Things I've read lately

So it was an outage for 89 days and I didn't read much and didn't update this with any of the books.

Absolution Gap--A reread, but good.
On Basilisk Station--Enjoyable
Bright of the Sky--Mostly interesting, but probably not enough to pay for the book on Kindle.
Installing Linux on a Dead Badger--Very funny. You should read it.
The Paradise War--Kind of interesting, but less so when I discovered that this is part of a long series. Neat that an established author put something out for free on the Kindle.
The Softwire: Virus on Orbis 1--Another free book. This was okay, but geared toward young adult or something.
The Paths of the Dead--I don't know why I keep reading these books. Plot is just fine, but the writing style annoys me.
The Jennifer Morgue--I liked The Atrocity Archives and some of the later works in this series better, but this one suffered by being read very slowly over a week or two.
One of Our Thursdays is Missing--I don't know why I keep reading these books.
How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe--Not that good.

A Clash of Kings--Partial reread to prepare for the upcoming 5th book.
The Color of Magic--I got about half way though one night before I needed to go to sleep.
Way too much stuff at work--I spent the first portion of the outage reading. Stuff about why the analysis done on nuclear fuel and nuclear cores and whatnot is done correctly. I think that got up to ~2000 pages not including graphs and the pages I skipped. But that doesn't count toward my total.

Hugo nominees thus far:
Novella
"The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window" by Rachel Swirsky--This was rather good. If there weren't an Alastair Reynolds up in the same category, I would vote for this.
"The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang--I read this one a while back (during the nomination period) because it seemed likely to get a nomination. It was interesting, but a lot more about people's feelings than I liked.
"The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand--This one didn't explain enough before the end. And just not that interesting.
Best Novelette
"The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele--I listened to this one on a podcast, StarShipSofa. But I read it again for now (because I couldn't remember whether the name was the same). This feels like a strong contender to me. Neat that this was largely meta-sci-fi.
"Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly--Not actually that interesting. There is possibly potential in this universe, but this story was not compelling.
"That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone--I think I want to reread this one during a non-outage time. There were definitely interesting ideas here and the religion aspect somehow didn't throw me off.

Pages: I'm saying 20 pages/novelette and 85 for novellas as I don't know the pagecount due to reading on Kindle.
4113

Halting State by Charles Stross

This one was kind of neat. A combination of tech and spies and nerds. It was lacking something, though I'm not sure what. I just wasn't as pulled along as I should have been.

Pages: 336

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

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

One of the first blurbs inside the cover stated that this book "oozed sex on every page" or something similar. It doesn't, though the cover makes it something I wouldn't read at work*. There is some graphic description in here, but not much.

And after saying all that, I'd like to point out that I read it because I'm on a Stross kick right now, not because it looked like a sci-fi "romance" novel. There were interesting ideas in here, mainly dealing with a weird robot civilization that was largely weird because humanity had died out and thoroughly killed every biosphere capable of supporting it at the same time. I think this book should have had less sex in it because even though the fact that the main character was built in a factory to be a concubine and it was a big part of the unfolding of the story, it felt unneeded. Of course, the dedication was to Asimov and Heinlein--robots for Asimov, gratuitous sex for Heinlein.
Pages: 321

The Man Kizn Wars by Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Dean Ing

I think I have read this book previously, I know that when I was last in the hospital, my dad brought me some books and the fourth (I think) book in this series was among them. He also brought be the Isle of Dr. Moreau while I was in the hospital for some kinda serious surgery.  At any rate, I found this book enjoyable and while the stories on the whole aren't particularly memorable for me, I do tend to remember two of the neat plot points. I remember the last story more because it feeds into some of the later Known Space stories. I like the older sci-fi stories where the entire story seemed like a way to discuss the neat idea (using buckyballs to keep a planet wide goo from eating your ship, for example).

Pages: 289

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

Warriors edited by George R. R. Martin

Yet another thing Martin is doing instead of working on his Song of Ice and Fire books. This collection was okay, but the best part was finally reading some David Weber and deciding that he is kick ass.

Pages: 736

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

This is a story collection (short to novella length) rather than just the title story. While some of these stories are clearly pretty amazing, reading 508 pages of depressing, hopeless, slightly insane stories is a bit much. Given some sort of choice, I'd have rather gotten 3 collections instead of a single one.

Pages: 508

Juggler of Worlds By Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

This was okay. I coincidentally received Protector for Christmas while reading this. I thought this spelled out a few too many things, rather than leaving them implied. But it was good to read some of the back story about Nessus and Lewis. Also, this one kind of had a happy ending.

Pages: 349

Maniford Time by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter writes very good books. He writes horrible endings. Honestly, very few stories should be about how life continues in the universe. Most should be about some big event and then maybe hint that the event was important. Not directly state that man's purpose was to make more life in the universe.

Pages: 441

Lots of books in December

 I got behind in writing down what I'm reading, so here's everything I missed.

Gateway by Fredrick Pohl
Okay, but not that great. I prefer happier books

Pages: 278

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Fredrick Pohl
Not actually that interesting, not much happens, and leaves off annoyingly.
Pages: 336

Dragonseye by Anne McCaffery
Not much happened in this book. I didn't really care about most of the characters.
Pages: 416

Protector by Larry Niven
This book is enjoyable. I had read it before.
Pages: 224

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach
This was interesting, but the towards the end things went far too slowly. Lots of plot threads were quickly introduced because they contributed to the ending.
Pages: 304

Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton
Kind of weird, but okay. An awful lot of sex is implied, like if Heinlein had made sex a bigger plot point. Yes, sex can be a bigger plot point than in Heinlein and the book is still sci-fi. I'll give this author another try or two, but I don't particularly recommend this book. Some interesting commentary on politics and family relations though.
Pages: 416

Riverworld and other stories by Philip José Farmer
Riverworld was okay, I wasn't super fond of some of the other stories because they dealt more with religion and crazy people than I was interested in. I would like to read more in his Riverworld series.
Pages: 264

The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury
This wasn't very good. I only kind of like Bradbury, so that isn't surprising. I thought it was silly to include scanned copies of the manuscripts for two of the stories.
Pages: 247

And Another Thing ... by Eoin Colfer

I was kind of disappointed with this one. Douglas Adams made it seem easy to write funny books, but Eoin Colfer shows that it isn't really.

Pages: 288

Starship Sofa Stories Volume 2 edited by Tony C. Smith

I buy the SSS books to support the podcast. I didn't buy the Captain's Logs because I wasn't interested in reading a bunch of "um"s. I was sort of disappointed with this edition because I strongly prefer authors who give stories to SSS. This one contained maybe half people who have contributed stories. But, on the whole, the book was good. Larry Santoro did a neat five minutes and thirty four seconds on one of the episodes where he read a little bit of each story, mostly in different voices for everything.

Pages: 316

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

Exiles at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker

Back in high school (freshman year, I believe) we were assigned to read a book during winter break and then talk to the class about it when we got back. That wasn't good enough for me, so I read the entire series of The Rings of the Master by Jack L. Chalker. I hadn't read tons of sci-fi at the time, so pretty much anything seemed good to me. The books were good enough that I generally consider Chalker to be an author worth picking up at the used book store. Which is why I picked up Exiles.

This book was interesting because the tech/mystical neat stuff was sufficiently different. The main idea is that reality is governed by equations and that a sufficiently advanced computer can adjust the equations for new bits of reality. Then, there is a world composed of a bunch of hexagons, where each hexagon has a completely different environment. Some people crash land on the planet and the main part of the story starts. I was disappointed that there is another book in this series because it ended rather abruptly.

Pages: 337

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

I didn't realize that I had read this one before, from the library at least a year ago. It is sort of biopunk, but not particularly revolutionary, either in content or within the context of the story. Things are nifty, but not exciting. Also, this story doesn't have a "and they lived happily ever after because they were together, even if everything else sucked" or even a "at least they died together". It has a "it would never actually work" ending.

Some of the ideas are interesting, but I'm not sure it is worth the time to read five hundred thirty-two pages.

Pages: 532

Titan by Stephen Baxter

I was all set to write a really good review of this book, but then I had to go to bed and didn't come back to it for a week. This was a really good book until the last hundred pages or so. The end sucks as much as the vacuum of space that is occasionally discussed in this novel. The beginning of the book is wonderful. The middle is both neat and really annoying. If you want, I'll make up a new ending for you. Read through to where the end starts sucking (wherever you think it is) and send me a message. My ending won't suck nearly as much as Baxter's.

Pages: 676

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

This was seems like it was still set in the Revelation Space universe, but didn't particularly reference anything from the previous books. I was disappointed that the book was essentially a human interest story (including a love story) about a conspiracy theory. There were a few interesting moments, but this one wasn't really worth it for me.

Edit: I was mistaken, this isn't in the Revelation Space universe. That explains why nothing seemed to be referenced. Still, the book wasn't very good.
Pages: 576

Galatic North by Alastair Reynolds

This book is a collection of short stories in the Revelation Space universe. The back story about Nevil and the Conjoiners at Mars was really great to read--the events are referred to in other Revelation Space books, but here much of the story is explained. I love seeing the partial conclusion of the universe in the last story, Galactic North, where the galaxy has been taken over by the greenflies. I'd be even more interested in what life is like in the galaxy at that point, but seeing what most of humanity is doing is interesting as well. There are a couple of throw away stories--little bits of the universe that would never merit inclusion in a novel because they aren't important to any storyline, but that help fill out a character or an idea. I particularly like learning that the Conjoiner drives are controlled with a disembodied Conjoiner brain. I do not recommend reading this book before some of the other books in the universe because it does fill in a lot. I like trying to work out some information myself. But this is a good addition to the Revelation Space universe.

Pages: 384

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

In my quest for anything to read, I picked up Anathem again. I wish Anathem were more interesting, but it does an excellent job of pulling me in. Even though I've read it before, I still enjoy re-reading the entire book. The various words that Stephenson invented were nifty the first time, but now I just gloss over them and substitute the normal words without thought. The Anathem world is a very interesting place.

Pages: 1008