New books nineteen to twenty-four
Mar. 17th, 2009 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigerfort19) A Dark Travelling (Roger Zelazny). One of Zelazny's more off-the-wall science-and-fantasy mixtures: a werewolf, a ninja and a witch set out to rescue the wolfboy's missing scientist father. Not demanding or particularly enlightening, but certainly fun.
20) The Vorkosigan Companion (Eds: Lillian Stewart Carl/John Helfers). Includes a couple of brief but not uninteresting essays by LMB on the subject of being an author, as well as a few short bits and pieces (on Vor genetics, for example) that are available online anyway. Then there's a brief history in the form of novel summaries, followed by a set of, um, novel summaries, and finally the 'concordance', which is intended to be more equivalent to something like the Discworld Companion - a task at which it fails tediously. The entries mostly fall into three categories:
I'm not quite sure how many almost-identical summaries of each novel there are, but since there are multiple sets in the rest of the book anyway, I don't see much advantage in a synopsis of a book in the entry for every character who appears in it. I'm also not sure why anyone thought this book was a good idea; it contains approximately no new material and - unlike the Discworld Companion - completely fails to be interesting, enlightening, amusing, or even very useful for looking things up in. Sorry, this has turned into more of a rant than I'd intended, but when I was lent it, I had expected something more akin to CMOT Briggs' work.... [ETA: The person who lent it to me apparently feels exactly the same way about it, but didn't want to prejudice me by saying so before I'd had a look.]
21) The Mammoth Book of New Sci-Fi 20 (Ed: Gardner Dozois). The 2006 entry in his long-running series, containing the usual mixture of interesting stories by authors both new and well-known. (I'm slightly cheating here, as there are actually a couple of stories in it that I've not yet read at time of posting, but...)
Then I spent most of a week in bed feeling sorry for myself (nasty virus, followed by a secondary chest infection, which the antibiotics are now getting under control) and reading meaningless fluff when I was up to reading anything at all. Most of said fluff was old comfort-reading (Diana Wynne Jones for teh win again), but I did also fit in three new books:
22-24) MYTH Inc in Action; Sweet Mythtery of Live; Something MYTH Inc (Robert Aspirin). The continuing myth-adventures of Skeeve and his band of misfits. I'd swear there was more (or at least more overt) sexism in these later books than in the earlier ones, but that might be a side-effect of the female characters being more prominent, and it's still much less than espoused by many. (And there are several strong independent female characters, all of whom are at least as plausibly drawn as their male counterparts, as well as having their own clearly defined traits, goals, and character strengths/flaws, which is not something you can say for every male author by any means. [ETA: which is not intended as a defence of Aspirin's flaws, merely to note that he is better than many.])
20) The Vorkosigan Companion (Eds: Lillian Stewart Carl/John Helfers). Includes a couple of brief but not uninteresting essays by LMB on the subject of being an author, as well as a few short bits and pieces (on Vor genetics, for example) that are available online anyway. Then there's a brief history in the form of novel summaries, followed by a set of, um, novel summaries, and finally the 'concordance', which is intended to be more equivalent to something like the Discworld Companion - a task at which it fails tediously. The entries mostly fall into three categories:
- short and useless - "Tau Ceta V: One of the Cetagandan satrapy planets. (C)"
- mid-length and uninformative - there's a half-page definition of "spaceship", for example
- lengthy and repetitive - major characters get page-or-longer (Miles gets five pages) entries, which take the form of... yet more plot summaries for the novels they're in. Yay
I'm not quite sure how many almost-identical summaries of each novel there are, but since there are multiple sets in the rest of the book anyway, I don't see much advantage in a synopsis of a book in the entry for every character who appears in it. I'm also not sure why anyone thought this book was a good idea; it contains approximately no new material and - unlike the Discworld Companion - completely fails to be interesting, enlightening, amusing, or even very useful for looking things up in. Sorry, this has turned into more of a rant than I'd intended, but when I was lent it, I had expected something more akin to CMOT Briggs' work.... [ETA: The person who lent it to me apparently feels exactly the same way about it, but didn't want to prejudice me by saying so before I'd had a look.]
21) The Mammoth Book of New Sci-Fi 20 (Ed: Gardner Dozois). The 2006 entry in his long-running series, containing the usual mixture of interesting stories by authors both new and well-known. (I'm slightly cheating here, as there are actually a couple of stories in it that I've not yet read at time of posting, but...)
Then I spent most of a week in bed feeling sorry for myself (nasty virus, followed by a secondary chest infection, which the antibiotics are now getting under control) and reading meaningless fluff when I was up to reading anything at all. Most of said fluff was old comfort-reading (Diana Wynne Jones for teh win again), but I did also fit in three new books:
22-24) MYTH Inc in Action; Sweet Mythtery of Live; Something MYTH Inc (Robert Aspirin). The continuing myth-adventures of Skeeve and his band of misfits. I'd swear there was more (or at least more overt) sexism in these later books than in the earlier ones, but that might be a side-effect of the female characters being more prominent, and it's still much less than espoused by many. (And there are several strong independent female characters, all of whom are at least as plausibly drawn as their male counterparts, as well as having their own clearly defined traits, goals, and character strengths/flaws, which is not something you can say for every male author by any means. [ETA: which is not intended as a defence of Aspirin's flaws, merely to note that he is better than many.])
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Date: 2009-03-25 09:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-25 06:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-26 09:58 am (UTC)