SF/F Books: Chapter Two - What Are You Reading?

[Lowdarzz]

I just started How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove.

It's an alternate history novel that tells of the second American civil war in the 1880's. It's also the first book in Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.

 

[S. Gomez]

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, to be followed by the same author's The Island of Dr. Moreau.

 

[Mistral]

I just started How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove.

It's an alternate history novel that tells of the second American civil war in the 1880's. It's also the first book in Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.

Pal, you don't know what you are getting into. That series went the distance! Like 7-9 books long.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I've finished Nightingale's Lament, I'm really enjoying the Nightside series so far.
I'm just starting Guilty Pleasures, the first book of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series.

 

[Mistral]

Finished The Plague Year by Jeff Carlson. It was ok for a debut novel. Good premise, lots of gross descriptions(well, look at the title) and so-so characters. As for The Caliphate by Kratman that I mentioned last, I am upping its importance. About a week after I finished it I read a terrifying news article about a court in France that upheld the right of a Muslim man to beat his wife because "the cultural context requires it". This freaked me out because such a happening (and others like it) formed the premise of Kratman's nihilistic Arabic Europe society. What I had first dismissed as implausible became all too real. Read the book-and take a look around the world.

 

[S. Gomez]

Has anyone read Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series? I ask because I saw it on the bookstore shelf today and it looked intriguing. I don't really like to read a lot of modern swords-and-sorcery, so I wouldn't mind a review or two.

 

[Mistral]

I literally just read a review-its a series and the guy at the forum I was on raved and drooled over it. For what that's worth.

 

[Endymion]

I just started How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove.

It's an alternate history novel that tells of the second American civil war in the 1880's. It's also the first book in Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.

Pal, you don't know what you are getting into. That series went the distance! Like 7-9 books long.

11 books, actually. Hellalong.

Right now I'm reading Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

 

[Maestro]

Well, I survived trudging through Captain Dame Honor Harrington, Countess Harrington Book 3, The Short Mary Sueish War. Ugh.....

I chased it with Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and now I'm back into the 007 universe with Goldfinger. I must say that M must be one of the best bosses ever.

 

[Ruaidhri]

Has anyone read Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series? I ask because I saw it on the bookstore shelf today and it looked intriguing. I don't really like to read a lot of modern swords-and-sorcery, so I wouldn't mind a review or two.

Unbelievably complicated, but VERY rewarding.

This is a series projected to be 10 books long, with some books around 1000 pages, so it's a bit of a commitment, but Erikson knows how to craft a world. It's also not very linear. You'll find that one book will focus on a certain group of characters, and then you won't see them again till two installments later.

I will say that the first book is the weakest. It drops you into the middle of the story, and I had no idea what was happening for the first two hundred pages. It really picks up after that, and I'm glad that Gardens of the Moon held my interest enough to keep with it. The 2nd and 3rd books, are really powerful, with some marvelous characters. But it isn't until the fourth and fifth books that all the disparate plotlines start to form something cohesive.

I personally think that the Malazan series is great, and would urge you to give it a shot.

 

[Mistral]

I just started How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove.

It's an alternate history novel that tells of the second American civil war in the 1880's. It's also the first book in Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.

Pal, you don't know what you are getting into. That series went the distance! Like 7-9 books long.

11 books, actually. Hellalong.

Right now I'm reading Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

Reynolds has been hailed as the savior of the space saga but I had a rough time with his books. Maybe the flavor just wasn't there for me.

 

[S. Gomez]

Has anyone read Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series? I ask because I saw it on the bookstore shelf today and it looked intriguing. I don't really like to read a lot of modern swords-and-sorcery, so I wouldn't mind a review or two.

Unbelievably complicated, but VERY rewarding.

This is a series projected to be 10 books long, with some books around 1000 pages, so it's a bit of a commitment, but Erikson knows how to craft a world. It's also not very linear. You'll find that one book will focus on a certain group of characters, and then you won't see them again till two installments later.

I will say that the first book is the weakest. It drops you into the middle of the story, and I had no idea what was happening for the first two hundred pages. It really picks up after that, and I'm glad that Gardens of the Moon held my interest enough to keep with it. The 2nd and 3rd books, are really powerful, with some marvelous characters. But it isn't until the fourth and fifth books that all the disparate plotlines start to form something cohesive.

I personally think that the Malazan series is great, and would urge you to give it a shot.

Yeah, I've been reading more about it and it definitely sounds like something I'd be interested in. I just love big epics set in fascinating universes (well really, who doesn't like fascinating universes?), and this one seems to be particularly so. The fact that the author is Canadian is just one more reason to check it out.

 

[Stevil2001]

I'm reading Balthazar, book 2 of The Alexandria Quartet. In his foreward, the author argues that the books are "a 'science-fiction' in the true sense", but he's using a totally different definition of the word than everyone else ever. So I'm not actually reading any sf now.

 

[S. Gomez]

^What definition does he use, out of curiosity?

 

[Stevil2001]

The Alexandria Quartet uses as its inspiration relativity-- the continuum has four sides, three of which are space and one is time. So the first three novels cover the same events but from three different physical perspectives. Justine has the narrator laying down the basic events, Balthazar has him rewriting his story to incorporate more information from someone else, Mountolive is in the third person and focuses on an entirely different character in those same events, and Clea is set after the first three, being the only one to move through the time dimension.

Bits from the author's note:

Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.

Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern.

[...]
The subject-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. The third part, Mountolive, is a straight naturalistic novel in which the narrator of Justine and Balthazar becomes an object, i.e. a character.

This is not Proustian or Joycean method--for they illustrate Bergsonian "Duration" in my opinion, not "Space-Time".

[...]
These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call "classical"--for our time. Even if the result proved to be a "science-fiction" in the true sense.

So, you see it's more a play on words/ideas than anything else, but it's a bit of an interesting way of putting it.

 

[S. Gomez]

That is interesting. Especially considering what I read yesterday. Thanks.

 

[Ruaidhri]

Neglected to mention in my post that I am reading Final Impact by John Birmingham. It seems they skipped about a year since the last book, so I was taken aback when some main characters had died "off screen".

Rollickin' good stuff though.

 

[S. Gomez]

I took advantage of a Buy 3, 4th Free sale at the local bookstore and managed to get the first Steven Erikson book for free. Might be a while before I get to it, though.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I just started reading Saga of the Seven Suns Book 5: Of Fire And Night.

 

[PointyHairedJedi]

I'm aaaalmost finished The Years of Rice and Salt - I can't remember the last time I took more than a month to finish a book, but it's one worth taking time over.