The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-read 2018:

My head spun. Really. It did.

I will not go on record saying that this was anywhere near my favorite Vorkosigan novel, but there is enough plain fun and wild plotting and vibrant characterizations to satisfy any old-school Space-Opera junkie.

I make no excuse. Miles is a superhero. He rides the wave of superheroic Bujoldian coincidence and Miles always happens to be the right person in the right place with the right quippy tongue and the right mind for the job. Even when he isn't. He just happens to have a rather quick imagination and the ability to spin tales that anyone believes.

That, I guess, is pretty damn amazing. :)

It also says a lot about Bujold. :)


Original Review:

This was a great fast tale, and satisfying on many levels, but I have a few issues with it. Perhaps it's my same issue with all of the tales. It's plot providence. It ties up all of the side issues quite nicely, true, but it's almost unbelievable. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the different sections of the book almost as if it was a collection of short stories, and it really had the feel of just that, but when Miles comes up against his previous commander in the employ of the other mercenaries on pure chance, I went... Huh? He was old guard, and very unlikely to leave his beloved homeland. Perhaps he could be convinced to participate in a coup, but not to work as a mercenary. I might not have had this reaction if he had just been a completely different man, but then, the same level of hate wouldn't have made sense.

Sometimes, it's impossible to satisfy readers.

That being said, I had a great time reading it and Mile's antagonists were crushed to my great satisfaction. It can only be described as a great yarn. A lot happens, and I even accepted the fantastic chance that brought the Emperor into Miles's care (or neglect) as a funny way to up the stakes. Actually, the emperor kinda stole the show at one point.

Actually, a lot of Ms. Bujold's supporting cast tend to steal the show, often. I'm reading all of these with a keen eye on Ivan, too.

Very enjoyable!

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The Mountains Of Mourning by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Third read, 2/3/18:

You know, maybe it's just me, but the other times I'd read these books in a row, I really wanted big pew-pew military action. I wanted something big and outrageous like we had in Warrior's Apprentice.

When I read this in the timeline order, I was mightily pissed to have a measly character-building and societal change message wrapped tight in a murder mystery in the boondocks on Vorkosigan lands, in what should have been a lull right after graduation.

Upon a lot of reflection and ratcheting up a just eye, I'm reading this novella as if it had nothing to do with anything. I took it on its own merits.

What did I come up with?

Great mirroring of themes. Prejudice against mutants among all the ignorant peoples. Infanticide, blind fear, and a Miles who is automatically assumed to be the devil because he looks like a mutation. And even if he isn't, it'll be impossible to look into a murder of a child for being a mutant without having a ton of hate also centered on him. Maybe the backwater population of his own people should have been justified in being afraid of what Miles would do.

He's livid. But he's also trying to be just and clever and impartial even when it doesn't seem remotely possible in this situation. What can he do in a day and a half? Where can justice be found? Children are still being murdered in ignorance. In his own people's eyes, he should have been murdered in his own crib.

It's a powerful story.

Miles is still reeling under the effects of his own impossible grandfather who had been such a source of pain and a rift in his own family, who had wanted to do the same to him as the rest of these people, and yet Miles had won him over just by being super stubborn.

The young, freshly graduated military man Miles, having broken nearly every bone in his body from experimental treatments to keep him alive throughout his childhood, survived and thrived by this same stubbornness.

The solution and the resolution of this particular murder mystery are very bittersweet. It requires a lot of understanding and a lot of painful wisdom... all of which Miles must cultivate through his own tears.

I upped my rating. I didn't give this enough justice. There are no spaceships, but there is fast-penta interrogations, horses, firebombs, and vitriol. Sometimes scaling it all back is worth it for the penetrating look into a people.

(This won the best novella for hugo, btw)


Original Review:

This novella was intended to underscore social change and flesh out the backwaters of Barrayar and did so in murder-mystery fashion. Miles got himself into it and eventually got himself out, as well. The story takes place right after his graduation, and while it doesn't create immediate and widespread social change, it's a start. It's also not particularly my favorite out of the series, but it does have its place. There's no space battles, mercenary fleets, or megalomaniac dictators. That being said, it's certainly not a bad story. It should be judged on the murder mystery sci-fi standard.

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Absolute Infinite by Drew Cordell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Drew Cordell's future of humanity is surrounded by an AI with inscrutable aims.

In the first novel, what began with a hi-tech dystopia where scarcity was in the mind and humanity is harvested for a very clever use has led to rebellion.

Later on, we're thrown into a rich dystopia with other people who are much better off, but it leads right to the heart of War.

Think Terminator and a long-changing torn world as humanity is exterminated.

But the third book's reveals pick up on a number of fascinating hints in the previous two, taking us right into bootstrapping AI with even more time-travel goodies and much more in the way of uploaded consciousnesses, hi-tech warfare, and discovery, but don't think this is some sort of simple riff on other tales. These novels run with all the implications and is a rather more epic and well-developed.

It's definitely not fluff. It's delicious for all the great SF elements, the interesting character arc, the reveals, and the ultimate shape of the trilogy. :)

All you post-cyberpunk junkies will be doing yourself a great disservice if you ignore this. Seriously. :)

Ready to get thrashed?



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The Long Fall: Book 1 of the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: by Logan Keys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Do you like technothriller SF that takes the global route, say Day After Tomorrow style? Want deeper characterization and the promise of an epic ride that doesn't go all kiddy on you?

Check this out. It's the first in what is planned to be a long serial, so expect nothing more than 80 pages here, but do expect a dozen more. :) Epic? This is going to satisfy any SF disaster sweet tooth you might have growing in you. :)

Fortunately for us, the action and the fall, the disaster, begins almost right away.

And if you like your whole global warming theme to pick up the pace and scare you to death with a man-made chill, look no further.

SF popcorn read?

Undoubtedly.

Fun?

Absolutely. :)

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The Wrath of David by Sean-Paul Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I knew this was a dystopia nightmare before I came into the reading of it, where war had made a nightmare of the world, not just Scotland and the UK where this is set.

I even imagined it was going to be a rather standard tale of a man all in a rage over getting justice for his wife and not finding it after civilization barely hangs on. Not with the police, not with the military, nowhere. I really thought it was going to just be one of those vigilante thrillers full of guns and bad guys getting theirs, all graphic violence and many horrors done to women and the poverty-stricken.

What I didn't expect after this time of standard build-up was a world much worse off than I initially thought. I mean, it's really bad. Slavery in the UK, man. Total brutality toward women. Anyone who's brownish goes through the meat shredder.

And suddenly I'm entirely on-board with a little or even a lot of vigilante justice. Between David and his conscience, Louise, I was sitting on the edge of my seat with awesome action scenes and a great body count. Neo-Nazi England. Pure hell on all immigrants.

Just hell.

Maybe I ought to postpone my trip to England... *shiver* (strikes that off my wish-list)

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Eric by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second read and my reaction is pretty much the same as the first time.

Rincewind is funny.

Or rather, the situations he always gets into showcases the Discworld in awesomely epic ways and we always get vast adventures. Usually with some kind of weird sidekick and a healthy dose of Death.

All true, sure, but what if Rincewind was mistaken for a demon, summoned by a nerdy kid who insists that he is, because, after all, Rincewind came at his demon summoning. :)

Or how about Discworld's version of Troy? Meeting the Creator? Seeing the bureaucratic hell that is... um... hell? :)

It's a tongue-in-cheek romp and while it's quite hilarious and imaginative as hell, I'm caught in that unenviable place of having to judge it among all of Pratchett's other works rather than against the backdrop of all humor or fantasy books.

It's not my favorite Discworld novel. Not by a long shot. BUT it is a lot higher than some, and not even close to many of the later novels. Even so, I loved having Rincewind back again. :)

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Quietus by Tristan Palmgren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

This book is going to be a difficult one to review because it breaks a lot of normal conventions. The first half of the novel reads like a good outsider/anthropological exploration of our Black Plague from the PoV of a visitor from an alternate universe (the many-concurrent-universes brane). The second half reads like an outright space-opera full of huge ships and a truly immense population across space and branes and a plague that threatens to wipe them all out.

Similarities? Of course. Direct-line similarities, even, and it gets even more interesting when we have nearly godlike extradimensional civilizations involved in long conflicts with each other and with their own followers. Adding a monk from the middle ages asking important questions about God and why he lets bad things happen becomes another direct mirror to the subjects in these huge extradimensional empires and god-like beings involved in plague warfare.

The structure of this novel is pretty top-notch. I can ruminate about it for a long time and still find some really great questions and explorations. I've barely scratched the surface here.

On the other side of the coin, the factor of how much fun the novel is, how easy it is to read, boils down to how much you like heavy doses of historical fiction. I saw HUGE comparisons to be made between the front half of this novel and Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. Her's was time traveling historians getting stuck in the Black Plague and Tristan's was the moral and ethical quandaries of a multiverse-hopping anthropologist. I enjoyed it well enough and it went in quite interesting directions when it came to messing with indigenous cultures (in a very Prime Directive way) and the question of unintended consequences in timeline-development.

The second half of the novel was spaceships and AI companions and godlike beings messing with all us puny mortals in a very high-class SF full of action, more ethical quandaries, the fate of two vast empires.

My initial reaction as I was reading it was mixed. I liked it well enough but I wanted something juicier and more exploratory. It just felt like a number of other novels I've loved, also including KSR's Years of Rice and Salt and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim.

I did eventually get it. It just took a while to really flow into the historical fiction slant because, with that cover, I really expected the later explosion of big SF. :) No worries. It's there.

This was something rather interesting. I really enjoy the chances it takes. :)

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