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Chris R (for Reading)

offby1@bookwyrm.offby1.net

Joined 1 year, 2 months ago

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Rice, Dan: Dragons Walk among Us (2021, Wild Rose Press, Incorporated, The) No rating

I was not really impressed with this one. The setting -- a Seattle full of fictional coffee shops and real interstate exits, in what seems to be a near future where nanotechnology is a novel treatment, but not world-changing? -- is okay, I guess, but the characters left me cold. The protagonist was a pretty good teenager, in the sense that they whipped from mood to mood without rhyme or reason, but they weren't a lot of fun to read.

I don't foresee reading the sequel.

Mercedes Lackey: Arrows of the Queen (Heralds of Valdemar) (Paperback, DAW) No rating

Arrows of the Queen is the first book in the Heralds of Valdemar Trilogy. Chosen …

I picked this up for a re-read after a conversation with a friend who's a huge fan of the series. I'd read it... gods, years ago. Decades, even. I remember liking it, but finding it frustrating how the only "good people" were queer.

And, I mean, that's just not the case. I'm fascinated by how wrong my recollection of the book was. The only thing I was right about was that I enjoyed it.

Cory Doctorow: The Lost Cause (Paperback, 2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) No rating

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But …

I finished this book on the plane yesterday, on my way, ironically, to Burbank (or close enough to it).

First up, I enjoyed it, overall. The story was tightly told, the stakes were more or less clear, and the near-future setting had enough connections to the present to feel very plausible.

I had a bit of a hard time with the viewpoint character, who kept giving off vibes of "clueless post-millennial kid" in how they approached problems; I think the scene that gelled it for me was when something viscerally upsetting happened, and their response was along the lines of "I knew what I had to do; I had to go and bear witness". That sentiment pervades the whole book, this sense of "dunking on people on social media will change the world" and I think I have a hard time believing that, given the way the world has …

Kelly Regan Barnhill: When Women Were Dragons (2022, Diversified Publishing) 5 stars

Learn about the Mass Dragoning of 1955 in which 300,000 women spontaneously transform into dragons...and …

This was a good read, even if the ending got a bit ... "less".

I found the first two thirds to be the stronger part of the book. The way the world was talked around, papered over, and suppressed made for some powerful and occasionally hilarious moments.

The back third, cathartic as some of it was, didn't excite me as much. I wonder how much of that is because of who I am and because the book wasn't really written with me as the audience, and how much of it might be due to the book.

In any case, I still recommend this book unreservedly; it's a fantastic read.

Peter Watts: The Freeze-Frame Revolution (2018, Tachyon Publications) No rating

"How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? …

This was a fantastic bit of writing; a novella that I devoured a little bit TOO fast. It's all first-person, the narrator is probably reliable, and I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the worldbuilding.

I really appreciated the author's postscript about having a lot less scientific rigor in it given the concept. There's also a neat easter egg if you read it in colour.

Nicole Kornher-Stace: Firebreak (2021) 4 stars

I enjoyed this book way more than I expected to based on the premise. A bartender asked me what the book was about, and the best description I could come up with was "Imagine gamers that are trying to, and succeeding at, saving the world, in a corpo-fascist shithole future" and that never changed.

It's interesting to have a viewpoint first person character that is not particularly likeable and yet still manages to be a real protagonist; the last time I ran into this was in the Hunger Games series, and this book has a bit of a YA-bent to it too, albeit with several tropes absent.

I enjoyed it; I found myself wanting more, although I think the next book would be a lot harder to write well.