lurkerwithout | Entries tagged with john scalzi

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

Current Mood: tired

Starting with the Free Range short stories for May. We've got Christopher Rowe's "Jack of Coins" about rebellion and magic and guys in funny looking suits. Cecil Castellucci's "We Have Always Lived on Mars" is an abandoned Martian colony story with zee twist. Garth Nix's "Fire Above, Fire Below" gives us OMG Dragons are real and misunderstood. "Shall We Gather" by Alex Bledsoe is a niftly little bit of hillbilly urban fantasy. Cherie Priest's "the Button Man & the Murder Tree" is a crime noir piece and a prequel to the most recent Wild Cards book. Also from that series is "the Elephant in the Room" by Paul Cornell with Elephant Girl and Croyd Crenson and the duplicating powers girl, now naming herself Understudy. And lastly we've got Wen Spencer's Pittsburgh stuck in Elfland series and "Pittsburgh Backyard & Garden"...

I ended up rereading a bunch of Ring of Fire books in May, I think because I noticed the roommate doing it first. All seven of the print Grantville Gazettes edited by Flint and Goodlett and all three Ring of Fire anthologies edited again by Eric Flint. Plus rereading 1635: the Eastern Front, 1636: the Saxony Uprising by Flint alone. And 1635: the Papal Stakes by Flint and Andrew Dennis, as well as 1636: the Kremlin Games by Flint, Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff...

Clifford Simak's the Fellowship of the Talisman is an early example of One Quest add miscellaneous band of heroes. Set in an England where mankind is stuck in the Middle Ages because of rampaging demon hordes. Or maybe its just one horde...

Wicked Business has Janet Evanovich dipping into the Paranormal Romance setting with a baker\/magic seeker with Sexy Bad Boy partner. As well as the normal cast of colorful supporting characters...

I have to say I really enjoyed Weston Ochse's Seal Team 666. Its right behind Larry Correia's Monster Hunter books in the field of gun porn and monster fighting. And Ochse's band of badasses have a dog. Correia's just have a werewolf...

Way back whenever it was I read Joe Hill's first novel I didn't care for it. Thought it was well written and everything but it didn't click. Horns, with its broken protagonist and murder mystery and interesting supernatural twist definitely grabbed hold of me...

I'm pretty sure I read Jack McDevitt's Eternity Road back in high school or college, but I'm not positive. I did have a post-apocalyptic civilization slowing rebuilding phase. And this book, with its archeological expedition to search for a pre-destruction haven, is right in that wheelhouse...

My only real beef with Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations (edited by Paula Guran) is that I had several of the short stories in other collections. Including the Butcher, P.N. Elrod and Charlaine Harris stories. Still, plenty of other good, and new, pieces in this collection...

And finishing up with John Scalzi's the Human Division, another entry in his Old Man's War series. It reads a bit differently, since it was originally published serially, but a fun read nonetheless...

Total Books: 21

Current Mood: hungry

And just under the wire I get to the June book list. Which starts with rereading the Honorverse anthologies. Well the stories that worked in the setting. I'm looking at you John Ringo. More than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, the Service of the Sword and In Fire Forged. I was going to get to the regular Honor-verse books again, but I mostly kept getting distracted by new stuff...

Well mostly new stuff, since next up was the physical copy of Flint, Goodlett and Huff's 1636: the Kremlin Games after I forgot to cancel it when I bought the e-ARC...

But then a new book with John Scalzi's Redshirts. A fun, if quick book, about the titular trope of the extras on a tv show who get killed off to show how dangerous the threat of the week is. And told from the perspective of those "redshirts". And ones who grow to realize the trap they're in...

And then another Weber reread of the newest Honorverse book a Rising Thunder, probably in anticipation of that series wide reread I never got to...

Next up was a novel by Paul Tobin, one of my favorite comics' writers. Still doing a capes story with Prepare to Die, but mixed in with a love story. Later in the month I got around to another supers prose story with Jim Bernheimer's Confessions of a D-List Super Villain. The basic set up has nearly the entire world taken over by mind controlling bugs. With only minor power-armored bad guy Mechani-Cal still standing. And yeah names are the one area where Bernheimer's creativity tends to fall down. But other than that a enjoyable capes book...

Then I went back to David Drake's "Lt. Leary" series with the Far Side of the Stars. The British Empiralism in Space is a bit more explicit with this one. With the series leads, temporarily beached, commanding a wealthy noble couple on a vacation cruise of various less "civilized" worlds...

After that was the Mongoliad by..well a bunch of people, including Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. The mosiac, shared novel is a historical fantasy set during the era of Genghis Khan's sons...

Next up a pair of anthologies. Hex Appeal edited by P.N. Elrod is one of the better urban fantasy collections. In fact Elrod seems to have a pretty strong track record in putting together collections of stories that I predominantly like. As opposed Vivisepulture, a horror anthology edited by Andy Remic and Wayne Simmons. While there were probably a couple decent tales in it, I can't recall any of them out of the mess of mediocre, stupid or just plain terrible ones. I think I picked up the anthology for my Kindle months ago because Adrian Tchaickovsky had a story in it and I can't even remember what his was. Maybe the one about the killer ghost in someone's plumbing?

The Trilisk Ruins by Michael McCloskey was something where I kept seeing ads for it when browsing at work. The cover was pretty basic looking, but something about it made me click thru and read a sample. Not great scifi, but interesting and enjoyable with lost alien civilizations, artifact smugglers and a really alien-seeming alien...

Deadlocked was the latest "Southern Vampire" from Charlaine Harris. More vampire problems, mostly fallout from the killing of the Louisana Regent by Eric and his people. Plus problems with her remaining Fae kin and shapeshifter politics because of Sam and Alcide. Still weird how oddly tame these books are now compared to the HBO series...

Then I finally got around to my John Carter: Andventures on Mars omnibus of E.R. Burroughs. Once you work past the White Man's Burden and similar issues, the books are enjoyable as simple pulp advernturism. Well the first three, by the fourth and fifth books I was just skimming. Also I do prefer the more active movie version of Dejah Thoris...

Finished up the month with the e-Arc of Lois McMaster Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. The newest "Vorkosigan" is centered around cousin Ivan Vorpatril, a woman on the run and in hiding and a rush wedding that seems to make sense to everyone at the time...

Total books: 18

Current Mood: tired

I should really get these done sooner, I've been seriously slacking on them. And April was a pretty light month with the books read. Started with an urban fantasy series involving tooth fairies by Jennifer Safrey called Tooth & Nail. Don't remember a lot about this, beyond that the main character was an amateur female boxer, the fae were kinda callous jerks and the bad guy master plan involved mind altered kids. Also that I didn't care for it even a little...

After that I went with the second of Tobias Buckell's "Xenowealth" series, Ragamuffin. It takes awhile before the new characters meet up with the original cast, but it gives some excellent world building in its on-the-run tour of parts of the Benevolent Satrapy, where humanity are 3rd class citizens at best. Also some excellent zero-g gunfight sequences...

Next up is the second of Phil & Kaja Foglio's text versions of Girl Genius, Agatha & the Clockwork Princess. Like the previous novel, the Foglios do a great job of adapting formats, losing nothing from the original and adding just a small amount of extra info to increase the value of the book. The book covers volumes Four thru Six of the comic. And I'm hopeful that the next volume will be able to cover Agatha and Castle Hetrodyne in less time...

And then still another second volume, with Dan Well's Mr. Monster. I've been hesitant to finish up this trilogy, since much of whats going on the head of the budding sociopath teen protagonist disturbed me. Plus it involved violence against a cat which is just one of my buttons. The roommate assures me the mental state of John Cleaver improves a bit in the finale, so I'll probably get around to it fairly soon. After all I've still got some curiosity about how this whole Dexter + Buffy concept works out...

I then tried another book by Chris Roberson, End of the Century. It makes a somewhat novel take on the Arthurian mythos and has an interesting interconnected three-time period story. But something about how the ending shows that it was mostly a way to interlock several of Roberson's previous stories and characters that left me feeling fairly ambivalent about it...

Happily getting Jenny "the Bloggess" Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was a much more positive reading experience. Lawson's website is often one of the funniest things I'll read and her first book collection didn't disappoint...

Read the first of Alan Dean Foster's "Tipping Point" cyberpunk books the Human Blend and enjoyed it quite a bit. I like the set-up where much of human society indulges in wildly varying body modifications...

The next two e-books are really more novellas or even short stories than full length books. But both are quite good. Stephen King's Mile 81 is creepy and weird and he manages to give real depth to characters you only get to spend a page or two with. And John Scalzi's Election about a human running for city council seat that hasn't had a human win it in decades is just funny and clever in all the best ways...

After that I finally got around to finishing up Sherwood Smith's "Wren" series with Wren's Quest, Wren's War and Wren Journymage, a YA fantasy series focused on a teen princess and her wizard in training best friend...

Blake Crouch's Run was a very nasty piece of survival horror. The set-up is that a large portion of America's population seemingly goes crazy overnight and becomes a merciless army dedicated to wiping out the rest of the population. Regardless of what their previous relationships might have been. The struggle by the point of view family to survive both the kill-crazy mobs and nature was pretty brutal...

Next was a reread of the George R.R. Martin edited Fort Freak. I'd already read the latest Wild Card anthology, but I ordered my own copy when it hit mass-market paperback. And after that was another anthology with the May 41st edition of the Grantville Gazette (edited still by Flint and Goodlet) coming out a couple days early...

And I finished out the month with Dead is the New Black by Marlene Perez. An ok teen girl urban fantasy and start to a series that I picked up as a Daily Deal at some point. The urban fantasy bits seemed a bit hastily added into the teen girl mystery base concept. Still, an ok read but not something where I see myself tracking down the further books in the series...

Total Books: 16

Yeah a very light month. And thats with almost too short to count Mile 81 and Election added in...