Heavy serious slog: “The Viking Age, Volume 1” by Paul B. Du Chaillu, published 1889.
For lighter reading: ‘The Godzilla FAQ’ by Paul Simpson, published 2015.
I read through every Discworld novel I could get via my library app while I was in Ukraine in 2021. This turned out to be about 30 of them. The ones which were my favorites before are still basically my favorites, but I have a new context and appreciation for them now.
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I love those books. I have them all. I miss Sir Terry Pratchett. I still need to make the fish recipe in Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook that he recommended to me.
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Two years later…
I didn’t rush into reading them and finished the last book last month. The first four books brought The Duchy of Grand Fenwick into the 20th century, starting with them declaring war on the United States, entering the space race, conquering Wall Street and solving the world energy crisis in the 1970s. The last book includes an attestation from the Count of Mountjoy that the story is “as accurate as those in any other history I have read.”
Book number five, “Beware of the Mouse”, takes place in the 15th century. It was really interesting seeing the words that were in use long ago: lackaday, casque, houppelande and enough others that I brought back my tradition of writing down the words I don’t know so I can look them up.
It provides a lot of history about Grand Fenwick, but it’s not specifically about the founding of the country. It’s set 80 years after at a time when a new terror weapon threatens the Duchy’s very existence since their weapon of choice is severely outdated.
Leonard Wibberley wrote a lot of different series, maybe somewhere around 70 books in all. Another I might pick up is “Flint’s Island: The Lost Sequel to Treasure Island”.
Now that sounds interesting! I always loved reading Treasure Island when I was young.
So while I was on vacation I reread big swathes of the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds. It’s a Space Opera series that *follows the rules. *
No FTL. (This is cheated slightly, with the caveat that messing with FTL is a really bad idea if you like your world to make sense.) This means there’s some dramatic chase sequences that take place over years of travel time.
The characters are key which also means the storytelling can break expectations a bit. Characters can be killed offscreen. The “big fight scene” might be a coupe paragraphs of summary if it means less time for the big space opera amazing stuff happening.
It is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. The “big threats” to the setting potentially destroy humanity… but even then people make lives around the chaos.
Aliens are truly alien. There’s human offshoots like conjoiners (a consensual hive-mind of cybernetics; later conjoiners have features like colored head fringes to allow heat dispersal) and hyperpigs (pigs uplifted a bit) but they’re human. The aliens are weird and unknowable, and often long dead.
It’s sprawling. The trilogy I read covers a couple hundred years (not counting some flashbacks) but that’s a tiny fraction of the setting. The bits that have been actively written about cover several hundred years from a near-future settled solar system to a distant future where humanity survives in fragmented enclaves.
Good series. The main series is a trilogy but there’s another trilogy set in the near past and a new trilogy incoming (which spurred this reread).
I just picked up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. It takes place during the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. It’s also the story that inspired part of the setting of Firefly, specifically, the Browncoats fighting their losing battle for independence.
I’ll read it later because I’ve started on the first of the three Japanese light novels in the A Mysterious Job Called Oda Nobunaga series. It’s set in some kind of feudal society where part of becoming an adult is going to a temple to learn what your job will be. It could be something like Fighter, Archer, Baker or Farmer. Whichever it is, you get some boosts in your abilities from it.
The brother of a viscount goes to his ceremony, but instead of getting one of the usual jobs, he gets one that no one has ever heard of before: “Oda Nobunaga”. It doesn’t make sense and he gets teased by his big brother. But when big bro viscount sends him on a scut work mission, he starts hearing a voice speaking to him inside his head, giving him tips on military strategy…
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote a review on an anime series four years ago that was based partly on Oda’s place in Japan’s history. You can read about it over in the TV show reviews topic, as well as a similar anime series that draws inspiration from him.
That reminds me. I need to dig out a third anime series that draws inspiration from him but also draws inspiration from Space Battleship Yamamoto, a.k.a., StarBlazers.
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Volume 1 of “Neon Genesis Evangelion: Anima”, set 3 years after the events of the TV series. Interesting read so far.
I’m going to soon read Dragon’s Egg and the sequel Starquake as the latter as not available for a while.
Both are ‘hard’ sci-fi with a sweeping high concept: an expedition to study a rogue neutron star discovers intelligent life on the star that is microscopic and lives at an incredibly fast speed.
It’s a great novel and I think I read it every 10-15 years or so. I was probably a bit too young the first time. It’s an engrossing story of humanity and the alien race intertwined. A lot about the common science fiction trope of the ethics of gifting a young race with a ton of technology. It’s all weird as the young race is catching up on its own.
However, for a 1980 book it’s strangely dated in the early chapters, it assumes a Soviet Union that remained viable and that computers would, essentially, not be effectively nearly free compute. It made reading the first chapter or two tough: luckily the heart of the book, as I remember, is the alien race who are fascinating in many ways.
Bonus: I think I have a friend-of-a-friend relationship with the author, as I believe a friend was a student of the author at one point.
I read The Phoenix Project while on vacation last week. It enraged me so much due to feeling so familiar that I nearly threw my iPad overboard.
Im starting a what im almost sure is a smut book because 3 different friends have asked me to read it.
its calle " a court of roses and thorns". I just want to read my high fantasys/sci-fi pulp not pulp smut lol
im almost sure is a smut book
The second book in that series, according to Wikipedia:
A Court of Mist and Fury was tied for the tenth-most banned and challenged book in the United States due to being considered sexually explicit.
So, uh…
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God. My friends are weird.
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For the record, I’d forgetten that over an eighth of this book is effectively the prologue. There’s a setup to explain the astrophysics that has some ties to the larger plot, but….
I could note that there’s something relevant about a human relationship being explored as the later sections cover several alien relationships and the whole book intertwines human and alien affairs, but it’s still weird.
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I had the same reaction seeing a reference to MS-DOS 8.3 file names in the third ‘‘Crystal Singer’’ book. For a writer like Anne McCaffrey, who could envision FTL travel, humans and reptilian animals having telepathic bonds, and spores that grant unique abilities to humans, seeing it was a reminder that sometimes we have limitations we can’t see past but should be able to.
To be fair, X.3 is still the standard, even if X.X or even X is possible.
dir /x FTW
So for what is probably my last post on Dragon’s Egg I finished rereading it and managed to reread the sequel Starquake.
So Dragon’s Egg has some of the issues you’d expect with a science fiction novel from 1980, but importantly it’s really trying to tell a dramatic story akin to 2001 but more intelligible. It’s also hard sci-fi: so hard the reader risks cutting themselves. There is an appendix providing references and scientific explanations of much of the physics involved.
I do think Dragon’s Egg is worth reading if you want an optimistic story of adventure. It cuts between the humans (who are nonviolent, logical, scientists that mostly act in a sane and sensible way) and the aliens they discover. The aliens are one of the few aliens in science fiction that feel truly inhuman yet relatable. They live at roughly a million times rate of speed to us, so the exploratory ship’s mapping efforts take a few hours and cover the equivalent of centuries of development of the alien race. They’re the real stars, but in an epic sense as we see key moments of learning basics of tool use, agriculture, mathematics, up through a sort of Roman Empire analog. They speed run (even without the million to one thing) as they’re a pretty unified population.
The Prime Dir3ctive isn’t a thing here. Humanity gladly shares their local library with the creatures they find, even if they jump past us in many fields. They reciprocate by filling the library crystals (because it’s sci-fi of an era where everything used crystals II guess: they’re also stored offline and must be inserted in readers to be accessed.) albeit with much of the data encrypted.
It’s an entertaining story of how distant people that can’t directly interact discover how their histories are intertwined. There’s some amazing coincidences.
On to Starquake…
Before getting to the content of the book, this is literally the worst ebook conversion I have ever read. It’s presumably an OCR translation from the printed book. Actually, there’s a scan of the cover a page behind the ebook cover and it was a scan from a double rerelease of both books. The scanned cover even has a price tag!
The ebook has many typos. Page breaks are not fixed up properly, so paragraphs just end mid sentence. Headers are unstyled and poorly spaced. Several images from the appendices are missing.
The book is… weird. The first novel is sort of a mix of a cerebral science fiction story mixed with a few short vignettes that almost have a sort of Conan-ish vibe. The second hews closer to a trope that was perhaps not so played out in 1985: the Disaster Movie writ large. Starquake takes inspiration from movies like The Towering Inferno raised to an entire world collapsing. It has the small band of named plucky survivors (drawn from the aliens) with stereotypes you might expect like the Entertainer that has Secret Depths, the Engineer that wants to fix everything, the Outsider/criminal.
Charitably, this was inspired as much by Lucifer’s Hammer and similar: a 1978 novel of the world destroyed by a comet.
The author got deeply into the aliens, the Cheela, and this continues here. A big difference is in the previous boom we rarely had more than a chapter or two with a character as so much of the book was led by the human exploratory efforts with individual Cheela only living 15 minutes or so from our point of view. This boom centers much more closely on the Cheela survivors, who of course end up intertwined with the humans.
There’s a surprising amount of ‘adult’ Content. The plucky Entertainer I mentioned earlier? She’s female and apparently has huge eye flaps that distract male Cheela. This comes up very often. The Cheela of the previous book have a very open society with gender equality and no real concept or basis for monogamy: they’re egg layers with a communal clan-based hatchery as their way.
Anyway, there’s a lot of characters assuming the entertainer (who ends up a major part of saving the world, even if things go wrong) is just a bunch of big eye flaps. Draw your own analogies.
For the record, the Cheela are small oval sacks of matter. They’re around 5mm across weigh several hundred pounds. The physics are explained in extreme detail.
Edit: Apparently the ebook was reported as so bad by others and has been removed from sale. Vindication of a petty sort!
A bit late on the reply, but I’m actually reading another series by the same author and it is completely smut free.
Having said that, I recently saw an article suggesting who some of the lead characters should be for the TV adaptation of the “Court of Thorns and Roses” series. Apparently they are just doing casting for it now.
Hulu are obviously trying to vie with HBO for smutty fantasy 
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Not this one.
Bills itself as a factual account of Pearl Harbor including an interview with the author’s grandfather who was there, but has German planes on the cover bombing Pearl Harbor.