Some of the recent reads. I think the last time I did this, I was just starting Tchaikovsky's
Doors of Eden. Another fantastic story. It's about multi-dimensionality and what happens when those dimensions start to crash into one another. I really can't say enough about his stuff - he's one of my favorite writers at this point. For the Kindle, I also picked up two of his limited-release novellas,
Firewalkers and
One Day All of This Will Be Yours. I really enjoyed both of them, although the latter kind of feels like it could be built out into something bigger (or at least a series, which may well be the intention.) In fact, that one is a departure for Tchaikovsky in that it's actually pretty funny. It's an insane premise that somehow works really well. It's not long at all - I think I got through it in just a couple of hours - and it flies by. The main character is an absolutely deplorable human being, but one you can't help but root for anyway. Firewalkers on the other hand is bleaker. The basic idea of it kind of reminds me of the movie "Elysium" a bit - the rich are heading to space to escape a dying world while the expendable poor exist mainly to serve them until they can depart. It's a good story and again a pretty quick read. Neither of these are as heady as his "Children of Time" series or "Doors of Eden", but that's okay because they're their own thing.
I also read Cixin Liu's short story collection
To Hold Up the Sky. I didn't rate this one as high, not because it isn't a good read. I just have a really high expectation for his stuff, and some of these stories are from when he was just starting out and you can almost se him developing his writing style if you read them chronologically. That said, there are two stories in the collection that really stood out for me - "The Time Migration" and "The Thinker". For anyone who's ever read Liu's better known stuff, I'd bet I could hand you these stories without telling you who wrote them and you'd guess it right away based solely on the magnitude of the ideas within them alone. I absolutely loved both of these stories. There are a few others, too - "The Village Teacher" is kind of like Liu's love letter to the importance of education and still manages to fit in his big picture approach to the universe. And "Cloud of Poems" is really very weird and enjoyable. A few of them were a bit slow, but like I said those tended to be earlier works.
I read Robert Jackson Bennett's debut
Mr. Shivers as well. Another really good story, but I wouldn't put it in the same class as his Divine Cities trilogy or American Elsewhere. Bennett seems to write in the intersection between Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror, one of very few who do I think. This book leans more toward the horror end, kind of like The Troupe, and Bennett is really good at building an atmosphere. This one is set in hobo communities during the Great Depression, and has an atmosphere reminiscent of that old HBO show "Carnivale", which, personally, is exactly the tone I'd want a story set in that time period to hit.
Finally, I departed from my sci-fi kick for a book I got last Xmas -
The Last Season by Eric Blehm. It's the true story of Randy Morgenson, a backcountry ranger in the Sierras who disappeared. It's a compelling story about a guy who will probably polarize readers into "love him" or "hate him" camps. I definitely know how I feel about him after reading this, but I won't share that here because it'd be a dis-service to the work Blehm put in on this. I think that's the most outstanding part of this book: how Blehm managed to tell a very emotional story without making any judgments himself. He lets the people who actually knew Morgenson tell the story where it matters most and by doing so he leaves room for the reader to come to their own conclusion. In this way, I think he is better at this kind of reporting than Jon Krakauer, who dealt with a similar subject in "Into the Wild". My issue with Krakauer has always been that he puts himself in every story he writes. Sometimes that unavoidable (of course, he was
actually in the story for "Into Thin Air") but at other times I think it makes him lean pretty hard into painting a very directional story. It's impossible to read "Into the Wild" without feeling that he is trying to direct you to a conclusion about Alex. And for some people that probably made it a better story. But Blehm goes the other way, and personally, I prefer that approach: he doesn't judge Morgenson at any point. The only judgments you get in the book are directly from people who knew him and they're printed more or less as verbatims. It feels more like a news report than a story in that way, but I prefer that because I found that at different times I thought differently about Morgenson and only in the end did I realize that I leaned one way very specifically, and that was the result of an evolution based on balanced accounts.
So that's it for now. I realize these are long posts - and sorry about that - but I'm kind of digging the chance to share some of these books. Over the past decade my interests were kind of "cycling" and ... well, that's about it. I've always read a lot, but since last year when (1) the world went shithouse and (2) my back decided to remind me that near-50 YOs shouldn't spend every free moment riding a singlespeed in chunky east coast rocks, I've been spending more of my downtime reading than ever before. And I'm totally cool with that.