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Post by Rob Allen on Aug 20, 2022 19:52:40 GMT -5
High Couch of SilistraJanet E. Morris, 1977 I was curious after reading your review, wondering if the author was a man using a pseudonym. But Janet Morris is a very interesting person. In addition to writing fantasy, she's written historical and other fiction, and is a defense policy and strategy analyst who has specialized in non-lethal weapons. On top of all that, she and her husband breed champion-quality Morgan horses. Now I'm interested in finding some of her books myself. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 20, 2022 22:29:52 GMT -5
The only stuff by Morris I have read is her contributions to Thieves World, the shared world anthology edited by Robert Aspirin and Lynn Abbey, and they are among the very worst of al the plethora of stories by many different creators in that series. Her work nearly derailed the entire series it went so far off the tonal and thematic core of the series, and she tried to navigate her pet characters into apotheosis so they could take over the entire setting irrc.
-M
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Post by EdoBosnar on Aug 21, 2022 2:45:12 GMT -5
I was curious after reading your review, wondering if the author was a man using a pseudonym. But Janet Morris is a very interesting person. In addition to writing fantasy, she's written historical and other fiction, and is a defense policy and strategy analyst who has specialized in non-lethal weapons. On top of all that, she and her husband breed champion-quality Morgan horses. Now I'm interested in finding some of her books myself. If I hadn't known about her before, based on just this one book I think I also would have suspected that it was pseudonymously written by a man. Anyway, I similarly became interested in these books because I'd read some article about Morris and her Silistra books - I was intrigued by a planetary romance/sword & planet series not only written by a woman but also one with a female protagonist, and not long after that (this was about 7-8 years ago) I stumbled across an online bookseller offering the entire set for a really low price (I think I paid about $15 or so for it, including postage). |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 21, 2022 20:25:20 GMT -5
The only stuff by Morris I have read is her contributions to Thieves World, the shared world anthology edited by Robert Aspirin and Lynn Abbey, and they are among the very worst of al the plethora of stories by many different creators in that series. Her work nearly derailed the entire series it went so far off the tonal and thematic core of the series, and she tried to navigate her pet characters into apotheosis so they could take over the entire setting irrc. -M I should re-read Thieves World at some point... I remember liking the first few books. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 29, 2022 8:18:33 GMT -5
Hammer's Slammers Vol. 2
by David Drake
At Any Price
This was the first of 3 of these I read in a collection... they're very realistic seeming (at least to this non-military guy) military sci-fi.. the author served in Vietnam, so my impression is that there are stories of things he heard about and/or participated in and he dropped a sci-fi finish over to protect the innocent/let him get his point out there without offense.
In this one, the big sci fi element is the bad guys can teleport, so the Slammers and their excellent tech are needed to sense that coming. The tense bits come when the local forces encounter a nursery for the bad guys and they have a different view of what to do with it than the mercs do... good stuff.
Counting the cost
Apparently these stories have different personnel in each, so don't get attached to the characters. They're not generally much beyond 'solider #3' anyway, but that was a surprise to me. This was the 2nd of 3 of these I read, this one dealing much more with politics than actual fighting, where a crusade is going on, the the Slammers have to decide to help keep the person paying them in power before they move on to the job their doing, or let the internal dispute take its course and perhaps no longer have a job.
The man on the ground makes friends with another Mercenary in another company tasked with defending the city and the two end up teaming up... definitely pretty different from the first story, which is good. This one had some actual religion thrown in (I was surprised they weren't made up space religions) which was wild, and a bit jarring, but told a really good story.
Rolling hot
This was definitely my least favorite of the 3 Hammer's Slammers I read... perhaps because it was the least sci-fi. Its very clearly based on Drake's personal Vietnam experience, as a tank/armored car unit are rushing through the jungle to bolster local forces that may or may not needed it. The main character is a journalist that tags along/helps and is there to give the reader an excuse for exposition.
The vast majority of this story is a bunch of tanks and armored cars driven by inexperienced people trying to get through the jungle... I expect if your did such a thing you will enjoy that, but it was too dry and too detailed for me. The usual 'morale' at the end was quite clear in the beginning and probably didn't need 200 pages or driving through the jungle to reinforce it.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 30, 2022 21:16:50 GMT -5
Bird in a Cage
by Frederic Dard
I wonder, did every French man fall in love with every woman he met in the 60s? Dard seems to think so... but that's OK, it makes for a good story.
This is the 2nd of his 'Novels of the Night' I've read, and it was bizarrely similar... in both cases, the point of view character falls in love at first sight with a woman and is embroiled in a murder... though the details are as different as it could be, the theme is the same, which is kinda neat.
The mystery in this one wasn't nearly as clever, and it seems that the detective here was alot less dillligent then the one in the other story, which was a bit sad for Albert.. but it was Christmas, so maybe that's a good excuse. I'll probably wait a bit until I read the last of the 3 books of Dard's I was able to find, but now I'm super curious to know if that theme remains!
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2022 11:43:47 GMT -5
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 2, 2022 15:18:35 GMT -5
Yeah, sure, very lovely-looking books, but you're right about their affordability. I'm also not the target customer for these, as I'm all about finding cheap used copies of any book I want - and these classics have had so many editions over the years that it's more than simple to find copies at a fraction of the cost. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 2, 2022 15:21:07 GMT -5
This smacks to me of catering to people who want pretty books in their bookcases that will never be opened. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 2, 2022 15:31:57 GMT -5
This smacks to me of catering to people who want pretty books in their bookcases that will never be opened. Yup. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 2, 2022 19:28:43 GMT -5
My wife found an interesting book at the public library:  It's a prose novel written for readers aged 9-12. The cover is the only illustration. The author, Preeti Chhibber, is apparently popular and successful, with other published works in the Marvel, Star Wars and other universes. This is slated to be the beginning of a three-book series. I'll write more after I actually read it. |
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Post by berkley on Sept 2, 2022 21:53:27 GMT -5
This smacks to me of catering to people who want pretty books in their bookcases that will never be opened. Yup. I bet they smell nice. Looks like every single volume has a flower design of some sort on the cover - no matter what the contents are.
Oh, wait, I'm wrong: Pride and Prejudice has a peacock on the front ... and presumably something to represent Prejudice on the back?
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 5, 2022 21:02:55 GMT -5
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann  I grabbed this book at my local gaming store not too long ago, mostly because the cover are was good and it was an author I'd never read before. Someone was clearly a fan (several of the authors books were there), so figured it was worth a shot. On a side note, the game store has the nice benefit of being called Rivendell. So you can unironically tell people you're going to Rivendell  I was expecting a sword and planet tale, maybe a bit psychadelic.. but I definitely did NOT expect what this book is... a fantasy story set in biblical times in the actual city of Jericho, using some actual Biblical character. Only, (as the cover shows), one of the is a changling that has wings. And there's a whole lot of weird stuff that one could not possible guess until you read it. I won't spoil any plot details, but it definitely met the 'psychadelic' part of my expectation. It's not a bad story overall.. just really out there.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 6, 2022 3:07:05 GMT -5
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann (...) Sounds a bit like Swann's Not-World (which I've reviewed here previously); very much a fantasy, albeit with some grounded real-world settings and at least one character who was an actual historical person. Not a bad book, all in all. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 6, 2022 3:51:39 GMT -5
On to something I didn't enjoy nearly as much... The Golden SwordJanet E. Morris, 1977  The second book in the Silistra quartet ( my review of the first is upthread). This one is set about 2 years after the end of the preceding book, and it starts off with the main character, Estri, wandering lost and alone in a desert in the southern part of the main Silistran continent (I can’t say how she ended up there and why without spoiling the end of the first book). She is soon found by a band of Parsets, the name of the kind-of/sort-of nomadic people who live in that desert. Their leader, a man named Chayin, and his brother, Hael, who is the their ‘dharen’ (a lead ‘Day-Keeper’ – that’s the term for the planet’s priestly ruling class, which I forgot to mention in my review the first book), decide to turn her into a slave – which, among other things, means more sexual assault (oh, yay...). Eventually, though, Estri manages to stage a small-scale slave revolt, which is more or less unsuccessful, but in the process she kills the main female warrior of this particular Parset tribe or nation, and she so impresses Chayin and Hael that they give her the slain warrior’s rank and possessions. At the same time, Estri learns that there has been major political upheaval in the northeastern lands where she’s from due to her mysterious disappearance: the Slayer who was escorting her on her quest, Sareth, was falsely accused of killing her, so he rebelled and became an outlaw, while Estri’s former Well (again, see my review of the first book) has been taken over by a rival keepress who is making overtures to an alien race that wants to make greater commercial inroads on Silistra and help them reintroduce the high technology that the Silistrans had eschewed millennia ago. Sereth enlists the aid of the Parsets to do battle with the ‘pro-alien’ side. And this is all somehow tied to certain members of the mysterious, powerful alien race from which Estri’s father hails. After a very climactic third act, this one has a fourth act that virtually turns the entire preceding story on its head, with the introduction of a character deus-ex-machina style, in order to set up the next book. I have to say that – outside of the rather repugnant morality of the society depicted herein – this book was simply a slog to read. The world-building that Morris did in the first book is jacked up to eleven here, to the point that it becomes distracting and slows down the narrative: there’s way too much exposition, way too many overwrought descriptions, and way too much use of her made-up Silistran vocabulary (the back of both this and the preceding book have respective 20- and 30-page glossaries). The basic plot of this book could have easily been told in a book with about 120 to 150 pages – this one has almost 350. Anyway, two more of these to go… |
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