July 2022 Reading Thread

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The Judge said:
I read it for the first time this year, too, but I was happy with it right up until the denouement when as far as I'm concerned it all fell apart. I managed to suspend disbelief as far as Daneel's acceptance was concerned and Baley's inability to comprehend things, and though I was narked by Gladia's characterisation I could cope, but the motive behind the killing was just unbelievable and unless I missed something important, the events of and immediately after the murder had a plot-hole a mile wide! Interesting ideas but deeply flawed as a murder mystery was my verdict.
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Yes I've given up getting riled by misogyny in books from that era (actually, no, I do still get riled but I go in expecting it!) although here it wasn't really misogyny but rather just relegating women to also ran status. And yes it all seemed a bit extreme and also a bit storm in a teacup territory towards the end apart from the slightly ridiculous galaxy domination bit.
 
Vertigo said:
Does Asmov really expect me to believe that the residents of a planet producing the most advanced robots in the galaxy can be fooled into believing Daneel was not a robot? Especially when all his dialogue is, frankly, so robot-like. And it became very frustrating how Baley is constantly being blind-sided by the attitudes of the population. Asimov explained them very well early on and each time whatever caught Baley out just seemed incredibly obvious to me.
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Solaria produces shiny mechanical robots. Daneel is a fleshy being, more like an android, and is the only one of his kind in the galaxy. Besides which, the notion of a robot pretending to be a human would never occur to most humans. It's something like not believing a country can produce advanced fighter jets, yet fail to spot a stealth plane when the first one flew. On the second item, societies as extreme as Earth's and Solaria's will have a very hard time understanding each other. Most people don't even understand their own societies and certainly have a hard time understanding others' so it's not odd at all to me that Baley would have trouble with Solaria, though he does grasp it sufficiently in the end. In fact, they have an even harder time with his society.
The Judge said:
the motive behind the killing was just unbelievable and unless I missed something important, the events of and immediately after the murder had a plot-hole a mile wide!
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Lust for power (however sublimated) seems believable to me. Out of curiosity, if you could put the plot-hole in spoiler tags, I'd like to know about it. I had various quibbles myself though I didn't feel anything was too major.

For what it's worth, I re-read it awhile ago and this is what I thought (long review short, it's an all-time classic): Asimov's Centennial: The Naked Sun.
 
Finally finished that Wilbur Smith book I got, Storm Tide.

Fast paced pop historical fiction. Found the characters a little lacking, found it simplistic, but it was enjoyable. The character arcs weren’t very believable. 5/10 for me.

Thinking of going back to Gemmell now.
 
Silverheart (1995) Michael Moorcock and Storm Constantine. I picked this up from the honesty box outside Troutmark Books in Cardiff one Sunday a couple of weeks ago. I read a lot of Moorcock back in the day, but this was completely new to me. I had not heard of Constantine before. Apparently she wrote the book around a 40,000 word outline by Moorcock.

Perfectly readable fantasy, but not particularly interesting. There is clearly a bit of Moorcock in here, but it seems quite dilute, and lacks his edge. Maybe I am getting jaded. I rarely pick up this sort of thing de novo any more.
 
J-Sun said:
On the second item, societies as extreme as Earth's and Solaria's will have a very hard time understanding each other. Most people don't even understand their own societies and certainly have a hard time understanding others' so it's not odd at all to me that Baley would have trouble with Solaria, though he does grasp it sufficiently in the end. In fact, they have an even harder time with his society.
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Apart from the agraphobia I didn't feel Baley's cultural environment was all that different to ours and yet I had no problem getting the Solarian culture which is why I found Baley's difficulty with it difficult to accept. Yes we all have difficulties understanding other cultures but Asimov had done a good job of explaining the Solarian culture to the reader sufficient for me to be unsurprsied by all the things that Baley seemed to be surprised by. I just found that a little difficult to accept as reasonable.
 
J-Sun said:
Out of curiosity, if you could put the plot-hole in spoiler tags, I'd like to know about it. I had various quibbles myself though I didn't feel anything was too major.
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The robot has been programmed to hand his arm to Gladia as she reaches a certain state of fury when arguing with her husband, but (a) regardless of Leebig's clever wording, I can't see how it would know the exact moment when Gladia would simply take the arm and use it without thought and (b) surely a robot would understand that handing something heavy to an angry person might be dangerous, if only to the person herself. OK, I can just about cope with that bearing in mind it's had explicit instructions, Gladia might have been at fever pitch for some time, and it might not realise that humans have a capacity for violence.

But she doesn't kill Delmarre immediately. Either he sees what she's about to do, or he's hit more than once because he says "You're going to kill me." which is what the robot repeats ever afterwards. So what is the robot doing during those seconds while Delmarre is seeing his death coming and speaks? Even allowing for it being momentarily conflicted, its reactions must surely be faster than a human's, so why doesn't it react? It's still in the room, it can see that either she's about to attack a person or has already done so, and it's programmed that it can't, by inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, yet it does nothing to save Delmarre -- it doesn't need to have restrained Gladia, though that would be allowed under the first law, since it could have pushed Delamarre out of the way, or taken the blow on itself. At the end, Baley says it happened before the robot could stop her, and if we didn't have Delmarre's words I'd accept that, but since we do, I just don't buy it.

Anyhow, it then sees Delamarre die, Gladia collapse, and it realises it's been instrumental in a human being hurt, so it loses its mind. Fine.

So who puts the arm back on the robot?

I can think of ways around the problem, but as far as I can see it's never addressed as an issue, only the fact that the arm must have been bloodied.
 
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. There's something eerie about books within books: The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte is perhaps the best example. The Land of Laughs is about a man who travels to the home town of his favourite novelist (a children's writer whose books sound like a cross between Dr Seuss and Alice) to write his biography. Things become stranger and stranger, and move from comedy-drama to a small town magic-realist story that reminded me of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.

Overall, it's a good read. It feels slightly underplayed, as the weird events take a long time to appear, and the book takes a massive turn about a third from the end. The actual ending is powerful and ultimately creepy.
 
Toby Frost said:
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. There's something eerie about books within books: The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte is perhaps the best example. The Land of Laughs is about a man who travels to the home town of his favourite novelist (a children's writer whose books sound like a cross between Dr Seuss and Alice) to write his biography. Things become stranger and stranger, and move from comedy-drama to a small town magic-realist story that reminded me of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.

Overall, it's a good read. It feels slightly underplayed, as the weird events take a long time to appear, and the book takes a massive turn about a third from the end. The actual ending is powerful and ultimately creepy.
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TLoL progress from something like a memoir to a mystery to fantasy to horror. Carroll habitually goes low-key, understating rather that pushing the drama. I find in the best of his work I've read I like that approach.
 
Poul Anderson "The Avatar" (1978)
Disappointing. I was bored for lengthy passages. Also, for me, characters that speak an Irish brogue don't read well (usually) in print. Plus (sigh) too much of the book got bogged down in Anderson's wishful thinking on sexual relationships.
However, it's still Poul Anderson....
 
Toby Frost said:
Are the rest of his books good? I don't think I'll forget TLoL soon. I'd love to see what Marshall France's books were like.
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I've read Voice of His Shadow, Bones of the Moon, The Marriage of Sticks and From the Teeth of Angels. I really liked the first, enjoyed the next, was a bit meh about Marriage and felt the last was missing something, that it didn't quite work for me. I've also read a handful of his short stories and there's not one I wouldn't recommend; even the one I wasn't fond of "Mr. Fiddlehead" wasn't bad and "The Sadness of Detail" and "The Panic Hand" are excellent.
 
I've finished 3 of the 5 books of the This corner of the Universe series. They are This Corner of the Universe, No Way to Start a War, and The Wrong Side of Space all by Britt Ringel. This is a pretty good Mil SF series. On the plus side, it's anything but predictable. I keep finding it goes in logical directions, but still directions I didn't count on. For these 3 books we've seen a lot of fleet action. He writes really good battle scenes that remind some of David Weber and for me Weber writes the best battle scenes. Probably more true life, but less enjoyable for me, is the political situation in which this series takes place. Garret Heskan the main character is a patriot, who comes to slowly realize the clay feet of his government, and keeps pondering on the question what to do about it. --- If anything can be done. Or should anything be done?

The next book Loyalty to the Cause threatens to move out of fleet action and more into what I would call personal operations (perhaps machinations?) to right some wrongs. I'm not as eager to move on because of this. So I'll leave the final two for a bit while I read the new book by the author that is my guilty pleasure, Laurence E. Dahmers, entitled Talents and Tyrants, book 2 in the Time-flow series. The opening book was a bit of a disappointment so this book may be the one that makes me change my opinion of Dahmers.

edit: after reading this post I wonder if I'm getting much harder to please. --- If so, this doesn't please me at all.
 
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