Book Foo (and a bit of school foo)
Jan. 20th, 2004 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Heh. today my Computer Networks teacher quoted both Star Trek and the Simpsons.
Anyway,
Finished: Swan Songs (The complete Hooded Swan stories) by Brian Stableford
Started: Treason by Orson Scott Card
Very minor spoilery comments (nothing plotwise beyond 'back of the book' stuff, just general feeling wise) after the cut tag.
The Grainger/Hooded Swan stories hold up very well to rereading. The first time I read them, I read them as individual books (the collection collects: The Hooded Swan, Rhapsody in Black, Promised Land, the Paradise Game, the Fenris Device, and Swan Song), sometimes with months between me reading one book and finding and reading the next book.
Reading them as one lump makes a couple things clearer... for one, there is actually a good deal of character change of the main character. Sometimes you can't tell it all at once (he's an unreliable narrator especially when it comes to his own feelings and motives). In some cases it's that his perceptions of himself and others become more honest... characters who seem one way turn out not to be quite that way, and it's not so much their actions that have changed, but his perceptions of them.
The stories also hold up remarkably well, not suffering datedness other books sometimes do (it was written in the 70s). It's probably partly because it's set so far in the future that predictions on society don't seem ridiculous, and the technology posited still doesn't exist. I think at worst, there's a reference or two to computer brains of ships being extraordinarily large.
My favorite of the books was probably the Fenris Device, as it shows his character off in a number of ways and is just a lot of fun. My least favorite was probably Swan Songs.. in part because of how it resolved certain things, but also because it was the last one. I wanted more of them. I still hold out a faint hope that he'll decide to write another sometime.
And yes, I still want to play Grainger, or a Grainger-like character in some game somewhere sometime, like a Firefly MU* (even though he'd have to be altered).
Anyway, "Treason" is by Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, one of my favorite books. I'd never heard of this book, but I found it at the used book store for a dollar, so bought it.
It's about the descendants of exiles to a planet with very little int he way of hard metals. The main character is heir to the throne of one of the families, and possessed with the gift of extremely rapid regeneration, but because of a particular quirk of his genes, he's removed from the line of succession and 'exiled' with a mission to investigate one of the other countries. So far it's not bad, fairly enjoyable but not great.
Anyway,
Finished: Swan Songs (The complete Hooded Swan stories) by Brian Stableford
Started: Treason by Orson Scott Card
Very minor spoilery comments (nothing plotwise beyond 'back of the book' stuff, just general feeling wise) after the cut tag.
The Grainger/Hooded Swan stories hold up very well to rereading. The first time I read them, I read them as individual books (the collection collects: The Hooded Swan, Rhapsody in Black, Promised Land, the Paradise Game, the Fenris Device, and Swan Song), sometimes with months between me reading one book and finding and reading the next book.
Reading them as one lump makes a couple things clearer... for one, there is actually a good deal of character change of the main character. Sometimes you can't tell it all at once (he's an unreliable narrator especially when it comes to his own feelings and motives). In some cases it's that his perceptions of himself and others become more honest... characters who seem one way turn out not to be quite that way, and it's not so much their actions that have changed, but his perceptions of them.
The stories also hold up remarkably well, not suffering datedness other books sometimes do (it was written in the 70s). It's probably partly because it's set so far in the future that predictions on society don't seem ridiculous, and the technology posited still doesn't exist. I think at worst, there's a reference or two to computer brains of ships being extraordinarily large.
My favorite of the books was probably the Fenris Device, as it shows his character off in a number of ways and is just a lot of fun. My least favorite was probably Swan Songs.. in part because of how it resolved certain things, but also because it was the last one. I wanted more of them. I still hold out a faint hope that he'll decide to write another sometime.
And yes, I still want to play Grainger, or a Grainger-like character in some game somewhere sometime, like a Firefly MU* (even though he'd have to be altered).
Anyway, "Treason" is by Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, one of my favorite books. I'd never heard of this book, but I found it at the used book store for a dollar, so bought it.
It's about the descendants of exiles to a planet with very little int he way of hard metals. The main character is heir to the throne of one of the families, and possessed with the gift of extremely rapid regeneration, but because of a particular quirk of his genes, he's removed from the line of succession and 'exiled' with a mission to investigate one of the other countries. So far it's not bad, fairly enjoyable but not great.
