Mort(e) by Robert Repino
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Utterly humorless. Thousand year old ants somehow make animals sentient and give them hands to defeat the eeeevil humans. Tired, woke enviro-propaganda thinly disguised as, uh, SF or something. A cat searches for its long lost dog lover. Or something.
View all my reviews
Month: October 2021
Quick Review of Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish
The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
You need a certain languid frame of mind to appreciate Craig Johnson’s first Longmire novel. The language is exquisite and Johnson captures the atmosphere and personality of small-town Wyoming. This was clearly a labor of love for the author. On the other had, to read this book you can’t have anywhere to be. The pacing is glacial. Halfway through the book Longmire doesn’t have any solid suspects and doesn’t seem to mind much. Johnson spends so much time building in background to every character and situation that not much manages to happen. Sure, it’s wonderfully colored and the relationships between the characters show a depth that the current Netflix incarnation of the series can’t hope to reach. I just wish it moved along a little more quickly.
View all my reviews
Quick Review of Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City
I wish K. J. Parker could make up his mind as to whether this story is fantasy or a pseudo-history. His story features a not-quite Roman empire and the wrong-race engineer who saves the city from his [SPOILER] best friend. Yeah, all of that. As stories go, it was fine. Orhan, Colonel of Engineers, narrates the history of his defense of The City, which is Not-Rome. He’s a great character and a great unreliable narrator.
My gripe is that the author injects his 21st Century “new atheism” late in the story as an aside, lambasting the “freak cult who believes the king of the Gods sent his eldest son down to earth to die for the sins of the people.” Again, Parker needs to decide what kind of story he’s writing. Even for snarky Orhan, the diatribe was out of place and probably out of character.
Parker is a good author, but the odd screed just pulled me out of the story.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37946419-sixteen-ways-to-defend-a-walled-city
Quick Review of Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect
The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
When Alastair Reynolds is on, his work is amazing. He is an undisputed master of hard science fiction. Unfortunately he was not on for this one. The Prefect–the name of the book was changed from Aurora Rising–is mind-numbingly tedious. Changing the name didn’t help. From the beginning of this story, he introduces unappealing characters that I find it hard to care about. Tom Dreyfus is a pseudo-cop involved in rooting out voter fraud, bad AIs, augmented humans, and other future-y stuff. Bad things happen, who cares.
In his Revelation Space future history universe, Reynolds has created a sweeping epic spanning millions of years. The problem is that each of the stories is a snippet and there’s no coherent arc unifying the vastness. He’s published stories covering events happening in the next few hundred years, then some several million years in the future, back a few millenia, and so forth. He addresses some interesting and even amazing concepts in a nebulous setting with bland, lifeless characters. I want to like it all, but it just doesn’t come together for me.
View all my reviews
TrollWrite Productions 