Books: Times Eight

[woodwardiocom]

Empowered v6 by Adam Warren

This volume mostly dips off into a new subplot revolving around heroes who have made deals with devils for their powers, and the necromancers who love them, but it contains a bit of relationship genius:

"I invoke Clingy Monkey."

Emp and Thugboy have a deal. If they're fighting, and one of them decides he or she desperately needs a hug, they can invoke the Clingy Monkey protocol. Without either admitting any error in the argument, they then hug until the invoker is feeling better. Genius! Recommended.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

A few centuries in the future, Earth has colonized a few other planets, but there are aliens out there, and most of them are implacably hostile. Earth's Colonial Forces have the nasty job of fighting them in space and on the ground. They recruit from the elderly, using their superscience to turn them into fighting machines. Once you've done your hitch, you get to retire to one of the colonies. It reads rather like Starship Troopers, with fewer lectures, and the hero is 75, not 18. Good old-fashioned SF, recommended.

Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams

One of Williams' earlier works, our heroes are a brother-sister team of free traders, living on the dwindling edge between unexplored space and the corporate core worlds. They're a little young to be on their own, and so they keep making stupid mistakes. This gets worse when they stumble across a potential financial gold mine, and have to wise up or die. I don't usually enjoy novels about smart people being stupid (especially when they're being stupid due to drugs, sex, and being teenagers), but this one redeemed itself in its last few chapters. Mildly recommended.

WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

First in a trilogy about a blind teenage girl and her pet web-spanning emergent intelligence. Set in the present day, Caitlin is blind, but is the first candidate for an experimental treatment to restore her sight. Things go a bit wonky when the computer-moderated signals to her optic nerve show her the World Wide Web, instead of her bedroom. Not to mention, there appears to be something out there . . . Sawyer's handling of Caitlin and her gradual changes in sensorium is very deft, and I honestly would have enjoyed this novel even without the whole "The Net Is Alive!" subplot. Very recommended.

Cthulhu's Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer

A dark anthology of stories set after the Old Ones have reclaimed the Earth. The best of the bunch focus on one person's attempts to survive, often living in the darkest of denial. Many carry a glimmer of hope (often snuffed out). If you're into the Cthulhu Mythos, this is a nice new perspective. Recommended.

Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman

On board a slowship to another star, the crew stays sane by playing around in VR of the 20th century. Our hero is in charge of maintaining the twen-cen databases, and looking for errors. Then people start dying in the sim . . . This book has a pretty complicated background, and a rapid (and not entirely satisfying) denouement. It kinda reads like the first book of a trilogy, except it doesn't look like there'll be a sequel. Readable, but not particularly recommended.

Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn

A strange SF detective novel, third in a series where I haven't read the first two. Our hero alternately gets pushed around from clue to clue without having to do any detecting, then suddenly figures out vastly complicated interlocking gambits that should have an attached flowchart. An unsatisfying adventure, not recommended.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

Since I've read everything else she's written, next up was this fantasy series. In this setting, magic depends on your ability to connect with the "earth", and its presence in other living things. Our misunderstood heroes use this power to defeat malevolent beasties who pervert and steal from the living world in an attempt to take on true form. The book starts out in that territory, then spends the second half entirely dealing with the romance between our one-handed hero and the lonely farmgirl who falls in love with him. Complicated family and cultural dynamics ensue. Being Bujold, it's very readable, but I hope the second novel cuts back on the romance and adds the adventure back in. Mildly recommended.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

There's still a fair amount of romancy stuff in the second book -- those two books were basically Bujold going, "I am going to write a fantasy-world romance," after all -- but the third and fourth are definitely in the Adventure category.

[asciikitty.livejournal.com]

re: sharing knife. They get better. but they're pretty squarely romances.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Eh, I can live with that.