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Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)

2014-07-21 00:00

Cover for Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)

Review:

YA Aber­crom­bie means it's a lit­tle lighter in the gore, much lighter in the sex, yet still pret­ty heavy in the treach­ery and mis­for­tune.

And a big plus! Even though this is part of a tril­o­gy, it works fine as a stand­alone book! It has a be­gin­ning a mid­dle and an end­ing, too!

A fun read, will hap­pi­ly read the se­quel­s.

Heaven and Mel

2014-07-16 00:00

Cover for Heaven and Mel

Review:

Two stars is "it was ok". In this case, it means "it was ok for what it is". What it is is crap. Ok crap, though!

Jow Es­zter­has is prob­a­bly the worst writ­er I have ev­er read. He is a sanc­ti­mo­nious, delu­sion­al, self­-­glo­ri­fy­ing as­s. He be­lieves god talks to him about his movies. He be­lieves the vir­gin sends sig­nals to him and his pro­duc­ers green­light­ing his scripts (and even then, they don't get pro­duced!)

And he writes about an­oth­er sanc­ti­mo­nious, delu­sion­al, self­-­glo­ri­fy­ing as­s, Mel Gib­son. They re­al­ly sound pret­ty much the same to me, ex­cept one sounds an­gry and stupid, and the oth­er sounds pet­ty and stupid.

Al­leged­ly, the au­thor had such fear of Mel Gib­son he slept hold­ing a rosary in one hand and a golf club in the oth­er while stay­ing at his house. Then, af­ter a year of work­ing on a script with this man he feared so much, he takes his teenage son and wife to stay at Mel Gib­son's house in a se­clud­ed, re­mote lo­ca­tion in Cos­ta Ri­ca, so his son can go on long na­ture walks with Mel Gib­son.

How does that end? With the fam­i­ly so afraid of Mel Gib­son they sleep with butch­er knives un­der their pil­lows.

That's be­yond stupid, that's un­be­liev­ably stupid., so I ei­ther have to be­lieve Joe Es­zter­has lacks the com­mon sense evo­lu­tion gave a gar­den slug, or will­ing­ly put his fam­i­ly in harms way, or things did­n't quite hap­pen that way.

So, ei­ther the au­thor is a mo­ron, he's evil, or he's a liar. Please no­tice that those are not mu­tu­al­ly ex­clu­sive ex­pla­na­tion­s.

If the av­er­age chris­tian is any­thing like him and Mel Gib­son, I sure am hap­py to be an athe­ist.

Fi­nal­ly, the prose is aw­ful. How a per­son so in­ca­pable of thread­ing three sen­tences in­to a co­her­ent para­graph has man­aged to make a liv­ing off his writ­ing is a mis­tery.

The Goblin Emperor (The Goblin Emperor, #1)

2014-07-14 00:00

Cover for The Goblin Emperor (The Goblin Emperor, #1)

Review:

I liked it a lot. Sort of a fish out of wa­ter sto­ry about a boy that does­n't know how to be an em­per­or, and his strug­gle with tra­di­tion, com­pli­cat­ed fam­i­ly his­to­ry, etc.

Nit­pick: The nam­ing schemes are *painful*. They are ex­plained in an ap­pen­dix that it would prob­a­bly be a good idea to read be­fore the book.

Lockstep

2014-07-10 00:00

Cover for Lockstep

Review:

Ev­ery once in a while some­one comes up with an idea and you slap your fore­head be­cause it feels ob­vi­ous in ret­ro­spec­t. Lock­step is one of those.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, in SF, if FTL trav­el is im­pos­si­ble, but sta­sis is pos­si­ble, easy, and cheap, you get in­ter­stel­lar trav­el that's a one-way trip. Lock­step adds "why not hi­ber­nate EV­ERY­ONE so they wait for trav­eller­s?".

And once you have that idea, you get "fake FTL". But that al­so brings up the ques­tion of how long is it a good idea to hi­ber­nate. And once there is a large net­work of worlds hi­ber­nat­ing in lock­step, does it make eco­nom­ic sense to hi­ber­nate less than them? Or more? How about re­source ac­cu­mu­la­tion on hi­ber­na­tion? How about en­forc­ing lock­step? And so on, and this book ex­plores a lot of that.

So, the world build­ing is awe­some, plus it's orig­i­nal! The plot it­self is sort of a throw­away.

Spell or High Water (Magic 2.0, #2)

2014-07-01 00:00

Cover for Spell or High Water (Magic 2.0, #2)

Review:

Yes, white-­cis-geek wish ful­fill­ment fan­ta­sy yad­da yad­da yad­da.

It still is fun­ny, in­ter­est­ing, and a quick, en­ter­tain­ing read. Look­ing for­ward to the 3rd book if it ev­er hap­pen­s.
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