Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Book: Powers by Ursula LeGuin

Nebula winner in 2009. A slave is freed, then has adventures. Live in forest for a while, then with his original people in a marsh.

Book: A Dog in a Hat by Joe Parkin

A story of bike racing in Europe in the late 80s. A great, if not always convincing, series of anecdotes.

Book: Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost

Fantasy, metafiction. An interesting idea: A mostly water-covered world with stretches (spirals) of bridges on which people live. Oddly reminiscent of William Gibson's Bay Bridge colony. This is book 1 of 2. I'll read #2, but the ending of this one was slightly sour tasting.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Book: The God Engines by John Scalzi

A short (novella-length), dark take on a universe populated by living gods, who motivate space ships and are disciplined by, well, physical discipline.

The work is in very sharp contrast to Scalzi's often aw-shucks tone on Whatever, his blog, and substantially darker in tone than most of his other fiction.

Not that I insist on dark work, but if you're gonna do it, guts and blood and faith shattering is probably the way to do it.

Recommended.

Book: 2010 Nebula Awards

As with most of these collections, some very excellent stuff and some not so great. Oddly, the ones I was most eager to find more of were the young adult books. Maybe I'm regressing?

In the Jane Austen/monster mashup category was "Pride and Prometheus". Interesting mostly for focusing on Mary Bennett, who's rafrely given much narrative space.

Book: The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky

If the US starts creating clones of everyone to be used for replacement organs, what happens when a clone escapes?

Angst, apparently.

A few interesting ideas here, not hugely well explored. Not to mention pretty unappealing characters.

Book: Economics for the Rest of Us by Moshe Adler

Subtitled "Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal", this book is a pithy assault on modern (and classical, as I understand it) microeceonomics, and how the theories pushed by mainstream economists provide grist for the policies that insist a few homeless are small price to pay for an "efficient" housing market, or that people unemployed in a recession are just asking for too much.

Not gonna blow the lid off economic orthodoxy, but definitely a useful perspective on some of the economic dogma that underlies many policies.