Away Trip Books

Hello everyone,

Things are still being weird out there aren't they ? I'm ok but I'll be working at home for the next couple of days. I did a shop tonight and couldn't believe how much the place had been hit by the Locust Horde.

But enough about that - I bet you're seeing far too much about What's Occurring from other places and you want a place to get away from it. How about some books ?

After a good while missing diving in to the books, the Canada trip gave me lots of excuse to dive in to them again. I had finished Embers of War before the trip but not opened up another book since.

The first book to be devoured was All Systems Red, of the Murderbot Chronicles by Martha Wells.

This one is written completely from the perspective of the Murderbot, who hasn't got a name (can't remember it) outside of calling themselves Murderbot. They're a cyborg mechanism that acts as the security guard for a group of scientists surveying a planet. It sets off at a pretty smart pace and, with a few suitable interludes to let you catch your breath, keeps rocking along quite quickly too.

There is a lot of what's going on inside the Murderbot's head and you never really lose track of what's going on. Murderbot likes to think their way through the situation while the inner narration explains what's going on to the reader. That situation rapidly develops into one where Murderbot and peeps end up in extreme danger and funnily enough, what Murderbot would actually quite like to do is get back to devouring copious amounts of entertainment video.

An intriguing book and I'll definitely be back for more.

Oh - the setting is medium distant future with humanity out among the stars, attempting to not be eaten by various hostile fauna. The tech involved in the story is very believable. It's advanced enough to have artificially intelligent combat robots but it's still grounded in a certain limited reality that doesn't depend on pseudo reality stuff to make it work.

And then we have Tiamat's Wrath ...

I can't say too much about Tiamat's Wrath by the Expanse people, James S.A. Corey. It's book 8 in a series that will be 9 books long, so you can imagine how much spoiler potential there is here.

I think what I can say is that there is plenty of space based shenanigans going on. There's character development. There's new people. There's old people. There's old new people. There's new old people. And there's all the other shenanigans going on, both at the scale of people and all the way up to the scale of solar systems.

It's a spectacle of a book that bodes well for where the series continues to go and I will most definitely be coming back for book 9. I am very intrigued as to how they plan to end the series. I was most certainly glued from start to finish and it did very nicely for the second half of the flights there plus the evenings at the accommodation.

Next up was Big Ship At The End Of The Universe by Alex White.

This one most definitely dove whole heartedly into Space Magic. Indeed, it depended upon it.

It's set in the medium far future again, where humanity has well and truly spread itself around the stars and gotten comfortable enough to go racing. Somewhere along the way, humanity has evolved a whole new organ or sub organ in the brain, which is a source of magic. Mechanists can dive into machinery and computers. There are life mages, shield mages, sniper mages, analysis mages ... and more.

It was a genuinely interesting and very different world to be in, with Boots and Nilah being fun characters for the book to be centred around. There's the dashing racer and the old cynic that play off each other and it works oh so well for the book. There are a host of other characters too and you actually genuinely care about how they're getting on. At least I did when I was reading it.

It doesn't pull its punches with how hard some of the effects hit, the tech of this world is very definitely set up to win the fights and things like the Geneva Convention have been thoroughly forgotten about. There are machines that slice and dice people, neurotoxins for lunch and a massive conspiracy going on. It's a dangerous place and our heroines throw themselves at it fully as they launch in to an epic treasure hunt ...

I'll definitely be back for the next book in the series too. Alex White created a very curious place to base his stories in.

Last one for this collection is Old Man's War by John Scalzi (technically, I haven't finished it yet but there's only 3 chapters to go).

This one is set in probably more like the near future. Humanity is in the stars ... although Earth only really knows about this from a comfortable distance. As our story starts, our central character is contemplating signing up for the off world military.

There is an on planet military ... but in this story people above 75 years old get a chance to join up for the off world Colonial military, which then can lead to a life in a body freed from the ravages of their 75+ years so far. However, there is a cost ... they can never return to Earth. As soon as they leave, they are essentially dead to Earth.

How this is done is something I'll leave to readers of the book.

There is a bit of Space Magic in here but it's stuff that's done well and it makes the story rattle along nicely. Some books try to rationalise what they are doing behind the scenes. I think the best books just summarise that as a kind of Space Magic. The character chosen for the narration trick isn't going to understand, so the exposition in the novel doesn't attempt to either. It works and gets the Space Magic out of the way quickly.

What's more important are the characters, what they're going through and what they're thinking. And this is a book that's really rough on its characters. And that's done well too, with John Scalzi's trademark sense of off ball humour making them human and offsetting that roughness.

This is another one where I've bought the next book in the series (ok, it's on sale at the moment) before finishing the current book.

A good set of books ! I think the next one is likely to be a fact book, an overdue Ignition.

If you are having to face a period of being shut in for a while, I hope you have something to keep you entertained and a good book is excellent for that.

Be well everybody.