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2016-01-29 10:10

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

  • Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
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  • Review:

    It's a Vorkosigan book by Lois McMaster Bujold, so you know what you are going to get:

    * Puns
    * Gentle prose
    * Some jokes
    * A story where the enemies are organizational and logistic challenges in a peaceful environment.

    Ok, that last one is mostly the case with the recent Vorkosigan books. Long gone are the interstellar intrigues and spaceships fighting wach other. Now? Our protagonists are faced with the following questions:

    ¿What do I do with all this concrete mixer?

    ¿Should I ask her out, or is it going to be weird because she is the widow of my ex-lover we use to have threesomes with and we are having complicated 3-parent babies and technically the regent of the planet where I am the top military authority?

    You know, that sort of book.

2016-01-27 00:00

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)

  • Author: Liu Cixin
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  • Review:

    It's very good. It's also surprisingly difficult to read because of the missing resonance of the cultural and historical references. Sure, I know about Marie Curie, but what happens when a character mentions Wu Chien-Shiung "went even further than Marie Curie"? Sure, she went further because she became a physicist after Marie Curie died! Why is she even brought up?

    Is that some inherent chinese chauvinism in the original text? I have no idea, but I prefer to take it as an extra opportunity: a novel about alien contact written by a mildly alien writer. Sure, a "real" alien would be much different, in fact it would probably be unintelligible to me. So this is the mild substitute.

    I liked it a lot.

2016-01-21 03:29

Shift (Shift, #1-3; Silo, #2)

  • Author: Hugh Howey
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  • Review:

    And I am done with this series. Had to force myself to finish reading it, to be honest. Not that there's anything **wrong** with it, but it was just ... I don't know.

2016-01-21 03:29

Shift (Silo, #2)

  • Author: Hugh Howey
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  • Review:

    And I am done with this series. Had to force myself to finish reading it, to be honest. Not that there's anything **wrong** with it, but it was just ... I don't know.

2015-12-15 00:00

Gateway to Fourline

  • Author: Pam Brondos
  • Rating:
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  • Review:

    I got this as a free book on some Amazon promotion. It's an oldfashioned "gateway to a fantasy world" story, like the Narnia books or the Magicians trilogy.

    Did not like it much: it's slow-paced, the characters are shallow, and the "magical world" just looks like a boring version of the middle ages with an arbitrary and largely undescribed magic system, and a random evil race of tree-dwelling blue spider-monkeys. And then it just ends, expecting the reader to go pay for more. Sorry, no.

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