Path of the Fury by David Weber

Why didn't I start reading David Weber earlier? I know why I have not read him since December or so--the book covers for his main series have too many women and too many women who are there for sex appeal. I don't want stories driven by interactions between a man and a woman as such, I want explosions. David Weber just doesn't put the explosions on the cover of his book, he hides them inside.

Weber has a very neat way of taking something from mythology/folktales and mixing it in with space opera--with enough cybernetic stuff to make it feel sort of on the edge of things even though those ideas have been around for a long time. The cybernetic things reminded me of the Culture novels. At any rate, in this book the old idea that Weber borrowed was the Furies from Greek mythology, hence the title of the book.

There are a lot of explosions, some very fast ships, and a mostly satisfying ending. Oh, and there are more books in this series.

Pages: 512

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

The Laundry short story, Overtime, was nominated for a Hugo last year. Also, I read it on Tor.com. Finally, Charles Stross has a good blog and he pointed out the chronological order of the Laundry universe books a week or two ago. Luckily, the bookstore had exactly one copy of this book (it's the one to start with), and no others in the series.

This book had some dark moments, but was overall fun. I appreciated that (at least for now) the minor romantic subplot has been taken care of, as that would get in the way of the rest of the story. I used some of the historical knowledge from Cryptonomicon for some of the references to WWII code breaking. And it is sort of interesting to compare this universe to the Thursday Next universe--this one wins easily for me, and not just because the romantic subplot is a major part of the plot in the Thursday Next books. I'll be looking out for these books in the future.

Pages: 368

Pump Six and Other Short Stores by Paolo Bacigalupi

It seems like the well-regarded books this year are dark. At least, Bacigalupi and Miéville are the two rising sci-fi/fantasy authors and they are very dark.

In this collection, I did not enjoy Softer at all. It isn't written particularly well, the approach isn't that interesting, and I just don't want to read about a guy killing his wife casually and getting away with it.

The Fluted Girl was nifty, but still dark with strong almost sexual abuse. It isn't clear how abusive the sex is, but the rest is abusive. Kinda neat ending also.

I did like Pump Six. I had read this one previously, though I can't remember where. I identify with the guy keeping the pumps running because sometimes I feel like I am so much dumber than the people who designed the plant. I think it is mostly that I'm just one person and lots of people designed the plant, but I still like that someone is just slightly more knowledgeable than other people and still doesn't know a fraction of what he needs to. Also, I love the idea that people could build these fancy pumps that last for six centuries before finally breaking down. Yay for Engineers!

Pages: 239