Lucked into one of the Mythadventure series books, the first one, about a year ago.

I’ll read just about anything (except Dan Brown who’s awful… just awful) without too much complaint but rarely manage to find anything that keeps me interested over the course of a series.

I was enjoying [...]]]> And that’s A.S.P.R.I.N. rather than like the painkiller.

Lucked into one of the Mythadventure series books, the first one, about a year ago.

I’ll read just about anything (except Dan Brown who’s awful… just awful) without too much complaint but rarely manage to find anything that keeps me interested over the course of a series.

I was enjoying the first Myth book without really paying much attention — killing time you might say. Each chapter started off with a quote which, for the first twenty or so chapters, I simply ignored as do most people, I imagine, when the following struck my eye:

“One must deal openly and fairly with one’s forces if maximum effectiveness is to be achieved.”
-D. VADER

Re-read that line a couple of times and then decided I liked Robert Asprin well enough to read the whole Myth series.

Well, Asprin died in bed a week ago (May 22nd) so I won’t be anticipating anything new to the Myth or Phule series (cracking open the book with a big silly smile on my face) but I’ll read them all again, once or twice, and spare a thought for Mr. Aspirin — a man big, smart and serious enough to write the kind of light, silly little books I love reading.

Sean

I searched around a little more and managed to get a hold of all 4 Xeelee Sequence novels (I’m not a big fan of short [...]]]> I had never heard of Stephen Baxter until a few days ago — his name turned up a few times by accident while I was searching for Iain (M) Banks books.

I searched around a little more and managed to get a hold of all 4 Xeelee Sequence novels (I’m not a big fan of short stories) and I’m surprised… they’re pretty good.

Apparently, it’s hard sci-fi but I’m certain I don’t understand what that means.

Someone else called it a FutureHistory — I guess that’s cool insofar as the term has been around for yonks and people seem to understand roughly what it means…

…after 50 or so pages in to the first of the books (Raft), I still hadn’t begun to feel like an idiot for starting the book in the first place. Impressive.

The writing style is tight and straightforward.

It’s a grown-up Science Fiction novel written by a grown up fan of science fiction.

I won’t bother trying to explain the science (mainly because I haven’t really bothered trying to understand it in the first place) but it probably has some foundation to it… or not: I truthfully couldn’t care less if it were entirely made up and silly — more important to me is that it is immersive and compelling — so, fairly shortly into the first of the books, I stopped questioning the environment and started to follow the story.

You can look up Stephen Baxter on WikiPedia.

One note on my reading: I read everything on my laptop in digital format (PDF or LIT) — Bali sucks for books.

Enjoy,

Sean