Top Ten Tuesday — Adjective In the Title

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

http://www.thatartsyreadergirl.com/top-ten-tuesday/

This week‘s topic / March 22: Books With an Adjective In the Title

Tricky topic. Lets see what I can did up on my shelf. For variety‘s sake I‘ll start with the books I added to my shelves last and work backwards…

Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings — my latest NetGalley addition: Two Ships. One Chance To Save The Future. Fleeing the final days of the generations-long war with the alien Felen, smuggler Jereth Keeven’s freighter the Jonah breaks down in a strange rift in deep space

The Art of Cursive Penmanship: A Personal Handwriting Program for Adults by Michael R. Sull — A practice guide to improve one‘s handwriting. We start with a discourse on the history and technicalities of handwriting. There is instructions on the correct sitting posture, how to place the paper, how to use your writing implement, on fountain pens and so on. Chapter 5 is the beginning of the practical part. That‘s roughly where I am right now. Haven‘t started with the exercises yet…

Ancestral Night (White Space, #1) by Elizabeth Bear — not quite sure why I added this one to my stack: A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Dying Earths: Sixteen Stories from the Ends of Times by Sue Burke and others — sounds depressing, but I want to read Sue Burke‘s story: The writers and contributors to the little corner of the web called SFFWorld.com have brought together a collection of stories about a dying Earth. 

Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes — this was a buddy read that I skipped. Everybody really liked it, so I got it after all: Titanic meets The Shining in S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, a SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended.

An Easy Job by Carrie Vaughn — short story, read it already… Carrie Vaughn is worth mentioning again.

The Black Coast (The God-King Chronicles, #1) by Mike Brooks — another buddy read that I skipped and my reading buddies all loved it: When the citizens of Black Keep see ships on the horizon, terror takes them because they know who is coming: for generations, the keep has been raided by the fearsome clanspeople of Tjakorsha. Saddling their war dragons, Black Keep’s warriors rush to defend their home only to discover that the clanspeople have not come to pillage at all. Driven from their own land by a daemonic despot who prophesises the end of the world, the raiders come in search of a new home . . .

Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim — I like the original fairytale and the cover is pretty, so I couldn‘t resist: Shiori, the only princess of Kiata, has a secret. Forbidden magic runs through her veins. Normally she conceals it well, but on the morning of her betrothal ceremony, Shiori loses control.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds — two novelettes set in Revelation Space. And the blurb of one of them is something aquatic. I had to get it: In the seas of Turquoise live the Pattern Jugglers, the amorphous, aquatic organisms capable of preserving the memories of any human swimmer who joins their collective consciousness. Naqi Okpik devoted her life to studying these creatures—and paid a high price for swimming among them. 

Digital Divide (Rachel Peng, #1) by K.B. Spangler — not quite sure why I picked this one. Genre bender with cyborgs: Rachel Peng misses the Army. Her old life in Criminal Investigation Command hadn’t been easy, but she had enjoyed it. Now, as the first cyborg liaison to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police, Rachel is usually either bored senseless or is fighting off harassment from her coworkers.

Yes, not 100% certain that those are all adjectives… *shrugs*

What interesting reads have you added to your shelves recently?

Ocean‘s 11 in Space

The Quantum Magician (The Quantum Evolution Book 1)
by Derek Künsken

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Ocean‘s 11 in space, with genetically modified humans and transhumans. The first dozen chapters are all about getting the crew together, with some backstory explaining the world. Your classic heist caper 101, but in a post-human world. 

Very short chapters with changing POVs, cycling through the various members of the crew.

Pretty interesting interview with the author from 2019 in Locus magazine.

“Two things a con man had to keep in mind were pay-off and risk. No con was risk-free. And risk was unmeasurable without reference to payoff.“

After the long set-up things heated up a little. For me the pacing was much too slow for a heist caper. There were some parts I enjoyed, but the author lost me somewhere after the midway point with all the techo-, science- and wormhole babble. It didn‘t bring the plot forward and bored me. A hundred pages less would probably have given me a tightly scripted plot that I would have enjoyed.

The puppet and numen dynamic was pretty disturbing. I found it so disgusting that it nearly made me toss the book. It was yucky, unsettling and just too much.

I liked Stills and Marie. As a book with an ensemble cast this was just ok. Shards of Earth did a much better job with it earlier this year. But a certain je-ne-sais-quoi was missing here. Yes, the characters kept talking French, no idea why.

I started with the audio. The narrator was less than ideal. He kept changing his speed, going from fairly normal to sloooow as molasses and back to slightly frantic, matching the situation. Shouldn’t that be a big no-no in audiobook narration? It’s a bitch, when listening at slightly exaggerated speed. I switched to the ebook in the second half of the book and preferred it. At least until I checked out of the narrative. I went back to audio, upped the speed and rushed through it, not wanting to DNF it. I am sure I missed stuff. Besides my pacing issues and the info dumps I blame the audiobook narrator for my lack of enjoyment. The book probably deserves at least 3 stars—I eye-read the last few chapters, where all the loose ends were tied up and I actually liked them.

Note to self: don‘t get any more audios narrated by T. Ryder Smith.

Note to others: plenty of gratuitous swearing. And that disgusting master/slave dynamic. Nope.

It‘s the bioapocalypse…

Behemoth (Rifters, #3)
by Peter Watts

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Prelude: ´lawbreaker

We meet Achilles Desjardins again. And…

“The past receded; the unforgiven present advanced. The world fell apart in time-lapse increments: an apocalyptic microbe rose from the deep sea, hitching a ride in the brackish flesh of some deep-sea diver from N’AmPac. Floundering in its wake, the Powers That Weren’t dubbed it ßehemoth, burned people and property in their frantic, futile attempts to stave off the coming change of regime. North America fell.“

ß-Max

We are at the bottom of the Atlantic. Hiding away, in conjunction with our former enemy.

Very readable, mostly. There are sequences where I don‘t understand a thing… Lenie is a bystander a lot of the time, shunned not only by the other side, but also by her own people. We as readers often do not take part in the action, but look at what‘s happening from the outside, from her POV. I am not a fan of that way of story telling. But it‘s what it is, when reading from limited POVs, I guess.

I am not certain that I really understood what went on in this book. Yes, hiding away, conflict with the opposing inmates, revolution, mutation, a new infestation… Got that. Much head scratching. I also missed a stronger sense of being underwater. It almost did not feel as if they were spending time in the deep sea.

Seppuku

Emerging from the sea… This one more linear and with more traditional story telling at first. I really liked the new character, Taka.

Trigger warning: <spoiler>Torture, mutilation, rape</spoiler>

I could have done without that part. It added nothing to the plot and made me uncomfortable. Was it just for the shock effect? Because as a plot point it was pretty pointless or at the most served as a tool for a info dump. It actually turned me off so much, that I lost my motivation to keep going. 

Consequently I really struggled with the last 100 pages. I literally lost the plot. I couldn‘t grasp what was going on or why Ken and Lenie did what they were doing.

The big reveal at the end left me rather cold, I was glad to be finished and disappointed with the resolution of this trilogy. Did the final conflict really have to happen in the off? Clarke as a mere bystander did not make me happy either. She devolved into the chick on the side. She really did not gell for me in Seppuku. I understand that characters can change and develop, but I could not relate to Lenie’s progression. 

I really liked the first book, it had a good plot and setting and a strong, convincing main character in Lenie Clarke. Maelstrom and Behemoth (ß-Max & Seppuku) were confusing over long stretches and hard to understand. I admit to skimming quite a bit of the techno babble. I think stopping after the first book would have been best.

How to rate this? Considering that I struggled to finish, had problems to follow the plot, disliked the character inconsistency of Lenie Clake and the gratuitous violence/torture, I can‘t really give this more than two stars.

---

In my headspace Noomi Rapace took over the role of Lenie Clarke.

A free version of this book(s) can be found here.

Playlist:

• Georg Friedrich Händel, Water Music

• Tchaikovsky, Iolanta

• Sergei Prokofiev

• Igor Strawinsky

Mathematical SF?

Glory by Greg Egan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram.
A very abstract beginning. I skimmed past most of that science-tech babble, I confess. I liked the story that followed the info dump.

However…
“There’s more to life than mathematics,” Joan said. “But not much more.”
Math was always one of my best subjects at school, but still… too much! Math Fiction? Mathematical SF?

It was ok, nice idea of a vaguely Star Trekky set-up without the Prime Directive and more cloning and uploading of consciousness. Plus that hard SF thing with the needle that I skimmed… Did I miss the big reveal, aka Brig Crunch? It probably just flew right over my head.

Glory by Greg Egan can be read for free here: https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog…

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Haunted space station?

Substrate Phantoms by Jessica Reisman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am not sure what to make of this book. I liked it, unexpectedly, as it was off to a slow start. It was poetic in parts. Interesting ideas. A fascinating first contact story. It made me feel sad for long stretches. Confused in the beginning. Slow build-up, slow paced, with a twist at the ending that I saw coming, but that worked well.

The beginning was a little difficult to get into. I had to come to grips with the unusual vocabulary and odd grammar. It was a good way to impress the otherness of the setting to me. Hard SciFi, I guess. I liked Termagenti station, but even more so the setting down on Ash, with it’s landscapes, memorable characters and the amazement of the station-born characters at encountering nature.

I liked the idea of the other characters taking up residence inside of Jhinsei. I wish the author had played around with that more. Maybe the book had felt more solid for me, if the author had explored that more deeply. But even so, lots to think about. I am sure this book is going to stay with me for some time.

World building with a lot of potential. I think I would like to pick up a sequel, to find out where the story takes the central characters.

I received this free e-copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

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