March Reading Thread

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Bick said:
Can it be both written in purple prose and be great? Purple prose is a pejorative term.

I read a few Harrington books, but gave them up after about 4 books. I don’t think they’re anything special, and the lead character is mostly just irritating (imho).
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I read quite a few of the HH books but they rapidly became Tom Clancyesque with endless descriptions of weapons and ship specs. I had to give up on the series.
 
Elentarri said:
I found that I don't really like Brunner's writing style. It's too disjointed for my taste. Brunner's "big ideas" novels are Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation), The Sheep Look Up (rampant consumerism and pollution), Shockwave Rider (technology), and The Jagged Orbit (racial tension and violence). However, I think the novels probably had more impact when they were first written about 40 years ago. Most of the ideas in them are now old news and stuff we are currently living with. At this stage, Brunner's "Club of Rome Quartet" of novels is basically preaching to the choir.​
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One of his I tried to read was The Squares of the City. I just didn't get it, had no idea what it was about, but it was like the city was a giant chess board.
 
alexvss said:
Both are great books (from what I could read from the latter so far), but I’m enjoying On Basilisk Station a little bit more, even if it’s a little tiresome to read. Oh, and there’s talking alien cats in it :alien::alien:.
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I've read both of them. I liked Terms of Enlistment but I loved On Basilisk Station. David Weber can get carried away in description but in my opinion that doesn't happen too badly until about book seven or so of the main series. I think the first four books in this series through On the Field of Dishonor are about as good as military SF gets. I'm jealous that you're reading them for the first time. I've read the early books in this series five times, and will likely read them again some time.

--- It is in his later books when he became really popular that it seems that there was no one to tell him "Ok David, that's enough. Wrap it up."
 
Just finished Catspaw by Joan D Vinge, been sitting on my shelf for a long time unread so far as I can remember. SF with have and have not society, gigantic corporates, machine augmented people, people with psi abilities who are hated as freaks. One of the "freaks" is hired by a big corporate to work protecting one of the family members under threat.
Very well written. Some dark bits, some rays of hope. Good world building. Main character trying to unravel not so much whodunnit as who is going to do it.


Regarding David Webber, I loved On Basilisk Station when it first came out, re-read several times, carried on with the series, hit a <sigh> point where I moved to only borrowing from the library and then flicking through to find just the bits with the Tree Cats and then gave up. I tried to re-read On Basilisk Station a few years back and just didn't get on with it anymore. Well, I'll still remember it fondly.

It was all the blasted politics that got to me with the series, plus the thinly veiled take on the French Revolution.

It's amazing how much military sf is actually Hornblower in space.
 
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I'm busy with Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker.

I have about 200 pages of this behemoth to go, and I am not enjoying it.

Unfortunately, having access to a wealth of information about the 17th century does not necessarily translate to skillfully writing a book about the subject. Global Crisis is a bloated text that could have used some trimming, tighter organisation, less repetitiveness, clearer writing, and the judicious use of an editor to tidy everything up. Parker has his thesis which connects the turbulent events of the 17th century and the changing climate caused by the Little Ice Age. While I think the thesis has merit (anything that effects large scale food production, effects society), Parker's text doesn't make the argument very well, nor does it provide sufficient evidence for his thesis. Tossing in a sentence about the cold weather in the middle of a war doesn't constitute evidence! It's as if Parker has dumped all the information here and it's left up to the reader to joining the dots. The synthesis and analysis of the information is inadequate (despite all the pretty charts and graphs). From this text, I could just as easily conclude that uncaring politicians, religious squabbles, and/or war causes catastrophic crises, or people just being people, with the local weather exacerbating the crises. This is an interesting, but dull, book badly in need of an editor.​
 
@Elentarri - a few years back I read Running with the Fox by MacDonald, who is a field biologist studying foxes, and he did the excellent thing of separating the more academic part of the text from the more descriptive, so on one page, or for a few pages, it is descriptive with standard white background, and every so often there are light grey boxes/pages which go into considerable scientific detail and you can just read the book as descriptive and skip the science if you prefer. Works very well.
 
Montero said:
@Elentarri - a few years back I read Running with the Fox by MacDonald, who is a field biologist studying foxes, and he did the excellent thing of separating the more academic part of the text from the more descriptive, so on one page, or for a few pages, it is descriptive with standard white background, and every so often there are light grey boxes/pages which go into considerable scientific detail and you can just read the book as descriptive and skip the science if you prefer. Works very well.
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Pffft! I would not skip the science. That is also very interesting. Thanks for the rec.
 
I'm starting Cascade Failure by L M Sagas - I'm enjoying it so far.

Some blurb:-
L. M. Sagas' debut, Cascade Failure, is a highly commercial, sci-fi adventure blending J. S. Dewes' Divide series with the broad fan appeal of The Expanse and the cozy sf of Becky Chambers. It features a fierce, messy, chaotic space fam, vibrant worlds, and an exploration of the many ways to be―and not to be―human.

There are only three real powers in the universe: the corporate power of the Trust versus the Union's labor's leverage. And between them, the Guild tries to keep everyone's hands above the table. It ain't easy.

Branded a Guild deserter, Jal "accidentally" lands a ride on a Guild ship. Helmed by an AI, with a ship's engineer/medic who doesn't see much of a difference between the two jobs, and a "don't make me shoot you" XO, the Guild crew of the Ambit is a little . . . different.

They're also in over their heads. Responding to a distress call from an abandoned planet, they find a mass grave, and a live programmer who knows how it happened. The Trust has plans. This isn't the first dead planet, and it's not going to be the last.

Unless the crew of the Ambit can stop it.
 
I read Morgan Stang's Murder on the Lamplight Express, the second in her series about a monster hunter employed to deal with supernatural threats who finds her hunts sometimes interrupted by having to solve a mundane murder mystery. As the name suggests this time the murder is aboard a luxurious sleeper train where, inevitably, all the travellers seem to have their own secrets and possible motives for murder. It's a fun pastiche of mystery novels with a fast pace which manages to cover a large number of subplots. I also like the way the world-building gradually reveals how different this world is to our world.

Then the sad news of Vernor Vinge's death reminded me that although I've read most of his work I hadn't read one of his most famous stories. True Names is often cited as inventing the cyberpunk genre and it is remarkably prescient for a story written in 1981. Many parts of it still feel very topical, particularly with recent developments in AI. Although some details are dated (such as its idea of how much computing power would be unusually large) I think the basic premise still works well today and there are a few unexpected twists along the way.
 
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