Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This collection is exceptionally well curated; I feel like every story fits the theme and every story is strong enough to stand on it's own and provide it's own interpretation of the topic. I really enjoyed the way each story took off in an entirely new and unexpected direction. Perhaps because the topic is so big there's lots of room for wildly different interpretations (and there are!) but the total collection leaves an impression bigger than just the sum of the stories. This is proper Capital "S" Science Capital "F" Fiction that asks the reader to interpret and define their own humanity.
There were two stories in the collection that I didn't finish. Musée de l’Âme Seule by E. Lily Yu isn't bad, it's just written in that dreamy stream of conscious second person POV that I loathe with an irrational passion. You know the kind of writing: every paragraph tries to stand on it's own like a lone tree in a deserted field, and little details weighted with importance glitter throughout every sentence like shards from a broken bottle in an empty alley. I don't doubt that it's fun to write, but I've never seen an example that's compelled me to pretend I'm someone else long enough to read their story.
The other story I didn't finish was Alex Dally MacFarlane's Coastlines of the Stars. It's written in the third person, but it's too lyrical with new chapter headings every two or three paragraphs. This is another device that I'm just not wired to appreciate properly, and while I'm sure it's an accomplished story I just couldn't bear to sit through it.
The real standouts in this collection, for me, are The Sarcophagus by Robert Reed, who takes the standard question "how much of your humanity can you change and still be human" and extrapolates it out to the nth degree in an engaging and thoughtful way. Taking the Ghost by A.C. Wise is another winner; what could have fallen into every post-apocalyptic cliche actually emerged as an example of how to do paranormal sci-fi correctly. E. Catherine Tobler's The Cumulative Effects of Light Over Time is one of those allegorical "the deeper they go into this cave the deeper they go into their self" stories, but it's done very well and kept me interested right up until the predicted end. I'll definitely be looking for more of her work. Seventh Sight by Greg Egan works for me on a number of different levels; I'm not sure it's remarkable in the objective sense but I felt a number of parallels between the protagonist and myself and that counts a lot for me.
Memories and Wire by Mari Ness sort of fell off my radar, but as I went back through the TOC for this review it sparked a rush of affection. IIRC, it's a brilliant concept but needs a bit more development to really come into it's own.
Also notable is The Regular by Ken Liu isn't as allegorical as most short stories, but it's also the longest story in the book and reads like a simple whodunnit. I liked it well enough, but I think I'd like it a lot more if it were fully developed into a novel length story.
This is a great collection of short stories. There is a depth and breadth represented here that makes the collection feel much larger than just the 26 stories it contains, and any fan of scifi should find more than enough worthwhile writing to justify buying this....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I left my "5Bs" blank because I didn't read enough of the book to make a valid score.
I made it about 12% into this book before I gave up. Not because it was too "extreme" or "graphic", but because it just wasn't written very well. I'm all about the splatterpunk - I don't even blink an eye at Edward Lee - and I took a chance on this at amazon when I saw the 3.6 average review at GR. I'm glad I didn't pay very much for it.
The content wasn't the problem. The problem is the writing. All of the sentences looked the same. All of the dialogue sounded the same. The author didn't show me anything. The author only told me things. The main character was boring. And she was predictable. I knew what was going to happen to her after her first "test".
There's just too many good books that are crafted by wordsmiths rather than written by content producers and lovingly edited by professionals that are advocating on the reader's behalf to spend time on books that are substandard. I do hope this author continues to refine his craft, the world needs more splatterpunk and I'm sure he has important stories to tell, but until he's better at telling them I'm going to spend my scant reading time on books that are produced to a higher caliber....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I finished this book a few weeks ago, and to be completely honest I'm having a hard time recalling any details of it. I remember the first book in the series, and I remember reading this book and thinking, "Where did the awesome go?" My recollection of this book is of some ridiculous plot twists and a Mary Sue revenant coming to save the day too often. Where the first book was gloriously dark and dystopic and our intrepid hero was properly cynical and jaded, this book just felt like it was full of whiny characters who were being shuffled from one plot twist to another. I just didn't like it nearly as much as the first.
I hope this is just the "second book slump", and the series continues to a third edition to wrap up the Big Boss Fight that's been lurking on the horizon. I'll definitely buy the next book in the series, but I'll be reading it with a healthy dose of trepidation rather than the unbridled optimism I had when I started this book....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is a short story tucked into the Sandman Slim series. I read it out of order (I'd already finished Kill City Blues) but that didn't change my enjoyment of the story. As a huge fan of Sandman Slim, my only problem with this book is that it was too short. It had everything we like about this guy - violence, wry self deprecating humor, a wicked (pun intended) sense of sarcasm and tidy little story line that wraps itself up at the end.
The story takes shortly after Sandman takes over hell and revolves around him taking a couple of legions of hellspawn out to the far reaches to take care of some business left over by the last Lucifer. Naturally, chaos, violence, horror, death and destruction ensue.
I'm not sure this would be a good way for people who haven't read the earlier books to dip into the series. It might be a little difficult to follow along; Mr. Kadrey expects the reader to have a firm grasp of the mythology he's created and the history of his major characters. On the other hand, as a quick little horro/action-adventure/romp it's a fun little diversion and for readers don't mind being a little behind on the backstory and motivations, this would be good introduction to the style and tone of the Sandman Slim series....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
If more erotica was written with as much insight, creativity and commmand of the language as Vanessa has, I'd read a lot more erotica. This collection of ten stories (all of them new to me; I don't believe any of them are in any of her other collections) is another set of knockout stories. Even the weakest amongst them are worth reading. The real standouts for me are Trebarthen Cottage, which blends the fantastical into the real seamlessly as Vanessa does in so many of her stories. The Shower Game by far the longest story in the collection, watches 2 relationships evolve around a mutual appreciation for voyeurism, and the story is handled quite deftly.
This collection doesn't really go into any of the taboo kinks that some of Vanessa's stories do, so this would be an excellent collection for the discerning reader looking for some top shelf, witty and well written vanilla erotica. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is an erotic short about a kink that I'm not particularly into, and yet it held my interest. As always, Vanessa's writing is leagues ahead of most in the taboo erotic genre, and her development of the characters as rounded people rather than vehicles for orifice oriented gymnastics makes the smut that much hotter.
Lactation isn't on my list of kinks, but I'll read anything Vanessa writes. I wasn't disappointed; it was hot and arousing and "did the job", so I'm sure people who are into lactation would be even more impressed....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
If you like the Laundry series, you'll like this short. It's a very quick read and treads well worn ground, but all the things I like about the Laundry are in abundance: sly digs at English culture, comically overdrawn computer science and good ol' fashioned whatdunnit in the vein of classic Dr. Who.The references to the eldritch gods and Crowley are like a fractal tesseract and provide the real meat of the story.
For people not familiar with The Laundry, this would work as a standalone. There's enough context provided to explain who the players and are and what they're doing, and the voicing, cadence etc are all exemplary of the series. For people familiar with the series, reading this out of order (like I have) didn't detract my enjoyment....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
One thing about Peter Watts - he has one of the most distinctive voices in scifi since Theodore Sturgeon. Despite the depth and breadth of topic, setting and POV this collection of shorts reads like a cohesive whole. All of these stories are worthwhile, which is unfortunately more than I expect from an anthology, though naturally I felt a few were stronger than most and the weakest are easy to pick out.
First of all, there are two shorts from the Rifters world: "Home" and "A Niche". These are among my favorites if only because I like the Rifters world so much. Other stories that stood out for me are "A Word for Heathens", a morality play in a world where Jerry Falwell and Farenheit 451 intersect. It took a few pages for me to warm up to "The Island", but by the end I was completely hooked and it's message of humility and the limitations of the human scope stick deeply with me.
I wasn't such a big fan of "Repeating the Past"; I felt like I've read that story a number of times before and I'm not sure it adds anything to the canon. I felt much the same for "Flesh Made Word", actually. The first story "The Things" only makes sense when you realize it's a first person account of the alien's perspective from the movie "The Thing". A cynical part of me feels that a story that needs an introduction like that has fundamentally failed to set it's scene properly; but it would be hard to know if it's possible to set the scene in-story without plaigerising the movie. Perhaps I'm asking too much?
This is a great set of short stories. None of them are long enough to need more than a single sitting to read, but nearly all of them contain ideas and emotions with subtle barbs that have sat with me long after I finished the book.
The outro - wherein Mr. Watts talks about his infamous detention at the hands of the US Border Patrol and his feelings about his canon being labeled "unrelentingly dark, "misanthropic" or "savage" is some of the best discourse on the nature of horror and how "bad things" is an entirely relative term that's entirely dependant on scope. Worth the price of admission just for that essay, actually....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I read this in the "wrong order". I finished Firefall before I started this, so reading this wasn't as much about whetting my appetite for a new book as much filling in a couple of gaps in the epic I just finished.
Protip: The correct order to read the Firefall series is:
Blindsight The Colonel Echopraxia
You can also read The Colonel first, but it'll very slightly spoil Blindsight. Please note that Blindsight does not have a surprise ending; but reading The Colonel first may slightly change your viewpoint while you read Blindsight.
That being said, it's a nice little short. I think I would have liked it more if I'd read it before I finished the series, because there is some intense (eloquent) characterization and the post/transhuman future he details is deeply thought provoking. But I already knew the characters and had gotten my thoughts provoked by Firefall, so all this did was fill in some details about a time and place that hadn't had much attention in Firefall.
Absolutely worth more than the £0.39 I paid for it....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Peter Watts makes scifi exciting for me again. This omnibus reads like a single epic; much like his beloved Rifters trilogy, the action in the latter book picks up right where it left off in the former book. Reading this book felt, to me, like Charles Stross meets Rifters and the Rifters win. We've got near-light speed travel, wildly augmented humans bashing headlong against the outdated confines of Abrahamaic morality and gloriously alien intelligences that are actually alien in the way the think, communicate, perceive and breed.
After all that, though, the series winds down into some familiar territory. The last few chapters of this merry-go-round don't hold as many surprises as much as they carefully tuck us gentle readers into a bed of nails with a blanket of stinging nettles. Anyone who's read Rifters will know how good at Mr. Watts is at putting an apocalypse together, and this time around he didn't have to drag up any archeobacteria. This apocalypse is the scariest kind, the perfectly plausible way humans will happily act in their own shortsighted interest to the detriment of the species, ecosystem, etc.
I think some parts of Firefall get a little bit preachy - but that may be a side effect of what happens when people try to communicate when they're lightyears apart. There aren't any "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" soliliquies but there are a lot of paragraphs where people try really hard to explain Their Big Idea. That being said, these are interesting ideas in interesting circumstances and I didn't mind the verbiage as much as I would have rather kept the pace of the story moving a little faster.
I really hope Mr. Watts writes some stories around his vampires; I think they're the best incarnation of humanity(ish) to come out of the posthumanist canon yet. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I like to think of myself as a HUGE Gibson fan. I was but a wee lad when Neuromancer came out, and I absorbed it as greedily as I did every issue of Omni. The Chiba City trilogy has had a profound effect on my entire life; it's shaped my aesthetics, informed my worldview and provided a schema into which I sort the minutae of my culture.
I hadn't been reading any fiction for a while, so when I decided I needed to read "recreational" books again I was excited to find this release. While the Chiba City trilogy is part of my Holy Pantheon of Greatest Books Ever Written, his later works didn't make such a deep impression on me. The reviews indicated this book incorporated more of the gritty, technologically oriented "street" than Idoru or Pattern Recognition and I eagerly tried to immerse myself into Gibson's latest near dark future.
I didn't finish the book. I got about 2/3 of the way through it and gave up. I was ready to give up at one third, but in honor of the memory of Case and Molly I soldiered on. There were two problems that I just couldn't get around that ultimately ruined the book for me.
First, I feel like I've read this story already. A plucky young lady with more brains than brawn gets involved with organized criminals who need her unique skills and experience. She's assisted by a team of wealthy criminals and brawny older men as she tries to figure out the new rules of her life and manipulate those around her to her own best advantage. Yawn.
Secondly, I couldn't keep the different characters apart. The voicing felt amateurish and the characterization was interesting for the characters that had access to the futuristic timeline, but the characters back in the (almost) contemporary timeline (with the exception of our plucky heroine) all blurred together into one mass that manifested itself as necessary to move the plot along.
Clearly, a lot of other people like the book so I suppose I'm the oddball here. I think it's fair to say I started the book with a lot of expectations; would I like the story better if I'd never read any Gibson before? In all honesty - probably. But I have read lots of Gibson and I found myself wanting more chrome and blood and corruption and grit and broken emotions than this provided me....more
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