards decision making.
Anyway
Shaara ACW Trilogy:
-Gods and Generals
-The Killer Angels
-The Last Full Measure
James S. A. Corey
-Leviathan Wakes
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I've had some design studio press books for about four years now. I'm just going back through them all. In particular I'm focused on Scott Robertson - how to draw. It's very good. (I figured a book is a book)
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I've been reading Shadow of Victory by David Weber.
What a dreadful slog the Honor Harrington series has become is more evident than ever in this book. It's 800 pages of setup and recap of events that have already been set up and recapped in A Rising Thunder, Storm from the Shadows and Shadow of Freedom (the three preceding books). To Weber's credit, he at least managed to write new text for all the chapters in this book (unlike previous installments of the series, where certain chapters were copied wholesale between books). Weber himself has assured his fans that all the added stuff in this book is required to set up the next installment, which will definitely (he promises) move the timeline forward, but I for one am reaaaalllyyyy skeptical about that.
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Has anyone tried the Manticore Prequels he has been doing with Timothy Zhan? Or more specifically are they any good?
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I've read the first one, which wasn't bad? It didn't leave much of an impression either way; It was however nice to read a story in that universe with battles that had actual stakes.
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Has anyone tried the Manticore Prequels he has been doing with Timothy Zhan? Or more specifically are they any good?
I read the first one and liked it; actually, I think that was the last Honorverse book I read.