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What Have I Been Reading? (2019 batch #7)
Eon by Greg Bear - Written in the 1980s and predicting a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia; some of the other predictions are very good while some are occasionally jarring. Like the Star Trek padd problem, people tend to hand each other handheld computers like they would paper memos, rather than just sending the data. The premise and design are clearly influenced by Rendezvous With Rama. This is an epic and has a tendency to get bogged down in itself and the details. Also, I have no idea if later books address this, but given the "moving down the Way moves you forward in time in addition to across dimensions,” I don't think there actually are any aliens in this: The Frants, Jarts, Talsits and the like are all alternate-future evolutions of humanity. Given what the Axis City people can do, none of them seem like unreasonable offshoots.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - A love story between two Terminators on opposite sides of a battle to determine history. An extremely complicated multi-step battle featuring many complicated and fantastical timelines. A lot of very florid prose. And a foreshadowed ending that works the way a time-travel story genuinely should.
Time Siege by Wesley Chu - The sequel to the very well-done Time Salvager. I was wary that it wouldn’t pay off the sort of resolution the time-travel premise offered, and I was right. Despite characters acknowledging that their ongoing plans were stopgaps and misuse of resources, nobody seems to realize that they can time travel and the timeline is explicitly not immutable. To be fair, this is a bridge book, clearly intended to get a lot of characters and setpieces from one place to another, and deliver some stinging rebukes to capitalism along the way. But realizing that about halfway through made me put it down for several months.
Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle by John Scalzi – This is, in fact, a whole bunch of different books, novellas and short stories flung together into one volume. (Which meant it also got spread out over the course of months.) I generally enjoy “Old Man’s War”-verse stories, but I wasn’t wild about “The Sagan Diaries”; it felt outside of his normal wheelhouse and didn’t work for me. On the other hand, “The God Engines” was also very different from his usual work and I really enjoyed that. “Scalzi’s Guide to Writing,” was not of particular use to me, having been raised by two professional writers and having no particular interest in doing it myself. That starts as blog posts about writing and then just devolves into random blog posts from the early 2000s. (Apparently he and I shared the opinion that “Who Moved My Cheese?” was a terrible book!) I generally skimmed it, because I read Scalzi to be entertained and publishing/politics/minutia from 15 years ago didn’t entertain me.
The Glitch: A Novel by Elisabeth Cohen - Point of warning that this starts with a parent fearing for a lost small child. By a quarter of the way through the book, I was wondering if the absurd satire of a Silicon Valley professional woman was leading to a twist that she was actually a robot. But no, it’s just that they took every goddamn bit of “lean in” advice and silicon valley lifehacks and crammed them into one person. I think the absurdity was intended to be funny, but we’ve hit the post-Soylent place in reality where this is “shake-my-head-in-dismay believable” rather than “parody funny.” And then, at the three-quarter mark, it both became clear that there was no sci-fi/fantasy twist of any kind, and that Shelley was bound and determined to be intensely stupid through the rest of the book. That was the point that my wavering between pity and dislike of the character turned into pure dislike; as her entire gimmick was being hyper-efficient, and she failed that with the intensity of a sitcom idiot. This was deeply frustrating in that it wasn’t the book it claimed to be.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - A love story between two Terminators on opposite sides of a battle to determine history. An extremely complicated multi-step battle featuring many complicated and fantastical timelines. A lot of very florid prose. And a foreshadowed ending that works the way a time-travel story genuinely should.
Time Siege by Wesley Chu - The sequel to the very well-done Time Salvager. I was wary that it wouldn’t pay off the sort of resolution the time-travel premise offered, and I was right. Despite characters acknowledging that their ongoing plans were stopgaps and misuse of resources, nobody seems to realize that they can time travel and the timeline is explicitly not immutable. To be fair, this is a bridge book, clearly intended to get a lot of characters and setpieces from one place to another, and deliver some stinging rebukes to capitalism along the way. But realizing that about halfway through made me put it down for several months.
Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle by John Scalzi – This is, in fact, a whole bunch of different books, novellas and short stories flung together into one volume. (Which meant it also got spread out over the course of months.) I generally enjoy “Old Man’s War”-verse stories, but I wasn’t wild about “The Sagan Diaries”; it felt outside of his normal wheelhouse and didn’t work for me. On the other hand, “The God Engines” was also very different from his usual work and I really enjoyed that. “Scalzi’s Guide to Writing,” was not of particular use to me, having been raised by two professional writers and having no particular interest in doing it myself. That starts as blog posts about writing and then just devolves into random blog posts from the early 2000s. (Apparently he and I shared the opinion that “Who Moved My Cheese?” was a terrible book!) I generally skimmed it, because I read Scalzi to be entertained and publishing/politics/minutia from 15 years ago didn’t entertain me.
The Glitch: A Novel by Elisabeth Cohen - Point of warning that this starts with a parent fearing for a lost small child. By a quarter of the way through the book, I was wondering if the absurd satire of a Silicon Valley professional woman was leading to a twist that she was actually a robot. But no, it’s just that they took every goddamn bit of “lean in” advice and silicon valley lifehacks and crammed them into one person. I think the absurdity was intended to be funny, but we’ve hit the post-Soylent place in reality where this is “shake-my-head-in-dismay believable” rather than “parody funny.” And then, at the three-quarter mark, it both became clear that there was no sci-fi/fantasy twist of any kind, and that Shelley was bound and determined to be intensely stupid through the rest of the book. That was the point that my wavering between pity and dislike of the character turned into pure dislike; as her entire gimmick was being hyper-efficient, and she failed that with the intensity of a sitcom idiot. This was deeply frustrating in that it wasn’t the book it claimed to be.