New Comic Day! (and Book Foo)
Apr. 7th, 2004 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6This week I got:
Alpha Flight #2 (Better than #1, but still not good enough that I want to buy anymore. Dropped)
Exiles #45 (Better than I thought it'd be, with a nice twist for Morph)
New X-Men #155 (Not bad actually, though a couple of 'huh?' moments.)
Supreme Power #9 (Excellent, great issue as usual)
Uncanny X-Men #442 (Again, not bad, with one really big ridiculous bit that seriously mars the story, though)
And, of course, a Gyro...
Also:
Finished: The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Started: Double Contact, by James White
Thoughts, minor spoilery info past the cut tag.
The Moon and the Sun did get better as the book went on. The 'courtly' plotlines never really drew me in, but I accept that they're important to understanding certain roles in the story and why people behave the way they do, and the idea that the King is sometimes a prisoner of his role as well. Still, once that was mostly out of the way and the Sea Monster's plot became center stage, I found myself enjoying the book much more and actually excited to see what happened next. The resolution (or rather, the aftermath of the resolution) was a tad predictable, but they did pull a nice twist with sea monsters and why we don't know about them, although it still felt somewhat unfinished.
I was also faintly amused that the main character felt so much like a Mary Sue. She was this beautiful, extremely talented girl, who all the men in the book seemed to want, saves the day, and wins true love. It wasn't bad enough to annoy me (after all, most main characters save the day and are extremely talented in one way or another), but it amused me, especially since her first name was Marie. I took to calling her in my head 'Marie-Sue de la Croix'.
I think, if I could have skipped past the 'courtly' stuff early on, or cut down on it significantly, I'd have rated this higher than Dreamsnake, but as it is I liked Dreamsnake more.
Double Contact is the last of the Sector General novels by James White. There probably would have eventually been more, but the author died a couple of years ago. This one focuses on the alien Dr. Prilicla, an empathic insect-like surgeon from a very low gravity world. He's the medical captain of an ambulance ship which is sent out on a mission when two separate distress beacons from unknown civilizations are detected, as well as one from a Monitor Corps (the 'Federation') that was sent to investigate. The two undiscovered species may well be at war with each other.
I'm only a very little bit into it, so of course I have to deal with the (occasionally quite clumsy) recapping of a number of things that anyone who's read the rest of the books already knows. Still, I've always liked the stories by the time the book ends, so I look forward to finishing up the series.
Alpha Flight #2 (Better than #1, but still not good enough that I want to buy anymore. Dropped)
Exiles #45 (Better than I thought it'd be, with a nice twist for Morph)
New X-Men #155 (Not bad actually, though a couple of 'huh?' moments.)
Supreme Power #9 (Excellent, great issue as usual)
Uncanny X-Men #442 (Again, not bad, with one really big ridiculous bit that seriously mars the story, though)
And, of course, a Gyro...
Also:
Finished: The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Started: Double Contact, by James White
Thoughts, minor spoilery info past the cut tag.
The Moon and the Sun did get better as the book went on. The 'courtly' plotlines never really drew me in, but I accept that they're important to understanding certain roles in the story and why people behave the way they do, and the idea that the King is sometimes a prisoner of his role as well. Still, once that was mostly out of the way and the Sea Monster's plot became center stage, I found myself enjoying the book much more and actually excited to see what happened next. The resolution (or rather, the aftermath of the resolution) was a tad predictable, but they did pull a nice twist with sea monsters and why we don't know about them, although it still felt somewhat unfinished.
I was also faintly amused that the main character felt so much like a Mary Sue. She was this beautiful, extremely talented girl, who all the men in the book seemed to want, saves the day, and wins true love. It wasn't bad enough to annoy me (after all, most main characters save the day and are extremely talented in one way or another), but it amused me, especially since her first name was Marie. I took to calling her in my head 'Marie-Sue de la Croix'.
I think, if I could have skipped past the 'courtly' stuff early on, or cut down on it significantly, I'd have rated this higher than Dreamsnake, but as it is I liked Dreamsnake more.
Double Contact is the last of the Sector General novels by James White. There probably would have eventually been more, but the author died a couple of years ago. This one focuses on the alien Dr. Prilicla, an empathic insect-like surgeon from a very low gravity world. He's the medical captain of an ambulance ship which is sent out on a mission when two separate distress beacons from unknown civilizations are detected, as well as one from a Monitor Corps (the 'Federation') that was sent to investigate. The two undiscovered species may well be at war with each other.
I'm only a very little bit into it, so of course I have to deal with the (occasionally quite clumsy) recapping of a number of things that anyone who's read the rest of the books already knows. Still, I've always liked the stories by the time the book ends, so I look forward to finishing up the series.
