David Gillon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
davidgillon) wrote2015-04-08 05:11 pm
davidgillon) wrote2015-04-08 05:11 pm
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Currently Reading - 8-Apr-2015
Nearly two months since I did one of these? Whoops! I keep thinking 'I'll do it after I read X', and then get distracted away from reading X.
I'm still not reading as much as usual, probably because I seem to be fairly heavily engaged in avoidance behaviour, which is manifesting as spending a lot of time around either games or gaming-related stuff. I think this is because of the uncertainty around waiting for a date for my gallbladder op, the op doesn't concern me, but I really don't do well with uncertainty. The other possibility is that it's a consequence of upping my butrans dosage at Christmas during the pancreatitis hospitalisation and what's actually stopping me reading is a higher level of opiate fog than I'm used to. I'm genuinely not certain which, though of course it could be both.
Non-fiction stuff read actually amounts to a hell of a lot: probably a dozen game supplements, about 20 large game related fanzines, plus a whole bunch of military history stuff from around the web which is feeding into my obsessive-compulsive 'collecting' of obscure military vehicles from around the web (current ares of fascination, Canadian softskins plus all the myriad Bren Carrier variants). That last one is sort of being fed by my starting to play World of Tanks on the net (massively multiplayer tank battles using lots of different WWII tanks).
Finally getting to what I have been reading:
Guards, Guards!
Men at Arms!
Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
I'd been thinking of re-reading at least some of Pratchett anyway, so following his death I curled up with a copy of Men at Arms to console myself. Men at Arms is technically the second of the City Watch books, but for various reasons it's a favourite and I started with it. At the opening of the story the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is looking slightly better than in recent years (mostly because of Carrot's irrepressible enthusiam for polishing his armour), but the Patriarch has decided on making it more inclusive, so they're expanding to take in elements of the city's minority populations, adding Lance Constable Detritus the troll, Lance Constable Cuddy (a dwarf) and Lance Constable Angua, who isn't what she seems. Of course there are a lot of minority focussed jokes, but this seems to be where Pratchett really focussed in on using the Discworld to talk about social inclusion. And of course there's a plot, or two, with Captain Vimes on the point of marrying Lady Sibyl and retiring from the force, and the minor matter of someone stealing something from the vaults of the Assassin's Guild. What's interesting in going back to these years later is that we see Pratchett writing a police procedural (unknown weapon subtype), and the Watch investigating it by collecting all the evidence even if they don't understand it yet, just like we're used to with CSI et al, (and, jumping forward to Feet of Clay, creating a forensics department) yet Pratchett was writing years before CSI. And of course it echoes every mis-matched cop buddy movie ever by throwing Detritus and Cuddy together, while Vimes is thrown into an existential crisis by the possibility of not being a copper any more. But this is Pratchett, and the social commentary is there to add another dimension to what would already be a perfectly adequate novel, and this time it's the Cult of the Gun, almost literally personifed as the true villain of the piece. And we have the moment that Carrot transforms himself from childlike enthusiasm for being a copper, to embracing his destiny (which is not the destiny that other people think) and becoming the copper that Ankh-Morpork needs him to be.
Guards, Guards! is, of course, the earlier book, the one that first introduced the Watch, and a sad state they're in at the start, with Vimes, Colon and Nobby drunkenly fumbling their way homewards after burying one of their own. They quite literally start in the gutter, with nowhere left to fall. And meanwhile Carrot is heading down from the mountains, intent on a career in the Watch, no matter that a career is the last thing anyone else in the Watch has ever wanted. And then we're on the case, with a sudden outbreak of death by dragon, which takes Vimes into the world of the swamp dragon breeders, and his meeting with Lady Sibyl, who is a deftly drawn example of the 'horsey' ladies of a certain social set (I know at least a couple of people who came out of the either the same mould, or one very like it). And that's when the Watch starts to transform itself, on one level because Carrot is both the man of the hour* and too innocent of Ankh-Morpork's corruption to be affected for it; on another because Lady Sibyl has been taught to see the best in everyone (or at least to pretend to) and Vimes, Colon and even Nobby can't help but be dragged into the distorted view of them she reflects back; but ultimately, it's because Vimes is a copper, the copper's copper, and he can't bear to see anyone getting away with a crime, no matter how powerful or dangerous they are.
* or perhaps boy of the hour as he is maybe 17 while all this is happening.
I'm actually only part way through Feet of Clay, and I honestly can't remember how the plot falls out, so I'm having the pleasure of discovering it anew (I do remember who-dun-it for one of the plot strands, I just can't remember the motivations). Someone is killing old men, and that 'someone' may be a golem, meanwhile someone else (probably not a golem) has managed to poison the Patriarch (it didn't take), and Vimes, Carrot and the Watch are on the case. The golems are an openly despised minority for Pratchet to build the book around, but he's pushing further into inclusion, this time by introducing Cheery Littlebottom as the newest member of the Watch, whose secret is that she's a woman (which is easy to overlook among the bewhiskered dwarvish community). It's a theme Pratchett came back to time and again, using dwarvish women's lib as a mirror for real world women's equality, and he pushes the generalised inclusion theme even further by playing games with Cheery's open dislike of werewolves while pairing her with Angua (whose secret in Men at Arms was that she was a werewolf, not that she was a woman), but I'm finding the odd line that is making me cringe a litttle - perhaps it's because he does everything else so well that the odd disablist slur popping up stands out so badly. Certainly he's no worse than just about any other author out there, but when equality is such a focus for him, it's disappointing to see him making a misstep (I can't actually remember the example I had in mind, I think it was describing something, or someone as insane, when the sentence structure actually implied bad or evil).
Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire.
I mentioned this one a few days ago as I'd been eagerly awaiting an ebook version (given my moratorium on buying anything but large format books in physical format) and it didn't disappoint. October 'Toby' Daye is a changeling, half human, half-daoine sidhe. Snatched at six from her family when her fae nature manifested, she's been a child in faery, a runaway in the worst areas of San Francisco, a member of a Fae court, a PI, a knight for her feudal lord, and a wife and mother. And that's before the book starts, and within a couple of pages all that has been stripped away from her. We pick the story up a dozen years later with Toby slowly rebuilding the life that was taken from her and shunning company with her Fae friends. And then one of them is murdered, and Toby finds herself bound to avenge her by identifying her killer, a quest that necessarily draws her back into the heart of both the Faery courts and those, like her, who never entirely fitted.
In some ways the setting is very derivative, feudal fae courts, the beautiful and dangerous fae nobility, but that's because this whole area of myth, and stories drawing on that myth, is particularly well defined and lots of people have worked in this area over the years (Emma Bull's 'War for the Oaks' would be a clear antecedent). But McGuire's version of faery is particularly well put together, we don't simply have the same old staple fae races (though they are there too), there are innovations ranging from the minor, the rose goblins, effectively a rose-cum-cat, to the major, with the Luidaeg, who has hints of perhaps once being part of a threefold goddess, and an overall feel that she knows how everything slots together and has plans on how to use it. And in similar vein the plot evolves around things we already know and have been told, even if we don't realise their significance at the time, with the final denouement being both expected, in that everything has fallen into place in the handful of preceeding pages, while still being able to shock us in how it plays out.
If I have a complaint it's that there's a teeny bit of girl-hostage about Toby, she tells us early on that she's not the warrior sort of knight, and that becomes readily apparent - it almost seems like she spends half the book having people patch her back up. That's not entirely a bad thing, it makes her very human, but it's possibly carried just a tad too far. But that's a minor criticism in a book I really enjoyed and have been seriously tempted to give an immediate re-read. Hopefully I won't have to wait quite so long for the next one to appear.
Prisoner, Lia Silver (aka Rachel Manija Brown).
This is part of a series with Silver's other books Laura's Wolf and Partner, and Packmate yet to come, apparently you can start equally well with either of Prisoner or Laura's Wolf (which I own but haven't yet read). I hadn't entirely appreciated when I bought Prisoner that the series are explicitly romances rather than urban fantasy, but too be honest I wouldn't have felt cheated if it had been marketed as urban fantasy, the story works perfectly well as either.
The story opens with protagonist DJ Torres (Filipino, music fan - hence the name - and US marine) one of two survivors of a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, the other being his buddy and fellow marine, Roy, but Roy's dying, and DJ's also a werewolf, so he throws caution to the winds and bites Roy in an attempt to save his life. That works, but unfortunately betrays exactly what DJ is to the authorities. Next thing DJ knows he's waking up in the proverbial secret base of the proverbial unnamed intelligence agency, and when threats start being thrown in his direction ('kill people for us or we'll torture your buddy Roy who we're hiding in another secret base, here, watch an example...') DJ promptly decides to escape, flattening everyone in his path until he meets his match in Echo, whom he initially mistakes for a harmless woman - try genetically engineered killing machine instead. The fight pretty much goes to best of three falls or a submission.
DJ and Echo are well matched, both physically and psychologically - especially so for Echo who desperatelt needs a partner to keep her psychologically grounded, but DJ needs to escape to help Roy, and Echo needs to stay where she is because her sister Charlie is hostage to the secret project's ability to keep her not-very-well-engineered body alive. So classic star-crossed lovers territory. I definitely enjoyed this even if it wasn't quite what I expected, though the romance roots show most clearly in how and where the plot reaches a climax (ahem!).
Reading Right Now
Like a Mighty Army, David Weber
Latest in Weber's Safehold series, the war between the Empire of Charis (the good guys) and the Church (bad guys), is headed into a winter campaign largely reminiscent of the American Civil War, though Merlin (our cybernetic hero) has managed to advance technology a little beyond where it would historically have been, with more general use of breechloading rifles than in the ACW, though steam powered ironclads are still a satanic invention as far as most of Safehold is concerned due to the Church's prohibition on technology. Merlin is the one person on Safehold to genuinely remember humanity didn't originate on the planet, that the whole Day of Creation, with it's thousands of eyewitness accounts, was actually a massive con trick inflicted on an unknowingly mindwiped group of colonists by a colonial governor with a fanatical plan to escape the extinction of Humanity by the alien Gbaba by turning them into a strictly pastoral society with medieval technology - and where 'strictly' means any unauthorized innovation gets a visit from the Inquisition, with the hot irons and the rest of the torturer's tool kit. Almost 900 years later and the system is falling apart as Charisian innovation drives the Church into matching them, while being ever harsher in its treatment of 'heretics'.
I'm a fan of the series, but it's combining two very different arcs, one the immensely detailed worldwide war (if you're reading them, go to Weber's website and grab yourself a copy of the larger format map, it really makes it much easier to follow the story!), the other the mystery of what's going on beneath the surface (literally) of the church's Vatican equivalent, which may be anything from the slumbering automated command centre for an orbital bombardment system to hibernating bad guys from Merlin's era (back when she was Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban, Terran Federation Navy). The war is clearly the major focus of Weber's story telling, but that means progress on the other arc is glacially slow and I think that's a legitimate area to criticise the books on (and there's still the Gbaba situation to be dealt with when the Charis/Church conflict is finally resolved.
Did I mention these are huge? This is book 7 and comes in at 650 pages. and they have a cast to match. OTOH the size of the dramatis personae does mean they're about 50 pages shorter than they look!!
Other Stuff Read
State Machine, K B Spangler
The first seven chapters of the next Rachel Peng techno-thriller, due next month, are available here.
Rachel is the liaison to the Washington DC Metro PD for the Office of Advanced and Complementary Emerging Technologies, which means she's a Fed, and a cyborg with a quantum chip in her head that allows her to make any database anywhere sit-up and beg, gives her reception across the complete EM spectrum, near telepathy with the other OACET agents, and so on. She's also half-Chinese, gay, and blind - the only reason she isn't the Federal poster child for diversity is the underlying fear of the agents and that the fact she's blind is a secret among a handful of her friends, the chip lets her mostly pass, though she has trouble with the simplest of things - reading and faces.
State Machine involves a murder at the White House and a missing maguffin (which I'm pretty sure I know what it is even if we aren't told within the sample). The sample does bring one aspect of the investigation to a close, though mostly the story is really just getting started and introducing the cast of characters, including several in a poly relationship which has unexpectedly developed between books. Last year's Maker Space was one of my favourite books of 2014, so I'm really looking forward to the full version being released.
The Sword of the South, David Weber
The latest in Weber's Bahzell Bahnakson series, this is being snippeted over at Collected Driblets of Baen with two and a bit chapters up so far, and it's being deliberately mysterious about the situation. An undisclosed amount of time has passed since War Maid's Choice, Bahzell and Leeana have a daughter and are running a tavern (as both are noted military commanders and champions of their respective gods/goddesses this is somewhat unlikely) and the proverbial bedraggled stranger with no memory of who he is just wandered in through their door. I'll be watching this develop. Of all three of Weber's ongoing series, this is possibly the one I'm most fond of.
Hells' Foundations Quiver, David Weber
Book 8 of Weber's Safehold series is also being snippeted at Driblets with seven and a bit chapters up. It was finding this that sent me checking to see if book 7 was down to a reasonable price yet (I refuse to pay hardback prices for an ebook). The first couple of chapters make an interesting vignette, though the series is now so huge that seven chapters don't even get us through checking in with the major characters!
Makeisha in Time, Rachael K Jones
<user name="alexseanchai"> pointed me at this short story (their original post here), a queer, black woman lives scores (hundreds? thousands?) of lives throughout history in the interstices of her contemporary life. Interesting conceit, and interesting exploration of the consequences to her contemporary life, and how 'history' rewrites her stories. TW for suicide.
Hopefully it won't be quite as long 'til the next of these, but given the size of the Weber, no promises!
I'm still not reading as much as usual, probably because I seem to be fairly heavily engaged in avoidance behaviour, which is manifesting as spending a lot of time around either games or gaming-related stuff. I think this is because of the uncertainty around waiting for a date for my gallbladder op, the op doesn't concern me, but I really don't do well with uncertainty. The other possibility is that it's a consequence of upping my butrans dosage at Christmas during the pancreatitis hospitalisation and what's actually stopping me reading is a higher level of opiate fog than I'm used to. I'm genuinely not certain which, though of course it could be both.
Non-fiction stuff read actually amounts to a hell of a lot: probably a dozen game supplements, about 20 large game related fanzines, plus a whole bunch of military history stuff from around the web which is feeding into my obsessive-compulsive 'collecting' of obscure military vehicles from around the web (current ares of fascination, Canadian softskins plus all the myriad Bren Carrier variants). That last one is sort of being fed by my starting to play World of Tanks on the net (massively multiplayer tank battles using lots of different WWII tanks).
Finally getting to what I have been reading:
Guards, Guards!
Men at Arms!
Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
I'd been thinking of re-reading at least some of Pratchett anyway, so following his death I curled up with a copy of Men at Arms to console myself. Men at Arms is technically the second of the City Watch books, but for various reasons it's a favourite and I started with it. At the opening of the story the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is looking slightly better than in recent years (mostly because of Carrot's irrepressible enthusiam for polishing his armour), but the Patriarch has decided on making it more inclusive, so they're expanding to take in elements of the city's minority populations, adding Lance Constable Detritus the troll, Lance Constable Cuddy (a dwarf) and Lance Constable Angua, who isn't what she seems. Of course there are a lot of minority focussed jokes, but this seems to be where Pratchett really focussed in on using the Discworld to talk about social inclusion. And of course there's a plot, or two, with Captain Vimes on the point of marrying Lady Sibyl and retiring from the force, and the minor matter of someone stealing something from the vaults of the Assassin's Guild. What's interesting in going back to these years later is that we see Pratchett writing a police procedural (unknown weapon subtype), and the Watch investigating it by collecting all the evidence even if they don't understand it yet, just like we're used to with CSI et al, (and, jumping forward to Feet of Clay, creating a forensics department) yet Pratchett was writing years before CSI. And of course it echoes every mis-matched cop buddy movie ever by throwing Detritus and Cuddy together, while Vimes is thrown into an existential crisis by the possibility of not being a copper any more. But this is Pratchett, and the social commentary is there to add another dimension to what would already be a perfectly adequate novel, and this time it's the Cult of the Gun, almost literally personifed as the true villain of the piece. And we have the moment that Carrot transforms himself from childlike enthusiasm for being a copper, to embracing his destiny (which is not the destiny that other people think) and becoming the copper that Ankh-Morpork needs him to be.
Guards, Guards! is, of course, the earlier book, the one that first introduced the Watch, and a sad state they're in at the start, with Vimes, Colon and Nobby drunkenly fumbling their way homewards after burying one of their own. They quite literally start in the gutter, with nowhere left to fall. And meanwhile Carrot is heading down from the mountains, intent on a career in the Watch, no matter that a career is the last thing anyone else in the Watch has ever wanted. And then we're on the case, with a sudden outbreak of death by dragon, which takes Vimes into the world of the swamp dragon breeders, and his meeting with Lady Sibyl, who is a deftly drawn example of the 'horsey' ladies of a certain social set (I know at least a couple of people who came out of the either the same mould, or one very like it). And that's when the Watch starts to transform itself, on one level because Carrot is both the man of the hour* and too innocent of Ankh-Morpork's corruption to be affected for it; on another because Lady Sibyl has been taught to see the best in everyone (or at least to pretend to) and Vimes, Colon and even Nobby can't help but be dragged into the distorted view of them she reflects back; but ultimately, it's because Vimes is a copper, the copper's copper, and he can't bear to see anyone getting away with a crime, no matter how powerful or dangerous they are.
* or perhaps boy of the hour as he is maybe 17 while all this is happening.
I'm actually only part way through Feet of Clay, and I honestly can't remember how the plot falls out, so I'm having the pleasure of discovering it anew (I do remember who-dun-it for one of the plot strands, I just can't remember the motivations). Someone is killing old men, and that 'someone' may be a golem, meanwhile someone else (probably not a golem) has managed to poison the Patriarch (it didn't take), and Vimes, Carrot and the Watch are on the case. The golems are an openly despised minority for Pratchet to build the book around, but he's pushing further into inclusion, this time by introducing Cheery Littlebottom as the newest member of the Watch, whose secret is that she's a woman (which is easy to overlook among the bewhiskered dwarvish community). It's a theme Pratchett came back to time and again, using dwarvish women's lib as a mirror for real world women's equality, and he pushes the generalised inclusion theme even further by playing games with Cheery's open dislike of werewolves while pairing her with Angua (whose secret in Men at Arms was that she was a werewolf, not that she was a woman), but I'm finding the odd line that is making me cringe a litttle - perhaps it's because he does everything else so well that the odd disablist slur popping up stands out so badly. Certainly he's no worse than just about any other author out there, but when equality is such a focus for him, it's disappointing to see him making a misstep (I can't actually remember the example I had in mind, I think it was describing something, or someone as insane, when the sentence structure actually implied bad or evil).
Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire.
I mentioned this one a few days ago as I'd been eagerly awaiting an ebook version (given my moratorium on buying anything but large format books in physical format) and it didn't disappoint. October 'Toby' Daye is a changeling, half human, half-daoine sidhe. Snatched at six from her family when her fae nature manifested, she's been a child in faery, a runaway in the worst areas of San Francisco, a member of a Fae court, a PI, a knight for her feudal lord, and a wife and mother. And that's before the book starts, and within a couple of pages all that has been stripped away from her. We pick the story up a dozen years later with Toby slowly rebuilding the life that was taken from her and shunning company with her Fae friends. And then one of them is murdered, and Toby finds herself bound to avenge her by identifying her killer, a quest that necessarily draws her back into the heart of both the Faery courts and those, like her, who never entirely fitted.
In some ways the setting is very derivative, feudal fae courts, the beautiful and dangerous fae nobility, but that's because this whole area of myth, and stories drawing on that myth, is particularly well defined and lots of people have worked in this area over the years (Emma Bull's 'War for the Oaks' would be a clear antecedent). But McGuire's version of faery is particularly well put together, we don't simply have the same old staple fae races (though they are there too), there are innovations ranging from the minor, the rose goblins, effectively a rose-cum-cat, to the major, with the Luidaeg, who has hints of perhaps once being part of a threefold goddess, and an overall feel that she knows how everything slots together and has plans on how to use it. And in similar vein the plot evolves around things we already know and have been told, even if we don't realise their significance at the time, with the final denouement being both expected, in that everything has fallen into place in the handful of preceeding pages, while still being able to shock us in how it plays out.
If I have a complaint it's that there's a teeny bit of girl-hostage about Toby, she tells us early on that she's not the warrior sort of knight, and that becomes readily apparent - it almost seems like she spends half the book having people patch her back up. That's not entirely a bad thing, it makes her very human, but it's possibly carried just a tad too far. But that's a minor criticism in a book I really enjoyed and have been seriously tempted to give an immediate re-read. Hopefully I won't have to wait quite so long for the next one to appear.
Prisoner, Lia Silver (aka Rachel Manija Brown).
This is part of a series with Silver's other books Laura's Wolf and Partner, and Packmate yet to come, apparently you can start equally well with either of Prisoner or Laura's Wolf (which I own but haven't yet read). I hadn't entirely appreciated when I bought Prisoner that the series are explicitly romances rather than urban fantasy, but too be honest I wouldn't have felt cheated if it had been marketed as urban fantasy, the story works perfectly well as either.
The story opens with protagonist DJ Torres (Filipino, music fan - hence the name - and US marine) one of two survivors of a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, the other being his buddy and fellow marine, Roy, but Roy's dying, and DJ's also a werewolf, so he throws caution to the winds and bites Roy in an attempt to save his life. That works, but unfortunately betrays exactly what DJ is to the authorities. Next thing DJ knows he's waking up in the proverbial secret base of the proverbial unnamed intelligence agency, and when threats start being thrown in his direction ('kill people for us or we'll torture your buddy Roy who we're hiding in another secret base, here, watch an example...') DJ promptly decides to escape, flattening everyone in his path until he meets his match in Echo, whom he initially mistakes for a harmless woman - try genetically engineered killing machine instead. The fight pretty much goes to best of three falls or a submission.
DJ and Echo are well matched, both physically and psychologically - especially so for Echo who desperatelt needs a partner to keep her psychologically grounded, but DJ needs to escape to help Roy, and Echo needs to stay where she is because her sister Charlie is hostage to the secret project's ability to keep her not-very-well-engineered body alive. So classic star-crossed lovers territory. I definitely enjoyed this even if it wasn't quite what I expected, though the romance roots show most clearly in how and where the plot reaches a climax (ahem!).
Reading Right Now
Like a Mighty Army, David Weber
Latest in Weber's Safehold series, the war between the Empire of Charis (the good guys) and the Church (bad guys), is headed into a winter campaign largely reminiscent of the American Civil War, though Merlin (our cybernetic hero) has managed to advance technology a little beyond where it would historically have been, with more general use of breechloading rifles than in the ACW, though steam powered ironclads are still a satanic invention as far as most of Safehold is concerned due to the Church's prohibition on technology. Merlin is the one person on Safehold to genuinely remember humanity didn't originate on the planet, that the whole Day of Creation, with it's thousands of eyewitness accounts, was actually a massive con trick inflicted on an unknowingly mindwiped group of colonists by a colonial governor with a fanatical plan to escape the extinction of Humanity by the alien Gbaba by turning them into a strictly pastoral society with medieval technology - and where 'strictly' means any unauthorized innovation gets a visit from the Inquisition, with the hot irons and the rest of the torturer's tool kit. Almost 900 years later and the system is falling apart as Charisian innovation drives the Church into matching them, while being ever harsher in its treatment of 'heretics'.
I'm a fan of the series, but it's combining two very different arcs, one the immensely detailed worldwide war (if you're reading them, go to Weber's website and grab yourself a copy of the larger format map, it really makes it much easier to follow the story!), the other the mystery of what's going on beneath the surface (literally) of the church's Vatican equivalent, which may be anything from the slumbering automated command centre for an orbital bombardment system to hibernating bad guys from Merlin's era (back when she was Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban, Terran Federation Navy). The war is clearly the major focus of Weber's story telling, but that means progress on the other arc is glacially slow and I think that's a legitimate area to criticise the books on (and there's still the Gbaba situation to be dealt with when the Charis/Church conflict is finally resolved.
Did I mention these are huge? This is book 7 and comes in at 650 pages. and they have a cast to match. OTOH the size of the dramatis personae does mean they're about 50 pages shorter than they look!!
Other Stuff Read
State Machine, K B Spangler
The first seven chapters of the next Rachel Peng techno-thriller, due next month, are available here.
Rachel is the liaison to the Washington DC Metro PD for the Office of Advanced and Complementary Emerging Technologies, which means she's a Fed, and a cyborg with a quantum chip in her head that allows her to make any database anywhere sit-up and beg, gives her reception across the complete EM spectrum, near telepathy with the other OACET agents, and so on. She's also half-Chinese, gay, and blind - the only reason she isn't the Federal poster child for diversity is the underlying fear of the agents and that the fact she's blind is a secret among a handful of her friends, the chip lets her mostly pass, though she has trouble with the simplest of things - reading and faces.
State Machine involves a murder at the White House and a missing maguffin (which I'm pretty sure I know what it is even if we aren't told within the sample). The sample does bring one aspect of the investigation to a close, though mostly the story is really just getting started and introducing the cast of characters, including several in a poly relationship which has unexpectedly developed between books. Last year's Maker Space was one of my favourite books of 2014, so I'm really looking forward to the full version being released.
The Sword of the South, David Weber
The latest in Weber's Bahzell Bahnakson series, this is being snippeted over at Collected Driblets of Baen with two and a bit chapters up so far, and it's being deliberately mysterious about the situation. An undisclosed amount of time has passed since War Maid's Choice, Bahzell and Leeana have a daughter and are running a tavern (as both are noted military commanders and champions of their respective gods/goddesses this is somewhat unlikely) and the proverbial bedraggled stranger with no memory of who he is just wandered in through their door. I'll be watching this develop. Of all three of Weber's ongoing series, this is possibly the one I'm most fond of.
Hells' Foundations Quiver, David Weber
Book 8 of Weber's Safehold series is also being snippeted at Driblets with seven and a bit chapters up. It was finding this that sent me checking to see if book 7 was down to a reasonable price yet (I refuse to pay hardback prices for an ebook). The first couple of chapters make an interesting vignette, though the series is now so huge that seven chapters don't even get us through checking in with the major characters!
Makeisha in Time, Rachael K Jones
<user name="alexseanchai"> pointed me at this short story (their original post here), a queer, black woman lives scores (hundreds? thousands?) of lives throughout history in the interstices of her contemporary life. Interesting conceit, and interesting exploration of the consequences to her contemporary life, and how 'history' rewrites her stories. TW for suicide.
Hopefully it won't be quite as long 'til the next of these, but given the size of the Weber, no promises!