Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

Hi all, welcome to the last month of autumn / fall for the northerners, and the last month of spring for us southerners.

I am continuing to make progress on The Parliament of Blood, which is a YA gaslamp adventure. A bit over halfway through, and enjoying it so far.

Aside from three books I'm halfway through, I'll be starting a library book I already had to extend once - Suns Will Rise by Jessica Brody. The conclusion of a Les Miserables retelling taking place in the future on a different planet.

I know I said I'd start Suns Will Rise, but it's a brick, about 7-800 pages long. It's quick reading since its YA but just holding the thing...so I did a quickie, also from the library - Athena: The Story of a Goddess by Imogen Greenberg, was able to get through it in one sitting.

Also, I'd better get started on one of those free Simon & Shuster books, as they are only available till the end of the month...I'll start with the standalone one - An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

I just finished The Midnight Library, and I'll be starting The Way of Shadows today!

Happy November! This year has flown by.
I started out reading Shikasta Re: Colonised Planet 5 on the first but also I had not finished another, kind of silly story, so I went back and finished it -- Pirate by Eve Langlais (scifi, clever with jokes, kind of goofy though as it is really about sex); I also started Between Worlds, fantasy by Martha Wells; ...Meanwhile, I remembered The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty has been sitting in my bookshelf waiting on me. So I happily started it last night.
So, it has begun.
I am way behind on listing the books I've finished this year in goodreads.

I finished The Parliament of Blood. A very enjoyable YA Gaslamp adventure where vampires try to take over the British Empire.

Next up, Black Magic, which looks to be somewhat of a rarity - a single volume manga. It will fill the translated slot in my Bingo.

Completed:
text:

Audible:

==========================================
Authors:
Becky Chambers, Aliette de Bodard, Patricia Engel, Matthew FitzSimmons, Sarah Gailey, Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz, J. William Lewis, Jess Lourey, Josh Malerman, Everina Maxwell, Hailey Piper, Richard Powers, Cadwell Turnbull, Isabel Wilkerson
Narrators:
Riz Ahmed, Kat Dennings, Taron Egerton, James McAvoy, Andy Serkis, Samantha Morton, Bebe Neuwirth, Michael Sheen, Arthur Darvill, Miriam Margolyes

I am just finishing Year One and can't wait to move on to the next one. Good thing I am always years behind everyone else, I can read all three right away! This sure had mixed reviews, but I really like it!

I bought some physical copies of the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie recently and I'm really keen on starting them, even though I'm already working on two books already... I don't wanna start a third book because I'll mix up all the characters.

I wanted something light and easy to read when I had a few minutes available yesterday, so I started on Young Lovecraft #1 by José Oliver

I'm finding it pretty cute (and creepy), good for fans of the comic strip Lio or the short movie Vincent (or anything Tim Burton). It's not meant to be accurate, the authors outright say they made up many of his childhood circumstances, not just the supernatural bits, so read it for the cute/creepy Lovecraftian comic and not as a biography.

I finished Black Magic. A bit disjointed but not terrible, It fills the translated slot in my Bingo.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence is a collection of 200 short essays written in response to an Edge question & edited by John Brockman. It's fantastic & very dense. I highly recommend it to all fans & authors of SF. I gave it a 5 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Finished Suns Will Rise, overall I enjoyed this retelling of Les Miserables.

I also finished Fathomless. Ok now, with a big twist at the end, I really, REALLY want to know how the series ends, but not sure if that book will ever come to light...or maybe I'll have to move to one of those alternate dimensions of Lovecraft's, the one with really weird geometries that mess with your mind, to be able to get a copy since it doesn't exist in our reality.

I'm also halfway through The Wake by Neil Gaiman, getting close to finishing the core Sandman series.

For my next dead tree book, I'll be starting a YA fallen angel series - Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick.

I have started The Airmen. I have had this sitting on my shelves for 7 or 8 years, as it is listed as book one of a series. However, as far as I can tell, he has never written the second book in that series, so I hope there it's not a book that ends in a cliff-hanger.

I tried The Way of Shadows, but I couldn't get past 32% because it was just so dull and weird... so I put that on DNF.

Now I've gotten back to Lonesome Dove, though that's not really sci-fi or fantasy, XD.

Aurora's End by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate was quite an enlightening look at container ships. I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

From Netgalley, a delightful novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky,
Elder Race is an entertaining blend of fantasy/scifi
(available for request on NG until 16th Nov)

my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Pausing my run through CJ Cherryh's "Foreigner" series.
Have just started Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
I remember the Tarkovsky film pretty well but never saw the George Clooney version.

Lynn wrote: "Have just started Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
I remember the Tarkovsky film pretty well but never saw the George Clooney version."

I have tried to watch the Tarkovsky film 3 or 4 times, but I have fallen asleep during it every time.

I saw the Tarkovsky version once a long time ago as part of a Channel Four season of foreign Sci-Fi classics. I remember enjoying it but finding it a hard watch. The Clooney (Soderbergh) movie is simpler and slicker. It looks good though, is very atmospheric and we'll acted, particularly by Natasha Macelhone (possibly not the correct spelling ☺) surprisingly watchable overall.

Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us wasn't just about nutrition, but also the scientific method & how food headlines are generated. It's short, topical, & explains the scientific method in the real world. Very well narrated & highly recommended for all. I gave it a 5 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Season of Storms

Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral by Christopher Lansdown

Tony wrote: "Lynn wrote: "Have just started Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
I remember the Tarkovsky film pretty well but never saw the George Clooney version."

I have tried to watch the Tarkovsky fil..."

Oh!! Hope you got a good night's sleep though. :) But I am a bit of a Tarkovsky fan....

The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy

A meteor shower results in an explosive growth of strange fungi in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Very good sci-fi, mystery mash-up. 4 stars

My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Finished my Lovecraft reread, now my eReader is freed up so that I can read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Finished Hush, Hush...if people complained about how Twilight was a stalker story and the female protagonist should have run screaming from her suitor, then this one takes it to the extreme, as the "bad boy" literally considers killing her for his own gain (but of course doesn't 'cause all true love and stuff). And the girl knows he's bad but still "just can't help herself" every time he pins her to the wall aggressively she ends up kissing him *eye roll*. Cause you know, that kind of behaviour from your boyfriend is all sexy right? He manipulates you, lies to you, considers killing, is physical with you, but he's just the one so you forgive him??? ARGH

Think I'm better off back in Troy with yet another retelling in The Silence of the Girls - by Pat Barker

Online, I finished An Enchantment of Ravens. I really enjoyed that one. The way the fair folk were portrayed felt very realistic and well done, excellent world building. Now if only I owned a copy of this one instead of a copy of Hush, Hush :)

The next book I'll start on rivetedlit.com will be Crown of Feathers by Nicki Pau Preto

Andrea wrote: "Finished Hush, Hush...if people complained about how Twilight was a stalker story and the female protagonist should have run screaming from her suitor, then this one takes it to the extreme, as the..."

Ewww, Andrea! That sounds so bizarre!

Heroes Fall by Morgon Newquist

I finished Dark Age; this was a disappointment and I am not sure that I will be reading the 6th volume when it eventually comes out. Being ready for some Alastair Reynolds I started Revelation Space, which is in fact a re-read but the first time I read that book was so long ago that I do not remember much about it.

I'm re-reading Peril's Gate. I certainly love this series!

My review of The Fall of Babel by Josiah Bancroft

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Finished Silence of the Girls, it's interesting to see how different authors fill in the blanks of what went on behind the scenes of the Iliad.

Starting on Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick. Now that the male character has decided he's not going to kill the female character, maybe the romance won't be as creepy as I go through the remaining 3 books?

I still have 27 books with another 4 in progress that I was hoping to read before the end of the year, not all are novels of course, there are short stories and graphic novels in that mix but I'll have to see which ones will have to wait for another year...

One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

Finally finished the demon anthology I started in October. There were some good ones, but too many disturbing and graphic rape/sex possession ones for my taste. It definitely leaned more towards the horror spectrum (which is fair enough, it was about demons).

And I won't be starting another book to replace this one :) I often have an anthology on the side, where I can read one story here and there, but I've got too many other books to read, and the graphic novels I've got lined up already cover the "I've got 5 mins to read, what can I squeeze in" kind of thing.

This fills my BINGO slot for anthologies, with one more slot left

I am currently reading Jade War, second book in the Green bone saga by Fonda Lee. All I can say right now is that I am thoroughly invested in the conclusion of this series!

I'm finishing the last half of Kanome Shirahama's Witch Hat Atelier.

I finished The Airmen. It was great fun and has a definite pulp sci-fi / Saturday afternoon movie serial feel to it. Fortunately it wraps up almost all the major plot threads, as it has been 9 years since it was published and the sequel has not appeared. It fills the Author New to Me Bingo slot.

I have started If I Were An Evil Overlord, which will fill the Protagonist is a Ruler Bingo slot.

Finished reading A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan. I am reading The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2) by Stephen King. I plan to read Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey, next when it is released on November 30, 2021.

Finished Crescendo...if anything it was worse than Hush, Hush...the protagonist is, well, just plain stupid. I mean of course it's a good idea when all your instincts are screaming "this guy is dangerous", but you decide to hang out with him anyway, just because you want to spite your actual boyfriend AND prove that he'll swoop in to save you. And not only do you end up nearly dying once because of that, but you keep doing it over and over again *bangs head on desk* If it weren't for the idiot main character, there is some interesting stuff going on in the background but she is just cringeworthy and hopefully will be removed from the genepool by the end of the series (one can hope...)

Switching to something where the female protagonist has functioning brain cells and understands actions have consequences - the sequel to The Silence of the Girls with The Women of Troy by Pat Barker.

Finished Crown of Feathers, I enjoyed it well enough but found it was a little long. Was nice to see the phoenix rather than say the more common dragon or unicorn.

I should have time to squeeze in one more rivetedlit freebie, picked the shorter of the three remaining (will have to pass on the other two) and will read Tithe by Holly Black

As you can see, I'm sort of cramming a little, trying to squeeze in those last fantasy books before I switch over to SF in Jan. Finished The Women of Troy, was interesting in that it covered a period of time (after Troy fell but before the Greek left) which I'd only seen touched upon before, let alone have 300 or so pages dedicated to it, interesting "behind the scenes" of what living in that camp was like.

Now I'm going to torture myself with the next Hush, Hush book since I'm obviously going to be giving them away but I hate to give away something I haven't read. But it's not starting off good, the author decided to use the amnesia trope, which worked great for Zelazny in the Amber series, but here just means anything she might have learnt from her previous experiences (not that she seemed to learn much) will be wiped clean. I mean in just the first few pages, she is finally back home after disappearing for months, and the first thing she does on the first night back is sneak out of the house at 2 in the morning to go hang out in the cemetery where she was found...you'd think after being told you were kidnapped you'd go at least ONE day without sneaking about in the dark and exposing yourself to danger...Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick

Wow! I hate it when characters show so little sense. The whole amnesia thing has been worked pretty hard over the years, especially since full amnesia so rarely occurs in real life.

At least, unlike Corwin, she was just missing a few months (i.e. the first two books). And it helps when there's magical intervention (or guess it was divine intervention, this is a book about fallen angels and nephilim) to explain the amnesia.

The annoying bit isn't that she just rushes out and does crazy things (pretty much any middle grade book are little kids saving the world instead of asking for help from their parents) but she'll say "This is a really bad idea, but I'm mad at my boyfriend so I'm going to force him to swoop in and rescue me since I know I'm in danger here." ARGH

To be fair, that recklessness works better in the third book, exactly because no one will tell her anything, she has to go off on her own to get answers...that seems, well reasonable. And her mother might be dating the big bad guy, again, here she's trying to save her mom and not just make someone else jealous.

I guess the difference is the first two books was about the romance and teenage angst. There were bad guys but she was sorta oblivious to that fact. This third book though, is actually about taking down a villain, so the motivations aren't driven by hormonal overload but by a justifiable goal.

It won't be enough to save the series though. I had two YA fallen angel series and I figured if I kept either I would only allow myself to keep one. Fallen, for all it's faults, had a far more reasonable female protagonist, and a far more convincing reason why nobody could explain to her what was going on. Hush, Hush though, will be dropped off down the street where a guy put up a box on his front lawn where people can exchange books :) Or at least I will when it's not stuffed full of strange Christian/New Age/Alternate Science stuff (I don't mind if other people like it, but not my thing, and apparently not the thing of the person who is getting rid of all those books either!)

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong was long, repetitive, & had too much preaching in it, but it was still really good in a lot of ways, so I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Finished Silence, it was better than the previous two and I have just one left to wrap up the series but first a break with one of my last three library books, as well as the second to last Troy related tale - The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

Also finished Tithe on rivetedlit.com, with only two days left I don't have time to finish either of the remaining two that interested me so won't start a new one. I'm secretly hoping they won't have too many books that catch my eye next month, I have so many others already on my list (21 of them) to finish up!

Sparks and Monsters by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio

I finished If I Were An Evil Overlord, an anthology of stories that poke fun at the trope of the evil overlord always making the wrong decisions with regard to the heroes. Most were humorous, but the quality was variable (as usual with anthologies). Tanya Huff's story was the best I thought. It also fills the Protagonist is a Ruler slot in my Bingo.

Hollow City by Kai Wai Cheah