Our reads January 2021

Yay! Happy to put a very bad year behind,and looking forward to some interesting reads ahead.Hope you got some new books. I was delighted to get £70 in amazon vouchers :0)

Dusty's TBR for January
SF/F reads
Robert McCammon - Boy's Life ✔
Alan E Nourse - Star Surgeon ✔
Cherie Priest - Boneshaker ✔
Terry Bisson - Bears Discover Fire ✔
Edmond Hamilton - World with a Thousand Moons ✔
Edmond Hamilton - The Stars,My brothers✔
Robert A Heinlein - All You Zombies ✔

from other genres
Lindsey Davis - The Spook who Spoke Again ✔
Capt W E Johns - Biggles & Co
Enid Blyton - The Wishing Chair ✔

Happy New Year everyone (fingers crossed)!

The first book of the year is already done in the form of Harrow the Ninth, which is even more of a hot mess than Gideon the Ninth, but I'm already frustrated that the third book will not be published until 2022.

I also have in hand The City We Became and Shorefall; it remains to be seen what my fourth selection of the month will be.

Started Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis for my SF&F book group. Not enjoying it so far but will persist.

I started Altered Carbon yesterday; I am thinking of teaching it this fall, but figured I had better read it before committing to it!

I am currently reading Schrodinger's Telephone and Rhythm of War. I have The Andromeda Evolution and Dark Piper lined up to read next. I bought a bunch of Andre Norton books recently.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy new year! I've just started White Queen by Gwyneth Jones, and am also plodding through Gamechanger, which contains many good ideas but also a lot of dross.

On the final stretch of Saints of Salvation, the concluding book of Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation series. Not bad, but not his best, either.

I finished my re-read of The Book of the New Sun last month (and posted a review). I've just started an initial read of The Urth of the New Sun, and I'm blazing through it--I read nearly half of it over the last two days.

Also, I read and gave a quick review to Swann's The Forest of Forever.

Happy New Year everybody!

I'm re-reading Mirror Image by Michael G. Coney. I know it's a re-read because I remember the title and cover illustration but I have absolutely no other recollection of it, so maybe my memory is really terrible or maybe it wasn't a particularly memorable book? I have to question the amount of time I spend reading when I don't seem to retain any of it. lol

Continuing my re-read of Zones of Thought with A Deepness in the Sky.

Just finished The Will to Battle and am in awe of the series so far. Now taking a brief break with an art book, then I'm going to pitch myself into a re-read - the first in possibly fifty years! - of 'Doc' Smith's Galactic Patrol. I'm under few illusions as to what I'll find; after all, I find myself sometimes taking a sharp breath at how my reactions have changed to something I last read three, four or five years ago. But for all that Smith's fiction is held up as now representing the worst of science fiction, I'm struck by how often people refer back to him within the context of the history of the genre. We should occasionally go down to the genre's cellars to remind ourselves about what's down there.

>5 Stevil2001: The film version of Altered Carbon is the best sf flick on Netflix IMOHO. The entire book series is great.

Currently reading The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Menace, which is an expansion of a novella, The Martian Simulacra from a couple of years ago.

Added Nexus by Ramez Naam to my reading rotation.

Finished The Last Emperox for next week's book group. I thought it ended the trilogy especially well. Turns out he wrote the trilogy as a trilogy, on purpose. I suspect that knowing how/when it would all end made the ending of this easier to write.

(Some writers do middles and starts much more easily, it seems, than endings. John Scalzi isn't one of those, necessarily: I just appreciate a solid ending.)

Added Catseye to read alongside White queen.

>17 karenb: The novel as brick does not seem to be Scalzi's metier. This was originally meant to be a homage to Dune, but the man quickly came to think better of the idea!

>14 DugsBooks: Do you mean the tv show?

I did enjoy it! Lots of neat ideas, though it flagged a bit in the middle. Or at least, I did. These complex noir conspiracies always do my head in.

>13 RobertDay: I re-read Galactic Patrol myself about 6 years ago and I thought it held up pretty well, given that it seems to be mostly aimed at juvenile readers. It's relatively lacking in the repetitive dialogue and stodgy narrative that mars so much of Smith's work.

Finished The City We Became yesterday evening and it'll be interesting to see how it fares in the granting of awards. I basically liked it, but it's very different from any novel Jemisin has done before, and if you don't care for political allegory it might not be the book for you. Not being able to go into work because of a moronic attempt at a putsch tended to raise my opinion of the novel.

Next up will be my TBA novel: A Choir of Lies.

>22 Shrike58: Oh dear! Political allegory is one of the things that attracts me to a novel. I might have to circle round a few times to learn more about this book.

Close to finishing The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. A good solid read so far.

Just finished the most recent Expanse novella, Auberon; about to start the final book of the original Mistborn trilogy, The Hero of Ages.

In parallel with my book reading, I also plough through a huge TBR pile of specialist magazines and journals. I've just finished a 1993 issue of the journal of the UK's academic Science Fiction Foundation, Foundation 59. Apart from finding some remarkably apposite comments in reviews of books set in the impossibly distant future year of 2021, I came across this in an article by Czech fan/academic Cyril Simsa on the probably little-remembered US author Henry Slesar, and it put me in an interesting frame of mind for my upcoming Doc Smith re-read (referred to in >13 RobertDay: above):

"A lot of his stories are perfectly respectable examples of the way sf was written in the '50s, and may even have seemed well above average for their day. But so much has changed in the genre in the interim: plot-lines which may once have seemed agreeably adventurous now seem trite and melodramatic, ideas which were part of sf's stock-in-trade are now unbearable clichés, the little philosophical homilies with which so many '50s sf writers liked to finish off their stories (the "moral", if you like) seem dated and prevent the story reaching a proper conclusion. In a world where fascism and civil war have come back to the streets of Europe, where naked manipulation of the political process by the mass media has become the norm, where rival drug gangs regularly shoot at one another with Uzi machine-pistols in the ruins of Los Angeles and computer networks will soon be offering us sex in cyberspace for real, it's difficult to read a story about a mad scientist with a beautiful blond daughter, or a solitary genius who invents a new variety of domestic robot, or indeed any story in which the moral turns out to be (in the words of the '50s B-feature) that "there are things man isn't meant to know", without disguising a smirk behind the palm of one's hand. (Then again, in fairness to Slesar, one has to ask whether the second-generation cyberpunks like Walter Jon Williams will seem any less ridiculous in 2022, and whether we won't perhaps be just as incapable of taking seriously anything with voguish references to "ice", "jacks", designer drugs, artificial intelligence, multinational corporations, computer voodo, banghramuffin orbital rave platforms, elephants in mirrorshades and so on, in an age no doubt as unimaginably different from where we are now, as the '80s were to the writers of the '50s.)"

>26 RobertDay: Very interesting.

I finished The Urth of the New Sun and posted my review. Now I've started This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It for a little levity before moving on to the Long Sun.

>26 RobertDay: This is interesting, and it caught my attention in particular because I've recently read and enjoyed the first two books in Walter Jon Williams' "Hardwired" series. Cliches and the rest are certainly issues in reading old science fiction. You have to suspend disbelief in two different directions at once both for the story lines themselves and for once vibrant ideas of the "future" that the passing of time have made trite or at least commonplace. It's a form of time travel, no? We're reading back to the time when death rays (or orbital rave platforms) seemed edgy. How did they see things then, and what does that tell us about who they (we) were? So, though I don't read all that much science fiction, when I do I don't necessarily mind if events since a book's writing have overtaken in form, detail and/or scope the world/society-building the story offers. But the storytelling's got to be good to make the trip worthwhile, of course. Well, since I'm only an occasional visitor here, those may all be truisms for you folks. If so, apologies.

>29 rocketjk:

Truisms? I don't think so. I've found some genre readers to be awfully scrupulous about the futurist plausibility of what they read. For me, it's just one factor among many that will impact my enjoyment of a book. And it's sometimes the case that seriously obsolete futurism can enhance my experience, by providing insight into the perspective of the writer's time. Time travel indeed.

It can be very fun to watch a movie from the 1980s set in "2021."

Finished White queen. It was a difficult read, but worth it for the very original treatment of aliens. The human characters are pretty unsympathetic and their motivations are often as incomprehensible as those of the aliens. I've got the sequel on Mount TBR so I'll give that a read some time.

Finished Beloved Son and Crenshaw, now reading The Secret Visitors

>14 DugsBooks: I really enjoyed the Netflix series although I generally prefer the novels - however I have not read Altered Carbon yet so had nothing to gauge the show against. I must put it on my too-be-read list.

>33 Britlost: I enjoyed both the the book and the series. There were differences but they were both good in their own right and on their own merits.

I've now finished Galactic Patrol. It is not without merit; just without much. Smith was more likely to show a tentacled, scaly alien to be one of the Good Guys than (perish the thought) a black person, but at least he did begin the movement towards diversity of heroes. Still, I've now put this particular demon to rest.

My review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/39732/reviews/61692276

Back on Arrakis again in Dune -- first time I've reread it since 2003. But then I got curious & checked all my files, finding that this is the 8th time I've read it (!). First time in 1970. There are very few books I've read that many times, and I'm not sure if any SF. I'm still enjoying it, though a few of the slightly stretched plot elements (in terms of plausibility) are standing out more than they used to. It really is a classic.

Finished The Secret Visitors, next up Dilation Effect.

Had a week off work. By law in Sweden, you have to take a minimum of 20 days holiday, so I have some catching up to do. It's not like 2020 was a good year for holidaying... Anyway, read a bunch of books: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Martian Menace, which is mostly the The Martian Simulacra but adds a cleverly-done third act; The Stone Sky, triumphant climax to multi-award-winning trilogy, just as brutal as the other books but the ending does seem somewhat inevitable; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, classic American Gothic, felt Merricat was pitched too young; The Colour of Magic, which I first read back in the 1980s, had forgotten how bitty it was, occasional flash of clever humour but mostly a bit laboured; The Day of the Triffids, surprisingly poor prose, very bland, goes straight into an extended, and unconvincing, info-dump, but it's clear it's the triffids that have entered public culture, not the actual book.

Finished up Shorefall and I have to admit that this is the least impressed I've been with one of Bennett's novels; though it's still readable. Too many working parts, too many data dumps, and I think that Bennett needed to emphasize one POV out of the raft of characters trying to stop his trilogy's "big bad." As always, your mileage may differ. It probably didn't help that I think N.K. Jemisin did a better job of pulling off the ensemble cast approach in The City We Became.

Still plodding through Boneshaker,80 pages to go.Steampunk is not one of my fave genres at the best of times,and I cant attach to the characters at all. There is a really annoying boy,who invariably makes the wrong decision,or believes the most obviously lying person while ignoring the pleadings of people striving to help him,. Tell him there are ravening zombies outside,listen to them shuffling,dont open the door. He'll actually give his solemn word to stay put and before you walk away two steps he will be opening that door!

When Boneshaker gets too annoying(after 10 pages or so} I am locating stories from Mark Kelly's most popular short stories list. http://www.sfadb.com/TopShortStories

Short stories need to end with a short sharp shock,some brilliant new ideaor leave some vivid image to stay in your mind,and what strikes one person as fantastically good will leave another reader cold,so you never quite know what you will experience.This week I read Fred Pohl's Day Million,so so,though Fred's wry dark humour is in full flow.
Then I was left wondering just why Terry Bisson's Bears Discover Fire tops so many lists. Perhaps just those pictures of bearsand humans sitting round a campfire? In the light of present world attitudes to those not of our tribe or group,I was left a tad apprehensive. All those humans and their rifles bodes ill........
I left the annoying boy in Boneshaker in the midst a battle,yesterday,have had no eagerness to see how he's doing,but next time I need to exit that tedium I intend to read Cordwainer Smith's Game of Rat and Dragon while continuing my search for a copy of Jeffty is Five

>40 dustydigger:. You are not helping me get Boneshaker out of the TBR pile. This time I passed it over in favor of the post-apocalyptic novel The Wolf Road, the story of an orphan girl being raised by a serial killer.

I can't help motivate anyone to read Boneshaker. I really wanted to like it, but meh.

I can't help motivate anyone to read Boneshaker either. One of the worst books I ever forced myself to finish.

>42 vwinsloe: LOL. Sorry vwinsloe,I cant whip up any enthusiasm for the book. Cant understand how it came to win the Locus award and be Hugo and Nebula nominated.

Paradoxosalpha calls it ''meh'' Gotta agree. But if you are a steampunk fan maybe you will adore it! :0)

>45 dustydigger:, the only steampunk book that I remember actually liking was Karen Memory, but that book seemed quite tongue in cheek. I was hoping from the description of Boneshaker that there would be some humor at least. But I am definitely moving it to the bottom of the TBR stack based on the comments here, and, ultimately, it may just make a good thrift store donation unread. ;>)

My problem with Boneshaker is, at the end of the day, that zombies generally bore the hell out of me. I finished it, but had no desire to pick up any of other novels set in this milieu. On the other hand, I rather liked the author's reinvention of Lizzie Borden as a Lovecraftian heroine.

>47 Shrike58: zombies generally bore the hell out of me

I concur. And yet, the zombie idea is central to This Book Is Full of Spiders, which I'm enjoying right now. The difference may be rooted in the way this Wong book interrogates the fear of zombies, rather than taking it for granted. (Also, it's on the comic end of the horror spectrum.)

This thread convinced me to remove Boneshaker from my TBR collection, but turns out, I already had.

In general, I don't click with the genre. The best Steampunk story was written by a friend, who didn't care to release his story to the general public. He strongly recommended Boneshaker, but I don't think it looks nearly as interesting or original as what he wrote as a personal challenge.

I am attracted to zombies in fiction more than I really understand or care to admit to. Dishonest characters putting themselves (and others) into dangerous situations for no good reason, though? Not as much.

>1 dustydigger: I did get new books for 2021! The Kindle ebook of Victoria Lee's Fever King is on sale for $0.99 and the second book in the duology is $1.99. Several other books on sale might provide relief in what looks to be another difficult year.

Finished Dilation Effect (yuk) and started The Year of the Griffin.

Another vote against Boneshaker here.

>45 dustydigger: Those awards were what made me pick it up in the first place. Soon found myself scratching my head over the accolades as well.

>46 vwinsloe: I thought Karen Memory was okay but not as good as I expected from Elizabeth Bear after reading her amazing Jacob's Ladder trilogy. The Difference Engine is another steampunk book that worked really well for me. Arguably, The Anubis Gates is considered steampunk by some, and that is another of my favorite books. I also had a pretty good time reading Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl. Not great literature but better character development - and just plain more fun - than Boneshaker. Looking back at my review, I see that I intended to read the Gideon Smith sequels at some point. Since I have not done so nearly 6 years later, there is small chance of it ever happening. But I am planning a re-read of The Difference Engine this year.

Edit: Touchstones appear to be broken. Editing in attempt to fix...

>51 ScoLgo:

Second the votes for The Difference Engine and The Anubis Gates, and suspect many won't consider either steampunk "enough". (But I agree they are, and to good effect.)

Another I'd recommend is Padua's graphic novel, Lovelace & Babbage. It is on the comic end of things, while remaining historically accurate, so far as I can tell.

>52 elenchus: >51 ScoLgo:

I have not read, and have not attempted to read, Boneshaker, but I did read, and enjoyed immensely, both Difference Engine and The Anubis Gates.

>52 elenchus: >51 ScoLgo: I haven't read The Difference Engine but I have read The Anubis Gates and can recommend it as well. I'm also not a fan of zombies in general but I can give a thumbs up to The Girl With All the Gifts.

I'm actually due for a reread of The Anubis Gates, which is basically my gold standard for time-travel stories.

I've enjoyed Cherie Priest's horror/supernatural novels, The family plot and The toll. Both were atmospheric, although I felt the plot of The toll was not as strong as it could have been. I have a copy of Boneshaker and may give it a go one day; now my expectations have been lowered to rock bottom it might be better than I'm imagining!

But for now I'm reading Hearts, hands and voices by Ian McDonald, which is excellent.

I wrapped up and reviewed This Book Is Full of Spiders, and now I'm setting out on Litany of the Long Sun.

I decided to wait another week to read political fiction set close to home and went farther out, for The Stark Divide by J. Scott Coatsworth.

Added Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott to my reading rotation.

YAY! FINALLY finished Boneshaker. I get the feeling that I was supposed to be bowled over by a big denouement,but since I never connected with the heroine(?) it left me totally cold,shrugging ''so what?'' :0) Will not be continuing the series.
Rest of the month I am reading other genres,though perhaps another couple of short stories from Mark R Kelly's list will be squeezed in.Such as Game of Rat and Dragon.
For pure fun and indulgence and celebrating the inauguration I think I will do a reread of Heinlein's All You Zombies.No one like Bob for making time travel understandable(well,fairly......)

Hey, I recognize some of the Green Dragon folks here!

I'm currently working on The Consuming Fire, nearly done.

>61 Karlstar: Careful! You’ll break our cover.

The Time Travels rules;

Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.
A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.
It Is Earlier When You Think.
Ancestors Are Just People.
Even Jove Nods.

All You Zombies is still a good read. Not as shocking or mindblowing as when first encountered,naturally, but brilliantly executed. OK,its harder today to deal with the dodgy sexism and very strange reationships(to say the least) - typical laterHeinlein - but the story still has great impact.
I am now going to look online for Eric Frank Russell's wonderful impactful short story Sole Survivor.
Am also reading Jack Vance The Face book 4 of the Demon Princes. Its a bit of an oddity,different from the earlier books in the series. Not sure how I feel about it

Recursion time travel goes wrong.

The Passage: a Novel felt like it should have been broken up into multiple books.

I am about to tackle The Children of Hurin.

Started Smoke for my SF&F reading group - so far a bit meh and it's long, too.

I just started The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin. It's completely different from The Left Hand of Darkness and I'm enjoying it so far.

I'm about halfway through an ARC of Echo Wife and loving it.

>63 dustydigger: Have you seen the Predestination movie? Nicely done adaptation of All You Zombies starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook as The Unwed Mother.

>63 dustydigger:
To me, The face is one of Vance's most humorous books, and the standout instalment from that series. I don't re-read his Demon Princes books all that much, but this one I do (Ok, and sometimes The book of dreams).

Finished Year of the Griffin, started Cryptozoic.

>71 ChrisRiesbeck: Back in the 1970s, F&SF used to run silly little write-in competitions, and the one I remember was Great Collaborations That Never Were. I remember it for the John Brunner/Brian Aldiss novel 'The Sheep Look Up Cryptozoic', which always for me conjured up a cartoon image of bespectacled sheep poring over dictionaries.

Meanwhile, after bashing through the three Ada Palmer Terra Ignota books in quick succession - mainly because their complexity inspired me to keep up the momentum and read the whole series to date reasonably quickly - I decided to review the way I read series. So I picked up the fourth of the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth series, The Long Utopia. It was becoming fairly obvious by this point which bits were Pratchett's and which Baxter's, and most of this one was Baxter's, especially the Dyson planetary motor. Lots of people employ Dyson spheres in their stories, but Freeman Dyson also worked out how to dismantle a planet to get the material for a sphere. Which is fine if everyone agrees that the planet ought to be dismantled.

Next up will be a return to my Ken MacLeod read with The Night Sessions.

>72 RobertDay: I enjoyed Night Sessions. Well, I have enjoyed all Ken’s books.

>59 seitherin: Just started Unconquerable sun too, but other books have earlier return dates.

Finished The Order of the Pure Moon reflected in water by Zen Cho. Good historical novella about bandits in an occupied region. Tiny fantasy element.

Also finished Life and limb by Jennifer Roberson, contemporary fantasy about two guys fighting demons in Arizona. Angels are real, and so are gods, ghosts, and legends.

Just started XX. Looking good so far.

>73 pgmcc: >72 RobertDay: Maybe I should add Night Sessions to the list. I haven't read any Ken MacLeod in a decade, and I've no idea why: the ones I've read have generally had interesting themes, neat settings, a decent plot and weren't overly long.

I finally got around to reading one of Butler's novels (Parable of the Sower) and I think I should go and read more of them...

>72 RobertDay: I actually got something into one of the F&SF competitions, which eventually was reprinted in Oi Robot Competitions and Cartoons.

>77 AnnieMod: Yes, that would most definitely be a good idea.

Finished up A Choir of Lies yesterday evening. I liked it, but, if the bildungsroman is not your thing, and you didn't read A Conspiracy of Truths, pick another novel. To put it another way, I can remember being as young and stupid as the main character in this novel and I'm not sure that I wanted to be reminded of that!

>77 AnnieMod:. Yes, you should read more of Octavia Butler. Parable of the Talents is even better than Sower.

>67 SFF1928-1973: I loved The lathe of heaven. It felt more like something by PKD than Le Guin's usual style, though I very much enjoy both.

I finished Hearts hands and voices and thought it was excellent. A great setting, interesting characters and a good analogy of the religious-political conflicts in Ireland.

Now I'm reading Waste tide.

>81 Sakerfalcon:

I agree that The Lathe of Heaven is the Le Guin book for Dick fans. But we're all epistemological victims of technology now.

>81 Sakerfalcon: Now you are just pushing me to read Hearts Hands and Voices. I just brought my copy up to the new reading room this afternoon. Synchronicity at play...or do you have special powers, or a hidden camera in my house?

Edmond Hamilton's World With a Thousand Moons and the novella ''The Stars,My Brothers'' were rather typically bland,middling quality reads,from 1942,years before his marriage to Leigh Brackett.
Now reading Andre Norton's Star Guard and early chapters of Jack Vance The Face,but wont finish them till sometime in Feb.

>81 Sakerfalcon: >82 paradoxosalpha: Er, could it be because LHoD was Le Guin's homage to PKD?

Reading Blackhand and Ironhead Volume 1, the compiled and translated limited series (five issues, I think). What happens when you find out that the cage fighting solution to the villain/hero problem is all a lie, set up by your dad, who also had another kid that you didn't know about. Superhero half-sisters FTW.

Just finished The Consuming Fire, I thought it was much better than the first book. Some of my complaints about the first book were answered in this one, I should have known that Scalzi would fill in the missing pieces.

Can thoroughly recommend XX: A Novel, Graphic - starts off with the Earth receiving a signal from space, which turns out to be an archive of alien races, and ends up with re-engineering the Milky Way. Uses lots of typographical tricks and found texts, but nails 2020 online culture pretty accurately.

Finished Wanderers by Chuck Wendig.

Started N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became - so far an entertaining romp of New York vs tentacled horrors. I'm supporting the tentacles!

Just found out Kathleen Ann Goonan has died.

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/kathleen-ann-goonan-1952-2021/

Finished Cryptozoic! and started Zendegi.

I recently finished Crossroad, a Star Trek novel by Barbara Hambly, which was surprisingly good.

Well, I finished The Long Utopia and really got the feeling that a lot of the novel was Baxter's. And the big revelation at the end of the previous book was almost completely dropped. This book introduced a chunk of back story for one of the main characters - well, about one of his ancestors - which might have made a whole steampunky novel in itself, preferably written by Kim Newman. But it wasn't.

I then switched to part of my ongoing Ken MacLeod read, with The Night Sessions. This feels like three friends having good fun with batting ideas around - MacLeod for the plot, Iain Banks for the sarcastic robots and Ian Rankin for the police procedural stuff and the Edinburgh street map. MacLeod drops the Leftist machinations but takes up with Scottish Presbyterianism, which is just as factional.

And now I've switched again to psychological horror with Richard Christian Matheson's Created By, a tale set in the Hollywood tv industry, written in the early 1990s, just as series tv started getting grittier. A writer pitches a show called 'The Mercenary' to a studio. He has already been to Hollywood's most respected psychic who can usually tell if a show or film is going to be a hot or bomb, and in answer to the question "Will it be a success?" she says "It will be powerful." That's not necessarily a Good Thing.

>90 justifiedsinner: Sorry to hear about Goonan, I really liked Bones of Time, Queen City Jazz, and Mississippi Blues. She's got a couple novels I've not read, I'm going to have to add them to my TBR pile.

>90 justifiedsinner: That's unfortunate...I had a lot of enthusiasm for her novels at one point, but, for reasons I can't really enunciate the enthusiasm just evaporated.

>90 justifiedsinner: Thanks for the news. People who liked her work liked it pretty well. I read some of it when it came out, even.

Last book for January: Kate Elliott's Unconquerable Sun. Space opera that doesn't suck! Substantial enough to stand on its own and not be an obvious part of a series (though it is). A good mix of almost everything: POVs, activities, character backgrounds & species, fight scenes (from two people thru two space fleets), and politics (interpersonal thru intergalactic). Worth investigating if that sounds like your thing.

>92 Karlstar: If you liked Crossroad, then I recommend you check out Hambly's Ghost-Walker and Ishmael as well. I enjoyed all three more than I thought I would.

>96 karenb: Add a thumbs up for Unconquerable Sun to your recommendation from me. I'm only about half done with the book but I am enjoying it much more than I expected to. This one actually got me out of my reading slump.

>83 pgmcc: I can't reveal my secrets. But you should read Hearts hands and voices. It is very good.

>90 justifiedsinner: That is sad news. I love Queen City Jazz and really need to read the rest of the series. Maybe I will make Mississippi blues my next SF read.

>99 Sakerfalcon: Yeah, Queen City Jazz has been on my TBR for a while. I'll have to move it up.

>100 justifiedsinner: Me too.

>92 Karlstar:, >97 seitherin: I like all three of Hambly's Star Trek books a lot, though Crossroad is my favorite. I wrote a tribute to it here (along with other tie-ins): http://unreality-sf.net/2013/04/02/lasting-impressions/

>99 Sakerfalcon:, >100 justifiedsinner: I read Queen City Jazz as part of a project to read books set in my hometown of Cincinnati but found it kind of impenetrable.

>102 Stevil2001: I'm glad to hear that, I was seriously impressed by Crossroad and I'd planned on reading her other Star Trek novels. I've also read the Michael Jan Friedman ST novels, but they aren't quite as good. He did a few sessions of an author chat here on LT way back when.

>103 Karlstar: Mike is an incredibly nice guy, but I don't think he's anywhere near as good a writer as Hambly, though he was so prolific he did turn out the occasional gem. (My favorite of his is Shadows on the Sun.)