What Have I Been Reading? (2019 batch #1)
Jan. 15th, 2019 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroPick-A-Path #13: The Secret of 13 by B. B. Hiller - There were two Choose You Own Adventure books I had distinct memories of from childhood, and it turned out the reason I could never re-find this one was because it was from a different series. In an interesting change from other CYOA books (and Fighting Fantasy in particular), the story can go in a completely different direction depending on the seemingly-innocuous choices you make. In this book, you’re given a mysterious paper in the elevator, but which path you take determines whether that paper is a treasure map, a recipe, a newspaper clipping, or a completely-forgotten red herring. Other books try to keep the thrust of the story coherent regardless of which branch of it you take; this is a dozen different stories that start from the same hook. (Also, there seem to be only two places where one branch can loop into another, and they’re both very minor.)
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu - In a terrible, shitty future, “chronmen” dive into disasters in the past to retrieve necessary goods without damaging history in the process. I have a number of spoiler thoughts: I appreciate that he takes a somewhat different tact from most sci-fi and makes no effort to actually explain 90% of the tech, because James logically doesn’t actually know how anything works, just how to use things. (I’m reminded of the old Star Trek writers’ line, “How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?” “Just fine, thanks!”) James is a drunken action-man who needs to find smarter people to actually come up with good plans for him—really, rescuing two specific people from the past is the only smart things he does through the entire book, as the two of them drive all of his other good decisions. Really, though, this book is an indemnification of late-stage capitalism, because the corporations are running everything, and mining the past (and destroying civilization as we know it) to eke out slightly more wealth for themselves. The implication of the Nutris Platform’s destruction is that the timeline has already been changed when we start the book—maybe Earth wasn’t a shithole before that bombing was organized—and that the “cliffside of humanity” didn’t actually need to happen and potentially hadn’t happened before the corporations started mining the past. I’m a little worried that he doesn’t quite realize what he’s set up and that the sequel(s) will be disappointing. Because really, I think the realization they need to make is that they can, in fact, go change the past and fix some of the devastation, and the only rule of time travel that we’ve seen to actually be solid is that you can’t go back to the same place twice—which means that the corporations un-doing his work is much harder.
Death by Cliché by Bob Defendi - A tabletop RPG designer is shot in the head and sent into a terrible, cliché-ridden fantasy game. While this has a bunch of decent lines and an okay through-plot, it’s nowhere near as funny as it wants to be. Not as crude as Critical Failures but still dipping in that well; he’s self-aware but only to a limited degree, as he can’t seem to get away from the clichés enough to be really interesting with them. I found that the shattering of the fourth wall got old and despite name-checking Gail Simone, he threatens one of the only female characters with rape anyway. Honestly, upon further reflection, if this ended in a genuine subversion instead of obvious cliché it could have been genuinely good. Overall this ends up on the pile of rpg parody novels that I can’t really recommend.
The Forgotten Hours by Katrin Schumann – Katie’s father went to prison for statutory rape of her former best friend. She never believed he was actually guilty, but as his release from prison approaches, she realizes how little of the story she actually knows. (Obviously, that synopsis doubles as a warning of what sort of material the book covers.) Credit for “vivid” descriptions of emotionally-charged daily events that I didn’t think fell over into purple; but the really success here is managing to stick the landing. I thought for sure it was going to have some sort of ridiculous, nearly farcical twist ending…but this was written by a woman. It ends exactly how it should, and all the clues tie together neatly.
Modified: Volume 1 by Kat Stiles - Free on Amazon and only the first fifth of a story, this tells the story of a sex-obsessed woman who gets telepathic powers and meets up with a teleporting, super-strong anime girl sidekick. (I was shocked by the author’s gender, I have to admit.) I downloaded it expecting a graphic novel and was disappointed both by the fact that it was prose and the low quality thereof.
Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes by Nathan H. Lents - An entertaining look at the terrible mistakes evolution has wrought on humanity that we’ve managed to survive anyway. I found the earlier parts of the book (mostly focusing on biology) more interesting, because the psychological / sociological / economic “glitches” were mostly things I was already aware of. Heck, I learned a bunch of them in business school. But now I know that our eyes are backwards (but octopus eyes aren’t); and that much like we forgot the cure to scurvy, our bodies once knew how to make their own vitamin C but forgot it.
The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin – A woman working in comic books—who makes it very clear what the trials of someone in that situation might be—stumbles on a case of a comic-copycat vigilante and is recruited by the handsome detective on the case to help solve it. I got tired of the book quickly, feeling like MG’s mooning over Matteo became space-filling after a while. (Yes, he’s hot and you want him, we get that, you’ve said that twice in every chapter so far, either jump his bones or solve the damn case already.) Then I realized that I was reading a romance novel, not a mystery, and suddenly all the beats made sense. Oh, and likely spoiler for any sequels: Kyle the roommate is clearly the Golden Arrow, and his girlfriend Lelani is either his accomplice or the actual mastermind. Duh.
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu - In a terrible, shitty future, “chronmen” dive into disasters in the past to retrieve necessary goods without damaging history in the process. I have a number of spoiler thoughts: I appreciate that he takes a somewhat different tact from most sci-fi and makes no effort to actually explain 90% of the tech, because James logically doesn’t actually know how anything works, just how to use things. (I’m reminded of the old Star Trek writers’ line, “How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?” “Just fine, thanks!”) James is a drunken action-man who needs to find smarter people to actually come up with good plans for him—really, rescuing two specific people from the past is the only smart things he does through the entire book, as the two of them drive all of his other good decisions. Really, though, this book is an indemnification of late-stage capitalism, because the corporations are running everything, and mining the past (and destroying civilization as we know it) to eke out slightly more wealth for themselves. The implication of the Nutris Platform’s destruction is that the timeline has already been changed when we start the book—maybe Earth wasn’t a shithole before that bombing was organized—and that the “cliffside of humanity” didn’t actually need to happen and potentially hadn’t happened before the corporations started mining the past. I’m a little worried that he doesn’t quite realize what he’s set up and that the sequel(s) will be disappointing. Because really, I think the realization they need to make is that they can, in fact, go change the past and fix some of the devastation, and the only rule of time travel that we’ve seen to actually be solid is that you can’t go back to the same place twice—which means that the corporations un-doing his work is much harder.
Death by Cliché by Bob Defendi - A tabletop RPG designer is shot in the head and sent into a terrible, cliché-ridden fantasy game. While this has a bunch of decent lines and an okay through-plot, it’s nowhere near as funny as it wants to be. Not as crude as Critical Failures but still dipping in that well; he’s self-aware but only to a limited degree, as he can’t seem to get away from the clichés enough to be really interesting with them. I found that the shattering of the fourth wall got old and despite name-checking Gail Simone, he threatens one of the only female characters with rape anyway. Honestly, upon further reflection, if this ended in a genuine subversion instead of obvious cliché it could have been genuinely good. Overall this ends up on the pile of rpg parody novels that I can’t really recommend.
The Forgotten Hours by Katrin Schumann – Katie’s father went to prison for statutory rape of her former best friend. She never believed he was actually guilty, but as his release from prison approaches, she realizes how little of the story she actually knows. (Obviously, that synopsis doubles as a warning of what sort of material the book covers.) Credit for “vivid” descriptions of emotionally-charged daily events that I didn’t think fell over into purple; but the really success here is managing to stick the landing. I thought for sure it was going to have some sort of ridiculous, nearly farcical twist ending…but this was written by a woman. It ends exactly how it should, and all the clues tie together neatly.
Modified: Volume 1 by Kat Stiles - Free on Amazon and only the first fifth of a story, this tells the story of a sex-obsessed woman who gets telepathic powers and meets up with a teleporting, super-strong anime girl sidekick. (I was shocked by the author’s gender, I have to admit.) I downloaded it expecting a graphic novel and was disappointed both by the fact that it was prose and the low quality thereof.
Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes by Nathan H. Lents - An entertaining look at the terrible mistakes evolution has wrought on humanity that we’ve managed to survive anyway. I found the earlier parts of the book (mostly focusing on biology) more interesting, because the psychological / sociological / economic “glitches” were mostly things I was already aware of. Heck, I learned a bunch of them in business school. But now I know that our eyes are backwards (but octopus eyes aren’t); and that much like we forgot the cure to scurvy, our bodies once knew how to make their own vitamin C but forgot it.
The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin – A woman working in comic books—who makes it very clear what the trials of someone in that situation might be—stumbles on a case of a comic-copycat vigilante and is recruited by the handsome detective on the case to help solve it. I got tired of the book quickly, feeling like MG’s mooning over Matteo became space-filling after a while. (Yes, he’s hot and you want him, we get that, you’ve said that twice in every chapter so far, either jump his bones or solve the damn case already.) Then I realized that I was reading a romance novel, not a mystery, and suddenly all the beats made sense. Oh, and likely spoiler for any sequels: Kyle the roommate is clearly the Golden Arrow, and his girlfriend Lelani is either his accomplice or the actual mastermind. Duh.
