Tag: SF

I picked this up as a part of my BookBale Kickstarter from Caezik Press.  With these four stories I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Four novellas that all won awards?

I’d only read one of them before–Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain”. This one’s an interesting topic–what if people could be genetically engineered to not sleep, with no ill effects?

Mike Resnick’s “The Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” was an interesting structure. I never would have read this on its own, I think.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Mountains of Mourning” was probably my favorite in the collection. Even though I have never read a Vorkosigan novel, I think this is a prequel or early-set work so that I wasn’t lost in the world. It has me thinking I should probably reach out for the first novel proper as I think I’d like them.

Lastly (but first in the collection) is Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax”. I know of Joe’s interest in Hemingway, but thankfully this wasn’t too ‘inside baseball’ and it ended up with quite a SFnal bent to it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The only other comment I have on this edition is that the epub version I read had something strange where if characters were italicized on the right border of the page, the right edge, sometimes serif of the characters were cut off!  It didn’t stop me from figuring out text, but it was distracting and occurred through the whole book.

If you’ve buying from BookBale or Caezik, look this collection up. Well worth it.

OK, this one has been a long time coming.  It was one of the first ebooks I collected, just sitting there in my queue.  I have friends who speak very highly of Dr. Palmer’s work.  Heck, I’ve met and spoken with her several times and found her to be nice.  I’ve even met her parents! (Lovely people.)

Lightning is NOT an easy book to read.  I emailed my friend after I was done and said that I felt too stupid to read it.  It was obviously a labor of love for Palmer to put so much of what she cared about within history and thought and extrapolate that into the future.

There are some authors that I like, but I tend to gloss over some of their details.  David Weber and the majority of his space battle descriptions come to mind, but ignoring that the math and strategy of velocity and breaking speed at the right time is a lot like what I did for descriptions of philosophy in this book.  The great thing is that Palmer’s in on it! Some of her internal dialogue is with the reader and she comes out at some points and says–it’s OK to skip this!

With that reservation in mind, she’s built an interesting future and I am curious about how it will come together.  I’ve got the next book on order so we’ll take it one volume at a time.

I met Adeena two years ago at Balticon. She gave an interesting talk on “Space Junk”.  At the end she quickly promoted her books and I took note.  I first read her “Crazy Robots” series, which had some interesting concepts in it.  Lunar Logic is a standalone story, and I just got around to reading it.

I felt that the story started slowly, and the robots all being named “Ai-something” was cumbersome to the reader, but it makes sense within the world she’s created.  The book really took off after the initial world-setting and groundwork laid, becoming more readable and with a bit more action.

It’s a very timely book with ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’ all in our news and science speculation.  This book is the best kind of “speculative fiction”.

I recommend Adeena’s work.  I have been getting her newsletter this year and she’s been writing some ‘flash fiction’ that I hope gets developed into full stories.