mostly harmless books

I’m skipping over the many books I want to write about because I have a good reason to write about an older one. Nemira, one of the biggest publishing houses in Romania and the people who fed my teenage love of SF&F (black is still the color I associate with spec fic because of their SF collection) is having a contest. Write a review of one of their books and win another book. Free books!

I was thinking of reading a new book but the only available ones were too big. I have Lisey’s Story but I already read it and I’m not so eager to re-read just now, and I could borrow one of the Dozois anthologies from my boyfriend but damn, it’s big! So I’ll resort to talking about a favorite of mine: Stephen King’s The Stand.

Let’s start with the bad. The translated title is Apocalipsa (obviously, The Apocalypse), which sounds worse than the original. However, I see the point: there’s no direct equivalent of “making a stand” in Romanian. Then: hooow did you manage to make a normal(ish) sized book into two volumes of large paperback?! My English version was a normal paperback, just thicker…

But if you ignore that… oh boy. This must be one of the first post-apocalyptic books I read, so one of the books that made me love the genre. Back then I was trying to read all the books connected to The Dark Tower prior to reading the series, and my friend/Stephen King advisor had told me that: a) the book rocks; b) the characters in Dark Tower pass through the world. What I wasn’t expecting was to be hooked so fast.
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Via Joe, great news: Karen Traviss’ City of Pearl is available online.
(The offer is for US residents only, and you have to sign up to get the book, which I didn’t bother to do… so I wonder if it’s downloadable from other countries too.)

I didn’t write about City of Pearl, because I read it a year before starting this blog, but some rambling about the series and Ally (book 5) here and here. In short: bloody good SF.

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Nancy Kress - Inertia. Beggars in Spain (the short story) was one of my first SF reads and; this year, when I read Beggars and Choosers, I wasn’t expecting much, but I loved it. Inertia… not so much. I’ve seen reviewers name this as their favorite and I can see why: original idea, moral dilemmas… But something was missing for me, I can’t put my finger on it. I didn’t care about the characters or their fate, and the dilemma wasn’t interesting enough to make up for it.

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea. “Reminiscent - without being derivative - of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley“ would have been enough to convince me to read it. (more…)

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Jack McDevitt - Never Despair. One of my favorites. In a distant future, a diminishing group of people tries to find a legendary cache of knowledge left by the “old ones” before civilization collapsed. That premise alone is enough for me to become very interested, but the way it is explored makes it even better: far-future woman talking to a hologram of Winston Churchill after she takes shelter in some ruins that accidentaly house some computer that can still work. I love it when future characters meet people we are very familiar with. Even though we never find out if they reach their goal, we are left with hope.

Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. At first, this sounded like another cyberpunk story, and I don’t like cyberpunk. But it turned out to probably be my favorite. (more…)

What do you do if you have to spend 27 hours on a train. Stare out the window; talk to people; read; listen to music. Staring gets boring after a while, I liked the sound of the train better than any music, and the woman in my compartment was nice, but only knew Russian and a couple of words in Romanian and English. So I read.

I had been looking forward to Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse for about a year, so I had really high hopes. Too high, apparently. No, it’s not a bad anthology by all means, but it didn’t blow me away either.
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