Monthly Book Reviews

[firstfrost]

Bones of the Earth (by Michael Swanwick)

This was fun. It had the same sheer love of dinosaurs that Jurassic Park does (and especially Jurassic Park the movie), and the science is less noodleheaded. (Okay, cloning dinosaurs from amberified insects isn't strictly noodleheaded, but the whole "chaos theory" digression that explains why your goldfish bowl will kill you if in the end was inane. Jurassic Park wasn't dangerous because living systems are chaotic, it was dangerous because predators are dangerous. Lions eat crazy preachers. Tigers eat stage magicians. That sort of thing.) But I digress. This isn't about Jurassic Park. Anyway, the premise involves time travel instead of cloning, and the implausibilities wrap up nicely at the end. I can't quite put the plot in order, but I have confidence that Swanwick can and I just got a little confused. Four stars.

The Redemption of Althalus (by David and Leigh Eddings)

I think mjperson made me read it because he thinks my reviews of bad books are more entertaining than my reviews of good books. Well, this wasn't that bad. Go read these reviews for some really bad books. This was just... enh. First, if you're going to have twenty-five hundred years pass, more things should happen in those years. It shouldn't just be that the people in charge change their names and instead of being the Current Guy, everyone knows your name as that Long Ago Guy. Everyone is extraordinarily blase about being mind controlled by the "good" goddess. The kid is clever, sure, but when he comes to conclusions like "Hopping through time is like hopping through space, because hopping is hopping, right?" that should not be sufficient to have the other characters boggle "Is this child human? His thoughts and perceptions are so far beyond mind that I can scarce comprehend them!" I mean, "hopping is hopping" isn't that incomprehensible, even if "space equals time" is interesting physics. The sexy witch calling the main character "Daddy" and being terribly sad when he tells her to cut it out, I found creepy rather than endearing. But, to mjperson's credit, the bits where the kid keeps telling everyone else "Right, so, if we're omnipotent, can't we do X?" are kinda fun.

Earthling (by Tony Daniel)

I really liked Metaplanetary (and Superluminal almost as much), by this author. Well, okay, this is an earlier book, so perhaps he was still getting the hang of things. The book I checked out from MITSFS claimed to be a novel, but it was really three novelettes patched together. Now, I don't entirely mind that as a concept, but I would have liked the writing style to stay more consistent. The first part was third person, very terse, no quotation marks around dialogue. The second part was third person, more standard narrative style (i.e. quotation marks). The third part was chatty first person. The first part felt like an interesting voice; the second was sort of like the Postman, and the third was too short to really explain the new world it had built before crashing into the end of the book. Geologists might like this more than me. Two stars.

Drowning Towers (by George Turner)

A decent read, sort of depressing and slow-moving, about global warming and overpopulation and class differences. The frame story didn't seem to add much. Written from many different character POVs, done reasonably, though I didn't dislike the guy all the other characters hated nearly as much as they did. Three and a half stars.

Jack Faust (by Michael Swanwick)

Not nearly as much fun as Bones of the Earth. Faust bargains (with an alien, but that doesn't really matter) for knowledge, and gets science. Sort of like Connecticut Yankee (or the Leo Frankowski books, but they were a lot cheerier about how the Industrial Revolution at super-fast speed would go). And an interesting thought experiment about what you can and can't do with omniscience. Four stars.

(All from the MITSFS)

Comments

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I started reading Eddings when I asked Marcus one day for a fluffy book to read because my brain hurt from tooling. So I will always consider Eddings to be fluff.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Eddings is definitely fluff. :)
Belgariad I think was pretty good fluff; Althaleus was either good, mediocre or horrible fluff, depending on whether you believe mjperson, me, or arcanology.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Well, Eddings is like Romance novels - once you've read one, you understand the form and won't find anything surprising in any of the new ones, so they can be relaxing if you're not a bit of a critic.

Which is why they make me bite furniture these days.

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Belgariad and the Malloreon, since my mom read them aloud to my brother and me as kids (that way she could gloss over the sex and violence). Then I reread them as an adult and realized they didn't hold up nearly so well. What particularly bothered me is that there only seemed to be one female character type, and she got repainted for each of the female characters. Smug and beautiful with an excellent singing voice.