Six books. Well, I've been at home sick, what else would I do?

[firstfrost]

Look to Windward (by Iain M. Banks)

The back of the book suggests that this is, in fact, Brightness Falls from the Air, which I like very much. (All you people who take my book recommendations should consider that very highly rated as well. Heroes Die, too, while I'm at it. And Death of the Necromancer. Ask to borrow them too. But back to this book.) It isn't, of course, but it's really darned good. The back of the book also says "Hailed by SFX Magazine as 'an excellent hopping-on point if you've never read a Banks SF novel before'", which really seems like damning with faint praise (and gives me the excuse to put three punctuation marks next to each other). It's not only really darned good, but an excellent hopping-point too. I love Banks' dialogue. It's witty, and plausible. It sounds like clever people sitting around together being very amusing, instead of just people who the author has set up the perfect straight lines for. His aliens (at least the ones in the Culture) aren't really alien, they're all people. Clever people, furry people, strange finny people, AI people - I'm not sure there were any humans in the book with more than a few lines, but they're all people-flavored. Aliens are all very well to read about too, but it's hard to have good solid character drama with things you can't empathize with. Also, I think his Culture deliberately harkens back to the golden era of SF, when humans were perky and clever and unexpectedly resilient and optimistic and good. It's post-gritty, retro-cheery, something like that. Five faraway tragically exploding stars.

The Hidden Queen (by Lynn Flewelling)

This is the sequel to Bone Doll's Twin, and gets to slightly more of a stopping point than the previous book, though the story still isn't finished. As others mentioned, it's more epic and less personal than the previous book, but it's still quite good. Strangely, it seems a shorter book, but first books often seem to carry more weight with me. Less horror flavor, more fantasy flavor. Four stars.

Ghosts in the Snow (by Tamara Siler Jones)

A serial killer psych thriller -- set in something like the Ars Magica universe. (I say this, having never played in Ars Magica, because magic is pretty rare, and the setting is a big castle with lots and lots of servants and it goes into great detail about which servants do what and who can use what privies...) Anyway, it does an okay job with the is-it-him-or-not with the main suspect. Less of a good job with looking into the mind of the villain. As a forensic mystery, the detective spends too much time going to the scene of each new body and finding absolutely no clues. The romance plot (between the Sweet and Innocent Servant Girl and the Main Suspect) is angstified by the ridiculously contrived debt law posited for a nearby country: If I put you in my debt, by, for example, buying you lunch, you have to pay me back immediately. If you cannot pay me back in coin immediately, then I get to rape you. If I won't rape you or kill you, then you are honor bound to kill yourself immediately. An unscrupulous noble could wipe out whole peasant villages this way! I at least think that a country with these laws would have a better way to refuse gifts. Two stars.

The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (by Keith Hartman)

I read this again, after a bunch of other people also read it, and it's still good. It almost seems set in the Conflux world, what with the kitchen sink of things going on, especially Native American weird shit. It's really a lot of fun, the setup a little more so than the resolution. The big clash between the religious right and gay rights certainly isn't any less relevant now than it was when the book was published. My biggest nitpick: there is someone credited (unusually!), on the copyright page, with "proofreading and copy editing". I would be ashamed to be so credited, for this book. It appears that it has been spell-checked, in that all the mistakes are real words ("a hoard of demons"), but there are still a lot of them. Of course, maybe that means that Hartman is a really bad speller, and the proofreader did a huge and thankless task but a few slipped through. (Hmm. Meisha Merlin is the small press that put out To Ride Hell's Chasm, about which I had minor production complaints, as well). Four and a half stars.

Africa Zero (by Neal Asher)

I went and bought the other several books by the author of The Skinner, but this one doesn't impress me nearly so much. There's some of the same themes of immortality and vast power, but this time the setting is a future post-post-apocalypse Africa. I kept thinking it should be a Mike Resnick book, since he staked out the claim of SF Africa in my head long ago. The book is actually two linked novelettes, chock full of high-tech explosions, but the main character, The Collector, doesn't have enough of a personality to be compelling, and reading just for the explosions isn't so much my thing. Two and a half stars.

gods in Alabama (by Joshilyn Jackson)

A while ago, merastra gave a link to this author's web log, where she posted about her ninja husband catching a mouse. And I really like her exuberant hysterical writing style, so I've been reading more of her. One of my favorites is antics with new pets ("[Tadpoles] are not FOREVER PETS like WAFFLES"). Anyway, I bought her book. It doesn't have nearly as much hyperactive capitalization, but that's probably good, if this is her BOOK VOICE and not her BLOG VOICE (now I'm doing it...). It's a little bit of a mystery and a little bit of a character study and a whole lot of Southern. "There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches." I'm no good with accents, but I can nearly hear one in the print anyway. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and recommend both it and Faster than Kudzu (in which she also makes completely gratuitious analogies to Lord of the Rings, just like me!). Four and a half stars, but that last half a star is really secretly for Faster than Kudzu.

These are all mine and borrowable, though Ghosts in the Snow will get to find a nice home at MITSFS next time I'm there.

Comments

[kelkyag]

A prop for MWoW. Or at least, you said you might have a suitable key in the curio cabinet, though I suppose you didn't actually say I could make off with it.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Ahah! Right! I will put the key with the book in the Things To Give To Other People pile. :)