association-list

Yet another Strahan edited short story collection. Since it’s a collection, a list:

• The Lanagan story here is visceral and voicy and wonderful, for all that it leans ever so hard on its source material. People unfamiliar the legends old testament might be a little confused.
• I am glad to see new work from Tony Daniel. I wish there were more.
• The Schroeder story points to exciting new places for his Virga stuff, even if it isn’t his best work (he always feels a little constrained in shorts).
• The Baxter reminds me a lot of a Benford story about almost the same thing that I read just a few years ago, but I can’t remember the name of it.
• WTF is going on with the end of the Reynolds story? Also if I have to read another story about a galactic empire held together only by a human male of exceeding grace and wisdom (I’m looking at you too, Mr. Scholes) I am going to vomit.
• Need to track down more stuff by Daryl Gregory.
• I am not smart enough for perhaps 40% of Jeff Ford’s stories. This is one of those.
• Tighten, Moles, tighten! So very close, though.
• Ted Chiang makes peace with entropy.

Lots of good stuff here. An improvement, I think, on the first one. I have nothing to add to the gender balance thing at this late date.

I really wanted to like this more than I did. Williams’ far-future Mars/Earth stories and novel are the work of hers I like the most, in tone and theme, but this book seemed very much rushed, on a number of axes. The first part of the novel — which has been extensively sketched out in short stories over the last couple of years — is pretty strong. But at some point the writing gets ahead of the planning, and it all falls apart. The quality of the editing and copy editing also drop off in the latter half of the novel.

This is a shame, as this could have been a very fine book with a little bit more time to bake and some of the glitches ironed out. Hopefully if it gets a US release it’ll get another working-over to put a final coat of polish on it.

A book with a very long subtitle, which kind of gives you a hint as to what’s coming. A lot of words are used to tell a story that really doesn’t need all, or even maybe most of them. Interesting work from a new writer, but ultimately cannot seal the deal because the built world here is too close to our own, and too serious, to generally end up taking a back seat to the emotional struggles of the cartoonish and deeply simple central character. You’re also spattered beginning to end with little tangent infodumps that trade heavily in often second-hand relic Americana. Overall, it adds up to not very much that adds to the main narrative. America is simplified and it’s the simplified America that’s valorized and castigated and reverentially mocked, so too much of it seems to miss. It’s a book that seems to think too much of its movers and shakers and too little of the common people. It is also in love with its somewhat abstracted voice despite the fact that the voice very often robs the events of book of any immediacy they might otherwise have. There is a lot of music in the book, but little of it works with the text, either being buried in the infodumps where you’re already bored and want to go back to the story now or they’re just tacked on, like the author just realized that he hasn’t mentioned anything musical in two pages.

It’s almost a tic. Frustrating.

There are a lot of good parts here. I think that Slattery could produce some really interesting material if he manages to get all of the elements marching in line.

First book of the new year. I’m going to post them all, just so I can keep track of how much I’m reading and what’s actually getting read.

This is the second book in the Aleutian trilogy, and I read it because I read Spirit: the Princess of Lengthy Subtitle in PDF over the christmas break. Spirit has great worldbuilding and a wonderful sense of place, at least until you get back to Speranza and are in full enigmatic superwoman Count of Monte Christo mode. Losing Bibi as a central character is a near-fatal blow to the novel.

North Wind is a much earlier book. Interestingly many of its failures in the other direction, as she somehow makes the weird, fated, fizzle-ending plot work, mostly on the strength of the characters, but you never get a good sense of where you are, or what is happening there. A very personal novel for its setting, which is in the middle of a world-wide low-intensity conflict.