Book Update

I'm tracking reading again, here's this year so far:

January

• Of Dice and Men by David Ewalt. Another history of D&D, this from a more personal side than Playing At The World. Perhaps a little much of his own history with the game, although I expect that's aimed more at readers who don't have as much a history with roleplaying games as I do.
• All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. I was interested enough by the trailers for the upcoming Tom Cruise-starring big movie adaptation to look for the original. It's short, but a really good piece of science fiction. The conceit is that the main character gets caught in a time loop while fighting to defend the planet from aliens. As you'd expect, each time through he learns a bit more to survive longer, but the story goes a few unexpected places. A great read.
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Interesting space opera about a terrible empire that enforces peace an order by a variety of ruthless methods. Plays with some transhuman concepts - the narrator is a distributed intelligence - a warship mind with a large number of bodies at its disposal. 
• Marbeck and the King-in-waiting by John Pilkington. Second in an Elizabethan spy/mystery series. Good, but not outstanding.
• A Blind Goddess by James Benn. Latest in the Billy Boyle Second World War mystery series. Continues the same high standard.
• He Drank, and Saw the Spider by Alex Bledsoe. The latest outing in the Eddie LaCrosse hard boiled fantasy series, which gets better and better as it goes. If hard-boiled fantasy mysteries sound the least bit interesting, you should read this whole series.
• The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron. Second part in what is shaping up to be a big fantasy series. I didn't like this as much as the first - this opens up the world a lot, with more characters and more places, and I'm not a big fan of sprawling fantasy epics with lots of different point of view characters. That said, it's a good story so I'll be reading the next instalment.  

February

• Libriomancer by Jim C Hines. Light, fun supernatural adventure story. Lots of nice ideas based on magic powered by ideas in fiction. 
• Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson. Explores ice age life from the point of view of a young shaman's apprentice. A good story, focussed on the day to day life of a stone age group. 
• All In Scarlet Uniform by Adrian Goldsworthy. Latest in the series about the Peninsular War. Not as compelling as the previous episodes, but solid.
• The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones. Sword and sorcery in Haroun al-Rashid's Babylon. Absolutely fantastic, Jones really brings the world to life - both the historical and fantastical sides. The main characters are really great, too.
• Nexus by Ramez Naam. Nearish future technothriller about a drug that creates telepathic links between users. A lot of outstanding ideas about how human enhancement technologies could go (and how they might be resisted). Warning: some of the bad things the bad guys do with these technologies are rather disturbing.
• Measuring America by Andro Linklater. A history of the standardisation of measurements through the lens of the conquest (and measurement) of the United States. Interesting, but a bit unfocussed (I ended up reading it in pieces, in between other books).
• The Bones of the Old Ones by Howard Andrew Jones. Follow-up to The Desert of Souls, and just as good.

March

• The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers. Inspired by True Detective, I read this. Well, re-read in some cases (I had read a couple of the stories before). Interesting, especially the way Chambers's King in Yellow is not much like the version I'd come to know via the Call of Cthulhu game.
• Master of War by David Gilman. Medieval military adventure, following an archer who goes through the Battle of Crecy and the campaign around it. Very good.
• Crux by Ramez Naam. Follow-up to Nexus. A bit less fresh as it's mainly developing the ideas he's already introduced. That said, I think his world is heading towards a singularity (or something like it), so these developments are interesting to watch. I'm looking forward to part three.
• The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi. Follow-up to The Quantum Thief. Filled with just as many crazy trans- and post- human ideas and lifestyles. I found the plot a bit easier to follow than the first one, although it's another insane high tech heist story at heart.
• Codex Born by Jime C Hines. Follow up to Libriomancer.

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

I just finished Red Country - latest book in the First Law world. It's at least as good as the others, and revisits a few characters we've seen before to show how the intervening years have treated them.

The main story is great too - Abercrombie's ability to make characters (even horrible ones) human is here in full force. The story takes them to a piece of country that's an obvious parallel to the US West. The story isn't exactly a fantasy western, but that's a pretty good quick description.

Recommended! But read the other books first (knowing the history of the returning characters adds a large dimension to the story).

Just read: Burnt Ice by Steve Wheeler

Burnt Ice is a hardish (firm?) science space opera that reminded me a little of Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds*.

It's about a team of military engineering intelligence agents: they basically go in to check out weird tech and decide how to use/destroy it. As you might expect, a routine first mission draws them into a much more complicated situation.

There's a lot of getting into the details of the tech, enough that it's clear Wheeler has thought the implications of things through (even if not everything is fully explained). The world he introduces us to has a lot going on, as well (note: this is the first book of a series).

Recommended!

* Important footnote: Wheeler does not have any of the torture scenes or gratuitous awfulness that often appears in Banks and Reynolds stories. This is good.

Oh, I Forgot To Mention The New Johannes Cabal Novel

I have been greatly enjoying the Johannes Cabal books, and the third one - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - just came out. It's just as good as the previous stories. Recommended to everyone, if you don't like these you must be a bad person.

Here's Some Good Books I've Been Reading

First, Monster of the Week relevant works. I seem to have been on a bit of a monster hunting reading binge recently.

I absolutely love Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series (Child of Fire, Game of Cages, Circle of Enemies). I really like the guy telling the story, a chap called Ray Lilly. [Astoundingly mild spoiler] He got involved in some nasty magical events and was recruited by the Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers dedicated to killing all the other sorcerers who endanger the world. It's a pretty grim series, as Ray was a semi-professional criminal before all the magic and stuff. That and the fact that magic can be used for some very scary purposes. The action and mystery side reads a bit like Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, and the spells and magical creatures are terrible and awesome. Recommended if you like the sound of the Dresden Files, but with all the cute stuff removed.

Also good are Mike Carey's Felix Castor books. These follow a London exorcist in a world where the dead have come back - ghosts, zombies and werewolves are all becoming more common. As a detective, he's as hard-boiled as Ray Lilly. The stories are generally a mystery centered around a ghost problem, although usually not in a straightforward way. As the series has gone on, it has also built on what's gone before (both in the novels and in Castor's backstory) to add more depth to the world. There's a very detailed sense of Castor's London as well - it feels like Carey might have paced out the places that chases happen, that sort of thing. The mysteries are pretty grim here too. Recommended for the same reason as Connolly's books, above.

Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International is another good one. Not as good as the other two, but good. It's in much more standard techno-thriller mode, with lots of guns and violence and a thread of libertarian "anything to do with government is bad, anything to do with private enterprise is good" in there. But the basic monster hunting ass-kicking action is great. I haven't read the other two books in the series yet, but plan to get to them soon.

In another direction completely, Harry Sidebottom has a good historical adventure series set in Roman times. They follow what the afterwords explain is a historical character - a Roman general originally an Angles from past the German frontier. It seems like the historical record is just a few mentions for the guy so there's plenty of room to add adventures, and Sidebottom has done a great job doing so. He also manages to fit in a lot of historical details as the story goes on. Recommended for anyone who likes reading Roman historical adventures.

Here's Some Good Books I Read Recently

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Gritty, fun fantasy that makes a point of putting a big (or little) twist on each fantasy cliche in it. Grim but entertaining, maybe halfway between A Song of Ice and Fire and The Black Company stories? Logen Ninefingers (or "The Bloody Nine") is my favorite character in fiction for some time, a terrifying barbarian champion who is getting into middle age and just over all the fighting and nonsense. He's great.

And I finally read George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, too. Spurred on by the TV show, I suppose, although after the books I didn't feel quite so keen on watching it (possibly because so much stuff had to be cut). In any case, good but with some flaws. He's way to keen on adding point of view characters, something I'm not keen on in general. The sex and violence also grows tiresome. It's all so... sordid. And written just a little bit too larger than life to be believable.

Moving away from fantasy novels, I also really enjoyed James Gleick's The Information. It's a bit of a whirlwind tour of information theory and the way information has become more important through history. Lots of great stuff, although I felt it tailed off a little abruptly when he got to the present day.

Walter Jon Williams has a sequel to This Is Not A Game, called Deep State. It is better than the first one, and the first one was great. I recommend the pair of them to everyone interested in science fiction, gaming's growing intersection with the rest of life, and technothrillers.

Reading Update

Kage Baker The Empress of Mars: A nice story set in the shadow of her epic Company series. Only tangentially related, but good in its own right. Feisty, outcast Mars colonists versus everyone! Huzzah!

Seth Hunter The Time of Terror: Another Napoleonic naval adventure, broadly. More specifically, it's earlier (Robespierre is the chief antagonist) and our hero spends most of the book as a spy in Paris and smuggling things back and forward. Good stuff, but grim (being about The Terror, hard not to be).

Chris Wickham The Inheritance of Rome: A big, solid history of Europe from 400-1000. Lots of interesting stuff in here, although because of the book's scope, detail is lacking. It paints a picture of the fall of Rome being less catastrophic than had been previously thought, and follows the various aspects that were preserved and the new things that arose after. I'd been aware of the revision of the "Dark Ages" into something somewhat less of an oubliette of history, and this cleared up the reasons that view has come to be.

Read in August

Charles Stross's short fiction collection Wireless is good. Several of the pieces feel like they're sketches for novels, rather than fully fleshed out. That might just be the effect of them being short.

I recently read a bunch of Le Carre - the Smiley trilogy and then A Most Wanted Man. All good, and a very interesting contrast. The earlier novels are almost devoid of politics and describe spies who seem to almost fear ideology. The newer ones (including The Mission Song and The Constant Gardener) are all concerned with wrongs going on in the world, and Le Carre definitely wants to draw our attention to them.

Karl Schroeder's Pirate Sun is another great installment in the Virga series. Very strange, very cool science fiction here.

Re-reading of Robert Low's viking stories (The Whale Road and The Wolf Sea) just confirmed my liking of them. The internet tells me there's now a third volume - The White Raven - which I must get hold of.

I also read the first of Tim Severin's viking series, Odinn's Child. It is not as good as Low's take, but interesting. He also seems to be adding a supernatural element - ghosts and the like - which is odd in a historical novel. It's deliberately somewhat ambiguous whether these elements are actually real or just hearsay, but I'm not convinced about the approach. It is good enough to look for the rest of the series, so don't take those quibbles to seriously.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

A strange novel.

Lots of really cool ideas, but the plot basically happens only in implied spaces.

The novel essentially shows you a few little vignettes in the world, and you need to piece together most of the events from those. Sterling also sets them up so each part of the novel is the aftermath and/or setup for something big.

Not really sure what I think of it.

Recent books of note, June 2009

I read a couple of A Lee Martinez's comic fantasy novels - In the Company of Ogres and A Nameless Witch. Both are good, well worth checking out if you are a fan of Asprin/Pratchett/etc.

I've been working backwards through K J Parker's trilogies. Unfortunately, my main discovery is that quality has been steadily improving. I simply stopped reading the "Fencer" trilogy after a completely gratuitous atrocity. The "Scavenger" trilogy was good but not exceptional - it uses the 'protagonist is amnesiac' cliche, and despite this is a fairly good story. Parker pretty much ruined it for me at the end when the protagonist - who has shown himself to basically be a terrible person - is revealed to have previously been a terrible person. It wasn't quite the shock reveal it might have seemed when the plot was initially sketched out. So, my advice on K J Parker: read the "Engineer" trilogy and The Company. If you like those enough to want more, read the "Scavenger" trilogy. If you want even more and are not utterly sick of the current fashion for adding atrocities to a story for no good reason, read the "Fencer" stories.

I'm not sure where this fashion for atrocities comes from - I wonder if Iain Banks is somewhat to blame (at least in science fiction and fantasy), as people imitate his work. If so, they're really hitting the wrong bit to imitate. I have a feeling it might be deriving from some other places too - the "Literary Fiction" genre seems to do it as well.

Dave Duncan has a third "Alchemist" novel, which is great fun. I read one of his generic fantasy novels, too, and it was so generic I couldn't be bothered with the second in the series. Strange that the same person can write both. Or maybe generic fantasy just taints all that it touches?

This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams is a fantastic read... it's about a producer of alternate reality games, and what happens when she allows the real world and the game world to mix. Good characters, good story and a good understanding of how online life actually functions all feed in. Plus it is a story of this "this could, just, happen" rather than a more science fiction approach (like the near future in Stross's Halting State).

Speaking of Stross, the fifth installment of "The Merchant Princes" series is great although I'm unhappy I now have to wait a year or so for the final one.

The Escapement by K J Parker

The final installment of the Engineer trilogy. Ties everything up without too many surprises, in a satisfying manner. I really enjoyed these books and shall be reading Parker's other couple of series soon. They work on a few levels, combining world-building, a little philosophy and an exciting plot. The characters aren't exactly deep but they're well-drawn enough that I got drawn into their trials as the story went along - even a couple of them who were basically terrible people got some sympathy here and there.

Evil For Evil by K J Parker

The second book of the Engineer trilogy, which I liked more than the first. All the characters who seemed to be good at everything begin to lose control of the forces they had unleashed in this story, which seems much more plausible. The story itself begins to weave the characters together much more closely and thus becomes a lot more exciting.

I realised that in some ways Parker is writing about similar themes to those in Pratchett's works (particularly his newer ones) but without the overt humour - there's a certain black cynicism here, still, but the books certainly aren't comedy. That aside, there's a commonality of interest in how societies can be efficiently or corruptly structured and the effects of technological change.

Books Catch-up Post 3

Moving Target (aka Marque and Reprisal), Engaging the Enemy and Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon. The next three in the Vatta's War series. All very good. The only flaw is a tendency to have the characters be a little too awesome, which is forgivable in space opera.

The Guns of El Kebir and Siege of Khartoum by John Wilcox. The next two in the Simon Fonthill series. Both good and up to the standards of the previous novels. Things are beginning to go a little less hard on Fonthill in these ones.

Cretaceous Dawn by L & M Graziano. Adventure story about some people who accidentally time travel back to the time of dinosaurs and have to trek across the countryside to a particular point to come back. Good characters, science side of things is not explained at all (which I regard as a plus - if it is never explained it can't be nonsense), think of it as a superior Jurassic Park without all the waffle about 'Man playing God', chaos theory or kids (although there is a dog).

Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden. Second in his Ghenghis Khan series. Good, and a lot more exciting than the first one, mainly due to this one including Ghenghis beginning to conquer the rest of the world (specifically China).

The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

An absolutely fantastic read. It's superior space opera, told as a chap in a bar recounts the hunt for an ancient artifact to a bard. It takes a little while to get going but I got drawn into it more and more as it went on. The characters are fantastic and Flynn really makes you care about their motivations and histories as the story unfolds. Plus the storyteller and bard have their own little story that comes out in the interludes.

All this has as a backdrop a really interesting world, a celtic-influenced human galactic ("Gaelactic") empire that seems to be the result of a few interstellar wars over a few thousand years. The cultures of each different planet are vibrant and fun (although he does have some annoying dialect used, luckily not to excess), and feel like places that might have developed in the world he describes.

Great stuff. Read it.

The First Wave by James R Benn

The second Billy Boyle mystery, this one is just as enjoyable as the first. A few of the bad guys are pretty obviously telegraphed, but that doesn't really detract from the story as a whole.

Devices and Desires by K J Parker

I enjoyed this more than The Company, possibly because it is drawn on a somewhat larger scale. There's certain common elements - extremely competent characters driven to extremes by various flaws and it is possibly set in the same world.

It tells the story of an engineer sentenced to death for making improvements on a mechanical design, one of the worst crimes in the city-state where he lives (they are the renowned machine-makers of the world). This sets into motion a cascade of events that causes war and destruction, and looks set to cause even more in the following couple of volumes in the trilogy.

I also approve of Parker writing fantasy without magic, monsters and all that stuff. Just people in a different, apparently totally normal world doing their thing. Admittedly, his main characters are almost supernaturally good at everything they do, but only to an unlikely extent rather than an unbelievable one.

Books Catch-up Post 2

The Goddess and the Bull by Michael Balter: An account of the excavations at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and overview of what has been discovered about the stone age town there and more generally the region. Lots of information about the people involved in the archeology, too, and a history of the various fashions and arguments that have gone through the discipline (as they relate to that site). Fascinating stuff, reawakened my interest in prehistoric human civilizations.

All the other Vorkosigan stories by Lois McMaster Bujold. Solid space opera with a mystery/thriller (and occasionally romance) twist on them.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. Good, but not stunning. I found this retreaded the story of The Last Colony a little too much for my liking (I realise that he wrote it for a different audience, so this probably is not that big a deal). It did, however, clear up some problems that the other novel had so it was nice to see what was supposed to be happening with those.

Billy Boyle by James R Benn. A mystery novel about a Boston cop drafted in the Second World War and attached to Eisenhower's staff through a family connection. In London, he immediately ends up investigating some unusual goings on. It's a good story with some satisfying twists and a really good main character.

The Magicians and Mrs Quent by Galen Beckett. This is from a similar inspiration as Strange & Norrell, although this story is significantly lighter. It begins as essentially a fantasy take on a Regency romance and takes a detour through gothic too. Not really very serious, but fun and exciting. I am looking forward to the second in the series.

The Company by K J Parker. A group of retired military veterans start up a colony at the behest of their old unit leader. Things steadily begin to fall apart as their old rivalries come up, old secrets are revealed and so on. The fact that the leader has kind of stolen an island off the government is just one of the problems that they have to face. An exellent character study of things falling apart, reminiscent of Fargo (without the jokes about accents).

Books Catch-up Post

I've got behind on book reviews, so here are brief notes on the ones that I have read but not reviewed.

Trading In Danger by Elizabeth Moon. Superior space opera, good characters. Will look up rest of series.

Miles, Mystery & Mayhem by Lois McMaster Bujold. #3 of Vorkosigan omnibus editions. Patchy but overall good. Some of these stories written much earlier in her career, others much later, and you can tell. Later stories are very good, although the contiunity is somewhat stretched (not quite broken, though).

The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Follow up to previously reviewed story about seer's apprentice in Venice who solves mysteries. More of the same. Good, fun.

Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

After certain persons close to me going on at some length about Bujold in general and the Vorkosigan series in particular, and one of them lending us pretty much the whole of the Vorkosigan series, I have begun working my way through them.

This first omnibus edition comprises two novels that occur before Miles Vorkosigan himself is actually born, serving mainly to set up the world in general and the formidableness of his parents in particular. It's good, high action space opera. It has some of the flaws you might expect given that description - the heroes are just phenomenally awesome, for example - but accepting these conventions, it is an immensely good read.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Re-reading this was enjoyable, especially given that I had been thinking a lot about Lovecraft (with running Trail of Cthulhu) and it's relationship to espoinage fiction (given the Delta Green connection in my game). Plus, I've been reading a bit of Hellboy/BPRD and thinking a bit about Cold City/Hot War too, so I guess the whole apocalypti/monsters from beyond thing might be rather on my mind right now.

Anyhow, to the book itself... it's certainly raw compared to his later work, and filled to the brim with nerdy jokes about Lovecraft, information technology and spy fiction. Still, they are good jokes and it is a good story. I suspect that The Jennifer Morgue will get a second read pretty soon, too, and I'm looking forward to the third outing even more now.