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Post by mikef6 on Apr 27, 2023 14:57:46 GMT
Diablo Mesa (2022) by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Longish thriller that starts out with a great premise, mystery, attractive characters and is set in my home state of New Mexico, but the explanation and extended action at the end is so outlandish and silly that it ruins the whole story. I ended up hating the whole thing and vowing never to read another Preston and Child.
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Post by ant-mac on Apr 28, 2023 18:26:35 GMT
AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT by Arthur C Clarke and its sequel, BEYOND THE FALL OF NIGHT by Gregory Benford.
AGAINST is the short story which Clarke later expanded into the masterful THE CITY AND THE STARS, one of my favourite novels by him.
BEYOND is a chaotic mess, with some interesting ideas, but which ultimately fails to come together as a satisfying narrative and sequel to its vastly superior predecessor.
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Post by ant-mac on Apr 30, 2023 10:13:38 GMT
THE LION OF COMMARRE, by Arthur C Clarke.
On a united Earth in the far future, with a utopian but static Human society, a dissatisfied young man searches for "something more" in a world that believes it has discovered everything and ceases to advance.
It's a solid short story with some interesting ideas and moments, but it often gets overshadowed by Clarke's more famous and influential works.
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Post by jervistetch on May 1, 2023 3:23:38 GMT
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Post by Nalkarj on May 1, 2023 17:41:53 GMT
Quick reread: Ten Days’ Wonder, 1948, by “Ellery Queen” (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee). This book annoys me, because the first time I read it I was blown away. This is a well-written detective story/thriller, with traces of postwar noir, touching on big themes (existentialism, psychology, religion) and with a stunning premise. Then I reread it and I thought it sorta stunk. And now I’ve reread it again, and unfortunately I still think it stinks. It’s fundamentally “broken,” as insightful mystery critic Rich McD used to write on his blog, as both a mystery and a book. As a mystery, a huge problem is that (I’ll be circumspect in the spoilers, in case you haven’t read the book but are interested in what I’m jabbering about) Ellery’s first solution likely won’t convince the reader. (That it convinces the public, a major plot point, is unbelievable.) It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s anticlimactic, and once you realize that, you’ll probably guess the real killer’s identity without much effort.
The, er, pattern Ellery discovers is neat, but in the first (and, to some degree, even the actual) solution, it’s bizarrely irrelevant.
Lesson: In mysteries, the false solution has to be at least somewhat convincing, or else it’s really just filler. Cf. the great false solutions in John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, and a bunch of Christianna Brand’s books. And that is leaving aside the problems with Ten Days’ Wonder as a fair-play puzzle, which (SPOILERS at the link) blogger Rusty identified in his review. As a book, meanwhile, it devotes the first few chapters to one story (Howard’s amnesia) and then rapidly sidesteps to another. The first story comes back, of course, but it’s ultimately just not that important. Even worse, the characters never come alive—it’s strange, we spend a lot of time on the psychology of this tiny cast (another mystery flaw: tiny cast, a problem for the reader who suspects every character he meets), but they don’t convince—they’re more like Jungian archetypes than humans. Dannay and Lee, the cousins behind “Queen,” reportedly spent years on this story, yet Ten Days’ Wonder comes off to me as unfinished, even shoddy. Now, sadly, I don’t even think the book would be good for another movie adaptation, as I long thought it would. (There’s already one adaptation, which director Claude Chabrol did with Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins. I like Chabrol, Welles, and Perkins, yet I didn’t like the movie.) Too many flaws, too many things that would have to be changed, which in turn would upset the whole plot structure. Incidentally, Jorge Luis Borges wrote an excellent EQ pastiche/parody, “Death and the Compass,” that tackles many of the same themes as Ten Days’ Wonder. (I don’t know if the Queen cousins ever read the Borges: The story was published in 1942, but it wasn’t translated into English until six years after Ten Days’ Wonder.) They’re not the same, but the Borges story achieves its goals, and the Queen book—unfortunately—doesn’t.
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Post by ant-mac on May 7, 2023 22:45:03 GMT
THE LOST MACHINE, by John Wyndham.
After a spaceship crash, an intelligent Martian robot named Zat becomes stranded on Earth and tries to cope with living among Humans and seeks shelter with Joan and her father.
An interesting short story that set the stage for two follow-ups.
STOWAWAY TO MARS, AKA PLANET PLANE, AKA THE SPACE MACHINE, by John Wyndham.
Joan stows away on the first successful British interplanetary rocket to reach Mars, where she makes contact with a dying Martian civilization.
The novel was an interesting adventure story, but was criticized for several plot elements, including a faintly distasteful emphasis on British nationalism.
SLEEPERS OF MARS, by John Wyndham.
This novella is a direct sequel to STOWAWAY TO MARS, in which the crew of a Russian interplanetary rocket, which stayed behind on Mars after the British interplanetary rocket returned safely to Earth, interacts with the remains of the Martian civilisation.
All in all, it's an interesting but easily overlooked early science fiction franchise which doesn't always work, but is still entertaining in its own way.
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Post by mikef6 on May 9, 2023 0:55:49 GMT
Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks (Yes, THE Tom Hanks)
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Post by theravenking on May 13, 2023 15:49:25 GMT
I read the first book from this author, Guess Who, and didn't like it that much, and this follow-up got some not so enthusiastic reviews from classic mystery bloggers. I seem to recall, one of the problems being, that it was advertised as a locked-room mystery, which it reportedly is not. However I still find the premise of a group of people disappearing from a canal tunnel intriguing, and after all I picked up this copy for two bucks at a local store. So far I've only read the first few chapters though, so I cannot tell yet whether the book really sucks.
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Post by yggdrasil on May 14, 2023 10:59:04 GMT
Diablo Mesa (2022) by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Longish thriller that starts out with a great premise, mystery, attractive characters and is set in my home state of New Mexico, but the explanation and extended action at the end is so outlandish and silly that it ruins the whole story. I ended up hating the whole thing and vowing never to read another Preston and Child. They jumped the shark years ago with the "Prendergast" books, the last half a dozen or so have been rubbish.
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Post by thekindercarebear on May 18, 2023 3:37:21 GMT
I finished Silverthorn this past weekend and am halfway through A Darkness at Sethanon.
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Post by politicidal1 on May 19, 2023 2:03:57 GMT
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Post by thekindercarebear on May 19, 2023 22:32:39 GMT
Clive seems super popular.
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Post by politicidal1 on May 19, 2023 23:13:32 GMT
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Post by thekindercarebear on May 19, 2023 23:15:36 GMT
oh, i had no idea. i have had a lot of older men seeking him, patterson, and balducci at my shop. i've had to keep a good mix of those 3 for the non-fantasy/sci-fi book readers lol
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Post by theravenking on May 22, 2023 16:53:18 GMT
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