So this is the last book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy about Athena and Apollo’s project to found Plato’s Just City. It’s pretty clear that this was written only to close out the trilogy as there is very little plot. Much of it consists of a series of philosophical essays by Crocus, the first of the Workers, the robots Athena brought to build the city, to gain sentience. The much promised renewed contact between the Platonic cities and the rest of humanity also turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. But it does have time-travel, aliens and even a dinosaur!
It’s been a while since I last wrote one of these broad overviews of the various pieces of online fiction I’ve been reading. The truth is that I spend far more time reading so-called amateur online fiction than published books nowadays and recently I find that I’ve been enjoying them more as well. And of course many of the most successful pieces of online fiction eventually make their way to become published as traditional books. By far, my current favorite of the lot is The Wandering Inn web serial by pirateaba. I’ve been following this for a few years now so I thought I’d already written something about this but it turns out that I hadn’t. So I’m writing this to convince more people to try it out.
Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.
This Russian novel is probably best known as the inspiration of the video game of the same name though I have not played it as I rarely play shooters these days. It was however first made available online in the Russian language, making it an early example of the web fiction that I read so much of these days, and the author Dmitry Glukhovsky apparently started writing it at the age of 18. I decided to check it out after reading some good reviews of it and while it certainly feels like a Russian novel, I found that I don’t like it much at all.
You may not know who Christopher Priest is and I myself have not read anything by him prior to this, but I’d bet that just about everyone knows about at least one of his novels due to it being adapted into the film The Prestige by Christopher Nolan. This book is an anthology of some of his short stories spanning the many decades of his career. What is especially interesting about this collection is that each story is accompanied by a foreword telling something about that story came to be and an afterword recounting the aftermath of its publications. I’m sure that this would be invaluable to other aspiring writers.
I’ve been trying to be more up to date on current science-fiction books and this is one of the most talked about ones recently. It is the debut novel of its author, Rivers Solomon, who self-identifies using the pronoun they and them, and indeed many of the characters in it have atypical genders. I was also attracted to its premise of reimagining the scenario of black slaves in the America South on board a generation ship. In the end however I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would as it leans so heavily on its inspirational sources that it’s barely much of a story on its own.
New author for me time, with Daniel Abraham being today best known as one half of the duo who write under the pen name James S. A. Corey and are responsible for The Expanse series. I’ve never read that either but I love the televisions series. This novel was his debut and was recommended by many, being the first book of a quartet. Unfortunately while the world he creates here is indeed intriguing, I ended up not really liking this novel and I doubt I’ll read the rest of the series.
