Since the professional side of this blog has been gathering dust recently, let’s spice it up with a little bit of personal stuff. Here’s a quick recap of the books that I’ve read over the past few weeks. Grouped by the authors, with the titles in bold.
Peter Watts
His Blindsight was actually recommended to me by an old pal of mine quite a while ago, but, while it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read this one, I never got around to checking out his other works back then. Thus, Echopraxia, part 2 in the same Firefall series, named after some compulsive psychological quirk. It’s mostly hard science fiction, revolving, as well as part 1, around the issues of consciousness and freedom of will in a “philosophy meets science” way. The author, btw, is a scientist, and he bases his narratives on the published scientific literature, which he cites and discusses in the concluding chapter. A nice quirk for a sci-fi author! The other thing is, some of his books are released under Creative Commons and are freely available on his website, https://rifters.com (at the time of writing, they were here). Seems like the turn to the open access publishing mode in the scientific lit begins to tricke into the sci-fi, he he.
Starfish, Maelstrom, βehemoth are his earlier books. All are the primary works in the Rifters trilogy. These are about the deep blue sea, the devilconsequences of the ecological catastrophy caused by the mismanagement of the natural resources, and some nasty aspects of the human psyche. Totally recommended, the whole series, even in view of the absence of space-faring aliens and genetically modified vampires.
Glen Cook
His Garrett P.I. series can be described as hardboiled detective fiction meets urban fantasy. Seen the recently discontinued Carnival Row TV series? They are quite similar in spirit, sans the cyberpunk elements in the former. Sweet Silver Blues describes the detective’s epic adventure to the war-torn Cantard (a country) and back; Bitter Gold Hearts uncovers the convoluted scheme full of greed and treachery in the abusive Stormwarden’s (a wealthy wizard) family; Cold Copper Tears (perhaps, my favorite so far) is full of religious sects, cults, gangs and a powerful creature who thought himself a god; Old Tin Sorrows follows a series of mysterious killings, ending with a discovery of a tragic secret in the earlier private life of a retired army general; Dread Brass Shadows narrates the search for and destruction of a powerful book of magic (and - spoiler alert - a powerful crime overlord). All good.
What can I say - when it comes to the world of hardboiled fiction, I wouldn’t place Glen Cook above Dashiell Hammet or Jim Thompson. Nevertheless, he’s good even without the fantasy aspects taken into consideration. I’ve just said “good” twice in a row. Well, I wouldn’t’ve read five books about essentially the same things if I didn’t think so, would I?
Roger Zelazny
No, not his Amber stuff. A Night in the Lonesome October, actually, chosen as a reading material completely at random (that is, with no prior knowledge of the content). It turned out to be a tribute novel to a lot of author’s prosaic and poetic predecessors. Mary Shelley, Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, Poe (not the one of the Teletubbies, this), victorian, gothic, horror, romantic, you name it, and, hey, where do you put Mother Goose in this scheme of things? All between the same covers. Intrigued? I know I would be. Best to be read in October, though…