This was a very quick read and there's some interesting stuff going on here, but it felt over all too soon. The interactions between Dave and Carl were far too limited and I would have liked to see more of them.
It contains racism, which I guess is to be expected of a book from that time and a fair bit of sexism. Though the racism and sexism are mostly Carl's, while Dave is a lot less so and supports his wife's feminism in the whole and likes how multicultural Brunswick is, so I guess from that perspective it's more modern than it first appears.
Review of "Terry Pratchett's The light fantastic" on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
I don't know how many times I've read this in the past, it must be many.
According to goodreads I'd rated this a two which I really feel is a little harsh. Maybe it's my nostalgia talking but this is a decent Discworld book. Sure, it may not hit the high water mark of later books, but I liked it enough and there are still jokes in there that made me chortle after the multiple times reading it over the years.
There are parts of this I delighted in, but I think I have too many issues with this one.
The story starts us with the pilot Parvis who is making a delivery run to Titan and discovers that a few people have been lost on the moon, including his mentor Pirx (of the Pirx the Pilot stories). He takes a mech out to find them but ultimately must freeze himself in a cryo pod.
Jump to the future where Eurydice is heading to make first contact with a planet. On board they've taken aboard the missing people including two pilots who have been in cryo, both of whom have names starting with P, but they don't have any more information than that. They randomly choose one to bring out of cryo, using organs from the others, but also know that the one that the bring back will have amnesia.
"Oh. …
There are parts of this I delighted in, but I think I have too many issues with this one.
The story starts us with the pilot Parvis who is making a delivery run to Titan and discovers that a few people have been lost on the moon, including his mentor Pirx (of the Pirx the Pilot stories). He takes a mech out to find them but ultimately must freeze himself in a cryo pod.
Jump to the future where Eurydice is heading to make first contact with a planet. On board they've taken aboard the missing people including two pilots who have been in cryo, both of whom have names starting with P, but they don't have any more information than that. They randomly choose one to bring out of cryo, using organs from the others, but also know that the one that the bring back will have amnesia.
"Oh. So this will be important then!" I think "whether it's Pirx or Parvis will be an integral part of this story". Dear reader, let me dispel you of this notion. It's not. He never learns or if he does, he doesn't reveal it. And given that Lem mentions the fact that they are pretty similar personalities I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting. Just something I guess.
Anyway the resurected pilot picks up a book which the doctor gave him. And reads it. It's not important to the plot, but there you go. Previously one of the scientest was telling a story about El Derado. It's also tangental to the plot, but goes for pages.
And so here's my actual issue with this book. Why has it been stuffed with stories that have no impact on the rest of the story? I may have read that these were drafts of other stories Lem had lying around and had used as the basis, but in my mind he's being paid by word count here. You could argue that he's used the stories about discovery to tell us something about how man has always sought out new worlds and blundered, but I'm not entirely convinced that he achieves this even if it was his intention.
It's slog for slogs sake.
Anyway, the Eurydice is heading for a planet designated Quinta and doing so in a way that means that the will return soonish after they left Earth. Lem tackled the issue of contact with other worlds and the pointlessness of it in [b:Return From the Stars|251648|Return From the Stars|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875060l/251648.SX50.jpg|457761] and here he goes to great lengths to prove that travel to other stars in this short time period is possible. Great lengths.
Here, let's stop and grumble about how often the action in this book stops in order to drop into research paper territory. A great deal of history is laid out as to how the ships drive was created and how it's scientifically possible and I really didn't care.
Later, he goes into dissecting the arguments of the characters. Not by y'know having the characters have a discussion, no, it's in third person. Urhgh. It ends up being so dry.
So the pilot has two goals. One to remember who he is (or decide he doesn't care) and two to learn enough to be selected as the second pilot on the team that will be travelling on the smaller ship to Quinta, the Hermes, while the Eurydice stays away. Great so I'm now having to learn what he learns.
So he gets selected to go on the Hermes. Yah! We're about halfway through the book and they're still not at the planet. But spying on the planet they realise that it's full of signals and interference with each other, the planet has a ring of ice in it's atmosphere that appears to have been put up there by the locals from the sea and in orbit around the planet are many probes or satellite like things. They aim to catch one and it turns out to be biomechanical but diseased and the eventual decided upon theory is that there's a war on and that the infection was deliberate from the other side of Quinta.
The ship has an onboard computer, DEUS. And there's sort of a weird hierarchy where the captain, but the onboard computer tracks the mental health of the crew and if there's an issue with any of the crew, lets the captain and doctor know and they then need to handle it.
So what if the virus that diseased the probe that they caught infected DEUS. Eh, it doesn't happen. But DEUS often behaves weirdly.
The crew try to contact the planet with no success. Eventually they decide that the planet is ignoring them instead of not being able to understand and then start threatening them and this is where the book just entirely lost me. Because they carry out those threats, by destroying the moon.
What gets me is that it presumes that the threats could be understood and also the time limit could be understood. Which really?
They get contact, but things escalate, they send a fake Hermes down, it gets destroyed, they destroy the ice ring, get agreeement from one of the sides of the conflict to send the pilot down to check on the destroyed fake Hermes and let the Quntians know that if they don't recieve a message from the pilot every x minutes that they'll destroy the planet.
So in the last twenty pages the pilot finally gets to the planet. And he misses the second call in and the planet is destroyed by the Hermes, THE END.
What?
I just don't by the idea in the book that things would escalate like this. Imagine going to a strangers house in a less developed country, because you want to be friends with them. You knock on their door. They don't answer. So you blow up their garage. They say "Please go away" so you smash in their windows. It doesn't make sense.
And I've come to this after reading portions of [b:Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|889430|Microworlds Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348193964l/889430.SY75.jpg|874679] where Lem pulls apart stories about first contact from [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644l/8909.SY75.jpg|3194841] to [b:Roadside Picnic|331256|Roadside Picnic|Arkady Strugatsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173812259l/331256.SY75.jpg|1243896], but I can't see how Fiasco holds with those discussions (apart from the parts where he derides science fantasy for not giving full explanations of the tech).
Now I admit that I am often more to the whimsical stories of Ijon Tichy, but I really do enjoy the more serious tales of Pirx, but this one feels off. It feels hopeless and morose. As if the future is pointless, inevitable and not worth attempting.
Where I really land on this one though is that it could have been three different and good stories. but as is, it drags strangely and doesn't mesh well together at all and I don't like it.
I'm yet to read the last Lem novel which was published after this one [b:Peace on Earth|88313|Peace on Earth|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328874754l/88313.SY75.jpg|1271753] and as it's a Tichy novel I was keen to, but now I'm worried that I won't like it as I did this one.
Review of 'What Abigail Did That Summer' on 'GoodReads'
No rating
I don't quite know what I think of this one. Abagail is nice enough and the foxes are charming.
I like the concept of the situation/big bad that Abagail is facing in theory maybe more than I like it in practice. I like the idea of it, but I don't think it plays out the right way. I'm trying to keep this spoiler free and I suspect that I shouldn't.
My major bugbear was two things, first I was unclear who Abagail is writing this for. Postmartin is making notes for someone (it may have been pointed out early on who for, but I may have forgotten) on Abagail's prose and this mostly feels like it's an excuse to explain Britishisms to Americans, because presumably American readers can't be bothered to google things when they hit a word that they don't know. But also to explain some youf speak which …
I don't quite know what I think of this one. Abagail is nice enough and the foxes are charming.
I like the concept of the situation/big bad that Abagail is facing in theory maybe more than I like it in practice. I like the idea of it, but I don't think it plays out the right way. I'm trying to keep this spoiler free and I suspect that I shouldn't.
My major bugbear was two things, first I was unclear who Abagail is writing this for. Postmartin is making notes for someone (it may have been pointed out early on who for, but I may have forgotten) on Abagail's prose and this mostly feels like it's an excuse to explain Britishisms to Americans, because presumably American readers can't be bothered to google things when they hit a word that they don't know. But also to explain some youf speak which is fairly easy to decipher from context.
But it's a light quick read and expands the Rivers world somewhat, so... yeah.
In Pilot Pirx, Lem has created an irresistibly likable character: an astronaut who gives the …
Review of 'Tales of Pirx the pilot' on 'GoodReads'
4 stars
I'm always in a bit of a muddle, do I enjoy Pirx stories more than Tichy stories? I'm still not sure.
This is a bit of a weird read and it's a shame that the stories are in the order they're in (though I understand that they're chronologically ordered). The last story (Terminus) feels like it's a fairly large swing away from the stories that I feel make up the bulk of the book (The Conditioned Reflex and On Patrol) that are about Pirx replicating someone else's actions. Terminus is just somewhat depressing.
But Lem always has an enjoyable writing style and Pirx is a bit of an odd character at times, so this is still a great read.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a 1974 science fiction novel by American writer …
Review of 'Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said' on 'GoodReads'
2 stars
I'm not quite sure where I end up with this book. It started out of the gate strong, gives you a good sense of the world that the main character (Jason) inhabits and then rips him out of his place in that world. And that's hunky dory, I'm on board with that.
It at first seems like the book is going with pointing out the failures of the police when they get too much power, but at times it seems to just want to use that as a reason to keep Jason bouncing from place to place. But then it keeps stopping so that the characters can have a long discussion about the meaning or application of love. The character knows he needs to leave because the police know his location, but he decides to have a long conversation instead... it's kind of weird.
And when the reveal of what's …
I'm not quite sure where I end up with this book. It started out of the gate strong, gives you a good sense of the world that the main character (Jason) inhabits and then rips him out of his place in that world. And that's hunky dory, I'm on board with that.
It at first seems like the book is going with pointing out the failures of the police when they get too much power, but at times it seems to just want to use that as a reason to keep Jason bouncing from place to place. But then it keeps stopping so that the characters can have a long discussion about the meaning or application of love. The character knows he needs to leave because the police know his location, but he decides to have a long conversation instead... it's kind of weird.
And when the reveal of what's actually occurred comes up, it doesn't really sit with what happened just before the transition and that's never brought up in the explanation. And the explanation seemed to have to many missing threads for my liking.
I don't really get what Dick was going for in this one and while it mostly moved quickly it's not a story that's going to stay with me for very long I'm afraid.
I read The Magicians as a teenager and the mixing of magic with a detective story was amazing to me.
Today it holds up okay. At times it feels like you're getting a lecture on history and it doesn't treat it's female characters well. But still entertaining in the main.
"Listening to someone else's mix tapes is a huge breach of trust. But KitKat was …
Review of 'The big rewind' on 'GoodReads'
4 stars
"Raymond Chandler meets Nick Hornby" was the pull quote that got me to read this. And it's apt, though I think it's more Hornby than Chandler.
It leans very heavily on High Fidelity, Jett isn't on a quest to revisit her old romances, but it happens in any case. Much of the focus switches between the murder mystery, Jett's love and work life and the revisits.
The mystery is probably the weakest part of it. I called the killer before they were introduced by name in the story, though I was hazy on the reasons until 3/4 of the way through. And it does suffer from the painful thing of character who wants the killer found doesn't tell the detective really important information that they're like "oh yeah, that would have been good to know".
There are some dumb bits, but I got dragged along for the ride and felt …
"Raymond Chandler meets Nick Hornby" was the pull quote that got me to read this. And it's apt, though I think it's more Hornby than Chandler.
It leans very heavily on High Fidelity, Jett isn't on a quest to revisit her old romances, but it happens in any case. Much of the focus switches between the murder mystery, Jett's love and work life and the revisits.
The mystery is probably the weakest part of it. I called the killer before they were introduced by name in the story, though I was hazy on the reasons until 3/4 of the way through. And it does suffer from the painful thing of character who wants the killer found doesn't tell the detective really important information that they're like "oh yeah, that would have been good to know".
There are some dumb bits, but I got dragged along for the ride and felt good at the end of it so I'd say that's a win. It did feel somewhat refreshing in a way.
"Introducing an extraordinary female lawyer-sleuth in a new historical series set in 1920s Bombay. Perveen …
Review of 'The widows of Malabar Hill' on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
Well, three and a half let's say.
I like the setting and I like the main and supporting characters. The setting not only comes with tensions between castes, between the English and Indians but also with the complications of the police and legal systems in a society with various religious practices. And the author does a wonderful job of making this very clear and easy to understand.
Where it falls down for me is in the pacing and the mystery itself. I know I complain about this a fair bit, but at some point in a book if I have to ask myself "wasn't this supposed to be a murder mystery" and there's no corpse discovered, then there's a good chance I won't finish the book. I did have to ask myself that question, but because of the setting I hung on in there.
And part of the reasons for …
Well, three and a half let's say.
I like the setting and I like the main and supporting characters. The setting not only comes with tensions between castes, between the English and Indians but also with the complications of the police and legal systems in a society with various religious practices. And the author does a wonderful job of making this very clear and easy to understand.
Where it falls down for me is in the pacing and the mystery itself. I know I complain about this a fair bit, but at some point in a book if I have to ask myself "wasn't this supposed to be a murder mystery" and there's no corpse discovered, then there's a good chance I won't finish the book. I did have to ask myself that question, but because of the setting I hung on in there.
And part of the reasons for this was the constant flashbacks to Perveen's life before working for her father. Some of it is necessary, but it feels that it would have been nicer if we learnt more about her throughout the series. On the positive side, I guess there won't be too many flashbacks in the next book (I hope?).
In any case the mystery feels like it's solved mostly by an info dump that someone gives her near the very end of the book and so pfft... Anyway, hopefully the next book is better?
Review of "Mostly Harmless (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)" on 'GoodReads'
2 stars
Some interesting ideas in here, but then it just ends and it doesn't really seem to satisfyingly wrap things up.
Kind of felt like Adams threw up his hands and went I'm done. Almost as if he got sick of questions about why that one thing didn't happen so he felt obligated to write this one.
