finished H.G. Wells' "The War in the Air" last night.  NOT the ending I was expecting, and a fairly bleak one at that.  But then, Wells was describing the destruction of civilization due to a world war.  I wonder how many other writers have taken their cues from this story for what happens after the war.
BTW, first read LOTR when I was 16, haven't read it for a while, but they're still in my bookcase, along with The Silmarillion.

Last edited by joekc6nlx (11/07/2021 6:13 am)

I am reading The Sunken Land now. Wow. It’s beautifully written, a  feast of language to take slowly. I can see Surtac’s point about plot. But it doesn’t seem to matter that one is not sure where we are going with this.

Sentences here and there describing one scene or another keep putting me in mind of Hopper’s paintings of lonely and possibly very isolated disconnected and  alienated people, and he actually describes one such scene as Hopper-esq. i am indeed relishing this reading experience

edited to add: I saw a review that noted the allusions to Kingsleys The Water Babies, which are frequent in the book and also apparently provided the title, if I got that right. I wonder if that book has a meaning for Harrison that if we understood it might make the novel more understandable to us. I did think that the main character was himself sunken land that began to rise in the end. But I feel as if I now need to go read Water Babies to see if it provides a somewhat needed missing context. 

Last edited by Kokipy (11/18/2021 2:10 pm)

Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. First of his books I've read. I've always been a sucker for Andre Norton-esque Forerunner/Ancient Civilization stories. This one is not quite that, but similar. I'd say it's more a mashup of Niven/Gerrold's Flying Sorcerers and Lovecraft, with a dose of Princess (4th in line, so not the important one) on a quest. 
Fun and easy read, recommended when you need something nice.

The Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buelman. A pretty standard fantasy quest setup, with a few nice twists. Good characters, although the plot in the middle does fall into a series of events are just "stuff that happens" rather than essential to the plot (the plot did pick up nicely, and didn't leave a cliff-hanger, but a clear jumping off point to the next volume). 
None the less, recommended if you like this part of the genre, mainly for the good characters. 

Surtac wrote:

I realised I hadn't posted in here since my re-read of Dune, so here's a catchup of sorts.

I followed that with a re-read of its Hugo co-winner from that year, Zelazny's This immortal.  this has always been one of my favourite Zelaznys (and indeed one of my favourite books) and it did not disappoint this time around either.  Zelazny's voice and tone and use of language is poetic and delightful both.  You can tell he's having a lot of fun telling this story.

Next up was a collection of mystery stories by Mick Herron, Dolphin Junction.  Nice work as usual and there was a bonus of sorts for those of us waiting for the next Slough House novel, a short story featuring Jackson Lamb much earlier in his career. I'm looking forward to both the next novel due this year and the upcoming tv series.

The last book I finished in 2021 was a slow re-read of Cyteen. This book is an absolute masterpiece. I had picked it up again to check a factual detail within the story and it just drew me in once more until I'd finished the whole thing - again. And once again, I came out with  more information than I had going in - a more precise timing for the events of the Chanur books within A/U history.

My first two books of 2022 are both space operas - the final novel in the Expanse series, Leviathan's Fall; and the second book in John Birmingham's Cruel Stars trilogy, The Shattered Skies.  Both are good in their different ways: the first a solid and satisfying conclusion to an excellent series; the second an entertaining romp of non-stop action with sympathetic characters  in a book that avoids the potential traps of being the middle book in a trilogy.  Both are recommended.

 

I couldn’t agree more on Cyteen. One of the greatest SF books ever written, and CJC’s masterpiece, as I see it.

(parenthetically, I'll never forget the joy, and the smile on my face, when, about 150 pages in, I realized what the book was really about!)