December books

[ellarien]

Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

This final volume of the Baroque cycle is less scattered over time and space than the previous ones, with all the action taking place in a matter of months and most of it in England, with occasional excursions to Hanover. Change is in the air; the industrial age is just around the corner, and Enoch Root remains offstage. Queen Anne is dying, and an aged Daniel Waterhouse is trying to effect a reconciliation between Newton and Leibniz, while building a proto-computer out of the Solomonic gold and drumming up sponsorship for Newcomen's Engine. There are elaborate capers involving gold coinage, the Tower of London, and the Fleet Prison. It's a long book, but the only bit that dragged for me was the philosophical discussion between Newton and Leibniz.

I'd been half-considering reshelving these books under 'Historical Fiction', but this volume convinced me to leave them with the SF/Fantasy, and be thankful I don't try to separate the two too rigidly.


Dudley Pope, Governor Ramage, R.N.
Fifth in the Ramage series, which is a poor substitute for O'Brian but not entirely unentertaining. Skulduggery in a Carribean convoy, combined with a hurricane, leaves our hero stranded on a desert island with a crew, a beautiful French girl, and a very large pirate treasure.

Martha Wells, The Ships of Air
Sequel to The Wizard Hunters, this is set mostly on a large ocean liner carrying a motley crew of refugees across a world where most of them don't belong. (The ones who belong to the world are not at all sure about the ship.) The protagonist, Tremaine, is rather hard to get attached to; she's obviously badly emotionally damaged, but very good at hiding and supressing her feelings; she's also very smart and competent, which helps to carry the story along. The ship makes a great setting.

Elizabeth Bear, Worldwired
Satisfying conclusion to the trilogy that started with Hammered
Amazingly enough, no major characters die this time.

Audrey Niffeneger,The Time Traveller's Wife
This is one of those things that's marketed as mainstream fiction, complete with heavy paper and a reading-group guide in the back. It didn't feel like SF to me, in the end. It's basically the story of a marriage in which the husband has a medical condition that causes him to bounce around uncontrollably in time -- and to some extent in space, too -- which enables him to get to know his wife while she's still a child. The narrative structure is complicated, but each section is helpfully labelled with the date and the respective ages of the protagonists. The love story is bittersweet, perhaps more bitter than sweet, and the sections about the couple's attempts to conceive are downright harrowing in places.


Anne Perry, Half Moon Street
This is labelled as a mystery (subtype: late Victorian London police procedural); but it's really a dissertation on Victorian censorship, repression, and freedom of speech, thinly wrapped in a chocolate coating of murder story. It was interesting, even thought-provoking, but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I picked it up.

Alma Alexander, The Hidden Queen, Changer of Days
Competent fantasy debut by the author of The Secrets of Jin-Shei; the first volume felt a little weak and unoriginal in places, but the second fixes most of the problems I had with the first.

Comments

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I loved Time Traveller's Wife - it would have been one of my "best books" from _last_ year, actually. I still find myself haunted by their relationship - I agree about it being more bitter than sweet, but in a good way... I liked all the literary references too.

[ellarien]

It wasn't entirely my kind of thing, but it was well done.

Literary references? Oh dear. I obviously don't read enough literature.