Our reads December 2018

Another month,another pile of books. Tell us what you are reading.

Dusty's TBR for December
SF/F reads
Becky Chambers - A Closed and Common Orbit ✔
Timothy Zahn - Judgment at Proteus ✔
Laura Ann Gilman - Pack of Lies ✔
Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow ✔
Amanda Stevens - The Sinner ✔
from other genres
Sjowall & Wahloo - The Locked Room ✔
Patricia Wentworth - The Grey Mask ✔

These reads will finally finish off my 12x12 on LT,and my Pick N' Mix over on Worlds Without End.Cutting it very fine this year,I'm usually done by mid October and just enjoy rereads,fluffy stuff and guilty pleasures for the last part of the year. Been a tough year in RL,and I will have to likely cut down my reading challenges next year.It seems the years when I read 200 or more books a year are well and truly gone,I will barely reach 160 this year :0(

>2 dustydigger: I just made my target of 140, with a month to go.

I'm still reading Jerusalem by Alan Moore (I've been reading it for a month and a half) and I have conflicted feelings about it: while I think it's great and is on a scale that I've seen very infrequently (or possibly never) in other books I've read, I somehow wonder if it's great enough to justify all the time spent reading it (I would usually read 5 or 6 books in a month and a half, and I guess I'll still need at least one week at the minimum to finish it).

Just finished Moonrise and debating on what to read next...

Still working on The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton.

Started The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson....

Now reading Scienceville & Other Lost Worlds.

Currently reading The Second Ship which, whilst not particularly innovative, is still fun reading.

Currently reading The Wrong Stars and will also read The Stars are Legion this month...I may even make a dent in Cibola Burn!

I'm just a tiny bit into Revenant Gun, the final Machineries of Empire book. It's interesting; I really bounced off the first one (Ninefox Gambit), but read the sequel, Raven Stratagem, when it was short-listed for the Hugo, and ended up enjoying it a lot. This one I'm liking even more so far, which makes me think I should reread the first one now that I understand the world and characters better.

About 75% through Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's not what I expected, but a good read all the same.

I am still working through The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Guin. I am currently in the middle of The Farthest Shore, and I think I like it even better than the first two, so far. I also picked up The Lathe of Heaven in a bookstore last night, so I am going to have to try to squeeze that one in sometime soon as well.

I'm reading Osiris, a dystopian SF thriller that is a bit better than the usual fare in this genre.

Getting near the end of Lavinia. This historical fiction tale has fully engaged my attention.

Also about 1/4 of the way through Up the Walls of the World, which is very unique. I am enjoying it greatly.

Had meant to start on Dark Matter a couple of days ago but the UKLG story has pre-empted that. Likely will get going on it tonight.

I put everything aside today,including housework or watching TV to finish Amanda Stevens The Sinner. This fifth episode of the Graveyard Queen was the most eerie and scary book in the series,very exciting and gripping. Cant wait to get on with the final book in the saga.
That made 79/80 of my Pick N Mix challenge,only A Closed and Common Orbit left to read for it. I have started it am about 40 pages in and am really enjoying it,though I know several members of this group were left a bit cold by it.

>16 dustydigger: I actually liked A Closed and Common Orbit slightly better than I liked Record of a Spaceborn Few.

>16 dustydigger: A Closed and Common Orbit was fine. It was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet that was quite unenjoyable for me.

A Closed and Common Orbit is the clear best of the three Galactic Commons novels for me. (The first and third did little for me, but the second made me tear up!)

Added Never Stop edited by Emmi Itäranta to my reading rotation. Billed as a mix of Finnish speculative fiction.

Decided last night to pick up Marune: Alastor 933, which I think I last read way back in the 1980s, perhaps even earlier. My copy is a 1978 paperback and I suspect I bought it new (and it still looks new too). Vance is a singular talent but I find him a bit hit and miss.A reread of The Star King a few years ago was disappointing because of the crap plotting.

Finished The Zap Gun. Not Philip K. Dick's best novel, but still fun. I can't improve on Randy Stafford's review on this site. Not sure what to read next. TV Choice probably.

Just started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.

Finished The Chaos by Hopkinson, The El Dorado Adventure (not SF but retro adventure), and The Alternative Detective (not SF, but associational). About to start A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.

YAY! Amanda Stevens enjoyably spooky and eerie The Sinner,#5 in the Graveyard Queen series completed my Pick N' Mix challenge on WWEnd,80/80 books.I'm at least 25 books down on last year's spec fic reads.:0(
I started the year confident that I could read all 18 books to complete my marathon march through the Hugo and Nebula award winners,but all the real life issues were a major obstacle,and I still have 8 left to read.Oh well,not too many,I should finish by the summer.Then I go on to complete the Locus award winners, another 10 booksprobably in 2020.lol.
Cant resist working my way through one of WWEnd's lists!

>25 dustydigger: Congrats, Dusty! I am only doing half that many Pick & Mix books but expect to finish the 40th title tonight, Up the Walls of the World. In total this year, I am doing six separate WWE challenges with no overlaps for a total of 92 books. With 7 titles to go and three weeks remaining, I might not get them all in. It's fun to try though.

Next up for me is the 500+ page Six Moon Dance by Sherri S. Tepper... I would likely have an easier time of it if I picked thinner books! Or if I didn't have to work so much...

I just finished reading Boneshaker at my daughter's insistence. It was all right, but I don't think I enjoyed it as much as she did.

Now I can pivot to my recently-arrived LTER item Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea.

>27 paradoxosalpha: Being a Seattle-area resident, I was rather stoked to read Boneshaker a few years ago. Unfortunately, it disappointed... :-/

Yeah, I never understood the hype around Boneshaker. It felt like she was ticking off boxes to please steampunk fans who care more about attributes than fiction.

Still slugging my way through The Dreaming Stars because too many things are due back at the library for it to get more than 1/3 of my attention.

>28 ScoLgo:, >29 anglemark:

Steampunk seems like a sub-genre that leans toward fan service rather than literary artistry anyhow, I think. So I wasn't surprised to see that. I like the fact that it has helped to corrode stereotypes favoring medieval levels of technology in fantasy and "advanced" technology in science fiction, but when "steampunk" per se is what's on offer, I haven't been very impressed.

Going for a quick read with Muse of Fire by John Scalzi.

Greetings! I don't read a lot of science fiction, though I do enjoy keeping up with this thread each month. At any rate, tonight I've dipped into the genre by starting The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny.

It's a fun ACE edition from 1966 with cover art by Kelly Freas, in case anybody cares about such details.

Finished Muse of Fire. Liked it but could do with some editing.

Next up is The Dispatcher by John Scalzi.

>33 rocketjk: - Co-incidentally I have Fredric Brown's Martians Go home coming up next month,with the Frank Kelly Freas iconic little green man looking very glum on the front of the Astounding cover.
Yeah,the Dream Master cover is good,very cool.
And of course the MAD magazine! This has brought back fond memories of reading the mag way back in the early 60s.The humour tickled my teenage funny bone,though I'm not sure what I would think of it now.lol.
I love 60s cover art.Since reading your post I have spent well over an hour nostalgically browsing old covers on Pinterest. But Jim Burns and in particular Michael Whelan are still my personal favourite artists.Perhaps thought a bit old fashioned now,but I love their sheer technical skill,blended with a sort of exotic romanticism..
Dont you just love Pinterest? you can browse a huge variety of art there.I get submerged there and hate having to come back out,hours later!

>35 dustydigger: Absolutely. Those old covers are cool. They add a certain air of romance and imagination to the books themselves. This sort of thing is one of the big reasons I will always prefer paper books to electronic reading formats. Over on the mystery novel side of things, I recently read a murder mystery called The Hangman's Whip, by Mignon G. Eberhard. The cover on that one was by another pulp art legend, Rudolph Belarski. I am far from an expert in any of this, by the way. But whenever I happen to read something off my pulp fiction shelves, I always look to see if I can find out who the cover artist is. The cover in question can be seen on post #103 of my 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/281080.

By the way, those old MAD Magazines hold up quite well. I spent some time paging through a stack of them that I came upon relatively recently. I owned a used bookstore for about 7 1/2 years, just sold it a few months back, and you would be amazed at the items people sometimes brought in for store credit. Not necessarily particularly valuable (although sometimes, yes). The MAD Magazines weren't. But artifacts of historical interest? Oh, yes.

Just started The Waterdancer's World by L Timmel Duchamp, who is an excellent sf writer. I'd even go so far as to say her short story, 'The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.', is one of the best stories the genre has produced.

I read and watched Radio Free Albemuth. The book's barely adequate considered as a literary work, but raw and real; it was a posthumous publication, so it's unlikely PKD would've approved it coming out as it is. The film made from it is nowhere near the shambles I'd been led to believe it was. It's free with Prime if anyone's moved to find out.

Both things...book from 1985, film from 2014...seem eerily prescient about today's world.

I finished Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson the other day. Fascinating and well-written, as you would expect of this author, and full of political, social, and economic speculation. Science fiction is known for asking, "What if...?" and this book does that in a big way. It also asks that question of a non-Western country, which is interesting in its own right. The title might seem misleading, with a significant portion of the book taking place on Earth and not on the Moon, but the internal logic of the story supports this, so it wasn't a problem for me. Those part on the Moon came across as plausible, and the Moon came across as a real place, a landscape, and not a mere stage on which events played out. I find speculative economics, sociology, and related subjects in fiction fascinating, so the fact there is a lot of that going on was a pleasure for this reader. As in all things... YMMV.

Next up: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Finished The Dispatcher by John Scalzi. Liked it.

>33 rocketjk: I loved the Zelazny books I've read. There's really something about his writing style that is special and resonates with me (and a lot of other people, apparently :) I'd be glad to read what you think about The dream master.

>39 ThomasWatson: Thanks for the review! It seems that Red Moon ticks a lot of the boxes that made me like Red Mars and it's sequels so much. It's been a long time since I've read any KSR, maybe I should try to read this one soon.

I have been struggling through Issac Asimov's The Stars, like Dust... The story starts great with the hero locked in a school dormitory room where lights go out, communications are dead and he discovers a small radiation bomb ticking away. It grabbed my attention immediately... but then the story soon went downhill and I am not sure I can finish it. the story is fractured with no real flow to it IMHO.

I looked at some of the comments though and I laughed to myself. They said the writing was dated...Come on! Give me a break... it was written in 1950 almost 70 years ago... it could hardly stay current, could it. I would like to see how someone writing today would not be dated in 2090. You should take the language and style for the time it was written, which in this case was fear of the atomic bomb in the 1950's. Some of the most interesting stories on the subject were written in the 1950-1965. Alas Babylon written in 1959 which paints a totally unreal picture of an atomic bomb attack on the USA is still worth reading despite being dated. Philip Wylie with Triumph written 1963 is a great book addressing life in a fallout shelter as well as race relations along with Tomorrow written 1953 discussing civil defense differences between two cities one prepared and another not prepared for an atomic war.

All of these books are "dated" but they have good stories and reflect the attitudes of the times.

Unfortunately others also label the book as being "juvenile" as if that is a hard criticism.... Heinlein wrote juvenile novels during that era of writing and I still like them better than his later, more adult writing.

No, this novel does not fail because of being dated or juvenile... it is just a not well written story IMHO.

>43 Lynxear: I think Pebble in the Sky is the only good Empire novel. To be honest, I don't think Asimov ever really figured out how to write a novel on a consistent basis. Many of his early ones were actually fix-ups (like Foundation) and many of his later ones read like fix-ups (Forward the Foundation). There are some exceptions, like The Caves of Steel and Nemesis, but many are pretty poorly plotted.

>42 chlorine: If you enjoyed his Mars trilogy, you'll probably like this one. I'd say the same about New York 2140.

>43 Lynxear: I dont mind if 50s books are dated,as they are set at the time I was a child,I'm right at home! lol
I just tell myself that the books are set in an alternate universe where perhaps some tech was never discovered.
If people want to complain about reading dated books,we would never read anything now from the 20th century - and certainly not Dicken's or Shakespeare! :0)
True,a lot of 50s books can be poorly written,but life was hard for an author then,struggling to scratch a living,and editing and fine tuning their work was often a luxury beyond their reach
That looming shadow of world destruction was always there though,and it did help to give serious edge to the books.
I have had a lovely time the last couple of years reading the Winston Classics juveniles series from the 50s and will happily continue doing so in 2019. I will be adding a couple of Asimov's Lucky Starr series to my list :0)

My read today is a review-writing skim of Side Life by Steve Toutonghi. Lovely way to explore the inner life of a young tech superstar-turned-failure in a science-fictional adventure. Good stuff.

>44 Stevil2001: There are a few Asimov books that I liked from early reading that I have not necessarily added to my library here. I liked most of his robotic series. I, Robot was as juvenile as you could get in this book of short stories. But it is here that he outlines his famous three laws of robotics and then shows how even these seemingly rock solid laws can fall apart. My favourite short story in that book was "Little Lost Robot". The movie starring Will Smith was a travesty stealing the name of the book only. Smith did it again when he stole the title from a Richard Matheson classic I Am Legend.

Caves of Steel was ok but I liked Robots of Dawn and The Naked Sun. The relationship between Detective Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw was great and I often thought this would have made a great "buddy movie".

>46 dustydigger: Yes, I lived through that time as well and it was a pretty scary time with the progression of bigger bombs from atomic to nuclear being set off during the cold war of the 1950's to beginning of the 1970's.

I lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada during the Cuban missile crisis. We really thought war between Russia and America would happen and we would be the battlefield (the feeling still exists today). I was in Junior High School then. We had a cottage in north western Ontario and I remember our family plans to escape the big city and go to this cottage. I remember air raid drills where the student population was marshaled into a tunnel between two adjoining schools (imagine 500 students, no food, no water, no filtered air). I also remember a drill where they tested to see if we could get home from school in 15 minutes (I lived 1 mile from school and went to/fro on a bicycle). A neighbour dug a one room "bomb shelter" in his back yard later making a rock garden of it.

All this sounds pretty stupid now but back then it was all we had and it was serious stuff.

Wrote my review of the 4.5* delight that was Side Life by Steve Toutonghi.

>43 Lynxear:, >46 dustydigger:. I read On the Beach a few weeks ago and was surprised how well it held up for a novel of that vintage. I found it more readable than Alas Babylon.

I'm reading Sleeping Giants now, which is an interesting contrast.

>43 Lynxear: I really like I, Robot, it's a great book. But it's not a novel, and that's part of the reason why it works.

>50 vwinsloe: I've read On the Beach several times, and I like it more each time. There's something in the quiet dignity of how it ends that speaks to me more as I age; last time I read it I teared up at the end. I taught it to undergraduates, and though I don't think they liked it as much as I did, they did seem to get something out of it.

Some other books written in the shadow of the bomb in the 50s that still are,IMO, excellent reads are Clifford SimakCity,Leigh Brackett The Long Tomorrow and Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz

Becky Chambers A Closed and Common Orbitwas a really enjoyable read.with empathetic characters and themes of identity and friendship.
I'm now reading The Creeping Shadow and Judgment at Proteus and having a fun time preparing next years reading lists! lol.As usual I will post it nearer the end of December

>51 Stevil2001: I have just recently discovered Nevil Shute and have read On the Beach and liked it very much but I wondered, in real life, if it could be as quietly submissive in real life waiting for the end like that. There seemed to be no attempt to avoid the inevitable.

I have also read A Town like Alice and loved that WWII romance novel. Normally I am not drawn to such novels but Shute really did it well.

>50 vwinsloe: I read Alas Babylon in the late 1960's. Once I got passed the fact that radioactive fallout was not an issue in the story I thought the story was decent.

>52 dustydigger: I read A Canticle for Leibowitz decades ago and did like it... I will keep my eye out for the other two books you mention.

>54 Lynxear: I've never read any of Shute's other work. When I taught On the Beach, one of my students surprised me by having read a lot of it; it sounded like the kind of stuff I might like.

Just dropping back in to say that I enjoyed Zelazny's The Dream Master. I found it to be thought-provoking, well written and effectively suspenseful.

Going through Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor at the moment, it starts... alright I guess, but I don't think I will be going on with the rest of the series.

>54 Lynxear:
>55 Stevil2001: Round the Bend

>58 rshart3: Thank you... I think I will read all novels that he has written as I find them in used bookstores. I like his style of writing

I'm due to start Project Barrier by Daniel F. Galouye. I've got no idea what to expect from it.

>58 rshart3:. I'll have to check that out. I am another big fan of A Town Like Alice.

A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe awaits me on the Kindle. I am hell bent for leather to finish The Dreaming Stars, too, and then I've got The Psychology of Time Travel to review for the publisher.

Nevil Shute had a very varied range of topics,On the Beach being untypical in being classed as SF,but he always wrote with respect,compassion and sympathy for the ordinary man,whom he always showed was quietly,stoically brave and honourable,and stubborn in holding to what is right.
Trustee from the Toolroomwas a fun read in particular

Nevil Shute wrote in a wide variety of genres,and On the Beach was a bit untypical of his normaloutput. Shute admired the ordinary man in the street,who quietly and unheroically got on with life,showing a stubborn quiet integrity and bravery when forced into difficult or extraordinary circumstances. You can always root for a Shute hero,no modern requirement for murky motives and morals,so the books are classed as very old-fashioned,but I find his books very enjoyable comfort reads.
Lighter than On the Beach or A Town Like Alice.his final novel Trustee from the Toolroom is a quaint tale of a staid engineer who sets off from England to retrieve hidden diamonds in a yacht which sunk in the South Seas. The majority is taken up with just how difficult just getting somewhere was in those early days before package holidays and ubiquitous air travel. Our intrepid hero will travel by many means of transport to reach his destination,meeting a lot of fun characters on the way.I thought it was delightful!

I started on Ninefox Gambit but the first chapter didn't do much for me. I always bristle at books that throw into the middle of a bunch of jargon and world details without enough context to make sense of it. That's how I felt with the first chapter. I need to knock out a book I got from the Early Reviewer's list and then I might come back to this Ninefox Gambit.

>56 rocketjk: Thanks for the feedback! I've added The Dream Master to my wishlist. :)

>64 dustydigger: I'm a relative latecomer to Mr Shute's work so thank you for the recommendation. I've just requested Trustee from the Toolroom from my local library.

Have you read Pied Piper?

Whatever else this book is it's military SF treat it a little bit simplistically to start and you'll do better...at least that's what I did!

Still pecking away at KSR's New York: 2140 {gets a lot better as you read further into the book} but downloaded Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama on Hoopla after reading posts here {again} and on the net about Oumuamua, the interstellar object that dropped by the Solar System. I thought I had read Clarke's book back in elementary school but I am enjoying the read as if the first time since I don't recognize a lot of the story. Great read, perfect amount of detail for me & science concepts you can pretty much trust.

I finished it! I finished it! My review of The Dreaming Stars is up at last. I liked it better than the first book, and like the first book better than I did before I read this one.

The Slynx for tomorrow's book group. Her writing is very evokative,and the plot had some interesting ideas, but im so over dystopia; everything sounds like its happening here.

>64 dustydigger: >67 rhian_of_oz: If you like Shute, you might consider Nicholas Monsarrat. He's best known for The Cruel Sea, but his novels cover a variety of genres, including one science fiction one.

>69 DugsBooks: Started on Rama II and noted immediately a change in style for the dual author novel. Not as easygoing and the "flow" {for me at least} is not as smooth but an interesting novel none the less. The e- edition I am reading {Clarke would love that I am sure} has a great introduction by Clarke explaining the continuation of the Rama series which , he says, was not conceived as a trilogy but a stand alone.

I recently finished reading Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction and found it fascinating and very well-done. Paints interesting and unflinching portraits of Campbell and the trio of authors who figured so prominently in his heyday as an editor. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in the history of science fiction.

>74 ThomasWatson: Sounds interesting, I remember reading somewhere that Hubbard had a continuous roll of paper hung on a wall that fed through to his typewriter so he could write stories faster without having to insert new pages. This increased his income/time ratio.

A pound of paper by John Baxter, which I picked up simply as another book about book-maniacs, turns out to contain a very entertaining section about Australian (mostly, although he eventually visits the US and Europe) sf fandom in the 60s/70s--a picture not that different, one imagines, from such groups anywhere.

Alright, I know I'm late to the party on this one, which is a pretty common occurrence for me. I just read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Now, let me preface this by saying that I am just starting to read Science Fiction, and I have read almost no "Hard" SF. But anyway, I'd noticed that people in this thread seemed positive but maybe a little underwhelmed by this book. Now, maybe I just remember the lukewarm comments about this book, or maybe people were happy with this book, but didn't think it was quite deserving of all the accolades that were heaped upon it.

But the point is, as I started this book, I wondered if it would be slow, dull, or too technical. Instead I found a book that was interesting and I was able to fly through it. So I guess what I am trying to ask is, do you folks consider this to be a particularly strong example of hard SF, or do I need to start sorting through the piles of fiction belonging to this sub-genre in order to find the next book that captures my interest the way The Three-Body Problem did?

I thought the beginning of it was a perfect start, and was hoping for more history. Instead I got a lot of physics that I just didn't understand, and didn't finish it. I think its well written, but for other minds than mine. And yes its an example of hard sci fi

>75 DugsBooks: One of a great many assertions Hubbard made about his own life, many of which were probably fabrications that he may or may not have believed himself. He was, you might say, over-fond of embellishment.

I recently finished Body of glass by Marge Pierce which was an interesting but uneven read. Now I've completely changed tone by starting Captain Vorpatril's alliance.

>78 cindydavid4: I don't know how far you into the book you read, but it does double back to the 1970s timeline several times during the novel. Though it mostly focuses on the Red Coast Base. I agree with you, in that after reading the first section, I thought there was going to be a lot more about Chinese history during the cultural revolution and after. I was a history major in college, so I was excited about that...and it didn't really stay with the history for that for long. With the way the government in China manages media, I wonder if the author might've had to be particularly careful in how he depicted Chinese history...even though a lot had changed there since the 1960s and 70s.

I'm no physics expert either, so there were parts of that that went over my head as well, but I did feel like things were described in such a way that I understood the significance of what was being described, even if I might not be able to completely wrap my brain around the science.

I finished the book, and I really enjoyed it. But I'll certainly concede that I enjoyed the final third or so of the book less than the earlier portion. From about the Panama Canal portion on, it just felt like a lot of the air had been let out of the tires, but I think part of that was because much of the mystery element had been revealed, and the rest just dealt with resolving the plot, and maybe setting up the next couple of books in the trilogy.

Considering the activities of the current Chinese government in terms of hammering high profile celebrities for tax evasion and going old-school Commie on the Uyghur population caution is probably in order.

>77 Dr_Flanders: >78 cindydavid4: >81 Dr_Flanders: >82 Shrike58: I recently read the Three-body problem and soon after starting watching the Andromeda SF series again on Roku. I was surprised when on an early episode they explained a system they could not travel through because it had 3 suns and the gravity variances made their faster than light calculations too difficult.

My review of the sci fi thriller Europe at Dawn is up. Last in the Fractured Europe Sequence by Dave Hutchinson, kind of bleak, but so enfoldingly complex and deeply interconnectedly detailed that I'll miss its terrible antagonists, pocket universes, and damned decent spies.

Finished 'Children of Time' and am massively impressed: overtones of Wells or even Stapledon. Now lining up Brian Stableford's 'Hooded Swan' omnibus Swan Songs for a start after a short break with an aviation book.

>85 RobertDay: Read the 'Hooded Swan' series years ago and remember liking it a lot. I'll have to get back to Stableford sometime, I have Dark Ararat on my stack but I'll have to get the preceding volumes in that series first.

I have been so slow to read anything this month. I have managed only 2 books. The science fiction book I finally finished was Star's End by Cassandra Rose Clarke, which was an ok read. I am looking forward to my week of vacation so I can catch up. I hope to read Europe at Dawn next, as I really enjoyed the first three novels.

>85 RobertDay: I just order the Hooded Swan omnibus. It sounds good!

I've finally reviewed the underwhelming re-read of The Fabulous Riverboat. I'm still blown away by the concept of Riverworld, but found the 1971 take on race relations tedious.

>88 richardderus: I am reading Rama II after reading the original Rendezvous with Rama and there is quite a contrast , Rama did not have a lot of "world building" or overt social/interpersonal issues - just a "sense a wonder" from the author Clarke.

In Rama II the new co author evidently interjects huge amounts of social issues {mixed race babies/people an issue hundreds of years from now?} and large dumps of info into the characterization of people and world building that I find a little distracting. I think the racial issues are a didactic attempt to raise awareness for issues at the time the book was written but it is very heavy handed. I am still going to finish the book however ;-)

>89 DugsBooks: You're a more forgiving reader than I am, clearly. I'm simply not good at overlooking "that was then, this is now" differences in most stories. It always feels as though lightning has struck when I *do* get past that barrier.

I thought each of the Gentry Lee Rama books was significantly worse than the preceding one.

I started Heartless by Gail Carriger, fourth in the series started with Soulless. So far it's the same fun, witty and quick read as the others.

I'm listening to Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton. It's kind of tedious so far TBH.

>91 Stevil2001: As writers go, Gentry Lee was a damn fine astronaut.

>89 DugsBooks: and others: when I read Rama II, I found that I was affected, much to my surprise, when the authors killed off someone who looked as though they were going to be a main character. I had a similar reaction to one of the characters in the third book. But it looked as though a wily editor required a section taken out of the last third of the last book, because Lee recycled it as a part of one of his two solo excursions into the Rama universe, Double Full Moon Night. >91 Stevil2001: has it right, pretty much.

My review of the second Rama sequel, Garden of Rama, came down to four words: "Get on with it." Some kind person flagged that, until I expanded it by pointing out that this was my message of irritation to the authors of a novel where not a lot happens, at very great length.

In his first solo effort, Bright Messengers, Lee does what Dugs said, only more so. There's an extended sequence where a German character is subjected to an extended object lesson in the Holocaust. Quite why an unseen alien presence would want to personally berate a character over something done (by the time of the action of the novel) more than 250 years ago by his ancestors is quite beyond me.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi turned out to be a satisfying story, even though he left a rather large loose end in there. I'll always wonder what became of the "werewolves."

Looks like I'll finish 2018 reading a bit of fantasy, rather than more science fiction: Red Seas Under Red Skies, one of Scott Lynch's "Gentleman Bastards" book. So far, I like as much as The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I would *love!* to finish the year by reading a few of the stories I had earmarked to read during Sci Fi November - health-wise and life's tides evolving through the hours I had slated to read, I wasn't able to do anything except I did get to read and co-host a RAL for #smallangryplanet; whilst I'm co-hosting a RAL for the next two Chambers novels this New Year; the second runs in January.

--

My December TBR for Sci-Fi is the following:

Trans-Continental Girl in the Gears via audiobook
Far Orbit Apogee
2016 Nebula Awards Showcase
The Tesla Gate via audiobook
The Robot in the Next Cubicle
Almost a Millennium

I want to read the other half of the list in January but if I could get these read and properly ruminated on my blog before New Year's, I'd be thankful. I actually listened to "Girl in the Gears" already but due to health reasons I never had the chance to finish my review properly - this would be a re-listen and one I look forward too!

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Does anyone know of any wicked good anthologies I could perchance find via libraries? Either already published or will be published? As I can ILL them if their older than six months or request them if their newer - I love reading anthos for finding new authors - or point out a few publishers I could seek out? I know of World Weaver Press + Tor + Seventh Star Press - however, any others out there who are putting out anthos which takes us on a lovely ride through Speculative Stories by emerging writers whose writing styles feel fuller than the short pages their stories reside?

>95 RobertDay: Wow, I read the Rama books in high school, so I didn't know there were books 5-7. Sounds excruciating.

Finished Project Barrier, an interesting collection of four novelettes and a short story. Next up I'm reading The Ring of Ritornel by Charles Harness.

Added Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear to my reading rotation.

>100 seitherin: I've been eye-balling that one for a while so will be interested to read your thoughts. I really enjoyed Bear's Jacob's Ladder trilogy that kicks off with Dust.

>100 seitherin: and >101 ScoLgo: Karen Memory is in my TBR pile as well.

Finished A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, started Darwin's Radio.

>101 ScoLgo: and >102 vwinsloe: Karen Memory's been on my TBR pile since September, 2017. It finally cycled to the top of the pile. I've only read one chapter and things are already starting to happen.

>96 ThomasWatson: When I see anyone reading the 2nd book of Scott Lynch's series I try and pass on a warning that it does have a cliff-hanger ending. Happily book 3, The Republic of Thieves is now readily available.

I introduced my long late DAD to Rama, He was a mathematician/Statistician/Hydrologist.

He knew I had loved SF from the 1950's. But he never got into it until RAMA. He did really like #1.

But as he kept reading the series, he would say, with a sad shake of the head, it's not as good as the earlier one's :-(

I agree...

I'm reading The graveyard game, one of Kage Baker's Company series. It's a fun read.

>Cliffhangers don't usually annoy me. Of course, since I sometimes write them myself, it would be something of a double-standard to complain. ;-)

Finished up The Stars are Legion (B); interesting, but I can't say that I was all that into it. Then again, the author really isn't about giving comfort to your set-in-stone preconceptions!

I just finished reading a LibraryThing Early Reviewers proof of a collection of sf short fiction by Sarah Pinsker, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, and I've posted my review. All four of the reviews before mine gave the book five stars; I gave it 4 1/2. I hadn't heard of Pinsker before this book, but I'll be sure to keep an eye out in the future.

>110 paradoxosalpha: I read "And Then There Were (N-One)" a couple years ago and loved it; clever and touching all at once, from the title onwards. I was disappointed when it didn't win the Hugo for Best Novella... even though it came in second! I requested the collection from ER, but didn't win it, so instantly preordered it.

I've now finished the first Brian Stableford novel in the 'Hooded Swan' omnibus ('Swan Songs'): Halcyon Drift. It has a very Seventies vibe, but it also has a somewhat off-the-wall approach to technobabble and the imagery verges on the surreal at times.

The omnibus volume, from the late lamented Uk small press Big Engine, is rather a chunky book: squeezing six novels into one book leaves you with nearly 650 closely-spaced pages in a slightly small typeface. I thought this was going to be a tough proposition just in terms of physically reading this book; but I whipped through the first novel so quickly that I might be proved wrong about that. Now started the second novel, Rhapsody in Black.

Yay! cutting it fine,but Judgment at Proteus the final Quadrail book completed my 12x12! I am happily browsing the lists for next year's challenge,but I am reading so slowly these days,I may have to make it a 10x10 next year.
I will still continue working my way through the Nebulas,Hugos and Locus award winners(around 20 books left altogether and I try to read about 8-10 a year,so its still going to be a while to achieve my goal ! :0)

I'm reading Fritz Leiber's The Sinful Ones, a short fantasy novel with a complicated publishing history. Leiber began writing the piece in 1943, and it went through several strange mutations, reaching its final form in 1980. It has all the horror tinged atmosphere that he was always so good at evoking.

Happy Holidays to all of the LibraryThing SF group. Reading the comments and following the reading choices of the members has been a pleasure over the last few years.

I hope this link works, it is to Wired magazine and they have some online SF short stories about the future. I noticed one is by Martha Wells but I have not read any yet.

http://links.newsletters.wired.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MTQ4Mzc4MjkS1&r=MjM5N...

Seasons Greetings to everyone!hope you all get some great books as gifts,and have fine reading plans ready for next year.
Best wishes to everyone.

>116 dustydigger: Happy Holidays to you, dustydigger, and to all who frequent this discussion.

Books I have. The best gift I could receive would be more free time for reading!

Happy holidays to all!

Yesterday I read The three electroknights, a collection of four very short stories by Stanislaw Lem. Published as one of the Penguin Modern collection of single-sitting reads.

In my review I wrote: "These four stories were the first I read by Lem, and I'm not sure what to think of these, really. They feel like fairy tales where the conventional trappings have been find-and-replaced with sfnal terminology, which is cute. Sometimes there's an original thought in there, sometimes they read like juveniles with facile pointes. But then again, they are ultra-short tales with almost no space for detail and elaboration. I'll hold off passing judgment on Lem until I've read some of his longer fiction. "

My question to you, well-read Immersed Ones: are these tales representative of Lem's work? (The booklet contains The three electro-knights, The white death, King Globares and the sages, and The tale of King Gnuff.) What longer work of his (preferably standalone) would you recommend to a Lem novice?

I guess there's no Doctor Who Xmas special this year. (I see the BBC released a two-hour "yule log" video on YouTube.) In homage to the tradition, though, I'm finally getting around to reading The Coming of the Terraphiles, the Eleven & Pond story by Michael Moorcock (!?).

>119 paradoxosalpha: It's on New Year's Day this year.

>118 Petroglyph:

Sounds like you read a selection from The Cyberiad. Some are lighter than other but they do skew uncharacteristically "popular", even, dare I say it, funny.

If you think Lem might not be for you and you're not likely to read more than one of his books, then I'd suggest Solaris. In that case you'd at least have read his most famous work. But if full-on weirdness appeals, I'd go with The investigation.

>120 mart1n:

And we're ready for it, mate!!

Happy holidays all...:)

>121 LolaWalser:
Thanks!

One UK Christmas tradition didn't let me down this year: Jodi Taylor's wacky time-traveling lunatics from the Chronicles of St Mary's! The annual Christmas short arrived on my Kindle just like gawd intended, pfui on that darned old BBC. And Now for Something Completely Different is set on Mars this year, instead of in the past. It was fun, as it always is.

I finally finished The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton thanks to several nights of severe insomnia over the last week or so. Had a like/dislike relationship with this book. Overall, like won. I have the next volume on my reader, but I promised a friend I would read a fantasy she recommended so I will to put it on hold until I finish that (or one of the other three books I'm currently reading on rotation.)

Grr!!!!i spent ages preparing my 10x10 challenge (10 books each from 10 categories) for next year,and left the paper on the table,from whence it promptly disappeared,probably under a mountain of xmas wrapping paper and such in the bin.3 days,no sign of it.My poor old brain can only remember a few titles clearly so I have to get down to trawling for the titles once more.not amused.
Bedlam yesterday,huge family gathering all day till 8pm,read 10 pages of Elizabeth Moon's Into the Firein bed then slept a solid 7 hours,never done that for a very long time.lol
Today was spent restoring order to the house,and watching Alastair Sim as Scrooge for the umpteenth time. I never tire of it,or any other version of the classic tale ( I have already watched Albert Finney and George C Scott's versions,and tomorrow hope to watch Michael Caine's and the Muppets'version too.Wonderful stuff.)
I intend to just dig in and read for the next few days,and hope all of you too get an opportunity to do so.Happy reading,and planning for next year!

>118 Petroglyph:, >121 LolaWalser:: one of my Polish colleagues was hugely impressed that a) I'd heard of Stanislaw Lem; b) that I'd read him; and c) that what I had read went beyond his own experience growing up in Poland in the 1990s/2000s, where 'The Cyberiad' is read in schools as an amusing diversion. He could never see the point in 'The Cyberiad' for this very reason; after a long conversation, he may well go away and try some of his other books.

Reading The City for a book group. Im not big on talking animals, but Ive liked his other books so Ill go with it.

>127 dustydigger: Alistair Sims version is the only one I will watch. It never fails to move me, never fails to make me believe someone can indeed change So we watched that last night, along with Charlie Brown, the original Grinch and Christmas Carol.

Maybe this was a plot by your subconscious rebelling over the notion of another forced-march reading program.

I pretty much have half my reading list picked out for next year (see my 2019-tbr tag) and I'm already very depressed!

Happy holidays to all of you!

I'm using my vacation time on a mad rush to try and finish my 2018 50 books challenge, which seems kind of desperate since I still need to finish three books, but it's fun. I'm halfway through Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro and I find it engrossing.

>127 dustydigger: "Grr!!!!i spent ages preparing my 10x10 challenge (10 books each from 10 categories) for next year,and left the paper on the table,from whence it promptly disappeared,probably under a mountain of xmas wrapping paper and such in the bin.3 days,no sign of it.My poor old brain can only remember a few titles clearly so I have to get down to trawling for the titles once more.not amused."

Think of the new things you might find! :-)

Finished Cold Welcome by Moon. I usually avoid series until they're finished, or at least well into it. But she's one of my favorite action SF authors, so I couldn't resist. Overall well done, though perhaps a bit much of the deus ex machina element in the end section (don't want to say more to avoid spoiler).

My book group discussed The Wrong Stars (B) yesterday evening and we all enjoyed it to one degree or another; we're now feeling as if we need to hunt down some of Pratt's fantasy.

>134 Shrike58:
And The Dreaming Stars, the sequel. I enjoyed it just as much if not more than The Wrong Stars.

Finished The Ring of Ritornel which started well but rather fell apart at the end. Still it was interesting overall.

>127 dustydigger: >130 Shrike58: >131 chlorine: I have the exact opposite strategy. I have thousands of unread books on hand. I don't know what my next book will be, much less for the entire year. Sometimes an author will be mentioned here and that will trigger a read. Other times, it's as random a pull from the shelves as I can manage.

Here's my basic list for SF and Fantasy for 2019.Nice mix of award winners,vintage,and some light stuff,YA/ junior

My Hugo/Nebula award winners
Paulo Bacigalupi - Windup Girl
Lois McMaster Bujold - Paladin of Souls
Michael Chabon - Yiddish Policemen's Union
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
James S A Corey - Abaddon's Gate
Ursula K LeGuin - Powers
Ursula K LeGuin - The Telling
Cixin Liu - Death's End
Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
John Scalzi - Collapsing Empire
Charles Stross - Accelerando
Vernor Vinge - Rainbow's End
Connie Willis - Blackout
Connie Willis - Passage

Isaac Asimov - Lucky Star and the Oceans of Venus
Becky Chambers - Record of a Space Born Few
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Master Mind of Mars
C J Cherryh - Emergence
James S A Corey - Leviathan Wakes
James S A Corey - Caliban's War
David Drake - Death's Bright Day
Anne McCaffrey - Catacombs
Elizabeth Moon - Into the Fire
Andre Norton - Galactic Derelict
Andre Norton - Star Ranger/Last Planet
N Okorafor - Book of Phoenix
Eric Frank Russell - Sentinels from Space
Bob Shaw - Orbitsville
Joan Slonczewski - Door into Ocean
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
Jack Vance - The Killing Machine
Thomas Watson - Setha'im Prosh
Thomas Watson - The Courage to Accept
James White - Final Diagnosis

Ben Aaronovitch - Lies Sleeping
Patricia Briggs - Storm Cursed
Jayne Castle - Siren's Call
Genevieve Cogman - Invisible Library
Suzanne Collins - Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
John Crowley - Little,Big
Leigh Evans - The Danger of Destiny
Simon R Green - Death Shall Come
Simon R Green - Into the Thinnest of Air
Deborah Harkness - Time's Convert
Chloe Neill - Blade Bound
Nora Roberts - Year One
V E Schwab - A Gathering of Shadows
Nalini Singh - Archangel's Viper
Amanda Stevens - The Awakening

>138 dustydigger: I fell short on the WWE Pick & Mix thing again this year, and so probably won't repeat that. Setting up something like that has proven unworkable for me for a number of reasons, the main one being that writing time is so often at odds with time I spend reading. That may loosen up a bit - I "retired" at the end of October - but it may not. I quit the day job in order to spend more time writing.

So the goal for 2019 is less formal. There are more than forty titles on it, combining fiction and nonfiction. (That's not counting possible new releases by favorite authors.) This has always been true, so when I've been short a title or two over at WWE that doesn't represent the sum total of my reading for the year. I also include a few indie fiction titles, something WWE generally does not support.

Will I read all forty? Probably not. But I'll read most of them. ;-)

Just finished Rogue Protocol by martha Wells. It’s the third in the Murderbot series, and although I enjoy the company of Murderbot, and all the stories are great, I somehow feel that the first book in the series was such a great story it is a shame to continue it.

>137 ChrisRiesbeck:
Same strategy here, I have about 2750 unread/want to read books in my library. I try to read the books I buy new/full price, but other than that (the rest is either second-hand bought or given, or e-book bundles) I pick what I heard about. I have a loose strategy:

1 author: Isaac Asimov
1 series: Discworld
1 list: David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels
1 award: Nebula's (won, nominated, novels, novellas, it doesn't matter)
1 classic: (think Jane Austen, Bronte sisters era books, haven't picked one yet)
1 anthology: (haven't picked one yet but probably a Year's best by Dozois
1 big book: 1000+ pages, haven't picked one yet.

>138 dustydigger: Dusty, if you read Connie Willis' 'Blackout', you will have to continue with All Clear because the two books are actually one novel split in two by the publisher for length reasons. The story in 'Blackout' ends not quite in mid-sentence, but almost.

I'll say no more, but I shall be interested in hearing your reaction to the books as another Brit, as most reviews i've seen here on LT are posted by non-UK readers.

(Touchstone for All Clear not returning any results - try referencing the LT series entry.)

>142 RobertDay: >138 dustydigger: Having read Blackout I'd steer clear of All Clear, simply dreadful, badly researched and historically inaccurate. Very much an ill-informed American's idea of Britain and the British.

>141 divinenanny: 2750! I thought I was bad at 693.

>144 justifiedsinner:
It's not hoarding if it's books. Right? Right?

It's not hoarding if it's books and they are properly catalogued.

...and on shelves!

>147 Shrike58: I ran out of shelf space years ago.

Been on a roll recently, reading Abaddon's Gate and Ancillary Mercy while travelling. Enjoyed the former; thought the latter was a disappointing follow-up to the original.

>148 justifiedsinner: Mine are shelved, but the hardbacks are double-shelved, and the paperbacks are triple-shelved. Makes it hard to pick randomly by simple physical browsing.

>145 divinenanny: Correct. If it's books, it's a library.

They're shelved (double) and I got another 10 meters of shelf space for my birthday this year. I'm going to run out in 2020 I think.

And all catalogued, not only that, but I have written my own cataloguing system of which my LT presence is just a derivative. Taking in ISFDB and WWE as information sources.

I just finished Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick. I liked it, but I didn't love it. It had some cool ideas, but the ending fell flat for me. I think this one is kind of the middle of the road as far as PKD books go.

Ending the year by finishing a very good read, Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. With an ending like that, looks like I'll need to pick up a copy of Republic of Thieves sometime in the coming year.

I don't read a lot of fantasy, but these books are not only very different manifestations of that genre, they are unusually good regardless of genre. Definitely worth recommending to fellow readers.

>148 justifiedsinner: The floor is just the bottom shelf... isn't it?

>143 justifiedsinner: Yes, I'd fallen over Connie Willis' exaggerated belief in her own research abilities in To Say Nothing of the Dog, though there were warning signs in Doomsday Book, which I otherwise enjoyed. I was merely trying not to put dusty off. The problem seems mainly to be CW's level of research into ordinary British life, which should form a backdrop to specific research into the period in question but in her case doesn't. (Though there are failures in her subject research into the Blitz, too: in particular, she confuses the number of V-1 launches with the number of V-1 impacts - off the top of my head, I think the number of V-1s that reached any sort of target was about 20% of the total launched, though that may be my memory playing tricks.)

My reviews list as many of her failings as I could cope with, though they may be difficult to find on LT amongst the enthusiastic gushings from people who know no better.

>150 ChrisRiesbeck: >155 AHS-Wolfy: The floor is pretty packed too. I've had to resort to packing them in boxes and storing them in the basement. With all the other stuff the basement's getting rather full too.

>156 RobertDay: My favorite in Doomsday was the blacktopped road in winter. The medieval period was more inventive than most people realize but asphalt wasn't one of those inventions.

Chris et al: on owning more books than you can possibly read, often including piles on tables & the floor: the Japanese have a term for this: tsundoku.

Maria Popova did one of her wonderful blog entries on the subject, gathering positive views:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

>156 RobertDay: Adam Roberts does a brilliant take-down of Doomsday Book here: https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/doomsday-book-connie-willis/

>157 justifiedsinner: Now, I recollect that bit of scene-setting, but I just attributed that to the visual effect of assorted traffic (horses, carts, people) treading snow into mud that would look black in contrast to the snow, especially in the gloom of a late winter afternoon.

(Later: edited to add new observations.)

>159 iansales: has pointed me to see Adam Roberts' review, which I mainly agree with (a lot of Willis' research failures are to do with modern Britain as much as historical Britain). However, now he has quoted the passage about the road, I realise that I visualised it differently; not viewing the road from directly above, but looking down onto it from across a valley, where the bare hedges would give the impression of "a straight black line, bisecting the snowy plain".

My visualisation may be at odds with historical and geographical accuracy, not being intimately familiar with the area (though I know it a bit). But I didn't count that as an inaccuracy that marred my appreciation of the book, as opposed to the howling errors in her later novels.

> 158 Thanks for the essay link. I wish I could say I'm intelligently focusing on what I don't know, but really I'm just driven by two fears. One fear is left over from the days when most SF came out in paperback only, sometimes only once. So if an author wrote anything I kind of liked, I bought everything else of theirs I could find, because I was afraid I wouldn't get another chance. The other fear is having nothing to read. At one point in the 1970s, I realized I had 50 or so unread paperbacks in a drawer. That seemed extreme at the time. I went on a reading spree, knocking off three or four books a week -- remember how thin SF paperbacks used to be. Soon I had read them all. Having nothing to read next was such a shock, I went out to the local used paperback store and bought 20 more that day. I've never been in sight of reading all my books since.

>158 rshart3:, >161 ChrisRiesbeck:, I'm not sure the essay applies as well to fiction, which is less about knowing than about experiencing. You can't very well experience a novel only by sampling a few pages as a researcher seeing what makes it tick; really, you need to read it beginning to end.

But where the essay does apply, it got me thinking that our emphasis on trivia contests since at least the 1980s Trivial Pursuit craze maybe hasn't done us any favours. What surer way to have us treasure and focus on what we think we know?

>161 ChrisRiesbeck:,>162 Cecrow:
Chris -- I grew up in a house where the worst situation for us three kids would be walking around the house crying plaintively "what am I going to read" (imagine a whining tone). This in a home full of books...

Cecrow -- Popova does focus more on NF than fiction, but I'm not sure about your knowing vs experiencing distinction. I think Popova, who has a mystical bent (as do I), would say that experiencing is the truest form of knowing. Anyway, I find that one of the great things about fiction is being able to know better what others' experiences are.
But re-reading your post, the last paragraph seems to be along those lines also. ("...what we think we know?")
{edit} one man whom I admired greatly, and who became a mentor to me, first attracted my attention when he said, in a group, "I don't know who I am".