February 2016: What are You Reading?

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I thought I'd continue Ben Bova's tour of he solar system a little bit more, specifically by reading his novel Mercury, which has started well enough. Bova is rather 'old school' and I like his simple style and character-driven work. He also can pace very well, with a splendid ability to build and sustain tension.
 
I have just started Relatives by George Alec Effinger (1973.)

This deals with three variations on the same person in three different parallel worlds. Ernest Weinraub lives in a near future world of overpopulation and pollution; Ernst Weintraub lives in the early 20th century, in a world where Jermany (sic) has just won the Great War; and Ernst Weinraub lives in a very different world, seemingly in the 19th century, where the New World was discovered but never settled by a decadent Europe, and there exists one cosmopolitan city in an otherwise uninhabited Africa which is one big desert. More New Wave SF.

One of the risks of buying cheap old used paperbacks (mine is a 1976 edition, with a couple of stamping from inkpads and prices in pencil from the various used book stores where it has found a home) is that they may not be complete. This one is missing pages 9 and 10, so far. I hope that does not ruin the reading experience.
 
Finished The Water Room and now reading book 3 in the Bryant and May quirky crime series, The Seventy Seven Clocks.
 
Got a surprise in the mail ordered by my better half. It's Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 by Mark Voger. It's pretty much a coffee table book for those of us who grew up as monster kids, covering the era from "Shock Theater" (old horror movies sold as a package to television) to (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) the end of old-fashioned monster stuff with the last gasp of Hammer and the rise of newer forms of horror with The Exorcist on the horizon. Lots of monster ephemera is covered, from comic books to toys to novelty records to models to horror hosts and a lot more. Covers movies, television, magazines, etc. Some interviews with actors, artists, and so on. Lots of fun.
 
Hello everyone. :)

Just finished Howl's Moving Castle (fantastic, better than the also-excellent movie, and gloriously Welsh) by Diana Wynne Jones. Starting Perido Street Station by China Miéville. I haven't clicked with China's previous works (Un Lun Dun and Railsea both fell flat for me) but I'm really, really enjoying PSS so far.
 
I'm reading the Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan at the moment. Really enjoying it. Very, very unusual and found on the mainstream shelves despite what feels like a fantasy world setting. Definitely an author I'll be keeping an eye for in the future.
 
I finished The Hercules Text by Jack Mcdevitt. I thought it was a brilliant book. It dealt with a transmission being dissected on Earth from a race long dead. I loved how it dealt with the social, political, and religious ramifications of this. New technology emerges, but what will the group want to let the world know about, and what would be best left out there in space. Great read, and I was fully impressed with the quality of McDevitts writing. I will be finding more of his work.

I've moved on to Deadly Curiosities by Gail Z Martin. Ive read her Necromancer series so I look forward to trying her Urban Fantasy one.
 
I have just started The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith, a collection from 2014 of this author who died in 1961. It's interesting to note that this collection of tales, verse, and prose poems from places like Weird Tales is now published as a "Penguin Classic," with footnotes and a scholarly introduction and so on.

The first sentence of the first story in the collection ("The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," Weird Tales, November 1931) gives a good introduction to this author's style:

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers.
Click to expand...
 
Halfway through The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Really enjoying it. This got a lot of press last year, some of it quite mixed. I think it is a very good novel.
 
I just got done reading a GREAT short story by Eric Russell - - - "The Case For Earth"

A guy in his space ship is traveling to Mars. He lands on Mars and the first thing he hears is a "Knock Knock Knock" on the door of his ship.

How did this story not win some award? :)

Now and Beyond
 
The Doll Who Ate His Mother by Ramsey Campbell. This is a very good horror novel set in 1970s Liverpool. It's like Lovecraft but with well-realised characters and backdrop of social deprivation. Not full of laughs, but really well-written.
 
Finished 'The Seventy Seven Clocks' by Christopher Fowler, and now reading number 4 in his Bryant and May series, 'The Ten-Second Staircase'.
 
Just finished a short story from John Wyndham - - 'Compassion Circuit'
About a housemaid robot named Hester. (A battery driven model) ;)
For George Shand and his wife Janet things take a strange turn. My rating 4 stars ****

13 Great Stories of Science Fiction
 
Re-reading Patricia McKillip's In the Forests of Serre. Need to pick up The Forgotten Beasts of Eld one of these days...
 
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