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Folks,
I'm starting a new book blog thing. Since my own web sites have shriveled up, and in any event since I want to "share", I figured I'd post here in briefer format than that in which I otherwise might be inclined.
...
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The Prestige by Christopher Priest
This is an exceptionally engaging book. Priest writes in a peculiarly genuine writing style, making all of the characters seem at once familiar and honest. It is presented as a series of memoirs, only the in-betweens are actual current exposition, and it jumps around a great deal in both time and presenting character.
I found it surprisingly easy to get sucked into what at first appeared to be extremely dry prose. The fact that I had seen the movie and knew "the secret" in no way lessened my enjoyment of the book - in fact, "the secret" is pretty much telecast from the beginning. On the contrary, I found myself flipping pages quickly waiting to see how it was revealed - indeed, the very thrust of the book. A magic act in three stages, indeed!
You'll find the book filed under "fantasy" at your local bookshop, although I don't really classify it as such myself. Certainly it shan't be going with the Eddings and Salvatore on our bookshelves!
----------------------------
Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (as only partially ruined by the stilted nature of his son Christopher's writing)
Good read. Easier to get through than Christopher's other works, largely I suspect because more of the actual narrative was in a nearly-finished form. Tolkien had written multiple drafts of this story starting as early as World War I and ending as late as near his death, so there was plenty of time for the material to mature, as opposed to the Silmarillion, of which only some parts were in narrative first draft, and the histories which were entirely culled from notes.
Also, Christopher's own son helped a great deal with this book, which as one would suspect has had a mitigating effect on any residual stiffness.
In all, an engaging if not entirely happy read. The experience is much like watching Star Wars Episodes 1-3, only without having the happiness of your childhood ripped away and replaced with Jar Jar Binks. You know how it's going to end but aren't entirely how it gets there.
This was a VERY GOOD story, and an excellent way for the Tolkien estate to stop publishing posthumous works. It was already bordering on the ridiculous - although "serious fans" might argue with me, I consider myself to be quite a serious fan and yet I do NOT own the entire 653-volume set of histories. Best to go out with this one, and be done with it... because this one was GREAT.
-------------------------------------------
The Sand Wars by Charles Ingrid
This is NOT a great piece of literature, or even an exceptionally well-written series of novels. And yet if you go look on Amazon, 49/50 reviewers give it 5 stars. Why? Let me tell you a little story...
I was about 13 or 14. It was summer, and I was stuck in some godawful place my parents had dragged us to for the weekend, visiting some people I didn't know and forced to hang out with their children who were similarly disgruntled over being forced to spend time with me. Now mind you, I liked their kids well enough - the daughter in particular was quite fetching - but frankly we had so little in common that after an hour or two of pleasantries and forced conversation we were faced with the necessity of finding something to DO in order to not begin to grate on one another.
So we did what any teens would do - bribed someone older to take us to the mall. This was, however, the late 80's and it was upstate New York... way out in the sticks. The local mall was far from amazing. I found myself in a little bookshop, and perused their lone stack of science fiction with mild distaste. Everything on there was from a large name in the field, or was exceptionally pulpy. In the end, I settled for one of the pulp novels, paid my $2.99 and was off.
And spent the rest of the afternoon ENTHRALLED by the first half of the book.
And then promptly lost it in the shuffle to go see a movie, sleep and then pack the next day.
Over the intervening years, I would occasionally question someone who knows science fiction about the book, but nobody could tell me what it was from my vague descriptions. I chalk it up to the oddness of the weekend (or the wine we had been swiping from the adults when they weren't looking) that my normally perfect recall was exceptionally vague. All I had to work with was that it was about a soldier, a knight in a suit of powered battle armor. His suit, however, had something ALIVE in it. He might or might not have been going completely insane, and all the other knights were dead... and actually that's probably MORE than I really remembered, since I've now read it.
I forgot about it after a while, but a couple years back I got into dredging up old series I had never finished or out-of-print novels by authors I liked, and remembered it again. This time, aided by the raw power of Amazon.com, I discovered that the book was "Solar Kill", the first book of Charles Ingrid's "Sand Wars", and that it had long been out of print. It had originally been written in 1988-1989, briefly been reprinted in 1991 (undoubtedly the version I read), and then was impossible to find until the early 2000's. It was then reissued in a limited-edition omnibus version, 3 books to a tome, for $7.99 apiece. Cheap!
But even more luckily, I scored the first 4 books in their original format from the local used bookstore, pulp-novella covers and all.
These books are a contradiction in terms. At times painful to comprehend. The covers, titles, and blurbs would cause one to think that it's terrible pulp-fiction at its worst. Let's see... we have "Solar Kill", "Lasertown Blues", "Celestial Hit List", "Alien Salute", "Return Fire", and "Challenge Met". The writing is ... bizarre. Some people define it as "military science fiction", but it's realy not - the battles are glossed over and the strategies are alluded to at best.
The writing really jumps around, months will pass from one paragraph to the next with little or no warning. Sometimes you have to re-read a few paragraphs because no indication was given that it's been a year since the paragraph before.
And yet... it's really FUN TO READ. The story is good - it's like a fair-to-good science-fiction author (which Ingrid is) sat down and said "what elements do I need to make the ultimate sci-fi series?" and then proceeded to make a list:
- Unstoppable hero who has suffered unspeakable tragedy and yet adheres to a higher moral code.
- Plucky girl with whom said hero falls in love.
- Whores.
- Better yet, make the plucky girl an ex-whore... but one that has never had sex, so that the hero can deflower her. Hmm... how to pull this off...?
- Psychic powers.
- Aliens.
- PSYCHIC ALIENS!!!
- Wait, the plucky girl could be psychic! She can kill with her mind! YEAH! That's how she kept from getting de-virginized! Yet another obstacle for our hero to overcome!
- Intrigue
- Lasers
- Powered battle armor
- Hyperspace
- Obviously evil aliens (make them bugs, that way we're SURE they're evil)
- Galactic Emperor
- No wait, that's silly - why would the human race reach for the stars but then devolve to having an emperor? Wait! It's a three-branch government, with checks and balances, the emperor has to work through a gigantic space congress! WOO!
And so on and so forth.
And then he somehow makes it work. It's like someone else came up with a shitty story outline, and handed it to Ingrid and said "finish it, I'll give ya $50".
Do I recommend reading it? I'm not sure. If you like sci-fi, read Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid, think Conan is pretty cool... yeah I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by these books. But God help us, I can't just recommend reading them because they're ... GOOD. They're just not.
---------------------------------------
I'm starting a new book blog thing. Since my own web sites have shriveled up, and in any event since I want to "share", I figured I'd post here in briefer format than that in which I otherwise might be inclined.
...
-----------------
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
This is an exceptionally engaging book. Priest writes in a peculiarly genuine writing style, making all of the characters seem at once familiar and honest. It is presented as a series of memoirs, only the in-betweens are actual current exposition, and it jumps around a great deal in both time and presenting character.
I found it surprisingly easy to get sucked into what at first appeared to be extremely dry prose. The fact that I had seen the movie and knew "the secret" in no way lessened my enjoyment of the book - in fact, "the secret" is pretty much telecast from the beginning. On the contrary, I found myself flipping pages quickly waiting to see how it was revealed - indeed, the very thrust of the book. A magic act in three stages, indeed!
You'll find the book filed under "fantasy" at your local bookshop, although I don't really classify it as such myself. Certainly it shan't be going with the Eddings and Salvatore on our bookshelves!
----------------------------
Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (as only partially ruined by the stilted nature of his son Christopher's writing)
Good read. Easier to get through than Christopher's other works, largely I suspect because more of the actual narrative was in a nearly-finished form. Tolkien had written multiple drafts of this story starting as early as World War I and ending as late as near his death, so there was plenty of time for the material to mature, as opposed to the Silmarillion, of which only some parts were in narrative first draft, and the histories which were entirely culled from notes.
Also, Christopher's own son helped a great deal with this book, which as one would suspect has had a mitigating effect on any residual stiffness.
In all, an engaging if not entirely happy read. The experience is much like watching Star Wars Episodes 1-3, only without having the happiness of your childhood ripped away and replaced with Jar Jar Binks. You know how it's going to end but aren't entirely how it gets there.
This was a VERY GOOD story, and an excellent way for the Tolkien estate to stop publishing posthumous works. It was already bordering on the ridiculous - although "serious fans" might argue with me, I consider myself to be quite a serious fan and yet I do NOT own the entire 653-volume set of histories. Best to go out with this one, and be done with it... because this one was GREAT.
-------------------------------------------
The Sand Wars by Charles Ingrid
This is NOT a great piece of literature, or even an exceptionally well-written series of novels. And yet if you go look on Amazon, 49/50 reviewers give it 5 stars. Why? Let me tell you a little story...
I was about 13 or 14. It was summer, and I was stuck in some godawful place my parents had dragged us to for the weekend, visiting some people I didn't know and forced to hang out with their children who were similarly disgruntled over being forced to spend time with me. Now mind you, I liked their kids well enough - the daughter in particular was quite fetching - but frankly we had so little in common that after an hour or two of pleasantries and forced conversation we were faced with the necessity of finding something to DO in order to not begin to grate on one another.
So we did what any teens would do - bribed someone older to take us to the mall. This was, however, the late 80's and it was upstate New York... way out in the sticks. The local mall was far from amazing. I found myself in a little bookshop, and perused their lone stack of science fiction with mild distaste. Everything on there was from a large name in the field, or was exceptionally pulpy. In the end, I settled for one of the pulp novels, paid my $2.99 and was off.
And spent the rest of the afternoon ENTHRALLED by the first half of the book.
And then promptly lost it in the shuffle to go see a movie, sleep and then pack the next day.
Over the intervening years, I would occasionally question someone who knows science fiction about the book, but nobody could tell me what it was from my vague descriptions. I chalk it up to the oddness of the weekend (or the wine we had been swiping from the adults when they weren't looking) that my normally perfect recall was exceptionally vague. All I had to work with was that it was about a soldier, a knight in a suit of powered battle armor. His suit, however, had something ALIVE in it. He might or might not have been going completely insane, and all the other knights were dead... and actually that's probably MORE than I really remembered, since I've now read it.
I forgot about it after a while, but a couple years back I got into dredging up old series I had never finished or out-of-print novels by authors I liked, and remembered it again. This time, aided by the raw power of Amazon.com, I discovered that the book was "Solar Kill", the first book of Charles Ingrid's "Sand Wars", and that it had long been out of print. It had originally been written in 1988-1989, briefly been reprinted in 1991 (undoubtedly the version I read), and then was impossible to find until the early 2000's. It was then reissued in a limited-edition omnibus version, 3 books to a tome, for $7.99 apiece. Cheap!
But even more luckily, I scored the first 4 books in their original format from the local used bookstore, pulp-novella covers and all.
These books are a contradiction in terms. At times painful to comprehend. The covers, titles, and blurbs would cause one to think that it's terrible pulp-fiction at its worst. Let's see... we have "Solar Kill", "Lasertown Blues", "Celestial Hit List", "Alien Salute", "Return Fire", and "Challenge Met". The writing is ... bizarre. Some people define it as "military science fiction", but it's realy not - the battles are glossed over and the strategies are alluded to at best.
The writing really jumps around, months will pass from one paragraph to the next with little or no warning. Sometimes you have to re-read a few paragraphs because no indication was given that it's been a year since the paragraph before.
And yet... it's really FUN TO READ. The story is good - it's like a fair-to-good science-fiction author (which Ingrid is) sat down and said "what elements do I need to make the ultimate sci-fi series?" and then proceeded to make a list:
- Unstoppable hero who has suffered unspeakable tragedy and yet adheres to a higher moral code.
- Plucky girl with whom said hero falls in love.
- Whores.
- Better yet, make the plucky girl an ex-whore... but one that has never had sex, so that the hero can deflower her. Hmm... how to pull this off...?
- Psychic powers.
- Aliens.
- PSYCHIC ALIENS!!!
- Wait, the plucky girl could be psychic! She can kill with her mind! YEAH! That's how she kept from getting de-virginized! Yet another obstacle for our hero to overcome!
- Intrigue
- Lasers
- Powered battle armor
- Hyperspace
- Obviously evil aliens (make them bugs, that way we're SURE they're evil)
- Galactic Emperor
- No wait, that's silly - why would the human race reach for the stars but then devolve to having an emperor? Wait! It's a three-branch government, with checks and balances, the emperor has to work through a gigantic space congress! WOO!
And so on and so forth.
And then he somehow makes it work. It's like someone else came up with a shitty story outline, and handed it to Ingrid and said "finish it, I'll give ya $50".
Do I recommend reading it? I'm not sure. If you like sci-fi, read Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid, think Conan is pretty cool... yeah I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by these books. But God help us, I can't just recommend reading them because they're ... GOOD. They're just not.
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