I’ve been following the Forge of Destiny / Threads of Destiny forum game for many years now though these days I’m just a reader and rarely participate in voting. I still consider it the best xianxia story I know of. This book is set in that same fantasy world but features stories about other characters other than Ling Qi, the protagonist of the main series. Many of these are Ling Qi’s friends and associates but there are also plenty of those from other times and places. I’ve already read most of these stories before as almost all of them are available online for free but I bought this to support the author and it’s nice to have them in a single volume. I will note that many of the stories don’t really stand on their own but feel more like worldbuilding snippets. Those who aren’t already following the main story might not get much out of this book.
Something far different than the norm for me this month and it’s novella-length, yet published as a book. This particular work is I think significant not only for its text but also for who its author was, when it was published and its significance as a parable for the rise of the Nazis. Ernst Jünger was a highly decorated soldier, a militarist and a political figure of the conservative right. Yet he was also opposed to the Nazis and was indirectly implicated in the famous Operation Valkyrie plot against Adolf Hitler’s life. This of course made him a more polarizing and fascinating person. The book itself is set in an idyllic fictional land that is described in such a dreamlike way that it may well be considered fantasy. The story itself is short and simple but is rife with symbolism that can be interpreted in any number of ways.
I was leery about the premise behind this novel when I first heard about but hey if people like a genderbent version of the Chinese classic Water Margin, why not? Then it was a finalist for the Nebula Award and was recommended by a bunch of critics, so I thought I should give it a shot. Specifically I was curious about web fiction not being widely recognized and wondered how a properly published book lauded by mainstream critics would match up. My verdict is not well at all. It’s an entertaining action-adventure that can be sometimes quite amusing but I wouldn’t consider it a deep book or even good writing.
I’ve read plenty of short stories by Harlan Ellison though I don’t consider myself to be much of a fan. His novels are not considered notable and I suspect that a large part of his legacy comes from his contributions to television shows like the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone. His Dangerous Visions anthologies were hugely influential however and this final book was announced in 1973 and never came out. Ellison died in 2018 but his estate’s executor J. Michael Straczynski continued working on it and so now here it is.
This is one of the vintage science-fiction books I’ve been dipping into from time to time, one of the recommendations I got from YouTube. I found it notable in that it can be sharply divided into two parts which are very different from one another. I’d characterize the first part as a fairly stereotypical military SF story of the era that feels like it’s working towards the protagonist becoming an action hero. But then partway through he gets killed and then things get really crazy. Unfortunately I didn’t really like either part and I disliked the low-key sexism throughout. The best thing that I can say is that it’s a short book and so was easy to get through.
Again, venturing out of my usual habit of reading only fiction, I decided to read this so-called fictionalized biography which has been making the rounds. It supposedly recounts the life of the legendary polymath John von Neumann but is really more general than that. It’s full of anecdotes about the circle of genius scientists around von Neumann and most significantly traces how his ideas led to what is today called AI. It’s not really a popular science book as it’s very thin in terms of scientific facts and most of that is common knowledge. What it does offer is the inside perspective of many of these famous personalities, at least as imagined by author Benjamin Labatut. It’s debatable how authentic these stories are true in spirit according to what we know about them and that has to be good enough.
I’ve been wanting to read this entry in the Culture series for ages but couldn’t because for some unknown reason it is not available on Kindle when all of the other books are. In the end, I was forced to buy a paperback book for the first time in years. I particularly wanted to read this book because it supposedly describes how the Culture responds when it encounters an entity far more powerful than itself. It’s easy to uphold your professed ideals when nothing actually threatens you so the real test is when you face at least a peer of equal power. Unfortunately this book did not adequately answer that dilemma at all as the entity is just not that hostile. It is arguably more about how the various factions inside the Culture itself exploits the opportunity the entity presents as well as a love story that I find distracting and not very interesting.
