Tag: SF

I put this on hold at just the right time, so I was one of the first few library readers to devour this book.  This is the umpty-zillionth in the “in Death” series written by Nora Roberts under her pen name J.D. Robb.  My standard advice is, if you are new to the series, don’t start here. Go back to Naked in Death and see if you like that one. If you do, you’ll be OK with the standard two sex scenes in every book, and the bracketing of every case with death/investigation/takedown/interrogation-confession, all centering around Eve Dallas, Lt. NYPSD and her life partner Roarke (dreamy billionaire/former thief).

What makes this series fun to read (and I’ve read all of them) are the now-large cast of supporting characters that experience growth, and fun details of the universe that Robb has fleshed out over time.  As one example, there is almost no Coca-Cola in this universe, but in this book it actually gets mentioned.  I noticed!

Robb releases this book series on a twice-a-year schedule. (Even with a formula, how does she do it? There are some decent deep facts that make it into each book.) I need to go put a reminder in to place the next hold in January for a February release.

I picked this one up at a library sale in New York and it took a few months to get to it.  Like most authors I follow, I’ve been reading David’s work very much out of order.  This is an early work, and one that David refers back to in later works. HARLIE is an artificial intelligence–but referred to absolutely as an artificial human (my emphasis).  I ran into David at the 2025 Worldcon and told him I had just finished this book and exclaimed “How did you get so much of it right IN 1972?” He just shrugged.

The book’s not perfect–the subplot with the main scientist getting a girlfriend is fairly by-the-numbers but the relationship is necessary for development of an understanding about HARLIE.

All in all, an amazingly prescient story that is still relevant.

I have been reading Sawyer’s books for a long time on-and-off.  This one I acquired recently and got inscribed to me when I met Rob at Balticon this year.  I just got to the book this week and finished it in a couple of days.

Like all of Sawyer’s books, it takes an interesting premise and creates an engaging story around it.  I will say that while I figured out one minor plot point in advance, I missed a couple of biggies, which makes for wonderful reading!

The only “negative” point I’d have about this story in particular is that some of the details hinge around the O.J. Simpson case from 1995.  This is a case of “in 1997” this stuff was fresh with everyone; however, I never watched a moment of the trial and to this day still don’t know a lot about most of those involved.  It’s a minor quibble as I remembered enough, but not as much.  I had a similar feeling about the WWW trilogy because of the tech involved, some of which I never used, but it was cutting edge when written.

One of these days I’m going to have to print off a list of Sawyer’s novels and figure out which ones I have missed reading.  If you didn’t know, Sawyer now controls most (if not all) of his backlist and it’s easy to find his stuff at sfwriter.com