association-list

Some com­ments on recent purchases.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross.

Longer review forth­com­ing. The long and the short of it: pos­si­bly Stross’ best to date. Go get it.

World­wired by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

The Chains That you Refuse by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

Blood & Iron by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

I really should write some­thing longer about Bear. The first one is OK so far, it’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of Ham­mered and Scar­down. I’m not a huge fan of this series, but it’s OK. That said, I liked it enough to pick up Chains (also, par­tially for the awe­some title), which is very good. Some­how I’ve man­aged to miss every­thing that Bear has done in the short form so far, and I’m glad that Night­shade has brought most of it together in one place. Highly rec­om­mended. I picked up the last because I was so impressed, and my esti­ma­tion of Bear only con­tin­ued to rise. I had trou­ble putting it down. I’m eagerly await­ing the next thing that Bear comes out with. Seeing as she’s gotten out five or so books in less than two years, I don’t think that I’ll have to wait long.

Zoot­suit Black by Jon George.

Just started this one, but already have some com­ments. George has a talent for some won­der­fully vivid scenes, but the level of polish so far is really, really uneven. He suf­fers greatly from info­dump­ism, and they’re not par­tic­u­larly grace­ful info­dumps. In fact, they’re kind of annoy­ing. I’ll see it through and likely com­ment again, but the writ­ing here is really rough in places. I’m hoping that it gets better now that most of the char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions are out of the way.

The Engi­neer Recon­di­tioned by Neal Asher.

More Asher. Asher has a blog now. And this book of short sto­ries con­tains some intro­duc­tions. The con­clu­sion that I take away from these small sam­ples of non-​​fiction that the man has writ­ten is that Asher is some­thing of a per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity guy, and by some­thing, I mean he hates it a lot when people abdi­cate any degree of per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity at all in any form what­so­ever. He’s also not enam­ored of the cur­rent UK gov­ern­ment. I don’t really blame him there, but I think that there are better rea­sons to dis­like them. Some­what uncon­ven­tion­ally, he also seems to hate reli­gion for much the same reason, which isn’t some­thing that you see a lot in Amer­ica, where people want you to be per­son­ally respon­si­ble so that their mas­sive com­pa­nies aren’t respon­si­ble for the damage that they do, and then turn around and tell you that you should also love Jesus and vote as your pastor tells you to. So, not all bad. And the short sto­ries are pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff here that falls out­side of his main Polity sto­ry­lines, not all of it great, but most of it very inter­est­ing. The title story, set in the Polity uni­verse but not quite worked in to where he’s taken it lately, takes up a good chunk of the book, and is quite good, giving a lot of info about the Jain and what might really be going on there.

Gravity’s Angels by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swan­wick depresses me. The other short story col­lec­tion, this one from ear­lier in his career. Not quite as good, over­all, as Tales of Old Earth, but excel­lent all the same. Go get it.

Info­quake by David Edelman.

Not sure what to say about this one. The writ­ing is pedes­trian, the ideas are inter­est­ing, the his­tory seems unlikely, and the struc­ture is awk­ward. The char­ac­ters are OK. Two out of five isn’t really all that great. (note to self: strike the word ‘really’ from vocab­u­lary). Anyway, there’s some good stuff and some bad stuff here, as I’ve said. I think that a lot of my ambiva­lence after the fact stems from the fact that the book doesn’t really focus on the inter­est­ing things that he could be talk­ing about. We follow a weird, bril­liant, self-​​involved pro­tag­o­nist with some tragedy in his past, but he’s more or less a child of priv­ilige all the same. There are some inter­est­ing glimpses into the cor­ners of the world that he’s build­ing, but they’re just glimpses. And the giant macguf­fin that he’s build­ing us up to the whole time just isn’t all that inter­est­ing or rev­o­lu­tion­ary. I didn’t hate it, though. It just didn’t really speak to me.