It’s more of an evergreen statement. Yes, I do have a section on my bookshelf for his stuff.
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Few weeks ago I read Paperweight (1992), by Stephen Fry, a collection of radio scripts, newspaper essay pieces, and reviews. Erudite and funny, with a lot going over my head. Sometimes I think he was born in the wrong century.
More recently the newest John Scalzi, Head On, sequel to Lock In. Nice future mystery, but I think he often doesn’t differentiate his characters sufficiently, and I get confused as who’s who. But the future science is well thought out, with the problems and society nicely dependent on it.
Then I went back and re-read Scalzi’s first novel, Agent To The Stars. Pretty hilarious, but not without flaws (not really any tension to speak of, and the main characters seem too lacking in obstacles). But it is funny.
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I tots knew guys like that and it was really hard to read the book/watch the movie. I know guys who are really the Boy Scout type who really know their shit in the wild, and then those kinds of dudes who are like, I read a book, I can just kayak anywhere with my bag of rice even though I don’t know the ass end of a compass. It is a tough read.
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Was just watching Babylon 5, and there’s a scene of Ivonova reading a Harlan Ellison book called “working without a net.” I went to look it up, and it’s not real.
So I can tell you what I’m not reading.
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I have never finished a Mieville book. All signs point to me liking them, but something just doesn’t click.
As to what I just read, A Killer’s Mind by Mike Omer. Reads just like some murder mystery cop show. Not bad, but predictable. Worrth what I paid for it. Co-incidentally, Amazon Prime now gives away a book a month from a half dozen they pick and I think that’s what I grabbed last month.
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I read the whole series as a kid, and at that age, they were incredible. As an adult, I don’t want to reread them because I know it wouldn’t be the same.
The S.E. Hinton books (Outsiders, Rumble Fish, That Was Then This Is Now, Taming the Star Runner) were another series I devoured and would love to experience again for the first time, but would hesitate to reread now since I doubt it would have the same feel.
There’s an old saying by Peter Graham that The Golden Age of science fiction is 12. I think it’s unfortunately true and goes well beyond sci-fi.
I read and loved the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as a kid, along with many other high fantasy books, but I don’t think I’ve managed to get through one as an adult. Some modern fantasy, sci-fantasy, or comedy fantasy (M.Y.T.H. Inc. and Discworld!), but not any traditional high fantasy, despite how I used to love it.
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I suppose I should read the sequels now just in case, but I don’t think I’ll be posting any more retro kidlit reviews. I’m not here to crap on other people’s childhoods.
Slightly OT, when the internet matured enough that I could get video files of Star Blazers and watch it again after 25 years, I was pretty afraid it was going to suck. BUT IT DOES NOT 
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Since it’s October, tonight i’ll start my annual tradition of reading Roger Zelazny’s “A Night In The Lonesome October,” his last book. It’s a really fun book, full of the things that made Zelazny great. There’s a chapter for each night in October (plus one introductory chapter), so i’ll just read one per night, or maybe every couple nights i’ll play catch-up and read a few at a time.
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Well, I’m starting off my October by reading Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. Once I get done with that I can return to that Kafka collection, and next I think it’s time to reconsider reading this creepy tome, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. It’s looking more and more timely. (Perhaps it’s time for a new mashup a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)
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Given that g-8ers got Chuck Wendig fired… Now is a good time to buy more Chuck Wendig books.
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Meh.
Fire and Fury was a gossipy read, but it clearly showed that the Trump White House is a shit show of unqualified people and that Trump is not a competent president and more than a bit of an asshole.
In Fear, Woodward is willing to allow Trump’s incompetence to peek through, but it’s never harped upon as it deserves to be and Trump’s racism and bad history with women is not considered important. Shitty things he’s said or accusations against him are glossed over. There is no concern about how this might make him a terrible person, just comments about how these things are affecting him politically.
While the White House is clearly shown as a highly dysfunctional workplace, there is little if any condemnation of the people who work there. There is never any questioning of their aims and goals. (Woodward seems to favor the “globalist”/“free trade” faction, but for all I know this is simply because these are the people he had better access to.)
It would be difficult to give the book a satisfying ending, while the Trump disaster continues, but I thought Woodward’s was terribly weak. Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, who has just quit because he considers Trump too incompetent to defend (I’m simplifying/inferring a bit), regrets not being able to explicitly state his honest opinion of Trump to Trump, “You’re a fucking liar.”
That’s the last sentence of the book, so it’s apparently how Woodward wants to sum up Trump. Even if one doesn’t see Trump as part of the rise of US (and global) fascism, surely something stronger was warranted?
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Now this one, I’d recommend. Nicely detailed account of all of the evidence that points to Russia’s influence on the 2016 election and beyond. It’s very well structured, too. (One thing I left out of my critique above is that Fear doesn’t have much narrative flow, things just happen one after the other.) Most of it I already knew to a certain extent, but it’s good to have it all collected in such a well-organized fashion. I suppose it would never convince most of those who are still in the bag for Trump, but I imagine that’s an impossible dream.
Of course, the book’s primary focus is Russian influence. If you’re not interested in that aspect of the Trump fiasco, then it’s probably not the book for you.
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Uh, no… there’s the Merchant Princes series, which is about travel in parallel universes with different levels of technology, and a business set up to exploit it.
There’s the Laundry Files, which are sort of Cthulhu Mythos meets intelligence community bureaucracy.
There’s Halting State and Rule 34, which are near-future crime novels, no Singularity.
The Saturn’s Children books are set in a post-human setting with AI characters, but IMHO it’s pure space opera.
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ah, but then there’s Case Nightmare Yellow
He does have a new book out, starring Mhari, who’s somehow become "Dame Mhari Murphy, BSc (hons), MBA, FIC, DBE, styled Baroness Karnstein, member of the House of Lords and Chair of the House Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs "
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/10/happy-halloween.html
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I regret to say that I’ve only gotten halfway through the The Clan Corporate/The Merchants’ War.
This might seem a strange objection for the genre, but somehow he puts Miriam Beckstein in too much peril…
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The year : 2015, in an even worse time line than this one.
That may be a bit too much disbelief for me to suspend
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To me they really are, all of them, animated by the various stages of technological singularity. The Laundry series is explicitly about the approaching singularity mediated by Lovecraftian computation. The near-future stuff is similar but at a more realistic tempo of technological development.
In each series he comes at the issue from a different direction, but the worlds he builds are very carefully oriented with respect to it. Saturn’s Children is the closest he comes to imagining a post-singularity future that we can comprehend.
That’s what I got from them, anyway.
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Rereading some old Larry Niven stuff we’ve had on the shelf since the '80s. It’s kind of scary how the science in the stories has gotten out of date. I don’t mind Asimov or Heinlein stories being out of date, but Niven started writing when I was a teenager. Makes me feel old! For example,
In the story, Neutron Star, no one realizes that the extreme gravity gradient (or tide) from a neutron star is strong enough to rip things apart. Today we even have a word for it, spaghettification, but in Niven’s future it is apparently unknown (even by very advanced aliens). Furthermore, in the story, only one neutron star is known. Now we know around a couple of thousand of them, and there are thought to be 100 million (give or take an order of magnitude) in our galaxy alone.
But that’s what happens with science fiction sometimes. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the stories, fortunately. They are charming stories, if you can ignore the old fashioned treatment (or complete lack of treatment) of women.
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I finished this a few months ago, but I forgot to mention it at the time:
The author is an Australian Supreme Court judge whose father was a Korean war veteran. Takes a decidedly non-American perspective on the history of the Korean war.
Very highly recommended.
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This is the intro page, BTW:
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