Jonathan Palfrey
This book is set in New Orleans and documents the interrelated lives of a number of poor and generally unattractive people, central among them one Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, gluttonous, fat slob spoiled by his mother and distinguished by his extraordinary conceit and his incongruously fastidious command of the English language.
I bought this book, read about a sixth of it, put it down, and haven't picked it up again. So I can't write a proper review of it; all I can say is that it seemed quite well written, but the initial chapters failed to hold my interest. Some books suck me in and I read on compulsively, but not this one. Your reaction may be different.I give it two stars because I can't definitely identify it as a bad book. Perhaps it's just a slow starter and you need to read the whole thing to appreciate it.Also by [a:Michael Flynn 126502 Michael Flynn https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1282631351p2/126502.jpg]: I loved [b:The Forest of Time - Hugo Nominated Novella 11539011 The Forest of Time Michael Flynn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1570130951l/11539011.SY75.jpg 16478070] and quite liked [b:In the Country of the Blind 416325 In the Country of the Blind Michael Flynn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312053809l/416325.SY75.jpg 1922459].
On first reading, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It's a fairly congenial novel that reads quite well as a story, but it's also a wild fantasy in which all kinds of powerful magical effects are deployed casually with minimal explanation. I don't approve of wild fantasy, I prefer magic to operate rather like a branch of science, following laws akin to the laws of science.
The characterization is rather sketchy: I don't feel I get to know any of the characters well.
The Bolo is a fighting machine of the future: starting off as just a tank with a little added automation, it gradually evolves over the course of time into an intelligent, self-aware machine capable of operating under its own initiative.
This collection contains six stories, all written in the 1960s, featuring different models of the Bolo in different time periods.
The more substantial stories here are ‘The Night of the Trolls', ‘The Last Command', and ‘Combat Unit'.
‘Courier', ‘Field Test', and ‘A Relic of War' are readable enough but relatively feeble stories.
This is an unexpected kind of novel to come across in the 21st century: it reminds me more than anything else of Hal Clement's novels from the 1950s. There's the same childlike enthusiasm for an endless series of scientific and engineering problems, and the assumption that the reader will be as fascinated by them as the author.
This author certainly displays plenty of scientific understanding and imagination, though I have to take it all on trust because I'm not qualified to check it.
The story has a fairly simple plot and few significant characters. I found it quite congenial and entertaining, although I often skimmed through the scientific details. But so far I've read it only once, and I don't whether or how often I'll reread it in future.
I thought it rather a pity that the story focused on the adventures of Ryland Grace to the exclusion of the rest of humanity, which was simultaneously going through its own adventures. However, Grace had scientific problems while humanity had political problems, and the author's expertise is clearly scientific rather than political.
This book was first published in 1916; it's an adventure story from a bygone age.
The British protagonist and a few others (not all British) undertake an urgent espionage mission during the First World War, making their different ways across a Europe at war to meet up in Turkey. They experience considerable discomforts and dangers throughout, but in the end their mission is accomplished.
This is not my usual kind of reading, and I don't expect to reread it much, but it's quite readable and passes the time well enough.
I'm not sure that I've ever read it until now (2024). I noted the book briefly in my 1963 diary, but I suspect that I started it without finishing it. I turned 9 years old in 1963.
This is a collection of 26 short stories by the wonderfully prolific Robert Sheckley. I bought it because I expected it to be a collection of his best; in fact, it seems to be on the whole a collection of his darker stories. I tend to be partial to his lighter-hearted, amusing stories.Thus, I'm disappointed not to find here such classic stories as “Bad Medicine”, “A Ticket to Tranai”, and “Ghost V”—all present in [b:The Robert Sheckley Omnibus 2570167 The Robert Sheckley Omnibus Robert Sheckley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1319291259l/2570167.SY75.jpg 189841], which I have on paper, but unfortunately it's not available for Kindle.The average first publication date of these stories is 1958, so they are all dated in style, attitudes, etc. But they remain worth reading for the endless variety of imaginative concepts that went into them.
I didn't actively dislike this book, but I might well have done, as it's a pretty miserable story.The protagonist, Tom, has a lousy time for most of the story, and almost all of the characters we meet die during the course of it (do not volunteer to be a character in a book written by this author!).Nor do the few survivors get a really happy ending.The scenario is a world in which moving cities roam around, trying to capture and break each other up for parts. I read plenty of sf and fantasy, but this seems far-fetched to me. I don't think moving cities would be economical, the costs of moving them around would be excessive, and the people don't seem to have access to futuristic technology that might lower the costs.I was intrigued to encounter in this story the name Shrike, which I had seen before only in [b:Hyperion 77566 Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1) Dan Simmons https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405546838l/77566.SY75.jpg 1383900]. However, Wikipedia tells me it's been used in quite a variety of fiction, going back at least as far as a play in 1952; and it's also the name of an ordinary bird.
This is a less clear account of Kipling's life than an independent biographer might aspire to write. It is basically a collection of old memories and musings written down at the end of his life, but they are at least separated out into chapters in chronological order, and written in his own readable and distinctive style. He seems to have had a good memory, stretching back to his early childhood, although of course no human memory is reliably accurate.
He was born in December 1865, survived various early hardships, and lived to January 1936, reaching the age of 70. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, arriving in Stockholm in December 1907 to find the country in mourning for the death of the King.
I've read all the rest of this series (apart from the comic strips), and this story is an odd one out. Most obviously, it's set in New York City in the 1920s, whereas most of the series is set in London in the 21st century. Of course it features none of the regular characters, except the unnaturally long-lived Thomas Nightingale, who appears here in his 20s. (Molly, also long-lived, is mentioned but remains in London throughout.)
The protagonist, Augustus ‘Gussie' Berrycloth-Young, is completely new to the series. He's clearly an imitation of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and he's quite a good imitation, who makes an entertaining first-person narrator of the story.
The story is quite unlike the other stories in the series. Usually there is some magical villain whom our heroes set out to thwart and perhaps arrest. But in this case Nightingale arrives in New York on a private mission to rescue a somewhat magical lady and her young child, who are being held captive by non-magical New York gangsters.
It's not a bad story. But it's basically a writing exercise for the author, who can have fun (a) imitating Wodehouse and (b) exploring New York in the 1920s. It's almost irrelevant to the Rivers of London series as a whole. Although it does make me wonder afresh exactly what is the relationship between Nightingale and Molly: because he goes on his mission to New York, risking his life at some points, at her request.
The story features Nightingale younger than we've seen him before, and I expected this to be (a) enjoyable and (b) somewhat illuminating; but it isn't, really. The Nightingale we see here is a rather bland young man, lacking most of his usual charisma and character. I suppose it's plausible that he acquired charisma and character with age, but it's a bit disappointing.
Gussie I find rather confusing. Because he's a good imitation of Bertie Wooster, I expect him to be basically Bertie Wooster under an assumed name, but there are differences.
1. Gussie can do magic. This is quite natural and acceptable because he attended Casterbrook School; Bertie would also have been able to do magic if he'd passed through that school.
2. Gussie has a black American boyfriend. Bertie seemed to have little interest in sex, but flirted occasionally with women (rather than men). Thus, this is a bit jarring and strikes me as out of character.
3. Gussie enjoys dressing up in women's clothing, and goes to a masquerade ball in drag to compete for a prize. This strikes me as very out of character. Bertie didn't enjoy appearing in front of an audience, and I can't imagine him appearing in drag unless somehow forced into it (in which case he'd do it badly).
It's true, of course, that Gussie is not Bertie, and the author is entitled to differentiate between the two. However, I nevertheless find it mentally jarring that Gussie resembles Bertie while doing things that would be out of character for Bertie.
One odd incident: In the middle of a stressful situation, Nightingale asks Gussie to cast a werelight (a simple spell that beginners learn first). It would surely be quicker and easier to do it himself than to ask someone else to do it.
Like any collection of unrelated stories, this is a mixed bag.
Of the stories, I particularly like and periodically reread “Odd” and “Stitch in Time”, which are both rather poignant little time-travel stories. In the first case, an accidental time-jump seems to have a beneficial effect; in the second case, its effect is unfortunate in at least one way, although the overall balance of effects is hard to assess (a common problem).
“Random Quest” is a somewhat similar story, although the jump is sideways in time, rather than forwards: it's an alternative-world story. I like it a little less, but I also reread it.
“A Long Spoon” is a light-hearted fantasy story, mildly amusing, with a little twist at the end.
“Oh, Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty?” is a tedious story that may have seemed more original when it was written than it does now.
And finally we have the title story, the novella called “Consider Her Ways”, which I usually avoid because I find it repulsive. It's about a future world with no men, only women; but that's not inherently repulsive. I think it's repulsive because Wyndham (a male writer, born in 1903) deliberately made it so. Sigh.
I read this perhaps more than once in the 1960s and/or 1970s, but I don't think I read it again until just recently. It's a dystopian story, and I tend to avoid dystopias, because I like to be happy, and dystopias don't cheer me up.
I managed to plod through this one. Fortunately, it's a short novel, and there's a happy ending.
The dystopia is actually quite interesting and thought-provoking, although it's set in a far future that none of us will see, apparently long after a nuclear war devastated most of North America at least, and probably most of the rest of the world. The world is very slowly recovering, and humanity is very slowly recovering too, but the small community we visit has a religious dread of mutations, even those that are harmless or possibly beneficial.
The happy ending is flawed in a couple of ways, which I may not have noticed when I read the story long ago.
1. Only three of the characters actually benefit from it.2. The rescuers from far-away New Zealand could just have been nice people, and that would have made a pleasant ending. Instead, they turn out to be as ruthless in their way as the society that the chrysalids are fleeing. I don't see what good that does to the story.
This is a fairly memorable book (I still remembered the outline of the story some 50 years after last reading it), well done in some ways, and I was thinking of giving it three stars, but the flawed ending deprives me of a full reward for plodding through the dystopia, so I'll give it two.
This is a random assortment of 12 stories of varying lengths by Larry Niven (occasionally in collaboration with other writers). Five of them belong to his series of Draco Tavern stories; the others are unrelated to each other.
The first story, “The Lion in his Attic”, is a fantasy story involving magic, and not an exceptionally good one in terms of plot, but I'm fond of the incidental details, and I'd give it 4 stars.
I'd give 3 stars to another fantasy story, “Talisman”.
The other 10 stories are all science fiction, but not among his best. I'd give them all 2 or 2.5 stars, except for two of the Draco Tavern stories, “The Green Marauder” and “War Movie”, which are interesting/amusing enough for 3 stars.
Nothing here is really bad, the stories are all readable enough, but I don't feel a need to own most of them.
This is a fine series of 10 short stories of English history from various different centuries, some of them linked together, and often having some link to the Pevensey area, in East Sussex by the sea.
They're dressed up as stories told to two children by Puck and by participants in the events, who are magically brought forward in time to bear witness. However, these are on the whole adult stories of serious adult business.
The first four stories tell of before and after the Norman Conquest (11th century), and these are my favourites of the collection. Then we have three stories set in Roman Britain, in the later years of the 4th century. The last three stories are set later in time (15th century, 16th century, 13th century), and I like them less, although they're still readable.
Kipling has the knack of making these stories vivid and immediate, things happening to real people as though they were happening now. The book was published in 1906, so his modern times are not ours, but the historical stories don't date and still seem fresh.
This is a long, complex, exciting story written with some skill and a good deal of work. It kept me interested.
On the other hand, it's also a thoroughly depressing experience, and I don't read fiction because I want to be depressed. I don't hate it enough to give it one star, so I'll give it two.
This novel is a tale of endless misery, people suffering in numerous ways, having bad lives, being attacked, being killed quickly or slowly, and even in some cases being transformed into half-alien monsters. That's how it starts, right from the first page, and that's how it goes on. This first novel is followed by a whole string of sequels, and I presume they go on depressing readers indefinitely. But I stop here.
This is the story of five modern Americans who are unexpectedly and involuntarily thrown back in time to the Roman Empire in the year 165 AD, with no possibility of return, and decide to make it their mission to avert the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—partly in their own personal interests, and partly because they think that a thriving Roman Empire would be better for the world as a whole than the Dark Ages that followed the decline and fall in our history.
This objective would be absurdly over-ambitious, except that they arrive loaded down with advantages. They have a combined skill set that’s almost ideal; they've been sent back with a small fortune in Roman cash, plus books, seeds, medicines, and equipment; and the first person they meet after arriving is perfectly suited to helping them adapt to second-century life.
This is quite a long novel, but it doesn’t stand alone: it’s intended as the first of a series. However, it ends at a reasonable stopping point, not a cliff-hanger, and you can make up your own mind whether to read any further in the series.
It’s a well-researched book, giving details of many aspects of the Roman Empire: if you like reading about the Roman Empire, this one’s for you. It’s easy to read, although rather slow-moving in the first half, and rather preoccupied with warfare in the second half.
As a novel, it has the weakness that its heroes are never seriously challenged: they arrive with all they need to make progress, all the people they meet in the Roman Empire are remarkably cooperative, and their various technological projects encounter only minor difficulties. They have a major challenge hanging over them in the form of a barbarian invasion that could have wiped them out; but their introduction of gunpowder enables the barbarians to be defeated relatively easily.
If you’ve read Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time, try to imagine it without William Walker, and you’ll have a fair idea of what this book is like. Walker was an exaggerated villain, a Voldemort, and I dislike reading about Voldemorts; but they are an easy way of providing setbacks and surprises to liven up the plot.
I’ll be interested to see whether the next novel in this series provides a more eventful plot and a rather more challenging experience for the heroes. As it stands, this one makes a rather bland novel. I learned from the story at least one interesting new thing about the Roman Empire. I decided years ago that the Romans never conquered Germany because it wasn’t worth the trouble; but I read here that it could have been well worth the trouble if the Romans had known about the silver deposits to be found in Germany.
I also learned a little about the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who had previously escaped my attention because my reading about Roman history has been haphazard.
This novella is the last and longest of Piper's Paratime stories, apart from the novel [b:Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen 1440162 Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen H. Beam Piper https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1264374069l/1440162.SY75.jpg 1430769]. It describes the biggest threat that the Paratime Police have encountered: a large and wealthy criminal organization, including some politicians among its members, that has been slave-trading across different timelines for at least a decade without being noticed, because it operated on timelines unexplored by anyone else.Although it's a good story, it may be a bit confusing if read on its own: it would be better to read the preceding short stories first. In particular, “Police Operation” was the first story about the Paratime Police, and introduces the overall scenario more gently.Note: This novella was first published in 1955, so it is of course old-fashioned in style, in attitudes to men and women, etc. But it's silly to criticize old fiction for being old; if you don't like old fiction, then don't read it.
This is an implausible love story between two implausible people behaving implausibly in an implausible situation. It's quite elegantly written, and I didn't dislike it, but I didn't become engaged in it, because I couldn't believe in any of it.
The two protagonists fight on opposite sides of a seemingly endless and ruthless time war; they come from very different societies. They begin a sort of correspondence, very much at arm's length and without meeting each other, and despite their differences and their remoteness from each other, they somehow fall in love with each other. Could this really happen? Maybe, but I'm sceptical; and the authors failed to convince me.
For this story, Peter Grant is sent reluctantly out of London into rural Herefordshire, next door to Wales, to try to help with the mystery of two 11-year-old girls who have disappeared.
The initial chapters are relatively quiet as the scenario is unhurriedly set up for us. Things start to happen after Beverley Brook also arrives from London, and it becomes clear that some kind of weird shit (excuse the technical jargon) is involved in the disappearance of the girls. The situation gradually becomes quite complicated and exciting.
Positive aspects of this story are the presence of Beverley and the absence of the Faceless Man.
Negative aspects are the temporary replacement of the Faceless Man by a different kind of over-the-top villain, and the absence of most of the other characters we’ve got to know (including Nightingale), who remain in London. The new characters that we meet in Herefordshire are OK, but I don’t particularly mind leaving them in Herefordshire at the end of the story.
I mostly like this episode of the series, but towards the end it introduces us to a whole new level of weirdness that we haven’t encountered before, and it doesn’t quite seem real to me: I have some trouble believing in it. In a fantasy story, it’s the job of the author to convince readers that the impossible happens and that supernatural beings are as real as the chair you’re sitting on. Aaronovitch usually has the power to do this, but in this particular case the power he deploys isn’t quite enough for me (it may be enough for you). The problem doesn’t ruin the book, but it makes the climax of the story somewhat less satisfying than it might have been.
This story is similar in some ways to [b:The Orphans of Raspay 51193044 The Orphans of Raspay (Penric and Desdemona, #7) Lois McMaster Bujold https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562951434l/51193044.SX50_SY75.jpg 71836769], in that Penric and Desdemona are travelling abroad without other company; they meet someone in need of help; and they also meet people who are armed and hostile. However, the two stories differ in many details.This one makes a good story, I enjoy it. But it's rather lacking in congenial characters, apart from Penric and Desdemona. There are none of the characters we know from previous stories, and most of the new characters that appear in it are either unpleasant or unmemorable.Penric is glad to get home after his travels. I wonder what adventure awaits him next.
This is a fantasy novel from 1961, based on a novella from 1953. I think it was well received at the time—the novella was nominated for a Retro-Hugo Award—and it's not a bad story for its age; but six decades have gone by since then. Probably I'd think better of it if I'd read it in the 1960s, which I could have done; but as it happens I didn't read it until 2024.
I don't have any major complaints about it, it's readable enough, and most of it is quite a pleasant tale—although it becomes rather grim towards the end. But the characters didn't grab me, the situation didn't grab me, the writing style is adequate but dated; and I was tempted to abandon it unfinished because I had so little interest in reading on. However, I plodded on and finished it.
I like some of Poul Anderson's sf stories, and reread them periodically; but this is an old-fashioned kind of fantasy, and it doesn't seem to suit me.
This short novel was written in 1970, and it's very much of its time. It's mostly set in 1985 (15 years in the future), but the protagonist (Freddie Fong Fine) and indeed most of the other characters are mainly preoccupied with sex, drugs, and rock music.Freddie is an agent of a strange organization called WAIT SOME, and is investigating a possible grave threat to the security of the USA; but he's amateurish, easily distracted, and often high on something.Now and then we get news items and samples of what life is like in the imagined future year of 1985. On the whole it's an exaggerated version of 1970. Partway through, I realized that I was slightly reminded of [b:Stand on Zanzibar 41069 Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360613921l/41069.SY75.jpg 2184253] (published in 1968), although that's a better book and three times the length of this one.I initially found this book so tedious and unappealing that I was planning to give it one star. It's not immediately obvious that it has any plot at all. Later on, a slender and implausible plot gradually emerges. I decided that maybe I could be generous and give it two stars: which means that I could tolerate reading it once, but I don't plan ever to read it again.There were some creative works from the years around 1970 (books, music) that I still much appreciate. The best seem almost timeless; some are dated but still good; this is very dated and not much good.There's an introduction by the author written some 30 years after the novel, in which he says he intended it as absurdist, comic satire. Well, it's absurd, but it doesn't strike me as effective, either as comedy or as satire. And Richard Lupoff died in 2020 at the age of 85, so nothing I say will bother him in the slightest.
I bought this at the end of 2014, with a dim memory of having seen perhaps part of the film long ago. It's not the kind of thing I normally read, and I didn't get around to reading it until 2024. Then I read the introduction, the first six chapters, the last three chapters, and didn't feel a need to read the middle nine chapters.
It's a study of the psychology and methods of a mostly successful gang of three confidence tricksters—Silas, Liz, and Bob—and the sexual and other tensions between them.
The book is copyright 1967, and the film was released very promptly in 1968—co-produced by the author, though he didn't write the screenplay. I lived through the 1960s as a child, and I've read a fair amount of science fiction written in the 1960s, but I haven't read much fiction set in the real 1960s, and it feels a bit odd now to be taken back to that time, when the Second World War was a relatively fresh memory and some of the slang in use was left over from the 1940s and 1950s.
The author, Len Deighton, was born in 1929, so he was about 38 by the time this book came out: younger than Silas, older than Bob and Liz.
The book is quite well and carefully written, but it's not the sort of book I really enjoy. The ending is OK but seems rather inconclusive and undramatic; perhaps the author wanted to say that stories don't have to end in triumph or disaster. I see from a synopsis that the film altered the ending in an attempt to add drama to it.