A Descent into Dullness

Looking over the non-collected short fiction to start, beginning with N.K. Jemisin's Playing Nice With God's Bowling Ball which is about a police investigation of some super-science gone wrong involving young kids.  Steve White's the Last Secret of Mary Bowser is a sort of side story to what I think is his normal time travel war series.  I think.  What I do know is it doesn't feature near enough Mary Bowser, an African-Amercian woman who served as Union spy in the home of Jefferson Davis during the Civil War.  The Penitent Damned is a prequel to Django Wexler's "Shadow Campaigns" series.  And the Face in the Window and Servant of the Crown are more prequel stories for Brian McCellan's "Powder Mage" trilogy.  Max Gladstone's the Angelus Guns is a high concept story involving many worlds theory, an angelic civil war and a sister trying to save her brother.  Ursula Vernon examines modern living as a supernatural woman with the Day My Grandmother Exploded.  I'm not normally a fan of Adam Christopher, but I do enjoy noir stories involving robots like his Brisk Money.  Jonathan L Howard's Goon Squad stories are a mostly monthly supers serial done all in prose.  Enjoyable government cape squad stuff, and I finished the first three in July...

Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan's webcomic Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell was a wonderful sometimes dark comedy in a world where the mythological and fantastic mixes with the everyday.  And where protagonist Darwin Carmichael has to work constantly to try and improve his karmic balance after accidently giving the reincarnated Dali Lama brain damage.  Glad to have kickstarted and recieved the print collected omnibus...

Greg VanEekhaut's California Bones is a creepy urban fantasy where magicians can gain powers by ingesting the bones of extinct magical creatures.  And others take that further by ingesting the flesh and bones of other magicians.  The book is a heist story with a talented magician having to re-assemble his old crew to rob the vault of the ruthless and deadly ruler of California...

Adrian Tchaikovsky finishes up his "Shadows of the Apt" series with Warmaster's Gate where the Wasp Empire again goes after Collegium, while the Empress investigates an ancient power.  And then it all comes to a giant climax with Seal of the Worm with everyone, Imperial, Collegiate, Apt, InApt falling under the returned threat of the Centipedes...

I'm glad Robots Vs. Slime Monsters popped up on my kindle recommended list.  Because I'd manage to totally miss A. Lee Martinez doing a kickstarter to fund this collection of short fiction sequels to many of his books...

Shattered is the latest in Kevin Hearne's "Iron Druid" series.  The main focus this time is split between Atticus helping his original teacher adapt to the modern age and his apprentice investigating the death of her archeologist father.  Plus Loki.  And a traitor among the Tuath(a) Dé Danann...

John Scalzi's latest is Lock In a near future murder mystery where the lead character telecommutes from their totally paralyzed body to a robot drone to work as an FBI agent...

Probably the best of the short stories in Tanya Huff's He Said, Sidhe Said anthology is the title one, a retelling of Tam Lin involving skate punks and the Fae...

After reading Jim Bernheimer's prequel Origins of a D-List Super Villain, I of course had to go back and re-read his Confessions of a D-List Super Villain...

Django Wexler's second "Shadow Campaigns" novel, the Shadow Throne has Crown Princess with a deadly secret, student revolutionaries, dockside gangs, an evil spymaster and a female soldier disguised as a male disguised as a woman...

Another prequel, this time Twenty Palaces by Harry Connolly, to his "Twenty Palaces" urban fantasy series.  Got this one as a kickstarter reward for his Epic Fantasy With No Dull Bits project...

I liked that short story way up at the top by N.K. Jemisin that I picked up her the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  Great book and great setting.  Big, epic stuff...

Pair of finales.  Ben Winter's finishes up his "Last Policeman" trilogy with World of Trouble.  Which manages to be as uplifting and sad as a series where the Earth gets hit by a comet at the end can be.  C.E. Murphy finishes up her "Urban Shaman" series with Shaman Rising, which has the final confrontation against the Dark God culminating back in Seattle and has call-backs and cameos by pretty much everyone from the whole series...

Weston Ochse's Velvet Dogma is an old school style cyberpunk novel.  With the main twist being that people are essentially born owing their bodies after death for organ donation...

Darryl Gregory's We Are All Completely Fine centers around a support group for the survivors of what are essentially horror movies...

Cautionary Fables & Fairy Tales: Africa Edition, is a wonderful collection of comics telling fables and folk stories from various African traditions, edited by Kel McDonald and Taneka Stotts...

And finally I was surprised and how well Joe Abercrombie does YA-Fantasy with Half a King.  It still has that distinctive Abercrombie mud & blood flavor but with a lighter touch for a younger target reader...

Total books: 20

Its still June so this isn't late. Well its tolerably late. Tolerably to me anyway. Shut up, your moms a procrastinator!

Hrrumph

Anyway, started off May with Senrid, a somewhat disapointing Sherwood Smith book set in her main fantasy setting. I'd say I liked about half of this, though that was scattered all thru the book. And the using magic to remain frozen in adolescence because adult rulers shouldn't be trusted? What the hell was up with that? Glad that was an idea she didn't go back to...

After that was some David Weber rereading of his "Safehold" series. Thats the one where humanity is just one colony, that thanks to creepy brainwashing is semi-stuck in a Dark Ages theocratic society. But is breaking free of that slowly and painfully thanks to a really, really corrupt Church leadership and a secret cyborg trying to get the humans back to their high technology levels so they can deal with the xenophobic aliens that almost wiped our species out in the prologue. So Off Armaggedon Reef, By Schism's Rent Asunder, By Heresies Distressed, A Mighty FOrtress and How Firm a Foundation. As normal for Weber lots and lots of exposition and piles of secondary and tertiary viewpoint characters...

Then it was the newest "Iron Druid" book from Kevin Herne, Tricked. With our demi-Immortal ancient druid hero repaying a favor to Coyote that is supposed to involve creating a gold mine on a reservation. Which of course leads to some unmentioned Skinwalker problems. I swear I keep seeing Skinwalkers pop up lately as everyone's new favorite monster. Also more fall-out from the last book's whole Get Thor adventure...

Murder in Lamut by Raymond Feist and Joel Rosenburg basically involves picking up the late Rosenberg's Not the Three Musketeers soldiers from "Guardians of the Flame" and dropping them into Feist's "Midkemia" series. Right in the middle of the first RiftWar and sticking them with solving a noble's murder...

Emperor Mollusk vs. the Sinister Brain is the latest from A. Lee Martinez. Its a pulp-ish bit of scifi with the Evil Overlord as the hero who saves the day. I especially like how every planet in our Solar System has its own dominant intelligent species. And how all of them seem to hate the "hero"...

B. Justin Shier's "Zero Sight" series is a pretty good urban fantasy series. Its a mix of Magical Academy that falls in between "Harry Potter" and Grossman's The Magicians in tone with a taste of Military Ops feel thrown in. The two books in the series so far are Zero Sight and Zero Sum...

Next up I tried out David Drake's "Lt. Leary" series with With the Lightning and Lt. Leary, Commanding. Which is another "Horatio Hornblower"/"Master and Commander" inspired scifi series. Though its more of a direct lift of Napoleonic Wars British Navy in Space than, say Weber. Fun if you like that kind of setting, with an interesting way of doing the whole sailing ships to star ships thing...

Then I finished up Dan Wells' "John Cleaver" series with I Don't Want to Kill You. Liked it more than the second one. The whole psycopath/sociopath part of the Serial Killer Who Kills Demons bit is toned down. And it ends in a way that might make future books more appealing for me. But I still decided that the current three books weren't for me and dropped them into the trade-in box. Wells writes well, but his Dexter/Buffy mash-up didn't click with me...

I was more pleased with John Scalzi's rewrite of the classic scifi story Fuzzy Nation about planetary exploration and exploitation that turns into a first contact situation. Like "Avatar" if it involved Ewoks and wasn't really, really stupid...

Another new and enjoyable find was C.E. Grundler's Last Exit in New Jersey, a nice modern mystery/noir piece involving smuggling and boats and crazy people in love...

Also in the happily good new read Marion G. Harmon's supers books Wearing the Cape and Villains Inc. Good world building, well-written characters and a pair of stories that are both fun and tense...

Finally was Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited again by the VanderMeers again. There were a few gems in this one, though I'm baffled by the decision to start off the book with Gibson's "the Gernsback Continuum". Also whoever decided to code the Kindle version without including a fucking table of contents needs a kick in the ass...

Total books: 19

Dear A. Lee Martinez,

Lets be friends forever.

"Don't worry. I don't plan on any smiting, though itis well within my rights. But I'm not that kind of god. Never was a casual smiter. Sure, I've smote a few mortals in my day. I'm not proud of it, but it was back in the old days. Everyone was doing it, and I just wanted to be cool. But I'm past that sort of heavy-handed disciplinary action. It's good for a laugh occasionally, but I don't want to be your god because you're afraid of me. I want us to be buddies, compadres. Heck, we're practically family.

"But I'm not going to force myself on you. I don't need to. You'll see the benefits of having me around soon enough. You don't want to put me up for the night, that's cool. Though I did notice you have a very nice guest room. But I'll leave. No smiting. No wrath. Providing you make me a sandwich at least."

Teri made a bologna-and-ham offering for their new god.