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Currently Reading - 15-11-14
Nov. 15th, 2014 01:16 amOver a month since the last of these, I just haven't been reading, which is very unusual, and mostly down to the ongoing family stuff.
I was pushed back into reading this week, mostly as an escape, so here's a start at getting back into the groove
Mars Evacuees, Sophia MacDougal. 'When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham my school was closed, and I was evacuated to Mars'. This was mentioned at several of the YA panels I went to at Worldcon, and it sounded like it might appeal. It did :) One necessary point to make is that 'evacuee' has a very particular resonance in the UK that may not come through in other countries, harking back to children being evacuated to the country in the early days of WWII. The basic setup is that the alien Morrors arrived about 15 years ago, promising to fix global warming, unfortunately by the opening of the book things are not going well and none of the kids can remember not being at war. Our protagonist and narrator is 12yo Alice Dare (there's a running joke about people thinking her name is Alistair), Alice is the daughter of a prominent fighter pilot (her dad's in the navy too), and as such is one of 300 select kids evacuated to semi-terraformed Mars, the downside of which is they'll also be training to be the next generation of fighter pilots. Also along for the ride are Josephine Jerome, also British, also 12, and something of a science nerd, Carl and Noel Dalisay, Filipino-Australian brothers, with 12yo Carl being the resident wild-child and Noel his put-upon 8yo brother, plus a bunch of stereotypical nasty rich kids.
The trip out and the first few days at school are handled fairly quickly, then one day the kids wake up to find the very limited number of adults on the base have disappeared overnight and there's a fairly rapid descent into a Lord of the Flies scenario, with Alice and Josephine at the bottom of the hierarchy. With things going from bad to worse they and the Dalisays, and the Goldfish, their robot teacher, decide they have to reach the fighter base on Mons Olympus, which means crossing a fair chunk of Mars (Labyrinthus Noctis and Syria Planum), at which point things go from worse to even worse.
I think the only proper term for this is an Edisonade, no one is quite the inventor that sub-genre technically requires, but Josephine sort of fits the role, while Alice is the one holding everyone together. I really liked that Alice isn't actually best at anything - she's a good pilot, but Carl's better, Josephine's clearly the better scientist, etc, but she's the one who makes them stick together and be more than the sum of the parts (she does have one special ability, but it's got fairly restricted applicability). Inevitably they end up discovering more about the Morrors, which leads to probably my favourite line of the book 'How can you have five sexes? I mean, what would they all do?' (I'm picturing Enid Blyton spinning in her grave over that line, The Famous Five was never like this)
One of the things I really liked about this was that, though the primary character is white, just about all the other positive characters aren't, and yet race is pretty much never mentioned. The bullying nasty rich kids are a little stereotypical, but really only play a part in the earliest part of the book. The pacing is where you really realise it's a YA, the kids are faced with one challenge after another, until eventually it's Alice and Josephine doing an Aliens-esque last stand, complete with flamethrower. And everything ends happily.
I slipped into an unintended re-read of Tony Williams' The Foresight War, which is WWII alternative history. Williams edits one of the Janes guides in his day job, so there's a very technical focus at some cost to characterisation (though actually not as bad as I recalled, it reads a little like Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day or A Bridge too Far if Ryan hadn't bothered naming any of the minor players whose war we cross into for a paragraph or two). The basic plot is military history professor wakes up with an appalling hangover in an unknown room, looks out of the window and finds himself staring at the Crystal Palace on 3rd September 1934, which means he has five years to get Britain ready for the war. Not at all bad if you're into that kind of thing, and some really innovative ideas for how it would play out, but a very specialised sub-genre.
Another unintended reread was Manxome Foe, by John Ringo and Travis Taylor, which is the third in its series after Into the Looking Glass (Ringo only - though there's a character who basically is Taylor) and Voyage of the Space Bubble (Ringo and Taylor). I accidentally opened this on my kindle and couldn't remember if I'd read it or not (I had, but it's rare I forget a book to this extent), I also didn't check the authors, which might have warned me, and so I settled down to read. It's actually not bad as an extrapolation of 'how would we set up a space navy with mostly contemporary tech', but there are a bunch of issues that challenge or outright spoil the book to greater or lesser degrees: there's the navigator/major protagonist, who is pretty clearly a Marty Stu of Taylor, one of the Marines/secondary protagonist has the common problem in Ringo books of falling for a less than legal age young woman (not as bad as in some), the portrayal of a Filipino Marine armourer (who has cropped up in other Ringo books) is distinctly problematical (and his sub-plot is never resolved), while the only other female character is presented as just weird (I can accept most of her characterisation, but balk at the steel-toed heels on a submarine/spaceship). And they fly off to the rescue and save the sole survivor (who is never mentioned again) then they go fight the bad guys and heroically sacrifice themselves without anyone but redshirts actually dying. And then they have to tell the President that the Earth needs to prepare because the aliens will be here in 15 years, and sour the entire book for me with a piece of outright hatred against France, that's a) irrelevant, and b) historically incorrect, which may be why I couldn't remember it - I'd bleached it from my brain. So basically it's Oh, no, John Ringo! all over again.
I also read a freebie short story I picked up on Amazon, Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials by Annie Bellet, which is okay, but basically reads exactly like an episode of Dark Angel, the only difference between the two being that the Max character is blind, but with sufficient high-tech prostheses ('whiskers') that she really functionally isn't.
And for something different, Mercy Thompson: Homecoming, which is the first edition of a comic telling how the eponymous heroine of Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson series first arrives in the Tri-Cities and meets various of the other characters from the novels. The illustration is rather gorgeous at times, particularly the double-page spread of a werewolf pack in various stages of leaping a fence (shame double-page doesn't work on a kindle), and there's an adorable flashback to Mercy as a coyote-pup with a big swatch of the Marrok's (werewolf king) shirt in her teeth. The story-telling is okay, a little predictable if you know the back-story from the books, but I'm not a major comics reader, so I don't know if I'll follow up on the rest of the series (this one was on offer for a pound, or was it a dollar, the others aren't).
I was pushed back into reading this week, mostly as an escape, so here's a start at getting back into the groove
Mars Evacuees, Sophia MacDougal. 'When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham my school was closed, and I was evacuated to Mars'. This was mentioned at several of the YA panels I went to at Worldcon, and it sounded like it might appeal. It did :) One necessary point to make is that 'evacuee' has a very particular resonance in the UK that may not come through in other countries, harking back to children being evacuated to the country in the early days of WWII. The basic setup is that the alien Morrors arrived about 15 years ago, promising to fix global warming, unfortunately by the opening of the book things are not going well and none of the kids can remember not being at war. Our protagonist and narrator is 12yo Alice Dare (there's a running joke about people thinking her name is Alistair), Alice is the daughter of a prominent fighter pilot (her dad's in the navy too), and as such is one of 300 select kids evacuated to semi-terraformed Mars, the downside of which is they'll also be training to be the next generation of fighter pilots. Also along for the ride are Josephine Jerome, also British, also 12, and something of a science nerd, Carl and Noel Dalisay, Filipino-Australian brothers, with 12yo Carl being the resident wild-child and Noel his put-upon 8yo brother, plus a bunch of stereotypical nasty rich kids.
The trip out and the first few days at school are handled fairly quickly, then one day the kids wake up to find the very limited number of adults on the base have disappeared overnight and there's a fairly rapid descent into a Lord of the Flies scenario, with Alice and Josephine at the bottom of the hierarchy. With things going from bad to worse they and the Dalisays, and the Goldfish, their robot teacher, decide they have to reach the fighter base on Mons Olympus, which means crossing a fair chunk of Mars (Labyrinthus Noctis and Syria Planum), at which point things go from worse to even worse.
I think the only proper term for this is an Edisonade, no one is quite the inventor that sub-genre technically requires, but Josephine sort of fits the role, while Alice is the one holding everyone together. I really liked that Alice isn't actually best at anything - she's a good pilot, but Carl's better, Josephine's clearly the better scientist, etc, but she's the one who makes them stick together and be more than the sum of the parts (she does have one special ability, but it's got fairly restricted applicability). Inevitably they end up discovering more about the Morrors, which leads to probably my favourite line of the book 'How can you have five sexes? I mean, what would they all do?' (I'm picturing Enid Blyton spinning in her grave over that line, The Famous Five was never like this)
One of the things I really liked about this was that, though the primary character is white, just about all the other positive characters aren't, and yet race is pretty much never mentioned. The bullying nasty rich kids are a little stereotypical, but really only play a part in the earliest part of the book. The pacing is where you really realise it's a YA, the kids are faced with one challenge after another, until eventually it's Alice and Josephine doing an Aliens-esque last stand, complete with flamethrower. And everything ends happily.
I slipped into an unintended re-read of Tony Williams' The Foresight War, which is WWII alternative history. Williams edits one of the Janes guides in his day job, so there's a very technical focus at some cost to characterisation (though actually not as bad as I recalled, it reads a little like Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day or A Bridge too Far if Ryan hadn't bothered naming any of the minor players whose war we cross into for a paragraph or two). The basic plot is military history professor wakes up with an appalling hangover in an unknown room, looks out of the window and finds himself staring at the Crystal Palace on 3rd September 1934, which means he has five years to get Britain ready for the war. Not at all bad if you're into that kind of thing, and some really innovative ideas for how it would play out, but a very specialised sub-genre.
Another unintended reread was Manxome Foe, by John Ringo and Travis Taylor, which is the third in its series after Into the Looking Glass (Ringo only - though there's a character who basically is Taylor) and Voyage of the Space Bubble (Ringo and Taylor). I accidentally opened this on my kindle and couldn't remember if I'd read it or not (I had, but it's rare I forget a book to this extent), I also didn't check the authors, which might have warned me, and so I settled down to read. It's actually not bad as an extrapolation of 'how would we set up a space navy with mostly contemporary tech', but there are a bunch of issues that challenge or outright spoil the book to greater or lesser degrees: there's the navigator/major protagonist, who is pretty clearly a Marty Stu of Taylor, one of the Marines/secondary protagonist has the common problem in Ringo books of falling for a less than legal age young woman (not as bad as in some), the portrayal of a Filipino Marine armourer (who has cropped up in other Ringo books) is distinctly problematical (and his sub-plot is never resolved), while the only other female character is presented as just weird (I can accept most of her characterisation, but balk at the steel-toed heels on a submarine/spaceship). And they fly off to the rescue and save the sole survivor (who is never mentioned again) then they go fight the bad guys and heroically sacrifice themselves without anyone but redshirts actually dying. And then they have to tell the President that the Earth needs to prepare because the aliens will be here in 15 years, and sour the entire book for me with a piece of outright hatred against France, that's a) irrelevant, and b) historically incorrect, which may be why I couldn't remember it - I'd bleached it from my brain. So basically it's Oh, no, John Ringo! all over again.
I also read a freebie short story I picked up on Amazon, Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials by Annie Bellet, which is okay, but basically reads exactly like an episode of Dark Angel, the only difference between the two being that the Max character is blind, but with sufficient high-tech prostheses ('whiskers') that she really functionally isn't.
And for something different, Mercy Thompson: Homecoming, which is the first edition of a comic telling how the eponymous heroine of Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson series first arrives in the Tri-Cities and meets various of the other characters from the novels. The illustration is rather gorgeous at times, particularly the double-page spread of a werewolf pack in various stages of leaping a fence (shame double-page doesn't work on a kindle), and there's an adorable flashback to Mercy as a coyote-pup with a big swatch of the Marrok's (werewolf king) shirt in her teeth. The story-telling is okay, a little predictable if you know the back-story from the books, but I'm not a major comics reader, so I don't know if I'll follow up on the rest of the series (this one was on offer for a pound, or was it a dollar, the others aren't).
