lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
I don't know what it was about that month, but I barely read anything.  And its not like I was stuck on some door-stopper of a book.  So starting with the free-range short fiction is Kai Ashante Wilson's the Devil in America a depressing look at white-on-black violence.  And I mean wiping out entire towns level of violence.  Then Something Going Around by Harry Turtledove, which posits a parasitic infection causing unexpected suicides.  Sad and creepy.  Carrie Vaughn's the Best We Can presents the difficulty of science funding and global cooperation even in the face of potentially world changing opportunities.  Cold Wind by NIcola Griffith is old myths in the modern world and the relationship of predator and prey.  Finally Dale Bailey's the End of the End of Everything looks at the very concept of art at the end of the world.  Which actually ends up being a little hopeful despite all the nihilism...

The Girl Who Would Be King by Kelly Thompson is split between two super-powered women, linked together and forced to fill roles of Good vs. Evil.  Got it as part of a kickstarter for another book by Thompson...

Blackcollar is a military scifi story from Timothy Zahn.  With the titular group being super-ninja commandos brought out of hiding to continue the fight against mankinds alien conquerors.  I do literally mean super-ninjas 'cause their elite combat skills involve bypassing weapons detection using nunchaku and throwing stars.  Still enjoyable enough that I'll eventually pick up more of the series...

Daddy's Girl is another of R.J. Ross' "Super High" books.  With another super-villain daughter, though this one is definitely more Real Bad Guy than some of the previous bad guy parents.  Also time travel...

John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids is an old-school scifi/horror end of the world story.  With a disaster that turns much of the world blind and thus easy prey for the killer mutant plants that had been grown everywhere as a fuel source...

Beyond Dinopacalypse by Chuck Wendig is the middle part of the tie-in book trilogy for Evil Hat's "Spirit of the Century" rpg.  With the various pulp heroes getting to see the resulting psychic dinosaur overrun world that results of them not stopping the bad guys in the 1st book.  But time travel.  Because of crystals or something.  Meaning another chance to stop it all from happening.  Though I was a little sad to learn that Wendig's growing success means he won't be able to finish up the trilogy.  He's very positive on his replacement though.  Also from the "Spirit of the Century"  tie-in is Stephen Blackmoore's Khan of Mars which is basically what if Gorilla Grodd's Hero Son Went to a E.R.Burrough's style Mars to fight a Evil Witch.  Or maybe its a more Flash Gordon-esque Mars.  Very, very pulpy either way....

Treecat Wars is the next in David Weber and Jane Lindskold's Honor-verse prequels.  This one is more teen angst than the first, but still plenty of treecats.  Also debates on interactions between researchers and their groups studied and risks and cross-cultural contamination...

Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead is a pretty darn good murder mystery, high fantasy.  Looking foward to grabbing more of the series when I've got some extra cash again.  Though I read that the number of the titles indicates where in the setting's timeline each individual book is set.   Meaning this first novel, chronologically is somewhere in the middle of the series...

And finally Rags & Bones, edited by Melissa Marr and Timothy Pratt, is a collection of short fiction writes a story springing from a Classic story that inspired them.  Plus some excellent page-spreads by Charles Vess doing the same, except more visually...

Total Books:10
lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
More late than usual on this one.  So let us start with the free-range short fiction for August.  We've got "Cayos in the Stream" by Harry Turtledove.  A somewhat alternate history story with Hemingway hunting for Nazi U-boats in the Caribbean.  Then Meghan McCarron's "Swift, Brute Retaliation" where just being dead doesn't stop a dead kid from being a bullying dick to his little sisters.  V.E. Sawhab's "Warm Up" probably works better as a prequel chapter to her supers novel then as a stand-alone story.  And finally a Narbonic/Skin Horse short from Shaenon Garrity, "By Comitee", where a group of well-meaning activists (including an A.I, a gerbil and a cat) try to plan a surprise birthday party for a helicopter.  A black ops social services helicopter.  I do so love the Narboni-verse...

Carrying over from the previous month is the remaining of David Weber's "Safehold" books, How Firm a Foundation and  Midst Toil & Tribulation.  And I'm still very impatiently awaiting the next book due out next year...

Then we've got Neil Gaiman's the Ocean at the End of the Lane.  An excellent story about childhood terror and wonder and magic.  So like a lot of Gaiman's stuff...

Greg Stolze's Sinner is a supers book.  I think the roommate got this from a Kickstarter campaign.  I liked the world-building bits and the life and crimes of the titular super-villain, told after he turns himself in.  The final climax feels a bit rushed and I'm not sure how well it really holds together.  But Cephalopod, the remotely operated octopus themed super-hero was pretty damn cool...

Unfettered (edited by Shawn Speakman) was a pretty good anthology from a diverse bunch of writers, all to help with the editor's fight against cancer.  Or at least to help defray some of the costs of said fight...

Christopher Moore ruins art forever with Sacre Bleu.  Ok, thats his hyperbole.  But it definitely puts a similar twist on art to what he did with Jesus and vampires.  And King Lear.  And Christmas angels...

Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest by A. Lee Martinez shows that working fast food can really suck and lead to being geased and having to work for cryptic agencies who are lot less helpful than they could be.  Also that its hard balancing being a modern Orc with the urge to follow your ancestral traditions...

Probably the most memorable scene in Illona Andrews' Magic Rises is while on a boat ride to Europe, the band of American shapeshifters (plus Kate) have to fight a band of weredolphin pirates.  Greek weredolphin pirates...

The Russians Are Coming is another story filling in the time gap for K.B. Spengler's <a href = "http://agirlandherfed.com/">A Girl & Her Fed</a>.  With squirrel infestations to go along with sort-of-government cyborgs.  And super-hardcore sex.  Lots of that...

Chuck Wendig's Blue Blazes is basically a urban fantasy story.  But more a criminal syndicates type story.  But also still that elder horror from beneath the earth.  But also a broken family drama.  Plus monsters and magic drugs...

Warbound finishes up Larry Correia's "Grimnoir" trilogy with the neccesary super-sized action sequences and heroic deaths.  All very epic pulp adventure...

Charlie Huston's latest, Skinner, is a near future epsionage technothriller.  With the titular Skinner being the world's scariest bodyguard...

Naomi Novik's most recent "Temeraire" book, Blood of Tyrants, takes her band of dragons and pilots from Japan to China and then to Napolean's invasion of Russia...

Next is Jim Hines' second Libriomancer book Codex Born.  This volume concentrates more on bad-ass dryad Lena Greenwood, in addition to Libriomancer Isaac...

After that was a quick reread of Steven Gould's Helm.  Don't remember what prompted it, beyond the book being one of my favorites...

Then one of Neal Asher's "Polity" books, Line of the Polity.  Worth it for making me wonder what the D&D or GURPS stats would be for a Gabbleduck.  No one does crazy space monsters like Neal Asher...

And finally Austin Grossman's YOU.  Which reminded me a whole lot of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, in a very good way...

Total Books: 18
lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
Just getting this under the wire.  Starting off June with Mur Lafferty's the Shambling Guide to New York City.  Which is about writing tour books for the supernatural community.  Some nice twists on the usual modern paranormal tropes...

From one of my various Kickstarter rewards I got Harry Connelly's  King Khan.  Which is a pulp adventure story with a talking gorilla who teaches at Oxford going to Los Angeles to fight zombies and mummies and stuff.  At one point he's joined in his quest by a young Luchador.  Its pretty fucking great...

For some reason I got to describing Poul Anerson's the High Crusade to the roommate.  I forget why.  But that led to me realizing I know longer had a physical copy and so grabbing it for my Kindle.  And of course rereading the tale of how some English crusaders steal a spaceship from some space pirates and then go forth (with their entire fucking Duchy) and conquer space.  With swords and bows and shit...

Dead Ever After is the finale for Charlaine Harris' "Southern Vampire" books.  A decent ending that wraps up the majority of the various primary and secondary character arcs.  And leaves Sookie with the expected love interest...

I picked up James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes as Kindle Daily Deal, even though the roommate has the whole series.  And then after I finished it I found that it included ALL of Daniel Abraham's (who is the same guy) the Dragon's Path.  Which is the start to his epic fantasy series with religious wars and old soldiers and one of the leads being a bad-ass teen lady banker.  So basically two bucks got me the first book in a hard core no-FTL hard scifi series AND a great new first book for a cool epic, little bit grimdark but not to grimdark, fantasy.  Definitely five-starred THAT purchase...

I also quickly bought the King's Blood and Tyrant's Law the next two books for the series and am very impatiently awaiting the release of the 4th...

Fearsome Journeys, edited by Jonathan Strahan, is a tight little anthology.  Its got some Elizabeth Bear and Daniel Abraham and Scott Lynch and a new Glen Cook "Black Company" story...

Esther Freisner's Nobody's Princess and Nobody's Prize are kind of ancient Greek historical fiction, non-magical myth re-imagining, Torjan War prequels about teen Helen...

Limits of Power is the latest in Elizabeth Moon's "Paksworld" novels.  With several nations, who had outlawed magery (which is different from wizardry and not-druidery and clerical magics) for pretty solid historical reason, dealing with a resurgance of people showing up with magery powers.  Plus Alured the Black from waaaaay back in the first trilogy really steps up as a bad guy...

The roommate picked up the 5th and 6th of Craig Johnson's "Longmire Mysteries", the Dark Horse and Junkyard Dogs.  So after blowing thru those, I of course had to immediately grab Hell is Empty and As the Crow Flies, the 7th and 8th books in the series...

G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen is a pretty great modern fantasy set in the Middle East, with an Arab/Indian hacker getting involved with genies and targeted by state security because of the upper class girl he's gotten involved with...

Beginnings (edited by David Weber) is the most recent of his "Honorverse" tie-in anthologies.  Though the first story, dealing with early colonization star ships and the crashing Earth governments could be part of more than a few limited resource in-Sol system scifi settings...

Also the latest Grantville Gazette (still edited by Paula Goodlett) with this 48th volume filling in still more of the fringes for the "Ring of Fire" setting...

And then we've got the latest "Iron Druid" book from Kevin Hearne, Hunted.  Which has the death of a goddess and a chase across Europe and the Greco-Roman pantheons being assholes...

Then another anthology with Machine of Death (edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Maiki).  Which is a collection of short stories all based around the concept that society is introduced to a machine that perfectly and accurately and unerringly predicts how you will die...

And finally from the free-range short story round up.  Leigh Bardugo's the Too-Clever Fox is a bit of a fable about a fox and supernaturally skilled hunter.  Jedediah Berry's a Window or a Small Box is a very off kilter bit with a couple on the run in a strange and illogical world.  Porn & Revolution in the Peaceable Kingdom is another oddball story where every other species on the planet has become sentient.  I mean all of them.  The lead is a slime mold.  Except they basically live kind of like humans do now and keep humans as pets.  I mean we're still sentient, just not very bright.  Anna Banks' the Stranger is kind of a "Little Mermaid" homage, though it has a pretty soft and inconclusive ending...


Total books: 23

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