Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

Recent reading

Between Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross I have recently found two authors to look into, one pretty successfully and the other who had a free ebook of his first novel.

First is Linda Nagata who Alastair Reynolds lauded/blamed for several of the ideas in his early work on his blog nearly two months ago. So far I’ve gotten through her first two novels and am enjoying them quite a bit. “Tech-Heaven” was enjoyable even with the somewhat dated technology prognostication. I did spend a fair amount of the book trying to figure out just how much of a cryonics booster the author was and to her credit never quite figured it out, though it sure seemed to come down a fair bit on the positive side much of the time.

While figuring out which book of Ms Nagata’s to start with I ran across her twitter account where she had mentioned that one of my favorite author’s (who I had basically lost track of in the last few years), Martha Wells, had recently published “The Cloud Roads”. As usual for her writing, it caught my attention enough that I ended up spending time with it rather then venturing from my hotel and exploring Niagara Falls and it’s environs. Excellent world, great characters, and a well threaded plot made for a fun read.

After that it was back to Linda Nagata for “The Bohr Maker”. While “Tech-Heaven” had been somewhat obviously a first novel, “The Bohr Maker” is from an obviously more experienced author. The characters were more fleshed out and it read more smoothly with less to distract me into thinking about what the author’s motives where. I’m still not sure I could recommend it to my friends that prefer character relationships to world-building, but it’s certainly at least worth a look.

I had purchased both “Tech-Heaven” and “The Bohr Maker” through the store on my Barnes & Noble Nook Color but had seen Linda Nagata flogging Book View Cafe pretty hard in her twitter stream and figured I’d give that a try for the next novel in The Nanotech Succession, “Deception Well”. I haven’t cracked the cover quite yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

However I haven’t decided if I’m going to start that first or try Karl Schroeder’s “Ventus”. He has been doing some guest writing on Charles Stross’ blog for the past couple of weeks and has been more then interesting enough to take a look at, and who am I to turn down a free book in the process.