October 2022 Reading Thread

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I just finished Tade Thompson's Rosewater, which i enjoyed a lot.

The use of language was quite abrupt but i found i enjoyed Tade's writing style after a short while. I'm not sure whether to read the next book in the series, Insurrection (it's a trilogy), or return to Judge Dredd.

I couldn't resist and went with Dredd vs Death
 
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I just read:
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century - Ed. Orson Scott Card

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There are many 'best of' anthologies that aim to collect the finest short stories of the genre. Many have covered the golden age well and the Hall of Fame books, edited by Robert Silverberg, are semi official 'best of'' anthologies that collect many classic tales up until the start of the Hugo's (i.e. 1964). This volume, edited by Orson Scott Card, is attractive as it includes numerous classics missing from the Hall of Fame volumes, and secondly, because it covers three distinct eras: the golden age, the new wave, and the media generation.

The golden age section includes some great classic stories, including Poul Anderson's Call me Joe, and Robert Heinlein's All You Zombies— . The Heinlein is perhaps the great time travel paradox story, and a challenge to get your head around. Also in this section are a Theodore Sturgeon that I liked (A Saucer of Loneliness), which is unusual as I rarely like his work, and the great old Edmund Hamilton tale, Devolution.

The second section - the new wave - is perhaps the strongest, containing Harlan Ellison's "Repent Harlequin!", Said the Ticktockman, Robert Silverberg's Passengers, and Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, all of which are five star stories. Silverberg's story particularly impresses and is highly recommended. Also in this section are other famous stories that have a lot of merit, though they are not perfect for me. Ursula Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is thoughtful philosophy, but with no plot or characters is not actually a story and the R.A. Lafferty tale (Eurema's Dam) is typically surreal and quietly impressive, but he wrote many much better stories and is therefore an odd choice.

The media generation section contains a few very good stories. George R.R. Martin's Sandkings is superb (his short SF generally is), and the C.J. Cherryh story (Pots) is also a strong entry. However, it must be said that it was a strange choice - in a volume that aspires to gather the finest SF from the entire century - to include six stories from 1985. One gets the impression Card had simply read a lot of work in '85, and selected from that. This odd bias toward the mid-80's lets the volume down rather, given what could have been selected from the hundred years on offer.
 
I am about to start Are You in the House Alone? Growing Up With Gargoyles, Giant Turtles, Valerie Harper, the Cold War, Stephen King & Co-Ed Call Girls: A TV Movie Compendium 1964-1999 (2016) edited by Amanda Reyes, which consists of essays on the subject and reviews of American made-for-television films of the period.
 
I finished Naomi Novik's The Golden Enclaves, the final book in her Scholomance trilogy. I've really enjoyed the series and I thought this was a good conclusion, even if perhaps it wasn't quite as good as the first two books. It does have a dramatic change in setting, having left behind the claustrophobic setting of the first two books and now having the characters hopping from one side of the world to the other and back. I think it does perhaps lose a bit of tension and atmosphere as a result. To start with it's a bit unclear where the plot is going but I thought it did get more compelling as it went along and did a good job of revealing more of the backstory that was hinted at in the first two books. The key plot device here is something that builds upon a lot of the events in the earlier books and does explain a lot of things in retrospect, some of the big revelations here were set up as early as the first chapter of the first book. I think the ending had a bittersweet element to it that worked well, a lot has been achieved but not all the problems in the world have been resolved. El has always been a fun protagonist and I think it's an unusual perspective to be following someone who is trying very hard not to be the villain of the story even though the rest of the world thinks that she should be. I do also like the side characters that El has met along the way, some of whom we see a lot more of in this book (Leisel was an entertaining character here) although some were perhaps sidelined a bit.
Quokka said:
I enjoyed Time and Again by Jack Finney its not action packed but its a pleasant read and it was interesting to learn a little about the Dakota building and 1880s New York.
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There is a sequel From Time to Time which does try to add a bit more plot and jeopardy, which I'm not sure really made for a better book although I did still like the historical details.
 
Bick said:
I’m now starting Allan Quatermain, by H. Rider Haggard.
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Maybe there should be The Great Allan Quatermain Read at Chrons -- a thread for people wanting to read through the whole series in chronological order, taking a year or two to do it.
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See the sidebar to the right here:


Or maybe, come to think of it, reading in publication order would be the way to go. I'm certainly an advocate of reading the Narnian Chronicles in order of publication, not in chronological order.

Yeah, I think I'd go with publication order. In which case, Allan Quatermain is the second book, after King Solomon's Mines, rather than being the final one. But I don't want to get too invested in this idea till we know if there's interest in the Great Read idea.
 
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Extollager said:
Maybe there should be The Great Allan Quatermain Read at Chrons -- a thread for people wanting to read through the whole series in chronological order, taking a year or two to do it.

Or maybe, come to think of it, reading in publication order would be the way to go. I'm certainly an advocate of reading the Narnian Chronicles in order of publication, not in chronological order.

Yeah, I think I'd go with publication order. In which case, Allan Quatermain is the second book, after King Solomon's Mines, rather than being the final one. But I don't want to get too invested in this idea till we know if there's interest in the Great Read idea.
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I certainly prefer to read books in publication order (in the main), and my turning to Allan Quartermain reflects the fact that I read it was the sequel to King Solomon's Mines, which I read a year or two ago. Having said that, I didn't actually know the chronology nor that most of the books are prequels to KSM.

Publication order would appear to be:

King Solomon's Mines (1885)
Allan Quatermain (1887)
Maiwa's Revenge (1888)
Allan's Wife and Other Tales (1889)
Marie (1912)
Child of Storm (1913)
The Holy Flower (1915)
The Ivory Child (1916)
Finished (1917)
The Ancient Allan (1920)
She and Allan (1920)
Heu-heu (1924)
The Treasure of the Lake (1926)
Allan and the Ice-gods (1927)

But this doesn't seem to include some famous cross-over books in Quartermain's world, such as She. And I have She and was planning on reading it soon - do we include them? Also, I would want to read from books, not an electronic screen - finding some of the titles above might be challenging (though I think the project sounds fun). I think this needs a thread - want to start one Extollager?
 
OK -- a thread is launched!

The Great Allan Quatermain Read at Chrons -- Weird Adventures of Rider Haggard's Hunter Hero

This thread is for the discussion of the following 14 books by H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines (1885) Allan Quatermain (1887) Maiwa's Revenge (1888) Allan's Wife and Other Tales (1889) with the stories "Allan's Wife," "A Tale of Three Lions," "Hunter Quatermain's Story," "Long Odds"...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com

I think print on demand editions of a lot of the books are available. What I've done is download many of the books from Project Gutenberg, paste the text to make a Word document, adjusted the print size to suit myself, print the book out, and staple the sheets into several "volumes" for ease of reading.
 
Extollager said:
What I've done is download many of the books from Project Gutenberg, paste the text to make a Word document, adjusted the print size to suit myself, print the book out, and staple the sheets into several "volumes" for ease of reading.
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You could call them "paper-backs"...;)
 
Vince W said:
Just did a quick reread of The Peripheral by William Gibson ahead of the Prime series. Gibson is still one of my favourite authors.

On to Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It’s one of those books I meant to read earlier but then got so hyped I put it off.
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I consumed that one as an audiobook while I was sick with a bad flu around six years ago.
Not sure if that improved the experience or not, but it definitely felt surreal.
 
Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold. Cute, mildly entertaining and short enough to finish in one evening.
 
Bick said:
I just read:
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century - Ed. Orson Scott Card
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I've been on an SF short story binge & saw this volume just the other day on a list of the best SF anthologies. I've read most of the titles you mention here. Interesting about the focus on stories from 1985; sorta weakened my need to pick up a copy of the book.
 
I've finished Home Run by Nathan Lowell, A Smuggler's Tale. This is the last of a trilogy. I've read them all and I can't say that they got better. I struggled to finish Home Run. About the last third of the book had the two main characters getting around to making the decision that you knew they were going to make early in the book before "life got in the way." What I really liked about this book is that the scale was more realistic. It wasn't "Two heroes who hold the fate of the galaxy in their hands," level. It was about the life and life decisions of two young women with some significant advantages in life situations and how they make their own way. Pretty okay on that level. The flip side is probably also evident, the conflict in the book is usually not gripping. At the end of this book it's mostly two people talking as they explore the reality gap between what's expected of them and what they want for themselves.

Series rating: low 4 stars
Home Run: 3 stars.

Next up I believe will be Firewall by Andrew Watts.
 
I have started Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation (2018; new preface, 2020) by Terri Favro. It's partly a memoir about the author's father, who worked on one of the first robots in industry and tinkered with automated devices at home, and partly a cultural history of the reality and fantasy of computers and robots. The fact that the author thinks it needs a new preface two years after the first edition reveals the pace of technological change, I suppose. The author calls folks born between 1954 and 1962 (including herself and your humble reviewer) Generation Jones* and claims we are the ones most struggling to adapt to the digital world but also used to technological change (unlike older folks without that experience, and younger folks born with this computer stuff.) I detect a couple of errors in her discussion of science fiction already (claiming Astounding was a Gernsback publication, stating that Isaac Asimov took his first story to John W. Campbell at Amazing, and thinking that the story "I, Robot" by "Eando Binder" [the brothers E and O Binder; story not to be confused with the Asimov collection of the same name] was a comic book) so I hope the rest is more accurate.

*Generation Jones - Wikipedia
 
Those sound like pretty significant goofs, sort of like saying Newton developed the theory of relativity. Either she relied on sloppy references or gambled on educated guesswork.
 
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