What are you reading in 2024?

[Ryujin]

Guess that I'll start reading "The Dragon Stone Conspiracy" by Amanda Cherry, based in the universe of Ben Dobyns' "Strowlers", as I sit and wait to see if I'm chosen for a jury on Monday. It's been sitting in my collection for a few years now and I just never got around to it, for some reason.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Especially if they get the Starfishers related short stories in there.

You could probably get all four novels and the short stories into one modern compilation, and I can't for the life of me understand why they haven't done so yet.

(Does the one imply a Cook multiverse with Black Company and Starfishers?).

The entire environment of the Plain of Fear feels very much like a transplanted xeno-ecology, doesn't it? Question becomes whether:

A) It's an intrusion into the Black Company setting from Starsfishers, possibly the result of some serious magic (deliberate or otherwise) or a scientific catastrophe (maybe involving FTL/subspace experimentation).

or

B) Black Company is so far in Starfishers' future that the Plain is a last holdout of the native ecology in a world that was terraformed in some distant past by a scientific civilization that fell and was replaced with magic-using inheritors. That would have some similarities to the way Tekumel still has patches of the original (deadly poisonous) vegetation that spread from the "reservations" starfaring humanity (and allies) confined the native ssu, hluss, etc. to after their conquest.

 

[Clint_L]

I recently read Jessica Johns' Bad Cree. It's a page-turner - easy read with a compelling narrative voice. Imagine Supernatural (the TV show) but with a cast of all First Nations women. I think this is Johns' first novel, so I'll be looking for more from her.

I also read Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. She's a great writer! Like so much of contemporary SF, these books are centred on identity, in this case the implications of a technology that allows people to upload the memories and, to some extent, personalities of their predecessors. At the same time, though, it is also about the dynastic politics of an interstellar empire, and (in the second book) the conflict with a radically distinct alien race. So it does an amazing job of fusing the protagonist's inner conflict with a plot that invokes classic space opera tropes.

I don't think I'm explaining it super well. Think of it as kind of like if William Gibson wrote Foundation.

 

[Clint_L]

And, for those who enjoy popular science, I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Life in the Void. What a fun read! Each chapter is oriented around the history and science of one aspect of surviving in space (so dealing with gravity/zero G, eating, pooping, and so on. Maybe more than I needed to know about the latter, but I digress). Roach has a delightfully sardonic voice that frequently made me laugh, and some of the anecdotes are too crazy for fiction.

If you've read, and loved, The Right Stuff, then this book is a wonderful companion to it.

 

[Cadence]

You could probably get all four novels and the short stories into one modern compilation, and I can't for the life of me understand why they haven't done so yet.

The entire environment of the Plain of Fear feels very much like a transplanted xeno-ecology, doesn't it? Question becomes whether:

A) It's an intrusion into the Black Company setting from Starsfishers, possibly the result of some serious magic (deliberate or otherwise) or a scientific catastrophe (maybe involving FTL/subspace experimentation).

or

B) Black Company is so far in Starfishers' future that the Plain is a last holdout of the native ecology in a world that was terraformed in some distant past by a scientific civilization that fell and was replaced with magic-using inheritors. That would have some similarities to the way Tekumel still has patches of the original (deadly poisonous) vegetation that spread from the "reservations" starfaring humanity (and allies) confined the native ssu, hluss, etc. to after their conquest.

I wonder if they were brought in en masse when the guardian first arrived in the Plain of Fear and disrupted things (your A), or if the guardian transformed things into them. (The world the rays and whales are from couldn't be much more different from a plain, could it?)

Maybe some of the burned out shadowgates in the south go to the other Cook worlds?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Maybe some of the burned out shadowgates in the south go to the other Cook worlds?

Could be. We might have time to find out even. Cook's getting up there in years but still writing.

 

[prabe]

I had a severe willpower failure at the library, and my immediate to-read stack (as opposed to books I have on shelves that I haven't read yet) went kinda explodey. (The bottom book is one I own, the top book is from a previous run.)

 

[Autumnal]

That’s impressive. I, Bruce, Slayer of Bookbags, feel intimidated.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Ambitious. My next library trip has been postponed pending the completion of reading through a forgotten box of softcovers found in storage. Need to decide what's worthy of finding space for and what gets donated. At the very least the duplicates need to go - my relatives seem have been independently buying the same mysteries for years.

So far the disappointments have been Dell Shannon (no surprise, I knew what I was getting into) and some very poor Perry Mason books. Ngaio Marsh is doing well, though - which might explain why there are two or even three of so many of them.

 

[overgeeked]

My next trip to the library is a pile of masked luchador movies.