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Book Reviews of Recurring Authors
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis by Richard Roberts - Book four of the five-book (with one side-story) series. I think some of the charm of the original book has worn off, and sections of this rely on remembering all of the previous books (including the side-story) to make sense. It also leaves off on a gigantic cliffhanger, so of course I’m going to need to read the final sequel.
The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, ed. Harry Turtledove - While I’m not sure if these are actually the “best” such stories (among other things, they left out “A Sound of Thunder” for inexplicable reasons), I had somehow managed to get this far in life without reading any of them, and they’re all pretty solid--“Sailing to Byzantium” was the only one I couldn’t really get into. Several of the stories really showed their age, though I find that amusing in measured doses. (“The Price of Oranges” screams the 80s to me.) Several others were very clearly cynical reactions to other stories (“A Gun For Dinosaur” to “A Sound of Thunder,” and “The Man Who Came Early” to “A Connecticut Yankee” and similar yarns.) And “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” was clearly a world-building exercise and musing on polyamory that got time travel built into it because it needed an actual plot.
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi - A retelling of The Last Colony from the viewpoint of (shock!) Zoe, adopted daughter of John and Jane. (The fact that Zoe talks just like any other Scalzi protagonist is neatly explained by the fact she was raised by two of them.) Having read the earlier books, you know exactly where things are going, but it fills in a few gaps (like the werewolf plotline that I was annoyed about being dropped in the earlier volume) and fleshes out a bunch of the Obin backstory. No grand revelations, but another fun step in the series.
The Devil's Dictionaries by Bierce & Buff - This is a “good parts version” of Ambrose Bierce's original “Devil's Dictionary” plus a modern set up entries produced by Chaz Buff. (Apparently about 80% of Bierce's original was cut for misogyny, racism or incomprehensibility to modern audiences.) Buff’s set was written in the early 90s, mind you, and I found it dismaying how many are still accurate today (and even more so in the last year and change…). It’s totally offensive, deliberately so, and the sort of thing that you pull one or two quotes from rather than typically reading straight through. (It gets very repetitive, for that matter.) It amused me.
The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, ed. Harry Turtledove - While I’m not sure if these are actually the “best” such stories (among other things, they left out “A Sound of Thunder” for inexplicable reasons), I had somehow managed to get this far in life without reading any of them, and they’re all pretty solid--“Sailing to Byzantium” was the only one I couldn’t really get into. Several of the stories really showed their age, though I find that amusing in measured doses. (“The Price of Oranges” screams the 80s to me.) Several others were very clearly cynical reactions to other stories (“A Gun For Dinosaur” to “A Sound of Thunder,” and “The Man Who Came Early” to “A Connecticut Yankee” and similar yarns.) And “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” was clearly a world-building exercise and musing on polyamory that got time travel built into it because it needed an actual plot.
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi - A retelling of The Last Colony from the viewpoint of (shock!) Zoe, adopted daughter of John and Jane. (The fact that Zoe talks just like any other Scalzi protagonist is neatly explained by the fact she was raised by two of them.) Having read the earlier books, you know exactly where things are going, but it fills in a few gaps (like the werewolf plotline that I was annoyed about being dropped in the earlier volume) and fleshes out a bunch of the Obin backstory. No grand revelations, but another fun step in the series.
The Devil's Dictionaries by Bierce & Buff - This is a “good parts version” of Ambrose Bierce's original “Devil's Dictionary” plus a modern set up entries produced by Chaz Buff. (Apparently about 80% of Bierce's original was cut for misogyny, racism or incomprehensibility to modern audiences.) Buff’s set was written in the early 90s, mind you, and I found it dismaying how many are still accurate today (and even more so in the last year and change…). It’s totally offensive, deliberately so, and the sort of thing that you pull one or two quotes from rather than typically reading straight through. (It gets very repetitive, for that matter.) It amused me.