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it was ok
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2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting e
2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to take a chance on it, despite my checkered results of trying to read Clarke in the past. (I’ve read all four of the “Space Odyssey” books, all four of the “Rama” books Clarke had a hand in, and Childhood’s End, but found all nine books lacking in one way or another as good literature.) And alas, that turned out to be the case here too, a book that suffers the exact same problem I found most troubling in these other books too, which is that Clarke struggled profoundly during his career as a fiction author with the basic mechanics of the three-act plot, and thus tended to turn in novels where the first act takes up almost the entirety of the full book, there is no second act at all, and the third act is just blurted out as this gigantic infodump in the last chapter as fast as he could possibly move his fingers over his typewriter. In this case, that’s in service of an admittedly fascinating Gene Wolfe-like “space fantasy” concept; namely, it’s one billion years in the future, Earth has just one single domed city left on the planet’s surface (one so sophisticated that it can literally run, repair and upgrade itself), the people who are still around know that humanity once went out and colonized the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago, and now humans don’t and no one understands (or particularly cares anymore) why, other than vague myths about “invaders” who may or may not have destroyed the Earth’s surface, and who may or may not have agreed to let a single enclosed city of humans still exist as long as they promised never to return to space again. To be honest, the main reason this got my attention is because Tor mentioned that it’s a novel about an AI bot who gains sentience and then promptly goes psychotically insane; but unfortunately, while Clarke does mention this insane AI for a couple of paragraphs in his chapter-long expository monologue at the end of the book about what exactly happened to the human race a billion years ago to land them in the situation they’re now in, the insane AI doesn’t actually have anything to do with the main plot, just another of the dozens of interesting concepts that Clarke just randomly threw into this book willy-nilly with no particular rhyme or reason (cloned babies! Living sidewalks! A computer the size of a city! Robots that can walk up and down stairs!), a guy big on ideas but (I’m coming to realize) woefully short on actual writing skills. Between this and my disappointed reads in recent years of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, it kind of makes me wish I had been a young writer in the 1950s myself, when science-fiction authors could apparently become world-famous just by crapping out whatever barely readable nonsense they wanted, merely because the genre was so new and there weren’t any better books around to unfavorably compare these to. (I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that if you directly line up these ‘50s “classics” next to the average sci-fi novel coming out today, you’ll get a powerful lesson in how three generations now of passionate genre fans have pushed and elevated sci-fi into a level of quality that these ‘50s pioneers only could’ve dreamed of, which is ultimately a good thing despite the reputations of these ‘50s pioneers getting a good sound thrashing as a result.) Sadly, though, until Zorp and his minions finally visit the human race and grant us this ability to travel through time (All Hail Zorp), my dreams of making a killing in the ‘50s sci-fi community will have to remain just that, so let all this serve as the only warning you need about what you’ll be getting into if you decide to pick this up. Glutton for punishment that I am, I’m still thinking of reading more of Clarke’s work in the future -- in order to read this obscure novel, I had to download a torrent containing every fiction book Clarke ever wrote, and having those 33 novels and the four-volume short story omnibus now sitting patiently on my hard drive is a tempting thing indeed -- but for now, I suppose today’s disappointed write-up will have to do. P.S. As the always great Manny Rayner says in his own review of this book, and which I had totally forgotten I was going to write about in my review too, one of the inherent problems in sci-fi -- and why it’s so problematic to write a story set One Million Years In The Future -- is that we generally can’t imagine existence more than a few generations in the future from us, which is why Clarke’s Earth One Billion A.D. here sounds pretty much like 1956 Earth but with better gadgets. This is related to what I was going to mention, how again like my previous reads recently of Asimov and Heinlein, the sheer amount of casual sexism on display here is just head-shakingly astonishing in the 2020s, and such grand irony from writers who otherwise advocated for a more enlightened and liberal future. The fact that Clarke can write here about how sexism will have been entirely eliminated by a billion years in the future, then in the very next chapter state the line (I’m paraphrasing), “Like women have been doing for a billion years now, she couldn’t stop obsessively looking at herself in the mirror,” is just the freaking chef’s kiss of unironically unaware sexism, and gives you a good idea of just how baked into the very fabric of society this casual sexism was back then. ...more |
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 02, 2024
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| 9781637745052
| 1637745052
| 4.43
| 7
| unknown
| May 28, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m sta
2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m starting to develop arthritis, and the pain that this causes is starting to put a major crimp in my life as an urban-dwelling heavy pedestrian, something I find quite alarming. So when this book popped up in the “newly acquired” list at the Chicago Public Library, I went ahead and put it on reserve right away, and just got done reading it today. It’s well worth your time, although I will say that it essentially only repeats information I’m reading in all the other wellness books I’ve been reading these days, confirming yet again what the latest research in modern medicine has been seemingly saying over and over in the last ten years -- that conditions we used to think of as naturally occurring ones in old age that nothing can be done about, from arthritis to high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s, can in fact be largely prevented by a change in lifestyle, as well as focusing on a few specific new things once you get over the age of 50. To her credit, though, author Meredith Warner (a veteran orthopedic surgeon and professor at Louisiana State University) describes this well-known advice using an acronym I’ve never heard before, the easily remembered MEDS which stands for Mindset, Exercise, Diet and Sleep. Or in other words, if you adopt the mindset that you really can change your health for the better through your own actions; reduce stress through meditation; get the government’s recommended weekly amount of moderate exercise, including resistance training; follow the Mediterranean eating plan, plus add a few supplements to your life (most importantly omega-3); plan your meals to always take place at certain times, and go at least 12 hours a day without eating anything at all (i.e. no late-night snacking); and get a good solid seven hours or more of sleep each night (including going to bed at the same time each night), you can largely eliminate the pain that comes with orthopedic conditions such as arthritis, as well as lower your chances of getting degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s to almost zero. It’s welcome news, even if Warner isn’t saying anything particularly new or radical here; in fact, you could say that the news is even better precisely because it’s not radical new information, but merely a confirmation of what health book after health book after health book in the 21st century is now saying about how to live a life that keeps you healthy far into old age without the need for medications or surgeries at all. Warner calls the MEDS protocol “lifestyle medicine,” which I think is a very smart term for it; so I’ll be calling it that myself from now, and considering it a legitimate form of mainstream medicine that all of us oldies should be adhering to on a daily basis. The book comes strongly recommended in this spirit, that you won’t be learning anything new here that you can’t read in dozens of other books on the subject, but that Warner puts it all together in a smart and easy-to-understand way in this particular version. ...more |
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Jul 2024
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Jul 01, 2024
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| 0553448129
| 9780553448122
| 0553448129
| 3.69
| 282,491
| Nov 14, 2017
| Nov 14, 2017
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2024 reads, #14. DID NOT FINISH. I tolerated Andy Weir's debut novel back when it first came out, 2011's The Martian (my review), but I can't say that
2024 reads, #14. DID NOT FINISH. I tolerated Andy Weir's debut novel back when it first came out, 2011's The Martian (my review), but I can't say that I actually liked it; and that's because, as a so-called "hard science-fiction" author, Weir is both incapable of creating complex characters or believable dialogue, and has no interest in doing so, believing as he does that a novel doesn't need pesky things like interesting characters or believable dialogue if you have math equations! That would've usually led to me never reading another Weir novel ever again, but when a copy of his follow-up, 2017's Artemis, showed up in my neighborhood's Little Free Library the other week, I was just too tempted and second-guessed myself, picking it up and trying to read it this weekend. Note to self: Stop second-guessing yourself, Jason! Unfortunately this was exactly as terrible as I suspected it was going to be, mostly because Weir finally does try to create compelling characters and realistic dialogue in this book, getting things so cartoonishly wrong that the novel ends up reading like a high-school creative writing assignment from a dimwitted 14-year-old, and accidentally setting back race relations an entire generation by his embarrassing "I'm actually secretly a straight white male" depiction of a woman of color as the book's main character. (How can you tell that a woman of color character has been written by a straight white male? Well, if in the first 25 pages, she gives her personal carrier a man's name because it's "big and strong," literally says [using these exact words], "What's wrong with hookers?" and describes the chiseled-jaw Aryan acting as the Moon's sheriff "Hitler's wet dream" and then immediately confesses she has an enormous crush on him...it's a pretty good freaking bet.) A classic case of failing upwards, Weir's novels are just getting worse and worse, yet are securing bigger and bigger Hollywood deals (his newest novel just got acquired by Ryan Gosling), so take that as the dire warning to any actual intelligent readers that I mean it as.
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Feb 18, 2024
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Feb 18, 2024
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| 4.30
| 91
| unknown
| Aug 21, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
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Jan 22, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1984881736
| 9781984881731
| B0BWH5YYTR
| 4.06
| 3,578
| Nov 07, 2023
| Nov 07, 2023
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #2. Not nearly as fun a book as I thought it was going to be, and way more tedious a book than I realized it was going to be. It's "intere
2024 reads, #2. Not nearly as fun a book as I thought it was going to be, and way more tedious a book than I realized it was going to be. It's "interesting," but "interesting" in the same way that five straight hours of NPR during a car ride because you have literally nothing better to do is "interesting." Buyer beware.
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Jan 10, 2024
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| 9798702166483
| 4.26
| 54
| unknown
| Feb 25, 2021
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it was amazing
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I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out
I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. Merged review: I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. ...more |
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Mar 09, 2021
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| 4.31
| 1,202
| 2008
| unknown
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #97. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outli
2023 reads, #97. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is a compilation of forum posts by the eponymous Pook at the popular incel website SoSuave.net, put together by another forum member by the pen-name of Gubby, and I have to admit that it's a kind of perfect Platonian example of both everything I'm fascinated by in the alt-right men's movement and everything that drives me crazy. Just to begin with, although this book talks a lot about "dating" and "relationships" and what an incel can do to have these in their life, the way these events are described in the book are way off from the societal standard, with not one word spent on topics like emotional intimacy or personal vulnerability, but rather the entirety of a "relationship" being defined as "when a penis goes in and out of a vagina long enough and fast enough to produce an orgasm," at which point that "relationship" is over and it's time to go find another "relationship." This invariably then leads (like it always does in incel books) to the defining of the entire female gender not as individual humans each with their own individual personalities, quirks, likes and dislikes, but rather just an endless sea of interchangeable vaginas with legs, which you apply the same ol' shtick to over and over without ever bothering to get to know them as actual human beings, since things like personalities and interests aren't required for the incel definition of a "happy relationship." Especially infuriating in these books is the way they do these incredibly strict and niche definitions of terms, then pretend that this is the global standard that applies in every situation with every person. Here, for example, Monsieur Pook very specifically defines a "very attractive woman" (the woman you're ultimately working up to under an incel dating system, because by the point that they finally take an interest in you, you will have truly earned that vagina with legs) exclusively as someone with long hair and big boobs, who wears a lot of makeup and regularly squeezes herself into tight, trashy dresses. For a bunch of guys complaining about how they can never have sex, they sure are voluntarily eliminating a lot of women who exist from consideration! I can state all this with some authority, because as a teen in the '80s, I suffered from a lot of the problems incels do too (inconsolably horny, awkward around women, finding myself in the "friend zone" a lot), but it was only decades later with a lot of hindsight that I realized that I could've been fucking hot teen girls left and right when I'd been in high school, that all the signs of their interest were clearly there, but that I eliminated the very idea of dating them from my head because they were too much this or not enough that. Once I got into my twenties and actually did start dating these women, they turned out to be super-interesting and way more sexually confident than some bleached-out Kardashian who's poured herself into some Spanx while hanging out at a club on the Jersey Shore, and it's maddening to hear these dudes complain about how they never have sex when the only women they'll even consider are airbrushed AI bots in lad magazines. What's perhaps most infuriating of all, though, is the way these books get just a little bit of a situation right, just enough that the writing sounds serious and worth paying attention to, which is why these books keep selling and people just keep making more of them; but then they'll completely draw the wrong conclusion from this limited amount of true information, or take situations that's happened to them in particular as an aggressively obnoxious alt-right incel and state that this is the reaction that all creatures with a penis will forever always get from all creatures with vaginas. Like, Pook talks here about a common piece of wisdom in these incel books, that women generally dislike men who come across as weak, spineless, indecisive and easy to persuade; and that's a true statement about the world, in my opinion. But that has nothing to do with women's "mating rituals" or whatever these incel authors are attributing it to, but rather something that's simply true of the entire human race whenever they're hanging out with any other member of the human race, that all of us generally prefer to spend time with someone confident, courageous, with specific opinions and who can equally participate in a conversation about "where should we have dinner tonight?" Instead, Pook and these other incel writers state that this is proof that women want forceful, dominant, trick-playing "alpha males" to rule over them in a relationship with an iron fist like the animals they are, not bothering to acknowledge that you don't have to automatically go from being a doormat to being an asshole, that there are other shades of behavior in between those extremes. Or for another example, note here when Pook claims that "women simply aren't interested in your opinions," using this to claim that the proper response is to simply buy them pretty things and make sure to fuck them regularly, and just force your Star Wars and anime on them if they're not naturally interested. But Pook, bro, I gotta tell you, I've had dozens of female romantic partners over the decades who were interested in my opinions, just that my opinions weren't the crazy fucking woman-hating rantings of a fedora-wearing meninist, so no goddamn wonder you're finding that the women around you in your life aren't interested in your fucking opinions. This is the tragedy of the alt-right movement, that they're getting something like 25 percent of it right, which is just enough to feel righteous and motivated, but then just so utterly fucking up the other 75 percent that everything they touch turns into cartoonishly terrible shit just a moment later. However, I can certainly state that a book like this will absolutely help get you into the mindset of someone who believes this stuff, if you're interested in writing a novel where they're the villain-heroes in a world gone mad. Read it for this reason and this reason only. ...more |
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Dec 04, 2023
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Dec 04, 2023
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ebook
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| 1683735552
| 9781683735557
| B0BGPY97PX
| 4.02
| 93
| unknown
| Nov 01, 2022
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #96. In the last year of my therapy sessions, I've been starting to use the relatively brand-new Internal Family Systems (IFS) methodology
2023 reads, #96. In the last year of my therapy sessions, I've been starting to use the relatively brand-new Internal Family Systems (IFS) methodology of therapy more and more; and I've been responding to it really well, so I'm always excited to see a new book come out about this process, one that doesn't yet have a lot of documentation. For those unfamiliar with this style of therapy, it shares many of the same basic assumptions about physiology that Michael Pollan posits in his landmark book on psychedelics and the human brain, 2018's How to Change Your Mind (my review); basically, that the brain can be thought of like an orchestra with many sections (or "parts" of an "internal family" in IFS lingo), and that there's one section that acts as the orchestra's conductor, making sure all the other sections work in harmony (known as the "default mode network" in Pollan's book and the "Self" in IFS), the same section that medical professionals call the "consciousness," sociologists call our "personality," and religious people call the "soul." The main theory behind IFS therapy is that some of these parts become damaged or injured over the course of our life when bad things happen to us (these bad things being collectively termed "trauma" here), and that other parts of our system jump in to protect the Self from being permanently damaged by this injured part, essentially by burying it deep down in our subconscious so it can't get loose and damage the rest of our Self (at which point that part becomes an "exile" in the lingo of IFS therapy). There are two types of these protectors: ones called "managers" that are proactive (that is, they work overtime to prevent any future trauma from ever occurring), and ones called "firefighters" that are reactive (that is, they only go to work after new trauma has occurred, doing anything it has to in order to put out the "fire" of shame, loneliness, worthlessness and terror that the trauma induces in us). So, IFS therapy says, if we engage in bad behavior that we don't like but feel powerless to stop, whether that's proactive bad behavior (like giving unwanted advice, being a pushover, or even obsessing too much on therapy) or reactive bad behavior (like substance abuse, rage at small offenses, or even suicide), what we're actually seeing is our managers and firefighters still working overtime to protect an exile from trauma that ended sometime in our past; and that to end the bad behavior, you need to identify these parts, have compassion for them, thank them for protecting you, but gently convince them that the crisis is now over and they can ratchet back down in intensity to "peacetime status." That is, you're not trying to get rid of any of the parts, because they all as a collective group make up your personality (literally your Self in IFS), and there's nothing inherently bad about any of them (the part of your brain that wants to engage in substance abuse, for example, is ironically often the same part of your brain that worries about self-care); you're simply trying to convince these parts that the emergency is now over, that the trauma you experienced in the past is now done and finished, and that all your parts can now go back to living in quiet harmony, including those long-dormant exiles whose very existence you had forgotten about for decades. This particular newest book on the subject was written by an active IFS therapist, and it's clear in her stories that she started facilitating IFS sessions mainly because she was an IFS patient at first, and had such a breakthrough in her understanding of herself that she felt compelled to make a professional career out of it. This seems to be how a lot of people are coming to IFS therapy these days, frankly, by becoming converts after having it work profoundly in their own life; and this especially gets interesting when you realize that it's a form of IFS that's being used in the absolutely brand-new, still cutting-edge "psychedelics therapy" that's starting to legally happen in the state of Washington right now, where so-called "miracles" are happening in thousands of people at the moment, such as someone who's been an alcoholic for decades doing just a single IFS/psychedelics therapy session and then suddenly starting the next day never craving a drink ever again. That sounds like dubious snake oil when heard out of context, but is quite believable if you agree with the theories being espoused in IFS, and I've seen it work enough in my own life to be a believer myself; although to be fair, I want to acknowledge that there are a few critics and a lot of skeptics these days too when it comes to IFS, and that it's worth acknowledging that IFS therapy is still new enough to not have a proven track record that can be reliably duplicated by anyone in any situation who wants to, a sorta fundamental bedrock of the scientific process that needs to be achieved before anything can be said to have "been proven to work." So, take it all with a grain of salt, and go into IFS therapy being rational and curious, not with the blind devotion of the faithful; but certainly I encourage anyone who's into therapy to try out IFS therapy, and this slim (<150 pages) and plainly written guide is a great place to start, one that not only explains the entire process clearly but also uses some funny and insightful pop-culture references as metaphors that I haven't seen any other IFS book so far do. (Particularly helpful here is Kennedy's comparison of manager parts to the fictional middle manager Dwight Schrute from The Office: both take their job very seriously [often to the point of comical intensity], both relish being in control [often to the consternation of everyone around them], and both spring into action heedlessly during times of crisis [often leading to the situation getting worse instead of better]). It's both a theory and a therapy that deserves a close look by anyone wrestling with self-destructive behavior, especially since its conclusions are starting to overlap with unrelated other contemporary researchers in fields like neuroplasticity, healthy aging, and physical exercise, and this informative book is a great place to start your journey. ...more |
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Dec 02, 2023
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| 1982168560
| 9781982168568
| B0BVN1M6G2
| 3.77
| 18,332
| Sep 05, 2023
| Sep 05, 2023
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2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for
2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for me, and her habit of delivering her punchlines in a demon-child whisper frequently annoys me -- but I find her funny enough that I wanted to read her new memoir focusing on mental illness issues, the cleverly titled Sure, I'll Join Your Cult. Unfortunately, though, when you take away the need to deliver jokes in a pronounced rhythm and while taking lots of pauses for audience reactions, this self-confessed bipolar OCD sufferer kind of just goes off the rails, giving us prose that's so packed with digressions and bulletpoint lists and jokey-joke joke joke JOOOOKES!!!!! that it eventually all becomes this stream-of-consciousness fog you can barely follow; and while I enjoyed the first chapter of this, even by page 30 I was completely and totally mentally wiped out by Bamford's exhausting Robin Williamsesque patter, and at that point needed to turn the book back in to the public library for the sake of my own mental health. If the idea of listening to a Maria Bamford standup set, while she screams it as fast as she possibly can while not even stopping for a breath, sounds like fun to you, then you should absolutely pick this up, because that's basically what this book is; for all the rest of us, perhaps stick to YouTube clips of her performances, plus of course the best thing she's ever done, the 2010s two-season Netflix absurdist sitcom masterpiece Lady Dynamite.
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Nov 12, 2023
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Nov 12, 2023
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| 3.49
| 18,282
| Aug 20, 2019
| Sep 05, 2019
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2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the
2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the Nazis actually winning World War Two; and that got me thinking again about Robert Harris' 1992 Fatherland, one of the best of them all, a murder mystery set in an alternative Mid-Century-Modernist 1960s where a bunch of skinny-tie Nazis in sharp Kennedy suits are preparing to dually celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the war and Hitler's 75th birthday. And that was a reminder that I read that book years and years before becoming a full-time reviewer (literally picked up for a quarter at a random yard sale 25 years ago), and that I've never looked further into the career of this surprisingly interesting journalist and historian turned thriller author. Out of the 15 books he's now published since then, the one I mostly wanted to read was 2019's The Second Sleep, because that's one of the only ones besides Fatherland that scratches my alt-history speculative itch; namely, it's set about a thousand years after a civilization-destroying apocalypse, in which there's been such a long period where humanity's official policy was "never speak of the Science Years" (plus a complete lack of any historical records from our times, because of all of it originally being digital) that humanity has completely reverted back to a society identical to the beginning of the Medieval period, where they believe that this is how society has always been, with humans living in thatched huts and cowering before an angry and judgmental God before He eventually became vengeful and apparently destroyed this mysterious "Cloud" where all the world's information used to be stored. Unfortunately, though, just like my recent read of Daphne du Maurier's 1972 Rule Britannia (my review), Harris doesn't seem to have been able to come up with an actual compelling story to set within this fascinating universe, attempting to skate by on 300 pages of just concept alone; and let me tell you, once the novelty wears off on a "future humans think it's still the Medieval Age" concept, it simply becomes a historical fiction book, as if it was actually set in the Medieval Age, which is not the book I was wanting to read when I first picked this up. And while Harris tries to save the book the same way he made Fatherland so interesting, wrapping the plot around a mystery that's obvious to us modern readers but constitutes a shocking discovery to its characters (namely, when a '60s murder investigation accidentally reveals the Holocaust from twenty years previous, which had been quietly swept under the rug by the Germans after actually winning the war), here the reveal doesn't nearly spark the imagination, as our filth-covered neo-serfs very, very, very slowly come to realize, "OH MY GOD, HUMANS USED TO OWN COMPUTERS, WHATEVER THOSE ARE!!!!!!!!!!1!!" To be clear, neither of these reveals are supposed to be shocking to the readers themselves (and in neither case are spoilers either, which is why I don't mind divulging the information); but why it works in the case of Fatherland is because it's fascinating to picture a world in which the Nazis manage to completely hide the concentration camps from the public, leaving us a group of people who are certainly hard-right warmongers, but who in history's eyes aren't any worse than Spain's Francisco Franco (who held power for 36 years) or Russia's Joseph Stalin (who ruled for 29 years). If the Nazis hadn't bothered trying to eliminate the Jewish people, would they now not be thought of as The Greatest Monsters In The Entirety Of Human History? That's an interesting question to contemplate! What isn't an interesting question to contemplate, though, is, "What would happen if, a thousand years in the future, a group of people who have entirely lost the history of the 18th through 21st centuries suddenly rediscover it, but without the means, training or intelligence to duplicate any of it?" That's instead simply a gimmick, which like a jump scare in a horror movie is good for only a few seconds of legitimate entertainment before the audience goes, "Okay, what else you got?"; and that's why this book is so flat and disappointing, despite it being just as good in quality as Fatherland from 27 years earlier. That would normally get the book two and a half stars from me, being rounded up to three here at the "no half stars" Goodreads, so take that under advisement when deciding whether or not to pick the book up yourself. ...more |
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| 3.48
| 1,605
| 1917
| Jun 01, 1975
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2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was wh
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was where Mark Frost cribbed the idea of the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge" for use in the "conspiracy of conspiracies" TV show Twin Peaks he co-created with David Lynch. But alas, while Crowley meant for both this and all his other "Simon Iff, Mystic Detective" stories to be easy-to-read pulp thrillers in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, at a time in his life when he was flat-broke and it was suggested that such easy-reading material connected to his famous name would sell like hotcakes, I don't think he really had any idea how to actually write pulp stories that would appeal to a large general audience, turning in a barely readable book here that's a mess both conceptually and mechanically. I must confess, even with this being not even 150 pages, I still barely made it even a quarter of the way through before giving up in confused boredom, not so much a novel as it is a sneaky way to publish an occultism academic textbook, complete with the pages upon pages of impenetrably dense New Age nonsense a term like that implies. Maybe the hardcore Crowley fan will be able to get through this, but for all the rest of us, this book works better as a concept than an actual reading experience.
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| 4.06
| 184,400
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #74. It's summer, which means it's time for another of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books, comedic fantasy novels that have become a beloved institution in Britain where he's from, in the same manner as his peers Monty Python. Of course, the problem was that it'd been so long since I'd read the first two books in the series, I had actually forgotten by now what they were about, so I ended up re-reading both of those as well (1983's The Colour of Magic [my original review] and 1986's The Light Fantastic [my original review]). And that's when I discovered the unsettling truth -- not that there was a bad reason behind why I couldn't remember their storylines (it turns out it was because they don't really have storylines, I had forgotten, but are more like prose versions of cartoons, where no actual plot takes place and nothing anyone does has any consequences, making it easy to see why I had forgotten what they're about), but rather that reading these even a second time tended to be an exhausting exercise in overly frenetic nonsense, like taking the aforementioned Monty Python and then multiplying their absurdist hijinks by ten thousand while screeching all the jokes in an exaggerated falsetto Cockney accent as loud as you can possibly scream them, leading to an unsatisfyingly chaotic experience that simply wore me out long before the books were over. In this third book, then, which features brand-new characters and a brand-new story, the problem is the exact opposite; for while Pratchett obviously meant to write another parody of fantasy novels like the first two books, he ended up writing just a straightforward fantasy novel, and therefore turned in one that's only mediocre at best, for not being satisfying as either a genre story or a satire of a genre story (you know, much like how William Goldman's The Princess Bride started as a Postmodernist parody of fairytales, but then the '80s movie version changed it into just an actual fairytale, making it as unsatisfyingly sappy and sentimental as any other fairytale that's ever been written). That's the biggest problem here, that underneath Pratchett's dark sense of humor, love of puns, and gentle ribbing of genre conventions, there's a kind of unearned gooey sentimentality that wouldn't be out of place in a Lifetime or Hallmark movie, and I have to admit that this book's trite message of "GIRL!!! POWER!!!" just really rubbed me the wrong way, after having spent literally decades listening to people tell me how crazy and subversive and intelligent the Discworld novels are. Three books in, I have found none of these titles so far to be particularly crazy, subversive or intelligent, but rather just one step up in quality from fan fiction passed around as xeroxes in the back hallways of the annual Coniconicon; and so while I'm going to keep this series in my master list of Completist Challenge authors for now, I suspect I won't be returning to this universe for quite some time, and only then with a high sense of skepticism and an eye towards quitting it as soon as I find enough problems to justify doing so. It's a real shame, because I thought these books were going to be right up my alley; but it turns out they're not nearly the kind of brilliant displays of British wit and cleverness that I've been told my whole life they are. Your experience may be different, but I caution you to go into these with low expectations anyway. Terry Pratchett's Discworld books included in this review series: The Colour of Magic (1983) | The Light Fantastic (1986) | Equal Rights (1987) | Mort (1987) | Sourcery (1988) | Wyrd Sisters (1988) | Pyramids (1989) | Guards! Guards! (1989) | Eric (1990) | Moving Pictures (1990) | Reaper Man (1991) | Witches Abroad (1991) | Small Gods (1992) | Lords and Ladies (1992) | Men at Arms (1993) | Soul Music (1994) | Interesting Times (1994) | Maskerade (1995) | Feet of Clay (1996) | Hogfather (1996) | Jingo (1997) | The Last Continent (1998) | Carpe Jugulum (1998) | The Fifth Elephant (1999) | The Truth (2000) | Thief of Time (2001) | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) | Night Watch (2002) | The Wee Free Men (2003) | Monstrous Regiment (2003) | A Hat Full of Sky (2004) | Going Postal (2004) | Thud! (2005) | Wintersmith (2006) | Making Money (2007) | Unseen Academicals (2009) | I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) | Snuff (2011) | Raising Steam (2013) | The Shepherd's Crown (2015) ...more |
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2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school
2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school graduation gift; for it's not only a very well-done Personal Finance 101 primer, full of practical advice you can start doing right this second even if you have almost no money and no income, but author Anna Jo Beck spends an equal amount of time explaining why you should care about personal finance, even if you're an 18-year-old art major and anti-consumerist social activist, which was exactly what I could've used back in my young "my credit score doesn't matter because I'm never going to buy one of your bougeoise fucking McMansions in the first place" phase. It's best to think of this short, well-written guide in this way, as a gift to the young antifa in your own life, to help explain to them why they should be starting a Roth IRA as soon as possible anyway.
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| 4.03
| 90,980
| Apr 08, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the b
2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the book on my list in the first place; and that's always an exciting moment for me as a heavy reader, because it means I can go into the book with completely innocent eyes, knowing not even the tiniest thing about it other than that at some point in the past, there was something about it that made me want to read it. That turned out to be especially good in this case, because this is a science-fiction novel light on action but heavy on ideas, so going into it with no pre-knowledge of the plot was delightful in the same way that going into a Christopher Nolan movie with this little pre-knowledge is. And indeed, at a certain point I actually had to look up the date this novel was published (2014, it turns out), so that I could make sure it actually came before Nolan's 2020 movie Tenet; for while the storylines themselves are vastly different, they're both fundamentally based around the idea of a time-travel cold war, and very specifically the idea of an apocalyptic event happening at some unidentified point in the future, and those future madmen sending people back to the past to ensure that the apocalyptic weapon actually gets invented. As you can guess, our narrator is the Harry August of the book's title, a lower-class rural Brit who is born in the 1920s, lives an unremarkable life, and dies in the 1990s; it's only when he turns five in his next life and all his memories come flooding back does he realize that he's now living his entire 70-year life all over again, seemingly as a re-do completely from scratch. Author Catherine Webb (writing here under the penname "Claire North") smartly has August go through the exact kinds of emotional cycles you would expect someone living the same long life over and over to go through: in his second life, August quickly comes to believe he's insane, and kills himself as a teenager; in his third life, realizing that he's not insane, he instead turns to a life of science to see if he can discover the answer behind his reincarnation mystery; when that fails, he then spends his fourth life devoted to understanding all the world's religions, just to wake up in his fifth life realizing that that didn't provide any answers either. Eventually he discovers (through very clever, byzantine plotting and writing, the kind that will deeply appeal to fans of books like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) that there's actually a whole group of humans who suffer from the same problem as him, and that over the thousands upon thousands of Earth timelines that have occurred over and over they've managed to create a secret organization of sorts called the Cronos Club, where they do things like help "rescue" newly refreshed "ouroborans" (as they call themselves) when they become old enough to remember all their previous memories but are still too young to do something like hold a job or get away from their biological parents. (In one of the dozen extremely clever limits Webb puts on her fantastical conceit here, in order to keep the stakes high, ouroborans only have their previous memories resurface in the year between being five and six years old; so if they happen to get killed before they're five, they wake up in the next life with no previous memories at all, basically wiping them back into amnesiacs.) It's here where Webb really earns her book's bona fides as a truly captivating and extremely unique sci-fi thriller, for because of the way these reincarnations work, you can effectively influence what will happen in the far past even though none of these people are technically time-traveling. Imagine our hero, for example, who dies in each existence of cancer in the 1990s; then in his next life, when he regains his memories of the '90s way back in 1925, he can seek out another ouroboran who's currently in their seventies themselves (i.e. was born back in 1850s) and tell them, "Here's everything that happens in the 1990s," information that they themselves can now take back with them in their own reincarnation. Then at that point, they themselves can seek out an elderly ouroboran (i.e. born in the 1780s) when they're a six-year-old in the 1850s, and tell them, "Oh, by the way, here's everything that happens way in the future in the 1990s." This is both a head-spinning concept and easy to understand, and Webb gets a lot of mileage out of it, in one example explaining that through this process, the Cronos Club has determined that the oldest of their kind seem to have first started showing up in ancient Babylon around the year 3000 BC, and that it seems to be roughly one out of every half-billion people who are born with the trait. (She also employs lots of funny Harry Potter-style sly humor when it comes to this subject, such as the stone obelisk the Babylonian ouroborans leave in the desert for future Cronos Club members to find, but how in some of these existences, this backwards grapevine convinces the Babylonians to sometimes leave dirty in-jokes for club members in the 20th century.) Of course, with me mentioning Tenet, fans of that movie will easily see what the main conflict is here in this book, written six years before it -- namely, the ouroborans all know that at some point in the far future, the human race will genocide itself using an apocalyptic weapon, but with each new existence this apocalyptic event is getting closer and closer to our own times, with it first being around the year 2400, then in the next existence it suddenly jumping to 2350, then in the next existence after that it jumping again to the year 2300. I'll let the answers to who is doing this and why remain a surprise (although it's not difficult to guess, once you're introduced to the book's entire cast of characters); but the important part here is that, like Tenet, the book's main pleasure in the second half becomes that of the extremely clever and well-plotted temporal cold war Webb creates, in which one side is constantly attempting to send information about future technology back to the past, and the other side is constantly trying to stop them, but without any of them able to just explode into open warfare because then all the normal humans (or as they're called in this book, the "linears") will declare all of them monsters and wipe out the entire Cronos Club for good (which indeed actually happens in some of the 15 existences we watch here of our titular hero). It's all just extremely, extremely well done, and this is for sure going to be going on my list of Top 10 Reads of 2023 at the end of the year; and so how additionally astonishing to learn afterwards, when finally reading up on Webb and her oeuvre, that the entire reason I did end up putting her on my to-read list in the first place is that she managed the flabbergasting feat of getting her first book published by a mainstream press and it becoming a bestseller when she was only 14 years old. (Of course, it helps that her dad is a veteran in the publishing industry who basically sent her manuscript to an agent buddy of his, but still.) Only 37 as of the writing of this review, she already has an amazingly prolific 23 published books under her belt, and her sci-fi titles under her Claire North name have either won or been finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Award. (She also writes adult fantasy novels under the nom de plume "Kate Griffin," and Young Adult novels under her real name.) In fact, it was during this post-read research that I remembered that it was actually another book of hers entirely that first got me interested in her, the more recent 2021 Notes from a Burning Age, so I'm sure I'll be getting to that one soon as well, since I ended up enjoying this one so incredibly much. I'll be sharing my review of that a little later this winter; but for now, sci-fi fans should for sure not walk but run to your local library to pick up a copy of this, both a trippy and an accessible genre novel of high ideas that will scratch the itch of a whole variety of different kinds of readers. ...more |
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| 0099086700
| 9780099086703
| B001E52GWA
| 3.76
| 1,799
| 1956
| 1967
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2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
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| 9781585676026
| 1585676020
| 3.93
| 6,524
| 1970
| Jan 04, 2005
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2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
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| 0743410246
| 3.96
| 769
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743445643
| 9780743445641
| 0743445643
| 3.91
| 828
| Oct 2002
| Oct 2002
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called
2023 reads, #52-55. It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743445627
| 9780743445627
| 0743445627
| 3.80
| 834
| Sep 2002
| Sep 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0375713557
| 9780375713552
| 0375713557
| 3.75
| 2,329
| Apr 01, 1978
| Mar 12, 2002
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #49. Like many Generation X males, I was an obsessive fan when it first came out of the 1985 Chevy Chase crime dramedy Fletch, in which a
2023 reads, #49. Like many Generation X males, I was an obsessive fan when it first came out of the 1985 Chevy Chase crime dramedy Fletch, in which a smartass investigative reporter charms, lies and buffoons his way through a slow reveal of corrupt cops in Los Angeles reaching all the way up to the commissioner; and after enjoying even more a new Fletch movie in 2021 starring the absolutely perfect Jon Hamm (sadly lost in the swirl of the pandemic and therefore barely seen), I finally decided to sit down and start reading the eleven novels crime novelist Gregory Mcdonald wrote about this engaging, hilarious, yet world-weary character, starting with the third novel in the series since the first two are the source material for the two films. But alas, what feels like devastatingly witty and sophisticated dialogue in the movies comes across as more twee and annoying in book form, kind of like if Joss Whedon ever decided to write a crime novel, and I am absolutely not a fan of Joss Whedon's writing whatsoever. But then again, this is also a strange Fletch novel that perhaps shouldn't be compared to the first two; set entirely at a journalism convention at a former Southern plantation turned convention hall, none of our characters ever actually leave this hotel resort estate for the entire length of the book, and so lacks the zany side characters and thrilling action that helps break up the clever dialogue of the films. I admit, if you simply stuck Fletch in a hotel room for 90 minutes and had him talk nonstop in the movie versions, they would be severely lacking, which is exactly what Mcdonald does here; so before I pass judgment over the entire series, I'm going to take on at least one more of them, which chronologically means 1981's Fletch and the Widow Bradley, which Wikipedia assures me is a return to the globetrotting, adventure-embracing Fletch of the first two books. I'll see you here again later this summer for that! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 17, 2023
|
May 17, 2023
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.08
|
it was ok
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.43
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 2024
|
Jul 01, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.69
|
Feb 18, 2024
|
Feb 18, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 22, 2024
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was ok
|
Jan 10, 2024
not set
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 09, 2021
not set
|
Jan 07, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
did not like it
|
Dec 04, 2023
not set
|
Dec 04, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 02, 2023
not set
|
Dec 02, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
Nov 12, 2023
|
Nov 12, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.49
|
liked it
|
Nov 11, 2023
not set
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.48
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was ok
|
Sep 19, 2023
not set
|
Sep 19, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 17, 2023
not set
|
Sep 17, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 16, 2023
not set
|
Sep 16, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.93
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.96
|
really liked it
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
really liked it
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
really liked it
|
Jul 06, 2023
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2023
|
May 17, 2023
|
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