So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[JD]

I'm just finished I've finished the second and third stories in Heroic Hearts since my last post. The second story, The Black Ship was really good, this was my first story in Chloe Neal's The World of The Others series, and I'll definitely be checking more of the series out. The story Comfort Zone was Kelley Armstrong, and I've been wanting to check out her stuff for a while now. I liked it a lot, my only real issue was that it took me a little while to get used to the fact that she writes in present tense.
I'm taking a short break from Heroic Hearts to read One Piece Vol. 1: Romance Dawn the first tankoban of the manga. I've been waiting for this to be available from libby for months, and it was finally available today so I grabbed it.

 

[Steve Roby]

"That seems kinda familiar...," I thought. I found I've had the PDF of this since February 2008. I am only looking at it now

I was kind of excited at the time because I was a Brust fan for a few years. I read the first several books in his Vlad Taltos series and a few of his other books. I was also experimenting a bit with Lulu, printing out some other things in paperback that weren't available for sale anywhere. For example, an unpublished complete Doctor Who novel by a writer of a few published Doctor Who novels.

, and I see this on the Acknowledgements page:

That's [redacted] nerdy. Emacs is still around; I'm currently writing a short story in Emacs. Mandrake Linux is not, though its descendants include OpenMandriva, Mageia, ROSA, and ALT. OpenOffice, I use that regularly. In my dotage, I've become the Linux nerd I now wish I'd been at twenty-five. I suppose I do need to get a life...

Over the years I usually made an effort to have a good understanding of the computers I used at work, but never used Linux. It seemed like a bit too much work to do on my own time and my own computer. I had a couple of Unix shell accounts on different systems but never really got beyond basic user stuff, so I figured Linux would be beyond me.

 

[Reanok]

I just finished reading Star Trek Tos Identity theft by Greg Cox. The story took alot of suprise twist and turns I wasn't expecting. I thought the story with Chekov and Ryjo was really good. I liked this book alot Bravo!I hope you'll write more TOS novels in the future.

 

[Smiley]

I guess it's a good time to read books by Greg Cox. I'm about 2/3 through The Black Shore from the Voyager books.

Also in the mix are Guards! Guards! from Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Peril at End House from Agatha Christie (featuring Poirot and Hastings).

 

[bdub76]

Finished Memory Police last night.

I thought it was overall a cool concept, but it seemed like the author didn't really know what to do with it until it got silly at the end.

 

[Greg Cox]

I guess it's a good time to read books by Greg Cox. I'm about 2/3 through The Black Shore from the Voyager books.

My first solo Trek novel, after a couple of collaborations.

 

[Smiley]

My first solo Trek novel, after a couple of collaborations.

Did they give you any restrictions on crew deaths for the Voyager novels? They had just over 140 people to start with and no easy way to replace them, so I'm guessing that there was some limit or at least the need for discussion before killing off characters.

 

[KRAD]

Did they give you any restrictions on crew deaths for the Voyager novels? They had just over 140 people to start with and no easy way to replace them, so I'm guessing that there was some limit or at least the need for discussion before killing off characters.

The people writing the show didn't even pay any attention to that.............

 

[Greg Cox]

Did they give you any restrictions on crew deaths for the Voyager novels? They had just over 140 people to start with and no easy way to replace them, so I'm guessing that there was some limit or at least the need for discussion before killing off characters.

That was decades and many, many Star Trek books ago, but not that I recall.

I remember that the main piece of advice that our editor, John Ordover, gave us fledgling Voyager novelists when the line was launched was: "Think The Odyssey. Not Gilligan's Island."

In other words, he didn't want to see a lot of outlines where the crew almost gets home, but something goes wrong. We were to think in terms of The Odyssey: a long, epic voyage with lots of fascinating adventures along the way.

I perhaps took John's advice more literally than most, which explains why The Black Shore is basically Circe's Island meets the Lotus Eaters -- in scifi drag.

 

[Smiley]

The final captain's log explicitly shouted out The Odyssey, so that makes a lot of sense.

A book I enjoyed recently was The Seat Filler. It's essentially a rom-com fantasy where the narrator has a meet cute and falls in love with an Adam Driver type of movie star. The inevitable contrived conflict felt especially contrived, but the book earned my goodwill for everything else it did right.

 

[Greg Cox]

Oh, more memories of The Black Shore: My original outline was (unimaginatively) titled Paradise. Ordover rejected that title, mostly because Melissa Scott was already writing a Voyager book title The Garden, and he didn't want to go to that same well again, title-wise, in short succession. So he asked me for a new title.

A good call, in hindsight.

 

[bdub76]

Read Johnny Mnemonic from Burning Chrome at lunch today.

The short story was a whole lot different from the film. The film did pick up aspects of the short story like the dolphin, but the story was definitely different. The prose style that we later see in Neuromancer
was already in this short story. I actually prefer the film that has a more fleshed out story. However, I do like the prose style. It's poetic in places.

I also stumbled upon a book called Pilgrims about Catholic aliens. It intrigues me. I might read it later this month or this year.

And I learned about two series to check out: Sun Eater and Earthseed. Both are fascinating to me. The later is only two books long, so I'm likely to read that one first.

 

[Greg Cox]

I'm still rereading Assassination Vacation, a few chapters a night at bedtime. We've moved on from Lincoln's assassination to Garfield's, which lands somewhat differently now that I've watched the recent TV miniseries about him, Death by Lightning.

If nothing else, I have the actors' faces and voices in my head now.

 

[JD]

I finished up One Piece Vol. 1: Romance Dawn, and decided I wasn't really in the mood to go back to Heroic Hearts, and was in a Star Wars mood, so I borrowed Star Wars: The Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure by Jason Fry with art by Phil Noto. It's a middle grade novel that was released as part of The Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

 

[bdub76]

Read Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler at lunch today. This story was really good. It's a part of her short story collection by the same name. I stumbled upon her mainly because I've been reading new wave science fiction. I didn't even know it was called this until recently. I'm looking forward to reading more of her stuff.

I'm about 25% of the way into two novels now. The Book of Lost Hours and The Man Who Was Thursday. The Book of Lost Hours tries to do too much, and the writing isn't all that great. But it's not bad enough that I have DNF'd the book. The Man Who Was Thursday is fantastic fun. It's by the guy who wrote the Father Brown stories.

I do have several short story collections going now:

* Burning Chrome
* Bloodchild and Other Stories
* Skeleton Crew
* Jeeves Stories
* The Return of Sherlock Holmes

I'm now reading stories out of the above at lunch based upon my mood. I do think I'll stick with reading the Burning Chrome ones for my evenings. I have to be really focused for his stories, and that's easier to do while reading before bed.

 

[Greg Cox]

Assassination Vacation. Finished the Garfield section last night. Moving on to McKinley.

 

[Steve Roby]

After finishing all the Boom Comics Firefly material (pretty enjoyable, overall), I moved to another genre. I’ve read one of the old Shadow pulp novels, one of Max Allan Collins’s Mike Hammer novels (posthumous collaboration with Mickey Spillane), and I’m working through Collins’s own Nolan novels as published by Hard Case Crime. Fun stuff.

 

[bdub76]

Read two more Octavia Butler stories. She's a really good writer. Looking forward to reading her longer works once I get them from the library.

Read another Wodehouse story. This guy is also fantastic. The premise was so clever. They get together with Bingo to gamble on, get this, the length of sermons at church. It's wild. Never expected to read a story with that premise.

These are probably my new fav authors that I recently discovered.

Still making my way through my novel reads. Trying to decide what series I want to start once I finish them.

 

[Stevil2001]

Read two more Octavia Butler stories. She's a really good writer. Looking forward to reading her longer works once I get them from the library.

Read another Wodehouse story. This guy is also fantastic. The premise was so clever. They get together with Bingo to gamble on, get this, the length of sermons at church. It's wild. Never expected to read a story with that premise.

These are probably my new fav authors that I recently discovered.

Still making my way through my novel reads. Trying to decide what series I want to start once I finish them.

These are two great but very different authors!

 

[Greg Cox]

Rereading The Warslayer by Rosemary Edghill, in her memory, since she passed away earlier this week. She also wrote as eluki bes shahar and James Mallory, btw.

Warslayer is basically Galaxy Quest meets Xena, with the star of a syndicated fantasy-adventure series being magically transported to a fantasy kingdom where she's expected to be "Vixen the Slayer" for real.

eluki, who I edited at Tor, actually wrote me into the book as the author of an unofficial guide to Vixen the Slayer, and later persuaded me to provide both an introduction and a complete episode guide to the tv series, which she included in her novel.

We had too much fun working on that book. She will be missed.