Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Books Read, Jan-March 2018

01/14 Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, Ian McDonald
01/28 Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman
01/31 Whose Body, Dorothy Sayers

02/02 Cold Welcome (Vatta's Peace 1), Elizabeth Moon
02/05 Dimension of Miracles, Robert Sheckley
02/12 Ashes of Honor, Seanan McGuire
02/18 Overclocked, Cory Doctorow
02/20 Chimes At Midnight, Seanan McGuire
02/22 The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, Neil Stephenson & Nicole Galland
02/24 Guards! Guards! Sir Pterry Pratchett (rr)
02/26 Friday, Robert A. Heinlein (rr)

03/02 Killed at the Whim of a Hat, Colin Cotterill
03/13 The Winter Long, Seanan McGuire
03/17 A Red-Rose Chain, Seanan McGuire
03/20 Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff
03/28 The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi (rr)
03/31 Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi (rr)

Sixteen (adjusted from seventeen) books in the first quarter this year, none physical, four re-reads, and one political.

More detailed discussion under the cut.


Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone is two stories in one book by Ian McDonald. The main story from which the book takes its title concerns a student who figures out a way to design fractal patterns that can reprogram a person’s brain to do things: make them go to sleep, ignore what they see, or even die. He is pressed in to becoming a government assassin and eventually embarks on a Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan to try to redeem his soul and leave the trade, but leaving such government work is never easy. The second story, a short one, is called The Tear. And it’s on the strange side of science fiction, and I’ll leave it at that.

Trigger Warning, a collection of Neil Gaiman short fiction, is wonderful. It contains a short story set in the American Gods universe, among many other great works. It was an excellent purchase.

Whose Body was the first detective story in the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers. A couple of those works came up in my email offers recently and I decided to give them a try. This one was an interesting variation of a locked room case: a dead man is found in the bathtub of an occupied flat, naked, and freshly shaved. No clues as to his identity, and no one knows how he got in to the flat or bathtub. He’s not discovered until the man of the house goes to make his ablutions the next morning. Wimsey is an interesting character, reminded me a lot of Bertie Wooster only with quite a bit more going on upstairs.

Ashes of Honor is the sixth book of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye urban fantasy series. Toby is a fey knight and detective and something very bad is happening in the fey kingdoms. There’s a changeling – half-human, half-fey – who has come in to her powers and is teleporting in such a way that she’s burrowing tunnels through the walls of the fairy kingdoms, threatening dire consequences. And what’s worse – the child is the unacknowledged daughter of one of October’s former commanders in her liege’s guard.

Overclocked, a collection of short stories and novellas by Cory Doctorow going back as early as 2005, reflect his passion defending internet freedom and individual rights being superior to corporate rights. Many good stories here. While I still haven’t finished his latest novel, I did enjoy reading this collection.

Cold Welcome (Vatta's Peace book 1), Elizabeth Moon. Poor little Admiral Ky. Saves the universe from organized pirates, then gets shot out of the sky when she comes home to wrap up some family business, revealing that the conspiracy that kicked off everything wasn’t quite as squashed as everybody had hoped it was. I can’t wait for the second book! Elizabeth Moon writes splendid space opera.

Chimes At Midnight, October Daye #7. This is weird. I show that I finished reading this book on Feb. 20. Except I don’t think that I did. Based on the two Daye books that I read in March, I don’t think I read it at all, and I don’t see how I got past it. So I’m going to leave it here as a placeholder and remove one from the count.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, Neil Stephenson & Nicole Galland. I haven’t read everything written by Neil, but I wish I had. DODO was amazing. It’s contemporary time travel science fiction via magic. Except magic doesn’t work anymore, which is where technology comes in. A wild ride. I didn’t recognize Nocole’s name until I finished the book and got to the author pages and found that she’d written a book that I’d read a year or two ago called I, Iago, a re-telling of Shakespeare’s Othello from the perspective of its villain, Iago. A VERY interesting read. Yes, he was a conniving little bastard, but every villain has his reasons. Both books are excellent.

Guards! Guards! I was wanting to re-read some Discworld, and this was one of the first books that I read. It was the introduction of Vimes and Carrot the 6’ dwarf and the Patrician, and such a wonderful book. “It’d be a million to one shot!” I will always hold this book near and dear. I wish I’d gotten Sir Pterry to autograph this one for me, but I did get a copy of Good Omens signed by him.

Friday, a classic later work by Robert A. Heinlein, is an occasional re-read for me. It had been probably 20 years since I last read it, and it came up for $0.99 on one of my newsletters, so I snagged it. Unfortunately it had been poofread and contained numerous typos which were rather jarring. I think it counts as having read enough RAH for a few years.

Dimension of Miracles is a 1968 novel by Robert Sheckley that is called satirical and absurdist. It has also been called inspiration for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Wikipedia has a nice simple descriptor of ”The novel concerns the odyssey of Tom Carmody, a New Yorker who wins a prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstakes.” The problem is that once he travels to pick up his price, he learns that he doesn’t have the homing instinct to get back to his Earth. Thus his travels and travails begin. It was a lot of fun. Neil Gaiman, a close friend to Douglas Adams, wrote an extensive history of Hitchhiker’s and said that Adams did not know of Sheckley’s work before writing Hitchhiker’s, but read it afterwards and found it disturbingly similar.

Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill is a murder mystery set in contemporary Vietnam. My wife wanted me to get it for her, and she quite liked it and suggested that I would, so I read it and enjoyed it. The main character is a former big city crime reporter Jimm Juree moves to the coast along with her mother and brother when her mom sells their house and buys a hotel on a beach. She expects her life to become fairly bland and calm when

The Winter Long, October Daye #8. In the first book of the series, Toby is on a mission for her liege, Sylvester Torquill, chasing down the persons who kidnapped his wife and daughter. Toby caught up with them, and they turned her in to a koi. Fortunately she was in a Japanese garden and a passer-by saw her choking to death and tossed her in to a pond, where she was to remain, forgotten, for some 15 years. The person who did the transformation AND kidnapping was none other than Sylvester’s brother, Simon. And now he’s at October’s door after having vanished since turning her into a fish. He needs to talk to her, as bad things are about to happen.

A Red-Rose Chain, October Daye #9. A declaration of war against October’s kingdom, and October is appointed ambassador to try and prevent the war. The problem is that the king of the other kingdom is being swayed by his guest who hates Toby’s guts and they both want to eradicate changelings, of which Toby is perhaps the best known. War means countless Fey getting Elf-Shot, as killing other Fey would be a violation of Oberon’s Law. Elf-Shot just means you sleep for 100 years, no big deal if you’re a pure-blood. But if you’re a half-blood changeling like Toby and others, it’s lethal. And no one cares if changelings die. The king makes an offer to rescind his declaration of war: if Toby surrenders herself to be exsanguinated by his alchemists and vivisected, no war. Toby’s not to keen on allowing herself to be bled-out, not to mention the powerful spells and potions that could be made out of her. Another way must be found….

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff. I don’t read a lot of political books, especially contemporaneous ones, but if one is going to piss off the current administration so much, it must be a fun read. And it certainly was! Wolff was given high access to the White House and basically became a fly on the wall, sitting in on high level meetings that he shouldn’t have been at, but as the administration didn’t have a clue what they were doing, no one thought to say ‘That guy shouldn’t be here!’ and then kick him out. He interviewed a lot of the people in the White House and got some pretty amazing perspectives. Everything boils down to: Trump ran to bolster his business image, Trump did not plan to win, Trump made no preparation for what to do if he won, when Trump won he had nothing in place to run the country with, not to mention he didn’t understand how the country works in terms of how laws and regulations are passed. Thus we have the fiasco that blazes forth today.

The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi. I recently went on a re-read binge of John Scalzi and just today finished Zoe’s Tale. With the exception of the latest Old Man’s War book that released last year and was nominated for a Hugo, I’ve read the entire series in the last month. Android’s Dream is an interesting story. Earth has established a presence, albeit a tenuous one, in space among all the other species there. The problem is that its sponsor, the Nidu, out-clevered themselves. Their leader died, and to ensure the leader’s clan’s lock on succession, they cloned a special breed of sheep on Earth called Electric Blue, patented it, then locked the license to that clan. As a part of the succession rites, an Electric Blue sheep’s blood must be offered in sacrifice. And someone has slaughtered all of the Electric Blue sheep. Except for a woman who runs a pet shop store who oddly has traces of Electric Blue DNA in her blood….

Agent to the Stars is John Scalzi’s first attempt at writing science fiction. His high school 10th reunion was coming up, and he wanted to be able to say he’d written a book. He didn’t care if it had been published or not, he just wanted to be able to say that he’d written it. So he did. He later offered it for free on his web site and accepted donations for it. Said donations ultimately topped $4,000, paying for lots of pizzas and a laptop. The story revolves around a moderately successful Hollywood press agent who is called in to a meeting with the owner of the agency who tells him to parcel out most of his clients to the other partners in the agency. His new client? A gelatinous blob of snot, with more of them in a hollowed hunk of rock orbiting the Earth. They’ve been watching our broadcasts for years and decided that the only way they can be accepted by the human race is if they got some really good press, which is going to require a really good agent. Thus the fun begins. A very fun read, the final reveal was great. Kind of makes me wish there was a sequel.