Bibliophilia

I reviewed Updraft for The Green Man Review. Go there and read it if you want a review; this is more of a meditational commentary. There may be Spoilers here.

I noted in my review that there's some spiffy well-thought out world building, of the sort you'd expect from NIven, Cherryh or McCaffrey. That's absolutely true, and it comes with strong characterizations, too. But the other thing that really reminded me of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, the earlier ones, or Cherryh's Morgaine novels is that though they're often labeled fantasy rather than SF, they're both really SF.

I'm not sure Updraft, and the sequels, which I'm looking forward to reading, is fantasy. There's no hand-waving here. There's a post-apocalyptic traumatized society, and there's a rational, believable and even evolutionarily not implausible zoology.

Whether Updraft is SF or fantasy, I don't really know.

But it is compulsively readable.

This is a running list; I'll be adding to it as I go. 

The point of this is not only to keep track so I can vote, but to let others know what I'm considering so they can read them too. 

Bear, Elizabeth. Karen Memory. Tor. February, 2015. 

Bear is a super writer and an incredible story teller. I've been waiting for this book for a while. 

Caine, Rachel. Ink and Bone: The Great Library. NAL, July 2015.

Cherryh, C. J. Tracker: A Foreigner Novel. DAW. April, 2015.

Volume 16? I think? I love this series. In my head, it's one huge novel, but this book is eligible for 2016's Hugos. 

Elliot, Kate. Court of Fives. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, August 2015. (YA fantasy).

Hawkins, Scott. The Library at Mount Char. Crown. June, 2015.

Really really loved this; it's a complicated well-written book and it managed to surprise me. So far this is my front-runner for Best Novel.

Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season  (Vol. 1 of The Broken Earth). Orbit. August, 2015.

Novik, Naomi. Uprooted. Del Rey. May, 2015.

van Eekhout. Pacific Fire. Tor. January, 2015. Sequel to California Bones,which I really enjoyed. 

van Eekhout. Dragon Coast. Tor. September, 2015. Sequel to California Bones and Pacific Fire. 

Walton, Jo. The Philosopher Kings. Tor. June 2015. 

This is the sequel to the brilliant, absorbing and clever The Just City. Haven't read it yet, but it's on My List. 

Wilde, Fran. Updraft. Tor. September 2015. This is a first novel, and everyone I've talked to who has read it is wildly enthusiastic. 

I read both of these books (Hammerfall 2001) and Forge of Heaven (2004) when they came out, and hadn't really thought of them since. I didn't dislike either, but remember that large sections of Hammerfall were a bit of a slog at the time, because Cherryh so very feelingly described the environmental conditions faced by the characters. 

I noticed both books are available as ebooks via the public library and Overdrive, so have just re-read them both, back to back. 

First, reading them back to back is understandably much better than reading them three years apart; such is the nature of publishing. 

The basic plot line is that there are two factions at war, one of which heavily relies on genetic modification and nano tech biological symbiotes, and that faction earns the enmity of an a species that doesn't deal with aliens except via extermination. Caught in the middle is a small human colony, existing on a world after the aliens dropped a catastrophic planet-killer on the planet. A third party attempts to intercede on behalf of the human remnant population. Politics, cultural change, biology—all are important. 

These are interesting, complicated books, both like Cherryh, and a bit different.  I say that mentally thinking of a number of Cherryh's books I'd put in a category of good but different: Wave Without a Shore, Voyager in Night, especially).

I've been reading Cherryh since Mr. Kilpatrick the Latin teacher loaned me the serialized version of Faded Sun: Kesrith from Galaxy magazine. Her books shaped me-the-adult in ways that are profound.

I'm so very very glad she's still writing.

I'm re-reading Jo Walton's Among Others and it's just a fabulous as it was when I read the ARC.

Amazing book by an amazing author.

I'm also reading the collection of essays Jo Walton wrote for Tor. Com: What Makes This Book So Great. They're great companion pieces, not only because Walton wrote them, but because Among Others is about a character whose life is made better by the books she reads, and WMTBSG is about truly wonderful books.

I'm awfully tempted to by the hardcover of WMTBSG.

I read these years ago in the 1980s when they first came out, and liked them very much. 

• The Time of the Dark (1982)
• The Walls of Air (1983)
• The Armies of Daylight (1983)

I read them again as part of  checking out Oyster, and I'm delighted to say I still like them lots. I hadn't realized that she wrote two more Darwath novels:

• Mother of Winter (1996; Locus award nominee 1997)
• Icefalcon's Quest (1998)
•   
• I'm not sure how I missed them, since I've read most of her fantasy and SF books. I'm looking for them know. The Darwath re-read led me to re-read Hambly's Windrose Chronicles:
  • • The Silent Tower (1986)
    • The Silicon Mage (1988)
    • Dog Wizard (1993; Locus Award nominee, 1994)
    •  
    • They too held up well (I'm pretty sure that Windrose's character has a tiny bit of homage to Tom Baker's Doctor Who) and again, there are two more related books:
    •  
    • Stranger at the Wedding/Sorcerer's Ward (1994)
  • •  
      
      • My excuse is that I wasted an interminable amount of reading time in grad school. 
        •  
          • Jo Walton has a nice piece on Hambly's Darwath books "Nightmares and the Dark" over at tor.com:
          •   

Gould's Impulse features one of the best characterizations I've seen of a bright but believable teenage female in any genre, never mind in SF. 

This is thus far, my favorite of all of Gould's books. He's a solid writer—but this book has a lot of heart. 

From "How Amazon and Goodreads Could Lose their Best Readers" by Laura Miller:

"This latest pang in Goodreads’ growing pains is more than just an instance of poor social network management. It raises broader issues about literary culture and conversations, how they happen and who owns and controls them. The vast majority of the content on Goodreads is generated by the site’s users. As Alf Aldavan, another protester, explained it to me, longtime Goodreads members “don’t feel like users or customers. They feel like contributors, because they are: library data and reviews content are their work, as well as the actual data GR sells. In a community of people contributing work/content for free, contributors have expectations of respect for that work. Top contributors’ reviews were removed and there were threats to close their account.” His statement is borne out in a 2012 Forbes article on the 25 top Goodreads reviewers; at least two of them have abandoned the site, while four others have been threatened with the deletion of their accounts."

My name is Lisa Spangenberg.

I'm a Medievalist, a Celticist, a technologist, and I write for money.

I came here from Good Reads. 

I love books.