- starexplorer
- Admin and Speaker to Aliens
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- Registered: 4/16/2020
- Posts: 935
Re: What have you been reading lately?
Surtac wrote:
Anyway, not bad. I see why people like it, and why my friend gave it to me. Not sure I would recommend it, unless someone was considering reading it already. Its not River of Gods, for example.
Funny you should mention that. I see McDonald has just released his latest book, which looks like it might be another relatively short work in a new setting for him. It's possibly another YA coming of age tale a la his earlier Planesrunner sequence.
I might slip it into my reading plan before starting McAuley's Loss Protocol.
I've just finished a re-read of Le Carre's Karla trilogy, ending with Smiley's People. It's fascinating to see just how much those books have influenced later works in other genres, from Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe near-future SF dystopia to Mick Herron's Slow Horses contemporary dysfunctional spies to John Birmingham's Axis of Time alternative history.
I must read those Le Carre’s!
One world -- or none
- Surtac
- Antipodean Assassin
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- From: With Ken Behrens in CBR, AU.
- Registered: 4/29/2020
- Posts: 2,453
Re: What have you been reading lately?
Yes, you must Star. 
After finishing Smiley's People, I diverted briefly from the reading plan to fit in Ian McDonalds's latest offering. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur is a short novel set in a future post-apocalyptic dystopia of a broken USA that has descended into feudalism. The setting is reminiscent of what Adrian Tchaikovsky gave us in Bee Speaker, but the content is very different. There are no uplifted animal species but there are dinosaurs which are temporarily time-shifted from the Cretaceous period to the 'now' of the story and used as attractions in travelling circuses to entertain the disparate communities.
It's not a 'big' McDonald novel like River of Gods or The Dervish House or Hopeland are in scope, but it's beautfully written and a poignant story of a young man trying to find a place to exist in a broken world. And there are dinosaurs. Like his earlier Time Was, this book shows to me again that McDonald is just as good in shorter forms as he is at epic length works.
I'll probably head back to the plan and start the new Paul McAuley next.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
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