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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The Booker prize winner is a festival of depression. I guess the judges like that.
At some future point a totalitarian government rises in Ireland and starts taking away the freedom of the citizens. A rebel army arises and battles the government for control of the country. The whole story is viewed through the eyes of Eilish and her family. Through the course of the story her whole family gets whittled down. She loses her husband and then her two sons. The loss of the second son is the most brutal and I'm still thinking about it. Eilish deals with her father who lives across Dublin and battles dementia. It is one laugh riot after another.
The story covers all the different levels of the country's descent into chaos until finally Eilish and what is left of her family must flee the country. In a lot of ways Prophet Song depicts what happens to people and countries riven by war. There are even echoes to the Irish Civil War and the War of Independence. It is not a pleasant slog.
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City of Last Chance by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ah, fantasy. The book is a bit of a mess, but I enjoyed all the characters and their details. Tchaikovsky is becoming one of my favorite authors because of his inventiveness.
The City of Ilmer barrels towards a crisis. The occupying Pas have just lost one of their leaders in the strange forest at the center of town. This sparks reprisals that lead to counter reprisals which leads to a battle for control of the city. It's a full on Grimdark fantasy novel with the ruling classes being terrible. The populace struggles all day and all night from the students in the university to the factory workers to the demons who run the machines in the factories. There is the priest who is the last worshipper for one last God. There is man seeking his wife who was lost when they came through the strange forest in the center of town.
It's quirky and interesting and there is some logic to it but the book is all over the place. I can't wait to read the next one.
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The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
One of the main selling points for me was that the book has a couple of early chapters set on Avalon Island in the Zane Grey Hotel, a hotel I also stayed at back in the old times. Although Martin Hench, forensic accountant, stayed at a much fancier version of the hotel than I did.
Cory Doctoro is much smarter about the current world of finance and computers than I will ever hope to be. But his books come across as thinly veiled descriptions on inequities of modern society than full blown stories. There is a story and characters in there but there are also a lot of digressions to talk about things. In this case I felt like Doctorow might have watched John Oliver's piece about for profit prisons and how they just take money from the inmates and Doctorow decided that would be his next book. He has a lot of sermons for his pulpit, too from REITs which caused the real estate bust to the three strikes laws.
The Bezzle was good but there is a lot of explaining.
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You can just hit Pluralistic.net for the explaining and you won't have to read the books.
the hands that guide me are invisible
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Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Okay. Not one of Tchaikovsky's better books. It just felt too derivative. Rex is a hybrid sentient dog with lots of add-ons fighting against insurgents down in southern Mexico. He fights alongside a similarly modified bear, monitor lizard and a group of bees. They are basically slaved to a less than scrupulous handler until they are given their freedom and now they must question what they are trained to do and the morals of the fight.
The story comes in three parts. The first they fight. The second they deal with emancipation. The final part section they fight again. It all felt very familiar and not as inventive as the usual Tchaikovsky.
Yes, I am reading the second book in the series now.
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Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The focus shifts from Rex the dog to Honey the Bear. It also shifts to Mars where a new city is being built with modified humans. But events on earth will have a big impact on earth as a Trump like senator seeks to control all the workers on Mars through the technology used to control the uplifted animals.
This book was a bit better than Rex's book. The plot seemed more cohesive but it still isn't Tchaikovsky's best work. I want him to talk less about modified animals but that seems to be his big deal so that might not happen.
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I’m on the third book of a trilogy that you might like: The first book is Revenger by Alastair Reynolds. Top-notch world building, glorious space opera, and a little on the grim side. Far, far future, most of the planets in the solar system have been broken down into smaller chunks, resources used for making artificial moonlets, ringworlds, etc. Treasure hunting through previous epochs ruins fuels a lot of the intra-solar economy. Knowledge has been lost, is being lost, and civilization descending into twilight…
Really enjoyed the first two, now wrapping up with Bone Silence
In the Tudor Period, Fencing Masters were classified in the Vagrancy Laws along with Actors, Gypsys, Vagabonds, Sturdy Rogues, and the owners of performing bears.
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04-02-2024, 07:33 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-02-2024, 07:36 AM by Greg.)
Gracias.
My library has the first two books and I've added them to the Queue.
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Orders of Battle by Marko Kloos
More battles with the Lankies. Andrew Grayson goes back to space four years after the last major engagement to see what their alien foe is up to now. Of course bad things happen. Yes, the book ends on a cliff hanger. But I was okay with that since I had book 8 all queued up.
These books are really basic. And I think Kloos extrapolates nicely from things that already exist in our own world to posit what is happening in Grayson's world. The books go down like potato chips. Not as much thinking as the Tchaikovsky books. But I like them both. Very military sci-fi.
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(04-04-2024, 01:46 PM)Greg Wrote: Orders of Battle by Marko Kloos
More battles with the Lankies. Andrew Grayson goes back to space four years after the last major engagement to see what their alien foe is up to now. Of course bad things happen. Yes, the book ends on a cliff hanger. But I was okay with that since I had book 8 all queued up.
These books are really basic. And I think Kloos extrapolates nicely from things that already exist in our own world to posit what is happening in Grayson's world. The books go down like potato chips. Not as much thinking as the Tchaikovsky books. But I like them both. Very military sci-fi.
OK, I’ll look for those. I like Junkfood Reading.
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Centers of Gravity by Marko Kloos
And that is it for the Frontline series, for now. Good big action packed finale. Lots of military tech talk and jargon. Big space battles. Big ground battles. I think Kloos wants to be done but I think he keeps coming up with new stories for the people in the series. I'll keep reading them.
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Citadel by Marko Kloos
The Palladium series of which Citadel is the third book isn't quite as compelling for me as the Frontline series but it is still pretty good. There is a series of five settled planets in one system and one of the planets attacked the other four five years ago. They are still dealing with the fallout of that aggression.
Citadel feels like an interim book as we go towards the conclusion. There are some big set pieces as we go between four different casts of characters but it all seems like we are just getting started. There is a big attack on one of the planets. One of the space forces goes after anarchists that did a bad thing in a previous book. Another group goes after revenge. The stories conclude but you sense there is a lot of unfinished business on the table.
Book four comes out in July.
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Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A novella that could have used a few more pages. Young princess heads to the wizard's tower to get help from the wizard for defeating a monster ravaging the country or neighboring country. As we soon learn, the wizard isn't a wizard but an anthropologist from a much more technologically advanced society sent her to study the locals. And the wizard is not supposed to interfere with the locals. He is just supposed to observe. It goes on from there.
It's well written. It just seems like there is a bunch of narrative missing.
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House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is the sequel to City of Last Chances but could almost be a standalone since only one character transfers over, Yarric the last priest and follower of God. You should still read City of last Chances. House of Open Wounds is a different beast all together. Two armies are at war and the majority of the action takes place in the hospital tent that follows the army. Each character has there own way of helping the afflicted. Each character has their own secrets. The book is also sly and quite funny. And I really like the depictions of the Gods.
Yannic or Maric Jack as he is now called because of confusion about his name becomes an orderly in the tent all the while carrying his box of Gods on his back. He still fights with God all the time, either imploring God to heal the wounded or imploring God not to heal the wounded.
It's kind of a slow build as I struggle to figure out where the book was going until suddenly we were there and 600 pages had gone by. I hope there are more books in the series but this novel kind of wrapped things up for Maric Jack.
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The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney
The Gray Man is back! And I don't care. My two major problems with the book is the absurd plot and the lack of Gray Man in the Gray Man novel. (The food was bad and there wasn't very much of it) Plus, Courtland Gentry and Zoya are still on the run from the forces trying to kill him and that plot is getting tired.
In the Chaos Agent all the leading AI scientists are being assassinated. Court and Zoya get involved when a friend of Zoya's gets murdered. But that plot is on the periphery. Most of the plot is around a billionaire who is also a target being protected by a friend of Court's from a previous couple of novels. There is also the hunt to find who is killing the AI scientists. There is talk that a rogue AI program built by the USA and stolen by the Chinese is doing all the killings. That old plot.
I knew who was behind the plot in about ten pages. I had to wait for the rest of the characters to catch up, which is always tedious.
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