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Post by Slam_Bradley on Mar 28, 2019 10:53:51 GMT -5
Froomb! by John Lymington This one got my attention because of the title.... apparently it stands for 'fluid's running out of my brakes!' and is from a political cartoon at the time commenting on the nuclear arms race. The basic theme here is beware of the wrong sort of progress.. but Lymington is really all over the place with his themes. The main plot, one which the British minister of Science kills a guy on purpose with the intent to bring him back after 24 hours so he can see if Heaven exists, is weird, but a good point for discussion. What happens is the guy goes into the dreary future instead, and, after figuring out that's what happened, tries to get back as soon as possible to prevent it from taking place. Time Travel! Ugh! The author chooses not to actually tell us what happens at the end,.. I guess that's better than making my head hurt. Just. His post-apocalyptic vision is not nuclear war, but in alot of ways both worse and more plausible at the time.. the science is a bit questionable, but that shouldn't get in the way of a good story. There's some really ahead of his time stuff about genetically modified foods, and the the science guy, Packard, is a great study in Science v. religion, but each of those themes can have a story on their own... mixing them all together is a messy hodge podge with barely a plot is kinda a mess.. but at least it's not boring. I had to look Lymington up because the name meant absolutely nothing to me, which is rare for SF of that vintage. Looks like he was really prolific across genres. But I still don't think I've seen anything of his in any of his pseudonyms. I wonder if he maybe just never sold much in the U.S.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Mar 28, 2019 21:19:23 GMT -5
I suspect that's the case, yes. I'd never heard of him either(though I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as you), and none of the other titles really rang any bells.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 2, 2019 8:25:31 GMT -5
Honky Tonk Samurai Joe Lansdale
Slam reminded me I hadn't read a Hap and Leonard novel for a while, and thus the library provided. Even knowing exactly what to expect from a Hap and Leonard book.. this one was almost too much. From the very beginning when Leonard beats a man within an inch of his life for abusing his dog, to the multiple shootouts, it's like the author decided it had been too long since the last book, and he had to up the ante some.
If you're a fan of the series, everything that makes it great is in there... Lansdale writes the relationship of two 'brothers' better than anyone else. Leonard is especially over the top in this one, and it's weird to see Hap progressing toward family bliss, but their relationship is as true and entertaining as ever. Grab some Dr. Pepper and vanilla cookies and settle in, it's a good ride that you'll need to finish once you get into
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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2019 8:25:22 GMT -5
Continuing my slow read through of the Burroughs Tarzan books, I finished Son of Tarzan (#4 in the series) last night. I've read far less of Korak than Tarzan and this was the first time I read the novel that originated him. It took a long time before I started to like the character, and I found Meriem far more interesting than Korak through much of the book. Tarzan himself is relegated to a supporting character in this one, and I think the book suffers a bit from Burroughs attempts to disguise his presence/identity when he reemerges into the narrative. This was my least favorite Tarzan effort thus far. Still a solid read, but not quite as good as the previous entries of the later efforts I read a while back (though there are still more Tarzan books I haven't read than I have read). -M
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 3, 2019 11:18:15 GMT -5
Continuing my slow read through of the Burroughs Tarzan books, I finished Son of Tarzan (#4 in the series) last night. I've read far less of Korak than Tarzan and this was the first time I read the novel that originated him. It took a long time before I started to like the character, and I found Meriem far more interesting than Korak through much of the book. Tarzan himself is relegated to a supporting character in this one, and I think the book suffers a bit from Burroughs attempts to disguise his presence/identity when he reemerges into the narrative. This was my least favorite Tarzan effort thus far. Still a solid read, but not quite as good as the previous entries of the later efforts I read a while back (though there are still more Tarzan books I haven't read than I have read). -M I re-read it a couple of years back. It's middling Burroughs. He's already slipping into formula. And the Burroughs-coincidence meter is dialed up to 11.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 6, 2019 14:09:01 GMT -5
Conan the Buccaneer by De Camp and Carter Pastiche can some times be really great.. they can fill in a hole in a narrative, or show a new angle, or even show a new side of a character previous unconsidered. When you come down to it, though, what it really is fan fiction written by a profession. Sometimes you can really tell that's what it is. This is definitely one those times.. this story feels like de Camp and Carter took all their favorite stuff about Conan and mashed it together into one barely coherent narrative. I get they wanted Thoth Amon to be the 'arch villain' type, but it just doesn't work. I did enjoy the parts with Juma.. it was fun to see him again, but alot of the other ties felt rather forced, and the teenage power fantasy quotient (which is always high in these books anyway) was cranked up to 11 at least with the whole queen of the Amazons thing. Not that this is a terrible book, it's still clearly Conan, but I'll be happy to get back to some Howard originals
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 7, 2019 16:25:34 GMT -5
Second ContactMike Resnick This is an SF book based on its setting and situation, the year 2065 when humankind has mastered interstellar travel, but it reads more like a crime or even espionage thriller. The main character, Max Becker, is a military attorney who's ordered to serve as defense counsel for a starship captain who killed two of his crewman because he insisted that they were aliens. After he fails to convince his client to plead insanity, Becker reluctantly begins preparing a defense based on his client's wishes, but as he begins digging into the matter, he finds potential witnesses have been posted off-planet or otherwise placed out of his reach. And then he realizes there's a bigger conspiracy going on and he soon finds his own life in danger. The book's a real page turner - although since it was first published in 1990, you have to be able to get past the fact that there's still a Soviet Union, a computer hacker has to use a dial-up modem, and there's public phone-booths (for video phones to be sure). Worth the read, though, if you can find it in the library or snag a cheap used copy (which I did).
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 7, 2019 17:17:03 GMT -5
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoyMcCoy, when he's remembered at all, is usually remembered for They Shoot Horses Don't They? and is usually remembered with the early Black Mask/hardboiled crew like Cain, Hammett and Chandler. The comparison to Cain makes some sense, particularly for They Shoot Horses. Hammett not so much...and Chandler not at all. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is pretty clearly McCoy's second best known book and it occupies an interesting niche between the end of the Black Mask hardboiled era and the beginning of the paperback original era. The protagonist, Ralph Cotter is completely amoral and I'm not convinced he's a completely reliable narrator. The beginning of the novel finds the self-professed Phi Beta Kappa breaking out of a prison work farm. He ends up in "the city" where he blackmails a police lieutenant, becomes involved with a politician and wealthy businessman's daughter and in the end is done in by his own amorality. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye calls back a bit to Hammett's The Glass Key and looks forward to Jim Thompson's work. Unfortunately it isn't as good as either Hammett or Thompson. But it's still a decent noir and one that holds an interesting place in the development of the genre.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 7, 2019 20:33:39 GMT -5
Second ContactMike Resnick This is an SF book based on its setting and situation, the year 2065 when humankind has mastered interstellar travel, but it reads more like a crime or even espionage thriller. The main character, Max Becker, is a military attorney who's ordered to serve as defense counsel for a starship captain who killed two of his crewman because he insisted that they were aliens. After he fails to convince his client to plead insanity, Becker reluctantly begins preparing a defense based on his client's wishes, but as he begins digging into the matter, he finds potential witnesses have been posted off-planet or otherwise placed out of his reach. And then he realizes there's a bigger conspiracy going on and he soon finds his own life in danger. The book's a real page turner - although since it was first published in 1990, you have to be able to get past the fact that there's still a Soviet Union, a computer hacker has to use a dial-up modem, and there's public phone-booths (for video phones to be sure). Worth the read, though, if you can find it in the library or snag a cheap used copy (which I did). I haven't seen that one, but I do generally like Resnick.. he's not spectacular, but he's always good for a solid read.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 10, 2019 22:48:01 GMT -5
The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove
When I saw this at the book store (yes, a real, brick and mortar store... thank you Amherst Books!), I was just too curious to pass it up. I've read quite a few Holmes stories where he's pitted against some other Victorian era hero or villain, but most of them time they make some sense.
Taking the master of logic and deduction, and mixing in Lovecraft? How could that possibly work?
Somehow, it does. I loved how Lovegrove homages the time with his prologue of 'I'm a distant relative of Lovecraft and he left me these lost papers of Dr Watson).. it both gives him a good excuse to mimic Doyle and shouts out to what I find to be a fun literary device.
Rather than try to squeeze tentacled beasties into the 'normal' Holmes timeline, or make it a retirement story as many others, instead this we get 'everything you read before is wrong'... which is both annoying and interesting at the same time.
To tell your reader one of the great collections of stories at all time are 'fake' definitely takes a certain arrogance, but Lovegrove pulls it off. He writes Watson very closely to the original in tone.. some of the language is off, but nothing that throws you out of the story.
My main complaint is couldn't there have been a bad guy from the Lovecraft mythos? Why does it always have to be Moriarty? I get it, everyone loves an arch nemesis.. but it would have feel more like a true mash up and less an alternate Holmes if they did so.
I'd can't really comment on how well the Lovecraft stuff was handled, but it worked for me and my passing knowledge of the lore. I'm not certain I'll actually shell out retail to buy the other too books of the series (that was as much to support an actual store still existing as desire for the book), but I'll definitely read them at some point.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2019 23:06:24 GMT -5
The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove When I saw this at the book store (yes, a real, brick and mortar store... thank you Amherst Books!), I was just too curious to pass it up. I've read quite a few Holmes stories where he's pitted against some other Victorian era hero or villain, but most of them time they make some sense. Taking the master of logic and deduction, and mixing in Lovecraft? How could that possibly work? Somehow, it does. I loved how Lovegrove homages the time with his prologue of 'I'm a distant relative of Lovecraft and he left me these lost papers of Dr Watson).. it both gives him a good excuse to mimic Doyle and shouts out to what I find to be a fun literary device. Rather than try to squeeze tentacled beasties into the 'normal' Holmes timeline, or make it a retirement story as many others, instead this we get 'everything you read before is wrong'... which is both annoying and interesting at the same time. To tell your reader one of the great collections of stories at all time are 'fake' definitely takes a certain arrogance, but Lovegrove pulls it off. He writes Watson very closely to the original in tone.. some of the language is off, but nothing that throws you out of the story. My main complaint is couldn't there have been a bad guy from the Lovecraft mythos? Why does it always have to be Moriarty? I get it, everyone loves an arch nemesis.. but it would have feel more like a true mash up and less an alternate Holmes if they did so. I'd can't really comment on how well the Lovecraft stuff was handled, but it worked for me and my passing knowledge of the lore. I'm not certain I'll actually shell out retail to buy the other too books of the series (that was as much to support an actual store still existing as desire for the book), but I'll definitely read them at some point. Not sure when this was released, but if you liked it, you should check out the anthology Shadows Over Baker Street which came out 15 years or so ago and mixed the Holmes and Lovecraftian elements, including a short story by Neil Gaiman. -M
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 11, 2019 10:53:10 GMT -5
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
by Stephen Brusatte I wasn't one of those kids who was nuts for dinosaurs. I mean dinosaurs were cool. And I read the odd book about them. But they weren't super-hero cool. Or Revolutionary War cool. I became a lot more interested in dinosaurs later on when I found out how they influenced other stuff that I was super into (the writing of Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen's work, etc.). However, when I saw this book it seemed like it would be a good way to catch up on what has been happening in the world of dinosaurs in the last 30 or so years that I have been paying very little attention. Author Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh with a specialty in dinosaur evolution. He's traveled the globe digging up dinosaurs and has named 15 new species. What he gives us here is a nice overview of the birth, the evolution and the death of the dinosaurs from the Permian–Triassic extinction event to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. We get the current scientific thinking regarding most things dinosaur (including the fact that dinosaurs fly among us) and along the way we also get a glimpse at some of the great dinosaur hunters and theorists of the past...and some of the people who are changing how we think of dinosaurs today. If you're not a big dinosaur nerd and are just interested in an overview of their history, with a particular emphasis on the changed thinking in the last few decades this is a great book. For the dinosaur obsessed it may be a bit basic. Not being dino-obsessed it was great for me. I have read some reviews that find Brusatte to be narcissistic. I don't get that at all. Certainly he talks about his work. But he also talks about a lot of his colleagues and frequently cites to them as the best at this area and their amazing breakthroughs in that area. I never got the feeling that the author was puffing himself in any way and found his journey with the fossils to be generally interesting. Recommended...particularly if you have a passing interest in dinosaurs.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 14, 2019 17:40:30 GMT -5
SorryZoran Drvenkar Four young, mainly aimless friends in their late twenties living in Berlin establish an agency that issues formal apologies on behalf of others - mostly for business executives and other wealthy individuals who are feeling guilt about wrongfully terminating someone's employment, jilting an ex-mistress, etc. But then they get tricked into taking on the account of a client who ends up being a pretty cold-blooded murderer and everything pretty much goes to hell. The story has a really unique narrative structure, as each chapter is told from the point of view of different characters in the book, and there's also time-shifts. It also takes a while to really get moving, and if not for the rather brutal prologue, you could see the story going in several different directions and until it finally takes its really dark turn about a quarter of the way through - i.e., I could see the basic premise about the apology agency just as easily being used to tell a humorous (either light-hearted or dark) story. Recommended, although be warned, the dark aspects of the story are very dark - part of the plot involves several predatory pedophiles and their victims.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 15, 2019 9:06:45 GMT -5
Gates of Creation Phillip Jose Farmer I had no idea this was part of a series when I grabbed it, but it turned out not to make a difference... there's a two page summary of the first book that was such that I didn't feel like I needed to read it. Overall, this book seems like it would make a good video game, but wasn't much of a story. Perhaps there was more character development in the 1st book.. it wasn't here. There are some fun puzzles while while the 'good guys' (though most of them were pretty evil by design), moved from world to world, but the only plot was 'finish the maze'. Things were pretty clever at the end as the two sides tried to out-trick each other, so it turned out to have something worth reading about. I can't imagine what happens in 6 more books though.. I guess things move along in the same universe, but the story of these characters seems complete.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2019 21:04:41 GMT -5
When I was 11, I was "into sci-fi" but what it really meant was I loved Star Wars and Flash Gordon, and liked things like Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica on the TV, and was trying to read some HG Wells. But my aunt's boyfriend at the time, upon learning I was into sci-fi, tried to give me a couple of books to try to feed my love of sci-fi. They were Sci-Fi book club editions of John Carter of Mars (not A Princess of Mars but the last 3 books of the Barsoom series) and Gateway by Frederik Pohl. It was my first exposure to Burroughs in prose and Barsoom in any way that mattered (I was familiar with Tarzan from movies, comic strips, Mego and a few DC comics I had read at barber shops-my dad was a big Tarzan fan but had never read any of the Burroughs books, just Tarzan in other media, and I had seen but never read the John Carter comics from Marvel on the spinner racks), and I am still a fan of Burroughs to this day, but Gateway was not a book for an eleven year old who liked space opera and adventure stories with science fiction trappings. I remember not making it more than a few pages in before dropping it, and couldn't understand why my aunt's boyfriend had gushed about the book so much. Gateway and Pohl remained a conundrum for me for a long while afterwards. I became aware of the critical acclaim it got (Hugo and Nebula awards) and heard a few other sci-fi fans say good things about it, but I could never bring myself to try to read it again. I tried a few times, and even bought copies of it on occasion only to then sell them to used bookstores unread. Well, just a week or so ago, I ran across a copy of it for $3 in the spinner rack of vintage paperbacks at Half Price Books with its attractive cover by Boris... and thought what the hell, I'll pick it up again and see what happens, and lo and behold, this time I read it. Now I perfectly understand why my 11 year old self didn't stick with it. Half the chapters being sessions with a robot psychologist is not something that will appeal to a kid that age, and probably explains why I didn't get past that first chapter or so at the time. It took me a little bit to get into even now. And I have to say, even having finished it, I am not quite sure what to make of it. I can't quite say I liked it, but then I can't say I disliked it either. So I am going to break down into smaller chunks some of my thoughts on it. Some look at sci-fi as a predictor of the future, and I recently read one of Warren Ellis' newsletter essays about this concept, railing against it essentially saying it is absolutely the wrong way to approach sci-fi, and books like Gateway absolutely bear that out. It's vision of what future tech would be like does not age well at all, it is a future where tech didn't seem to advance much beyond what was available in the 1970s-phones, tapes, etc. and 70s visions of the future-domes, nutrient pastes, etc. and in many ways it makes the book feel like it hasn't aged well. It is also borne out of a 70s worldview, especially where psychiatry, drug use and sexual mores are concerned, and the book revels much more about 70s culture and thinking than it does about any kind of future vision. Despite the sci-fi trappings, the book is essentially about the main character, Bob, coming to terms with survivor's guilt, though what he is trying to come to terms with doesn't become apparent until well into the book. Through most of it he just comes across as an unlikable schmuck. That being said there were things to like about the book. Pohl is an amazing writer when it comes to structure and laying the groundwork for his reveals. There are lots of little asides throughout the book (classified ads from Gateway, mission reports, lectures on astrophysics or conjectures on HeeChee culture or history, etc.) that seem almost irrelevant as you read along until you hit the point of the book where it sharply ascends towards the climax and denouement, when each and every one of them starts paying off, and if you had been paying attention to them, they provide enough clues that you can start piecing together what is going to happen (or happened since the chapters that aren't in Bob's therapy sessions are essentially flashbacks though you read them as happening in real time), without explicitly telegraphing upcoming events and spoiling the reveal for readers. It is also synchronicity to read this now with all the headlines astrophysics and its big new reveal have been garnering the past week. Pohl also does a good job of making an alien culture seem alien without ever divulging too many details about them (the HeeChee) and in portraying our tendency to humanize things even if it is not warranted when he portrays human civilizations attempt to speculate and draw conclusions about the HeeChee and their motivations So overall, I think it is worth having finally read it, but I still can't really say I liked it. It's more interesting as an artifact of what was considered "good sci-fi" in the late 70s than as an engaging story in and of itself, and most of its merits are more in terms of the technique in writing than in its narrative, characters, or actual content. -M
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