Our reads in December 2019

Another month,another pile of books. Share your reads with us

Dusty's TBR for December
SF/F reads
James White - Mind Changer ✔
Peter Crowther - Moon Shots ✔
Charles Stross - The Rhesus Chart✔
Daniel O'Malley - Stiletto

from other genres
Carol Higgins Clarke - Fleeced ✔
Rachel Howsell Hall - Skies of Ash✔
Cyril Hare - He Should Have Died Hereafter✔
Evelyn Waugh - The Loved One ✔
Jim Kelly - The Skeleton Man✔

I have Winter of the Gods, The Dreaming Stars and Rosewater in hand.

Finished The Sudden Appearance of Hope, which was very good. Now rereading The World of Null-A, prior to a read of The Players of Null-A. I have both books in storage, and Null-A Three as well, but the copies I have here I bought at Fantasticon in Copenhagen last September.

Joachim Boaz's Generation Ship Story read-a-thon has caught me so I'm now reading "Wish Upon A Star" by Judith Merril.

I'm currently reading Shadows Beneath, a collection of four stories by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler, the team behind the podcast Writing Excuses. For each story, the book opens with its final form, but then takes you through transcripts of brainstorming sessions, early drafts, revision notes, and more, to detail the process. Very neat to see creative minds at work; I think it would be a good textbook for a creative writing course.

They are also just good stories. Kowal's is strong, Tayler's is decent (far better than I would have guessed from reading bits of Schlock Mercenary), and I particularly enjoyed Wells's clever "I. E. Demon." Still working on Sanderson's. Two, arguably three, of the stories are science fiction; Sanderson's is fantasy.

I am ready to start Revenger finally. And I have Antediluvian that is due back to the library soon. Then, maybe, Leviathan Wakes. I am watching The Expanse right now and it is awesome. I own the books. I need to read them.

I am stacking up books for my week of holiday vacation. Those will be books for my sequel and space opera challenges on WWE that I have yet to determine as I want as many on my Kindle as possible so I don't have to lug doorstops on the plane.

I cried buckets as I finish James White Mind Changer.Though there was to be one more in the Sector General series,this is the real finale of the beloved series about the massive hospital in space.I will definitely have to read the series again,it will be enriched by what we learn about Omara in this book.A surprising and bittersweet ending,but very satisfying.
His books and stories about the hospital spanned 37 years of writing,starting in 1962,and his pacifism and hope for mankind to rise above petty bigotry and hatred shine through from beginning to end. Considering he lived through decades of the violence and bitterness of Northern Ireland,that is some achievement.
Nice little article on Tor for those unfamiliar with the series - https://www.tor.com/2016/05/05/lonely-hospital-at-the-edge-of-space-a-return-to-...
I particularly liked the final section :
''For thirty-seven years and twelve books, the Sector General series brought readers a uniquely nonviolent, inclusive vision of future medicine. Sixteen years after the passing of author James White, the space docks of Sector General no longer see the busy traffic they once did, and fewer new readers are making it through the airlocks. But for the curious souls who do find their way inside, Sector General is as busy as ever. Doctors still scramble to treat an incredible variety of weird and wonderful aliens, they still grapple with difficult ethical choices, and they still overcome tremendous differences to work together for the greater good. Whether you’re a new admission or a returning patient, there’s plenty worth investigating in the 384 levels of Sector General.''

Straight on to his Double Contact,then I have only one more book to read to complete my Century of Books challenge,one book read for each year 1920-2019.

Still reading Can & Can'tankerous by Harlan Ellison.

Divergent Trilogy
Selection Series-First 3 are the best
Hunger Games Trilogy(but you already knew about that) :)

Really liking Anathem by Neal Stephenson, this is definitely my kind of book. Nifty reversal where the men & women of science are the ones in the monastery.

I spent my day putting up three blog reviews of Lisa Henry space opera novels: Dark Space, Darker Space, and Starlight. All are on their respective books' pages now.

It's a medium-future Earth-at-war series with gay male leads. They prove to be uniquely compatible with the task of making Earth's attackers, the Faceless, acknowledge Humanity's right to exist...in deeply surprising ways. Trigger warnings for non-consensual alien/human sex; in general, the more eww-ick your idea of gay-male sex is, the less likely you are to enjoy the reads.

The world-building is on a par with that done in the 192pp novels of the past, before book-bloat took hold with its good and its bad side effects.

>8 dustydigger: I'm going to have to look for this series. It sounds great.

I've been rereading Earthrise, which I loved the first time around.

Sadly SF lost a great presence this week: DC Fontana, major contributor to ST:TOS, died at age 80 on Tuesday.

>14 richardderus: How sad. For me she is forever to be thanked for all the stuff we learned about Amanda, Sarek and of course their son. She could produce dynamic exciting plots but deftly wove in the personal and emotional stuff too.
Bad year for iconic Star Trek women writers.We lost Vonda N Macintyre earlier this year,another writer of iconic Spock stories.

>8 dustydigger:. I found the first 11 Sector General books in three volumes. They will be Christmas reading. Thanks for the recommendation.

Finished Can & Can'tankerous by Harlan Ellison. Mostly liked it.

Next up is Deeper Than the Darkness by Gregory Benford.

>15 dustydigger: I agree. I am always a little sadder when I learn of the great and the good passing out of our world.

Currently reading Mission Critical. About a third of the way in. A mixed bag so far. Have spotted a couple of egregious errors the editor should have picked up, though.

Should have been finishing off challenge reads but was having too much fun with Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One No one comes out well in this blackest of black comedies about,among other things, the American funeral business.Mind you,Waugh himself comes out the worst,shown as a cruel tongued,misogynistic and anti-American,anti Hollywood cultural snob. In particular I had to snigger many times,especially at some of the snipes at American women. Ouch. Fortunately some of the worst gibes were written in high faluting high cultural waffle about classical times. Obviously Waugh assumed that women were too stupid to know when they were being insulted,but I imagine feminists will be foaming at the mouth.Loved it in a guilty pleasures sort of way. Oddly,though written in the late 1940s,it had a strong vibe of A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall - but much more like a hammer than a scalpel that will cut through to the bone.

Great fun (especially grateful for the splendid picture of Sambo the bald parrot lying stiffly in itsgorgeous casket)now I must get back to James White Double Contact and Charlie Stross The Rhesus Chart,my last SF of the year.
Already have chosen my basic SF 50 books for next year. As usual I will post them at the end of this month.

>20 dustydigger: I await, with the sigh-tinged-with-a-moan firmly corked, your list of the 2020 50. You wallet-flattener you.
***
Where's all the Trekkies? The Hollywood Reporter did a 40th-anniversary story on the perilously-close-to-disaster making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Finished Whatdunits, started Good News from Outer Space.

Read Armageddon's Craddle: Watershed by Jonathan Brewster. Was fairly interesting. Don't think very many books are set in that moment of what might have happened between 'today' and a typical Cyberpunk environment ?

>7 daxxh: We just finished watching Season 3 of The Expanse last night. A couple of hours before sitting down to watch the show, I had just closed the covers on Abaddon's Gate. There are quite a lot of changes to characters and their interactions, (more so as the show progresses), but the basic plot remains. I am enjoying both media thoroughly.

>31 igorken: If you want a really thorough and fascinating take on the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I highly recommend the oral history, Return to Tomorrow. Detailed interviews with all the cast and crew from the time of production. It shows how much they got right, and wrong. The amount of detail they put into the verisimilitude of the sets is ridiculous!

>25 Stevil2001: SIX HUNDRED SEVENTY TWO PAGES?! PAPER PAGES?! Ow. Nope, not for me, as there's no Kindle version and my hands simply won't do that much weight anymore. It's a good idea, just not accessible to someone in my circumstances.

Just today, 79-year-old Rene Auberjonois, narrator of many an audiobook, as well as Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, died of metastatic lung cancer. Second Star Trek actor, after Robert Walker from The Original Series on the 5th.

Started The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton, looks good so far.

>27 richardderus: Why do you keep posting obits and unrelated stuff in this thread? No biggie, but I'm mldly curious.

>29 anglemark: The Auberjonois one doesn't seem related to you? He was Odo; he narrated several ST:DS9 novels; and anyway, if you're only mildly curious, why bother asking? It comes across as both offensive and controlling.

>30 richardderus: Hi Richard, I personally don't mind but this thread is about "our reads in december 2019" so I do understand people would consider it unrelated. A separate post in the group may be more suitable.

>30 richardderus: I ask because it's so very much off-topic, but as you were offended I'll just drop it. But that was the reason I asked.

>26 richardderus: Haha, yeah it's a bit long. I know a lot of small presses are reluctant to do e-versions because the economics are bad, so I'm not surprised.

I don't mind one way or the other about the "off topic" posts. I am guilty of those myself!

On topic, is George Orwell's 1984 considered sci fi? It doesn't seem to have much science in it but it doesn't strike me as fantasy either!

>34 leslie.98: I would call it a dystopian novel, which is a genre with different concerns than SF; overlapping in that there are many SF dystopias, but not all dystopias are SF. If one used the broader term "Speculative Fiction", it would fit 1984, but I don't see it as SF. The Handmaid's Tale is another example of the same type. The whole Cyberpunk subgenre of SF, on the other hand, is one big dystopia.

Finished Mission Critical. Meh. The Allen Steele story would have been all right if all the cultural references hadn't been 30 years old - and this is in a story set more than 100 years from now. A lot of the other stories felt like ancient plots wrapped up in fancy new world-building. Still, it was only 99p...

Frances Hardinge's new novel Deeplight has just come through from the library. Dead gods, undersea terror, and death-defying friendship - I can't wait!

Reading Dragon in exile, more Liaden universe goodness. And just started Rosewater insurrection as the final part of the trilogy has just been released.

I'm now reading The Last Day, a near future SF thriller in which the Earth's orbit has slowed to the point where the same side always faces the sun. I haven't quite made up my mind about it yet but the world is intriguing.

>34 leslie.98: Coming, as I do, from the generation on Airstrip One where Orwell's '1984' was still set in the future, it may be debatable as SF now, but I think most of us who were reading SF in our youth read it as though it were science fiction. What Orwell would have thought of that question is open to speculation.

Perhaps of more interest is its prototype, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920), which certainly is SF.

Just finished Iain Banks' Dead Air, which I found to be one of the funniest of Banksie's mainstream novels - partly because I had a very clear visualisation of the central charatcer, Ken Nott, the expat Scots London radio shock-Jock, as Banks himself.

>34 leslie.98: >35 rshart3: I, on the other hand, would call it one of the classics of Science Fiction along with We, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale.

In my mind, I have always thought of 1984 as sci fi. The question occurred to me as I am currently rereading it (for the first time since the 1970s) and noted the lack of science (unlike Brave New World). Except of course for the Thought Police's ability to spy on you through the television (telescreen)!

Actually, as I was typing this comment, I realized that the speak-write device was probably science fiction for the time this was written. Such audio recorders are fairly common now!

Well I am glad that I reread 1984 as it turns out that I had forgotten it almost entirely!

Now I am reading Andre Norton's Star Soldiers...

Finished Rosewater (B) this evening. Though there is much to respect about the novel I can't say that it really captured my imagination.

>45 Shrike58: I thought it was a bit all over the place. A good debut, but not a Clarke winner.

I suspect that Thompson is more interested in giving the reader a portrait of his main character and a sense of atmosphere rather than plot.

I finished Revenger. I am not one to usually read YA books, but since this one was by Alastair Reynolds, I did. It was ok and I will read the sequel since I own it.

Right now, I am reading Antediluvian by Wil Mccarthy.

I really enjoyed Andre Norton's Central Control books - Star Guard and Star Rangers (aka "The Last Planet").

Finally took the plunge into Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell after buying it second-hand for £1. I'm not really into fairy-tale/fantasy stuff but enjoyed the BBC series a couple of years ago, and so far the book it quite entertaining. (Takes deep breath), however, I'm only 60-odd pages into an 800 page novel so who knows?

I've just finished Dragon in exile and Rosewater insurrection. I enjoyed both. I liked that the Rosewater sequel was split between different narrative voices giving multiple perspectives on the world.

>50 SChant:

Strange & Norrell is really more alternate history with supernatural elements than it is a typical "fantasy" yarn.

So busy I have little time to read,so I read a few short stories from Peter Crowther's Moon Shots,but did finally complete Charlie Stross The Rhesus Chart,completing my reread in order,to refresh my memory, of the first 5 Laundry Files books,where our Bob was prominent as hero.Not so much in the later books.
Doesnt look as if my library is going to get The Labyrinth Index,which came out 2018,so its on my list as a Xmas present :0)
Not sure if I'll find time to read Daniel O'Malley's Stiletto or Ransom Riggs Map of Days,but we'll see.

Finished Good News from Outer Space, started Einstein's Bridge.

About to start The Night Lies Bleeding by M D Lachlan, a continuation of his Wolfsangel series, a dark saga about a werewolf that starts in the Viking era and travels through the ages. In this one the wolf is caught up in the Blitz and Nazi Germany's fascination with Viking myth and the occult.

Read Shadow Captain and The Neutronium Alchemist Part 1 Consolidation. After the latter, I need to read something lighter before tackling Pt. 2. I like Hamilton, but he writes some dense, complicated books. There are so many characters and it has been a while since I read The Reality Dysfunction that I had trouble remembering who was who. I need to finish this series soon so I don't forget so much between books.

I preordered Bone Silence. I want to see how this story ends. I think I will read Ready Player One next. And then on to Pt. 2.

Reading Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee....

Finished Einstein's Bridge, in the middle of Dogsbody.

Finished Ready Player One (good), Herland (ok), and Virtual Light (good). Now to finish the last book I need to read for my WWE challenges -The Neutronium Alchemist Pt. 2 Conflict.

Now the fun of picking next year's books begins!

Wound up Winter of the Gods (B-) yesterday evening and, on the whole, it didn't impress me as much as the first book in the trilogy; the climax had a comic-book quality to it, and I don't mean that in a good way. I suppose that Brodsky enjoys enough good will with me that I'll finish up the story.

I just finished Far-Seer by Robert Sawyer which I see came out in 1992. I missed a whole bunch of great science fiction in the 1990s by returning to school and then starting a new career. Fortunately it's still possible to find some of these gems and I'm glad this first book of the Quintaglio series came my way. Now I'll have to find book #2 as I have book #3 in my TBR pile.

I would like to thank dustydigger and others for bringing James White and the Sector General series to my attention! I have found the first omnibus Beginning Operations at the Open Library and am enjoying Hospital Station at the moment.

Well,here's my basic 50 reads for 2020. Looking interesting and diverse. Roll on 2020! :0)

Katherine Addison - The Goblin Emperor
Brian Aldiss - Hothouse
M T Anderson - Feed
Lauren Beukes - Zoo City
Leigh Brackett - Sword of Rhiannon
Patricia Briggs - Smoke Bitten
Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon
Octavia E Butler - Dawn
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margerita
Orson Scott Card - Xenocide
James S A Corey - Abaddon's Gate
John Crowley - Little,Big
Samuel R Delany - Dhalgren
P K Dick - Ubik
Kenneth Grahame - The Reluctant Dragon
Coli Greenland - Take Back Plenty
Peter Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction
Charles Harness - The Paradox Men
Nathaniel Hawthorne - House of Seven Gables
Zenna Henderson - Pilgrimage
L Ron Hubbard - Battlefield Earth
Faith Hunter - Bloodring
N K Jemisin - The Kingdom of Gods
CM Kornbluth - Takeoff
Stanislaus Lem - Cyberiad
Jack McDevitt - Moonfall
Naomi Mitchison - Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Devon Monk - Magic in the Blood
Richard K Morgan - Altered Carbon
Naomi Novik - Spinning Silver
Katherine Paterson - Bridge to Terebithia
Mark Phillips - Brain Twister
Christopher Priest - The Inverted World
Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
Joanna Russ - The Female Man
Joanna Russ Picnic on Paradise
Maria Doria Russell - The Sparrow
Robert J Sawyer - Starplex
Clifford D Simak - Cosmic Engineers
Joan Slonczewsky - Door Into Ocean
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
George R Stewart - Earth Abides
Charles Stross - Labyrinth Index
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time
Jack Vance - Languages of Pao
Thomas Watson - Seth'aim Prosh
H G Wells - The Invisible Man
Virginia Woolf - Orlando
Philip Wylie - When Worlds Collide
Roger Zelazny - Damnation Alley

I bit my alternate universe bullet and read S.M.Stirling's Marching through Georgia, which I'd avoided for a long time because of the assumption that it would mainly consist of racist wish fulfillment. Well, always challenge your assumptions: the wish-fulfillment is at the very least papered over. But I found the premise - that the Loyalists who fled America after the War of independence went to South Africa instead of Canada - badly thought through. And ultimately, although alternate histories rely on showing us a world that's different, it can't be so different that we have no point of reference beyond the divergence point. The writer usually has to show us places we know, or have walk-on characters we recognise and can say (for example) "Dwight D. Eisenhower is a jazz trombonist in this universe!" (Howard Waldrop's short story, Ike at the mike, for example).

Not so with the Stirling. The novel is set during an alternate World War 2, and the only recognisable person beyond world leaders who gets namechecked is General von Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad. Not a person most of us identify with. So whilst 'Marching through Georgia' was competently done, it didn't excite me as an alternate history. That it didn't excite me as a jolly good jape goes without saying.

Now on Hannu Rajaniemi's The Fractal Prince. So far, a lot like The Quantum Thief; lots of weirdness and a story struggling to emerge from it. A third of the way in, and the story is winning.

That might have been Stirling's first published novel and he shouldn't be judged on that one alone. However, it did give him a reputation that took awhile to live down! He does have a tendency to make things a little too easy for his villains.

Those curious about my working reading agenda for this coming year check out my "2020-TBR" tag.

>65 Shrike58: I have other Stirling in my TBR pile, so I won't be judging him on that alone. And as I said in my review, the characterization was fairly strong.

>63 dustydigger: That is a great list! Several of those titles are on my TBR pile; maybe you will inspire me to read them in 2020! I hope you find some gems in the pile.

I read 39 science fiction books this year, of which a third were rereads. Of the new reads, The Fated Sky and Alliance Rising are my "best of" and both occurred early in the reading year. I reread almost all of James H. Schmitz's ouvre, definitely worthwhile.

ETA Dusty, I've read 17 books on your list for sure, perhaps a couple more of the older ones.

>63 dustydigger: I have read 22 of your list for this 2020, Dusty; some of them are definitely due a re-read. Five are on my TBR pile (this is not reflective of the size of that pile!), six if you include the Peter Hamilton, on the grounds that I've not read the second and third parts of that trilogy and will certainly need to re-read 'The Reality Dysfunction' because it has to be possibly fifteen years since I last read it.

Am basically done with The Dreaming Stars (B+) and continue to enjoy this story cycle.

2020 here we come!

My new year's wish for you:

May the worst thing that happens in the new year be the best thing that happened in the old.

Happy New Year !!