{"id":664,"date":"2025-12-20T17:26:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T22:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/?p=664"},"modified":"2025-12-20T17:26:48","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T22:26:48","slug":"unrivaled-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/?p=664","title":{"rendered":"<i>Unrivaled<\/i> (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I picked this up as a part of my BookBale Kickstarter from Caezik Press.\u00a0 With these four stories I figured I couldn&#8217;t go wrong. Four novellas that all won awards?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d only read one of them before&#8211;Nancy Kress&#8217; &#8220;Beggars in Spain&#8221;. This one&#8217;s an interesting topic&#8211;what if people could be genetically engineered to not sleep, with no ill effects?<\/p>\n<p>Mike Resnick&#8217;s &#8220;The Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge&#8221; was an interesting structure. I never would have read this on its own, I think.<\/p>\n<p>Lois McMaster Bujold&#8217;s &#8220;The Mountains of Mourning&#8221; 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&#8217;t lost in the world. It has me thinking I should probably reach out for the first novel proper as I think I&#8217;d like them.<\/p>\n<p>Lastly (but first in the collection) is Joe Haldeman&#8217;s &#8220;The Hemingway Hoax&#8221;. I know of Joe&#8217;s interest in Hemingway, but thankfully this wasn&#8217;t too &#8216;inside baseball&#8217; and it ended up with quite a SFnal bent to it. I enjoyed it a lot.<\/p>\n<p>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!\u00a0 It didn&#8217;t stop me from figuring out text, but it was distracting and occurred through the whole book.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve buying from BookBale or Caezik, look this collection up. Well worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I picked this up as a part of my BookBale Kickstarter from Caezik Press.\u00a0 With these four stories I figured I couldn&#8217;t go wrong. Four novellas that all won awards? I&#8217;d only read one of them before&#8211;Nancy Kress&#8217; &#8220;Beggars in Spain&#8221;. This one&#8217;s an interesting topic&#8211;what if people could be genetically engineered to not sleep, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/?p=664\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;<i>Unrivaled<\/i> (2023)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[30,40],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-take","tag-book","tag-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":666,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions\/666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johntilden.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}