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defrogIt was a slow month for reading. You can blame Thomas Pynchon for that. Details below.
The Human Division by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
[POTENTIAL SERIES SPOILERS HERE] This is the fifth book in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. For those who don’t know, it started off as a digital publishing experiment between Scalzi and Tor to essentially create the print equivalent of a TV series – 13 standalone stories that also form a wider narrative arc, bookended by a two-hour “pilot” and a “series finale”. The premise: unable to keep using Earth as a farm for colonists and soldiers, the Colonial Union (CU) can no longer use brute military force to defend its colonies or fight the Conclave, an alien federation opposed to new colonies. That means diplomacy. The story follows a “B-Team” of diplomats who get the low-level diplomatic missions but always somehow manage to find trouble – not least since someone keeps sabotaging their missions. Like any episodic series, some episodes are stronger than others, but the weaker ones are few and far between. As both an experiment and a story idea, it works really well, with the side benefit of refreshing the OMW series. Scalzi also succeeds in populating it with a cast of likeable characters, even if they’re all a little too good at snappy American banter. There’s a second “season” already being released, with the book version due later this year. I’m looking forward to it.
Flashfire by Richard Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the 19th book in the Parker series, and – if you didn’t know – the one that was made into the recent Jason Statham film. Parker pulls a job with a team who only afterwards inform him that the take is intended to finance an even bigger job – a jewelry heist in Palm Springs. When Parker refuses that job, they take his share anyway and promise to repay him later. Bad move. This is probably the most elaborate Parker caper of the series so far, as Parker’s plan to get his money back involves building up a cover identity as a Texas oil millionaire and displaying a level of role-playing and social engineering that has only really been hinted at in previous books. He also gets unexpected help from a real-estate agent who figures out his game and wants a share of the take. It’s a bit jarring to see Parker in role-playing mode, but Stark makes it convincing. The only weak part is Stark’s vignettes of Palm Springs’ hoi polloi, which is a little too stereotypical. But he weaves a great tale, giving Parker plenty to do and making him work for it. The film version isn’t bad, but the book is better.
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve only tried Pynchon once before (The Crying Of Lot 49), and it didn’t make a big impression on me. But people have been namedropping him recently because of the film version of Inherent Vice, so I thought I’d try him again. I went with this, which is billed as a sort of political novel exploring the culture clash between 1960s hippies and the Reagan administration – with added ninjas, TV addicts, Star Trek jokes and crazed DEA agents. Which sounds great on the back of a book jacket, but in practice it’s a jumbled, meandering mess. Pynchon constantly wanders back and forth in time with no warning and goes off on the kinds of fantastic tangents where by the time he’s back on track you’ve completely forgotten what he was originally trying to tell you. It’s sort of like having someone on LSD write down the plot of a film he saw ten years ago in the order he remembers it and then not bothering to edit it later. It’s actually okay in places, and there was just enough here to convince me to finish it (or maybe at some point I decided to finish it out of spite). But I don’t think I’ll be trying Pynchon again.
A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m off and on with Pratchett – I generally like him, but his books are ubiquitous enough that I’m not in a big hurry to read all of them. After his death earlier this year, I felt compelled to revisit his work, starting with this collection of short fiction and essays, dating back as far as his first published story when he was 13 years old. On the one hand, his early writing inevitably suffers in comparison to his more polished work later in his career. On the other hand, his talent was obvious even when he first started, and it’s interesting (for fans, anyway) to see his writing style evolve. It’s also interesting to see him do non-Discworld stories (there are some Discworld stories here, but they only take up the last third of the book). Overall it’s a decent and surprisingly diverse collection.
View all my reviews
This is yr life,
This is dF
The Human Division by John ScalziMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
[POTENTIAL SERIES SPOILERS HERE] This is the fifth book in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. For those who don’t know, it started off as a digital publishing experiment between Scalzi and Tor to essentially create the print equivalent of a TV series – 13 standalone stories that also form a wider narrative arc, bookended by a two-hour “pilot” and a “series finale”. The premise: unable to keep using Earth as a farm for colonists and soldiers, the Colonial Union (CU) can no longer use brute military force to defend its colonies or fight the Conclave, an alien federation opposed to new colonies. That means diplomacy. The story follows a “B-Team” of diplomats who get the low-level diplomatic missions but always somehow manage to find trouble – not least since someone keeps sabotaging their missions. Like any episodic series, some episodes are stronger than others, but the weaker ones are few and far between. As both an experiment and a story idea, it works really well, with the side benefit of refreshing the OMW series. Scalzi also succeeds in populating it with a cast of likeable characters, even if they’re all a little too good at snappy American banter. There’s a second “season” already being released, with the book version due later this year. I’m looking forward to it.
Flashfire by Richard StarkMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the 19th book in the Parker series, and – if you didn’t know – the one that was made into the recent Jason Statham film. Parker pulls a job with a team who only afterwards inform him that the take is intended to finance an even bigger job – a jewelry heist in Palm Springs. When Parker refuses that job, they take his share anyway and promise to repay him later. Bad move. This is probably the most elaborate Parker caper of the series so far, as Parker’s plan to get his money back involves building up a cover identity as a Texas oil millionaire and displaying a level of role-playing and social engineering that has only really been hinted at in previous books. He also gets unexpected help from a real-estate agent who figures out his game and wants a share of the take. It’s a bit jarring to see Parker in role-playing mode, but Stark makes it convincing. The only weak part is Stark’s vignettes of Palm Springs’ hoi polloi, which is a little too stereotypical. But he weaves a great tale, giving Parker plenty to do and making him work for it. The film version isn’t bad, but the book is better.
Vineland by Thomas PynchonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve only tried Pynchon once before (The Crying Of Lot 49), and it didn’t make a big impression on me. But people have been namedropping him recently because of the film version of Inherent Vice, so I thought I’d try him again. I went with this, which is billed as a sort of political novel exploring the culture clash between 1960s hippies and the Reagan administration – with added ninjas, TV addicts, Star Trek jokes and crazed DEA agents. Which sounds great on the back of a book jacket, but in practice it’s a jumbled, meandering mess. Pynchon constantly wanders back and forth in time with no warning and goes off on the kinds of fantastic tangents where by the time he’s back on track you’ve completely forgotten what he was originally trying to tell you. It’s sort of like having someone on LSD write down the plot of a film he saw ten years ago in the order he remembers it and then not bothering to edit it later. It’s actually okay in places, and there was just enough here to convince me to finish it (or maybe at some point I decided to finish it out of spite). But I don’t think I’ll be trying Pynchon again.
A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction by Terry PratchettMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m off and on with Pratchett – I generally like him, but his books are ubiquitous enough that I’m not in a big hurry to read all of them. After his death earlier this year, I felt compelled to revisit his work, starting with this collection of short fiction and essays, dating back as far as his first published story when he was 13 years old. On the one hand, his early writing inevitably suffers in comparison to his more polished work later in his career. On the other hand, his talent was obvious even when he first started, and it’s interesting (for fans, anyway) to see his writing style evolve. It’s also interesting to see him do non-Discworld stories (there are some Discworld stories here, but they only take up the last third of the book). Overall it’s a decent and surprisingly diverse collection.
View all my reviews
This is yr life,
This is dF
