book update

[jwgh]

Slightly less than a month ago, I asked for your help in deciding what I should read next. This is what I ended up reading:

* Connie Willis's "Uncharted Territory", which got three votes. Entertaining, also contained lots of gender stuff. Not my favorite Willis, but pretty good.

* Ken Macleod's "Cosmonaut Keep", which got two votes and there were some nice comments about Macleod from people who didn't vote for it. This was very good and I think I will try to read it again in the (hopefully not too distant) future; it deserved more sustained attention than I was capable of giving it. Also if I understand correctly there is (or will be) a sequel and it would be a good idea to make sure I understood everything in this book before I read the next.

The book's chapters alternated between a (implied) near future world in which the European union is united under Communist rule, and the Russians make contact with an alien vessel. Information from the aliens accidentally makes its way to a member of the IWWWW (International Workers of the World Wide Web), who defects to the United States, then ends up on a Russian satellite ... The other chapters are in a more distant future on a planet settled (some time in the past) by cosmonauts, in which some humans team up with an intellilgent dinosaur to rediscover the secrets of celestial navigation, more or less. (Hopefully this is not too spoilery.)

* Keiichi Sigsawa's "Kino No Tabi: Book One of The Beautiful World", which got two votes. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I liked it better than the anime (I decided I liked the anime better), and then figuring out why I liked the anime better. There are some aspects of each not present in the other, but to say more would be to spoil certain things for people who have not already seen or read the series. (Which you should do. Both are quite good.)

I mailed this book to paracelsvs, so maybe he will have some comments if he's read it yet.

* Rudy Rucker's "Mad Professor". A bunch of short pieces, many of them collaborations, with some notes at the end. I have a weakness for conceptual science fiction stories, so I maybe liked 'Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation' (itself a collection of six even smaller pieces) or 'Visions of the Metanovel' best; of the relatively straightforward stories, I liked 'Jenna and Me' (about the presidential daughter) a lot, and 'Cobb Wakes Up' is a nice little piece (it's taken from an old draft of 'Realware').

* The July 2007 issue of Asimov's, which got one vote. vardissakheli voted for this because it contained a Michael Swanwick piece, which turned out to be a goofy little riff on Asimov's recent anniversary and made me laugh many times.

Not on the original list, but I read it anyway:

* Austin Grossman's "Soon I Will Be Invincible", a novel with two narrators. The first is Doctor Impossible, a supergenius supervillain who simultaneously plots to take over the world and ponders the question of why, if he's such a genius, he's ended up where he is in life. The second is Fatale, a newly-recruited cyborg superhero. My father got me this book for my birthday; it's quite good and I think cgoldfish in particular would really like it.

This is leading up to another poll, but I will save that for another post.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Two things: The aliens encountered by the Russians were not in a vessel, as such. Let's just say they encountered aliens. Also, the Russian station in question wasn't in Earth orbit, as you sort of implied.

The book has two sequels, which feature the further adventures of the Cosmonauts from the B-plot of Cosmonaut Keep. This is the "Engines of Light" trilogy, but to say why would spoil the first book.

Also, you'll find that pretty much all of his books flip between two parallel stories (sometimes parallel in time, sometimes not, and sometimes the time comparison is meaningless), and, well, he's damned good at it.

Second, Connie Willis as a new collection coming out this September called "The Winds of Marble Arch" which sounds almost like an Agatha Christie title for a Poirot mystery. It'll have some that already appeared, including "Fire Watch," "Even the Queen," and the really brilliant "The Last of the Winnebagos," as well as a bunch of new stuff. 600 page hardcover, so there should be a good bit of new meat there. Also, if you have read "To Say Nothing of the Dog," I suggest you take the time to find and read the referenced work, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men In A Boat." It's a short read, and it's pretty hilarious. It's pretty consistently reported that the two men with whom JKJ went boating were based on his friends, but some reports indicate that the book was based on his honeymoon boat trip on the Thames, while others indicate it was a boat trip with the aforementioned friends (and dog).

[jwgh]

The two parallel stories thing was a little baffling at first, because I was reading the book in short pieces separated by a day or so, so on day 1 I read the first chapter and on day 2 I read the second and was a bit, you know, hang on, I don't remember any of these people ...

I've read 'To Say Nothing Of The Dog' and thought it was hi-larious, and also read a book by Peter Lovesy based on 'Three Men In A Boat' that I also liked, but haven't read the JKJ yet. One of these days ...

More Connie Willis = good.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I read the second volume of the Engines of Light trilogy (I have forgotten what it's called) without reading the first one, and found it somewhat baffling, and also containing one or two too many speeches about the relative advantages of anarcho-libertarian socialism vs. centrally planned authoritarian socialism, or at least I think that was what was going on. Probably if I read Cosmonaut Keep first it would work better.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Heh, the funny thing is that Engines of Light is the less political of his two major series, the other being the "Fall Revolution" series. "Dark Light" and "Engine City" are the other two books in the "Engines of Light" trilogy.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should mention that Jerome K Jerome's works are in the public domain

Gutenberg has him. (http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/j#a173) I also recommend "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow," and I should soon be reading the followup to "Boat," "Three Men on the Bummel" (a term for a bike trip whose only limitation is a return date, evidently). Actually, looking at the linked list, I had no idea he had written so many novels.

Biographies of Jerome are somewhat interesting as he and his generation are the product of some government education initiative for universal education and a dozen years later the lands of England were suddenly flooded with literate nobodies (to the great chagrin of educated somebodies) and so some of JKJ's works were considered to be a new form of low-grade literature to feed the market for all these newly educated folks.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't really take any political speeches in Ken MacLeod books at face value. He loves playing around with political ideologies, and will happily switch to another one in another book, or another chapter.

[cgoldfish.livejournal.com]

i like books!

[jwgh]

I like them too!