Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Well, I finally figured out a way to get some reading in these days. I drive an 8 hour shift for the Red Cross delivering blood most Sundays and I get hours and hours of uninterrupted audio book reading done. Hardly any distractions and it helps pass the time on those long drives.

Right now I'm reading The Black Prism by Brent Weeks and really enjoying it. I've seen him doing a lot of interviews with other authors on Crowdcast and thought I'd give him a go. Glad I did. There was an unexpected twist in the book that actually made me gasp out loud! That's a pretty good trick for an author to pull off.

In the queue next are 2 just released books on audio: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (love me some Murderbot!) and Andy Weir's new book Project Hail Mary. These 3 books have me really excited about reading at the moment and I'm going to have to find more time somewhere cause I'm anxious to get to them all.

dustydigger - 2021-05-01 4:52 PM
I was delighted to find that [Ellison] story online since I have completed 9/10 of a best short story list and have been looking a while for this tale to complete the project. Quite expensive to buy,but thanks to the great way WWEnd is now listing which anthologies contain short stories I managed to locate it without having to pay. A hardback collection including the story cost over ?12 Ouch

I have a hardcopy of The Essential Ellison for which I paid $75.00 sixteen years ago (!). If you ever need a story from it, drop me a line.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?246509 

That series is definitely on my "must get to" list. Thus far I've only read The Algebraist, but it definitely lived up to the hype I've seen for Banks. 

And I really loved Vinge's Zones of Thought series, I found parts of it quite mindblowing when I read it a decade ago. 

I share your assessment of Time War: very flowery prose for those who enjoy that, but no worldbuilding, plot, or character development, and no reason for the main characters to fall in love. I No-Awarded it on my Hugo ballot. 

The Murderbot is awesome, of course. I enjoyed The Midnight Bargain but did not think it was nearly as excellent as that author's Kingston Cycle series (which I will probably nominate for next year's Best Series Hugo). Piranesi is a fast, short, bizarre read, and I thought it was okay (but it was a vast improvement over Jonathan Strange, which I DNF'ed - twice). I haven't tackled Black Sun yet; the synopsis screams "not my thing", but since it's on the Hugo ballot, I'm going to at least try it. I've only seen a few people say they've read it, and the reviews were decidedly mixed (good worldbuilding, but the characters are acting out a predestined plot, and it ends on a cliffhanger). I'll be interested to hear your reaction.

I haven't read that one yet, but I'll be interested in your opinion on it. I did read Delta-V, which I found very good apart from the ending being a bit abrupt.

I've just got done reading Juliette Wade's Broken Trust (The Persistence of Blood, Mazes of Power, and Transgressions of Power). It's science fiction set in the underground of what appears to be a post-apocalyptic planet (possibly Earth?); people live mostly underground, and there's a caste system which consigns people to living narrowly-defined lives based on their assigned social roles.

The plot features lots of political intrigue, with some progressive characters who are working for reform of their badly-broken social system. It took me a while to really get absorbed in the first book, but once I did, then I really flew through it and the sequel.

I read Stephen Leigh's Amid the Crowd of Stars, which has a similar premise to his Mictlan series (Dark Water's Embrace and Speaking Stones) - an interstellar human colony ship was stranded on a planet, with the humans being forced to adapt to an incompatible biological environment. I thought it was not quite as good as the Mictlan stories, but it's still good.

And on the same theme, Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Expert System's Champion is a good sequel to the first novella, which goes to some new places. 

I've just had Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary drop into my box, and am really looking forward to it. 

And I've read a few of the K.J. Parker novellas, but I'm doing a roundup read of all of the rest of the short fiction. These stories are all faux history of a world which resembles Earth in the Age of Antiquity, and the main characters are always sly, witty, unreliable narrators who have to use their brilliant intellect to save the city/empire in unexpected ways.