gap-filling reading
Aug. 17th, 2017 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraOryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. My note on my to-read list was just "prioritize this already", one of those must-reads I just kept not getting to. It is very powerful and well-done but I can't exactly say I *enjoyed* it; I admit I like the plucky survivalist fantasy of "fun" takes on the apocalypse like David Palmer's Emergence (a longtime favorite) much more than Atwood's realistic squalor. The world is too bleak right now to read anything this remorselessly non-escapist. Dubious choice, me.
The Human Division and The End of All Things, John Scalzi. I had read the rest of the series and always sort of intended to finish it, and I ran out of library ebooks and I had them on my phone because Josh had bought them, so. Scalzi is very, very good at writing books that keep you turning the pages, and then at the end you think, sure, that was fine, I would buy another one of these. I don't mean this as a criticism, I really admire Scalzi's professionalism and skill in producing A Satisfying Reading Experience. He - spoilers - did something so interesting in the Old Man's War universe, creating the United Federation of Planets and not letting humans be part of it - I can think of lots of stories where 20th century humans find out there's a League of Planets out there, judging them or whatever, but not a lot of future-set stories where aliens are doing the big good thing and spacefaring humans are left out or the enemy. Creates a good built-in tension to the world, that things are not how we would want them to be, and yet ultimately he has to either undermine that premise or leave it unsatisfying. I felt like in the end he tried to split the difference and it was kind of a meh ending. (Also, whatever happened to the whole "Special Forces want more rights/recognition" thread? I kept expecting that to come back in but it was just dropped.)
It's sort of funny, I was thinking of Oryx as a classic from quite awhile ago (I would have guessed the 90s) and the Old Man's War books as "recent", but Oryx is actually from 2003 and OMW from 2005. Of course Human Division and End are more recent, 2013 and 2015, but the world is still pinned down by the worldbuilding from 2005... I wonder if more "literary" works automatically seem older to me, hmm.
The Human Division and The End of All Things, John Scalzi. I had read the rest of the series and always sort of intended to finish it, and I ran out of library ebooks and I had them on my phone because Josh had bought them, so. Scalzi is very, very good at writing books that keep you turning the pages, and then at the end you think, sure, that was fine, I would buy another one of these. I don't mean this as a criticism, I really admire Scalzi's professionalism and skill in producing A Satisfying Reading Experience. He - spoilers - did something so interesting in the Old Man's War universe, creating the United Federation of Planets and not letting humans be part of it - I can think of lots of stories where 20th century humans find out there's a League of Planets out there, judging them or whatever, but not a lot of future-set stories where aliens are doing the big good thing and spacefaring humans are left out or the enemy. Creates a good built-in tension to the world, that things are not how we would want them to be, and yet ultimately he has to either undermine that premise or leave it unsatisfying. I felt like in the end he tried to split the difference and it was kind of a meh ending. (Also, whatever happened to the whole "Special Forces want more rights/recognition" thread? I kept expecting that to come back in but it was just dropped.)
It's sort of funny, I was thinking of Oryx as a classic from quite awhile ago (I would have guessed the 90s) and the Old Man's War books as "recent", but Oryx is actually from 2003 and OMW from 2005. Of course Human Division and End are more recent, 2013 and 2015, but the world is still pinned down by the worldbuilding from 2005... I wonder if more "literary" works automatically seem older to me, hmm.
