Lui Cixn is a very very famous author from China, virtually unknown outside China. I recently picked up the Three Body Problem, which was e first of a trilogy. I learned a lot about Chinese Culture from the first book, as it mostly occurs in the recent past, but the other two are in the far future. The series I would classify as Nhilistic Fiction, in this case Science Fiction. There is a place for it, K. J. Parker writes this stuff in fantasy. It is a very good read, but as you follow the character you begin rooting for them and then as the tension builds things get worse and then at the moment of triumph, everything collapses for one reason or another, usually betrayal by family and everyone dies— I mean, the entire city is butchered, the nation is put to the sword, the family is cut to pieces, everyone dies.
James SA Corey is writing the Expanse Series. There have been six books in each of the last six years and there is supposed to be nine books total. The SciFi is uplifting, dark and gritty. You feel that life on Earth is tenuous and that the entire civilization is on the brink of flowering or collapsing, they way good writing should make you feel. And now it is a series on television. The series on television is almost as good as the books, almost. The Television series is Exceptionally good. The detail that they put into things, like the technology and the people make it feel real. The one and only problem with the television series is that the casting choices have blotted out how I pictured the characters in the books. But, it is really really good. And e books are coming fast. Nine books in nine years. I think I am going to introduce my sister to the series, the TV series, cause she has two kids, commutes three hours a day and all that silly stuff.
Ben Arronovitch. A series based around the rivers of London. We are taking magical police work. Magic has been on the rise in the past few years and e magical investigations office of e met has increased from one officer in the last fifty years to two, and there are more people coming. The first book delt with a ghost that was possessing people and making them carry out crimes based on Punch and Judy, the real bases for the popular marionette routine. We meet the Goddess of the Lower Thames and her sisters the Tyburn and Berverly Brook, small tributaries to the Thames. They have magic and power, temporal power too. What is more is the characters are multiethnic. the main character is a second generation migrant from Africa. His father is a jazz musician. The goddess Thames is a West indies woman who killed her self in the 60s and found a vacancy in the Celestial Bureaucracy instead of dying. As the series progresses we meet Father Thames, country Thames who unlike the city vibrancy is filled with hickishness and old world charm, old world as in Roman Old. And magic, and London. A fun read and a pleasant way to spend your time.
Charles Stross. I was flipping through the front cover at what he has written, and then I began to start checking them off mentally, I had read them all. SciFi, far future, near future, a future where humans all died and robots aped humanity, SciFi fanatasy present day, I guess that is just Fantasy. The one I am reading now is called collectively the Laundry Files, because the initial building the secret agents were based in was fronted by a Laundrymat. Picture a world where the Nazis were really doing something constructive with their death camps, they were killing people to open up dimensional rifts and make deals with demons to gain power. That was the first book. The Second book was a parody of Goldfinger with the mystical agent slipping into a spell where he liked to wear tuxedos and he had to investigate a man with a cat in the Bahamas. There was a girl too, but she was a mermaid from the benthic depths. Really. Okay here is the premise for the books: there is magic, but it is not what you think. It is advanced mathematical formulas that use energy to break through the curtain between worlds and other outside creatiures give you power for creating these formula. The formula are very complex and hard to do so there were not many magical eruptions until people developed computers powerful enough to do them for you. When it happens you get a knock on your door and you are given two choices, you can join the secret organization and except a severe pay cut and hunt down magical law breakers and attempted invasions or you can die. Not really much of a choice really. Oh and using magic is bad, queue drug Comercial with eggs. Except, when you do magic without major protections demons eat your brain, so really bad. Each book is about the secret organization and the characters in it and how they police the world.
Each book is based around a theme and each book is written after the events, they are debriefing note put into file. The stories are filled with funny acronyms and as I said they are based around themes, like James Bond, Vampires, Nazis and the one I am currently reading, Superheroes. Because the computing power of the world is getting out of hand, the number of instances are increasing, from one per million people per year to one per month then three per month per million people. Remember London England has about 10 million people so that means one per day. One day Mo, an agent with a bone white violin with a sticker that says 'This Maching Kills Demons' because the violin in her hands does that and more, is called to Trafalgar Square because something is happening. She is a middle aged woman and that means she is effectively invisible. She arrives to find a pyramid of naked people and other people being added to the pyramid, one at a time, lifted up, stripped of their clothes and placed at the top of the fourth pillar in the square. There is no time to lose and she whips out her violin and dispatches the villain and saves the people, only about five thousand people had pulled out their cellphones and have posted movies to Facebook of her doing it and a live broadcast of the BBC too. Opps. Oh well, deflection time. The solution is to create a fictitious organization that is fighting super human villains. Hilarity insues.
I was entering my favourite bookstore in Big Smoke and they had a bunch of Neil Gaiman books on a shelf that had just been priced. The release date was in five days. They said that they had no problem selling them as the book was already out in Europe. Norse Gods. You can find this stuff on e Internet but it is not something I have the patients to look at all the time, the Internet that is, so seeing it in a book, I said sure why not. Besides I know WaifGirl would read it if I gave it to her and she is stuck up in Bonnieland. So I got it and read it. Different than I was expecting. Loki is the villain but he is also the hero. His pranks are evil, but he is viewed as that is his nature, killing him is the consequence unless he can think of a way out of it. It starts at the start and it ends with the end of the world, where it begins again. I am not sure if it is true to the originals but it was very interesting.
Hopefully I will read all the books I brought up then I can deposit them in the used bookstore and let someone else read them, maybe WaifGirl, but probably not.
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