December Books 3
Dec. 31st, 2009 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI had time to finish off both my purse book and my bedside book this afternoon, so I may as well blog them now and keep things tidy.
Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air
Steampunk fantasy, rather overstuffed with the fantastical and bizarre, as the realm of Jackals -- where at the best of times the penny dreadfuls are government propaganda -- is menaced not only by the communist/revolutionary nation next door, but by things reminiscent of Pratchett's Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, and defended by a motley collection of steam-powered robots, adventurers, airship sailors, magically-enhanced superhero types, and plucky orphans; not all of these categories are exclusive. I have no idea what Doric columns were doing in the underground tunnels in a world where the names of and natures of almost everything else had been thoroughly munged, but that's a small quibble. The Dickensian allusions -- particularly in the names -- are heavily sprinkled on; I think I also detected hints of Pratchett and maybe Mieville, but the world and its denizens, fantastical as they are, never really came to life for me.
Michael FlynnThe January Dancer
Space Opera, more or less, from the author of Eifelheim (the one with the stranded alien spaceship in medieval Germany as the Black Death closes in). A tramp ship's crew stumble across an ancient alien artifact, and various factions chase across the galaxy in search of the thing. Hard SF it isn't; this is a world where Einstein and Newton are remembered in the same breath as Shiva and the other gods of ancient Earth, and FTL happens by something wormhole-ish. The narration is distanced by the framing device of an nameless man in a bar telling it to a nameless harper, but it's elegantly written and somewhat less downbeat than Eifelheim.
I think that makes 68 books read this year. I've acquired at least 73, and probably purged something similar -- or there'd be more of a shelving problem than there is already. I've written almost no fiction, but made forty-odd necklaces and a couple of bracelets, traveled on business I think six times and on pleasure ... well, more often than that, though that was mostly short Phoenix trips, taken around 2000 photos, and joined Dreamwidth, Facebook and Twitter, not that I do a lot with the latter two yet.
Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air
Steampunk fantasy, rather overstuffed with the fantastical and bizarre, as the realm of Jackals -- where at the best of times the penny dreadfuls are government propaganda -- is menaced not only by the communist/revolutionary nation next door, but by things reminiscent of Pratchett's Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, and defended by a motley collection of steam-powered robots, adventurers, airship sailors, magically-enhanced superhero types, and plucky orphans; not all of these categories are exclusive. I have no idea what Doric columns were doing in the underground tunnels in a world where the names of and natures of almost everything else had been thoroughly munged, but that's a small quibble. The Dickensian allusions -- particularly in the names -- are heavily sprinkled on; I think I also detected hints of Pratchett and maybe Mieville, but the world and its denizens, fantastical as they are, never really came to life for me.
Michael FlynnThe January Dancer
Space Opera, more or less, from the author of Eifelheim (the one with the stranded alien spaceship in medieval Germany as the Black Death closes in). A tramp ship's crew stumble across an ancient alien artifact, and various factions chase across the galaxy in search of the thing. Hard SF it isn't; this is a world where Einstein and Newton are remembered in the same breath as Shiva and the other gods of ancient Earth, and FTL happens by something wormhole-ish. The narration is distanced by the framing device of an nameless man in a bar telling it to a nameless harper, but it's elegantly written and somewhat less downbeat than Eifelheim.
I think that makes 68 books read this year. I've acquired at least 73, and probably purged something similar -- or there'd be more of a shelving problem than there is already. I've written almost no fiction, but made forty-odd necklaces and a couple of bracelets, traveled on business I think six times and on pleasure ... well, more often than that, though that was mostly short Phoenix trips, taken around 2000 photos, and joined Dreamwidth, Facebook and Twitter, not that I do a lot with the latter two yet.
