My Shipping email for Stephen Donaldson’s Against All Things Ending hit my inbox last night, a full 5 days before Jordan/Sanderson’s Towers of Midnight hits the shelves.
Torn between cramming the latest Thomas Covenant in before the penultimate Wheel of Time book and leaving it until afterwards to savour…
I picked up The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton with some trepidation. When it comes to reviewing the final book in a series it’s usually a hard job. The expectation that’s built up is difficult to deal with pragmatically. The longer the series, the more of a let down the ending can often be.
Once more, making little sense, the ebook is only £2 cheaper than a 700+ page hardback.
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton arrived in the post yesterday. It’s the third and final volume in the Void series, which is itself a sequel to the Commonwealth Saga.
The second volume contained an awful lot of Edeard in the Void and Hamilton has promised the third volume will be more rooted in the Commonwealth. So far this seems to be bearing up, I’m 200 odd pages in and whilst we have been into the void a few times, it’s mostly be for small parts of chapters, rather than a hundred or so pages at a time.
It’s definitely a case of so far so good. I was very disappointed with the way the final book of the Commonwealth Saga panned out, Judas Unchained went a bit Keystone Cops with a car chase and the Planet’s Revenge was just, well, silly. I have hopes with an extra volume in this series things will be concluded to a more satisfactory degree.
The weapons and spacecraft are beginning to get interesting too. The Navy Deterrent Fleet and the Accelerator Ship are both examples of some left-field thinking at the extreme end of where Hamilton’s sci fi has gone before. I approve of this since I was a little disappointed by the appearance of ultra drives over hyper drives and (random letter)-sinks in the previous books. We’re not talking about flying trees here, so Dan Simmons has nothing to worry about, but it is a new direction for Hamilton.
I’ve around 500 pages to go, the view is positive so far, expect a review by the weekend all things being equal.
For those of you out there that don’t realise the difference between e-ink and conventional displays, some chap has put a Kindle and an iPad under a microscope. The results are interesting. By interesting I mean “freaky how e-ink mimics actual ink so well.”
You can see the results here
It didn’t take long then. Hot on the heels of the new £109 wifi Kindle from Amazon, Waterstones have cut the price of the Sony eReader Pocket Edition to a mouthwatering £99. Other retailers have cut the price but none as low as Waterstones. Get one while there is still stock!
This is our August book group read and I’m really flying through it. I am currently reading it on the Kindle app for the iPhone, although I do have a paper copy of it somewhere, I just haven’t been able to locate it.
It’s not the first time I’ve read Dracula, that happened almost 15 years ago when I was a student. Back then I read it in one sitting and could hardly move when I’d finished.
Given its age, its a remarkably accessible book, really easy to read but also packed with genuinely unsettling moments. Dracula climbing lizard like out of his castle window is profoundly unsettling yet there are moments of humour too, as when one of the doctors proclaims, “Chasing an errant swam of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic.”
I’m about two thirds of the way through but expect to be finished in pretty short order, so expect a more in depth write up then.
The drive to mass adoption of ereaders took a massive step forward today with Amazon announcing a £109 6inch wifi only Kindle on their UK store. A second version with built in 3G costing £149 was also released but it looks like this is going to drive prices down across the board. Drop the wifi and £20, and it’s almost the dream price for mass adoption.
Before you get all excited and think Asterix Gallus is an entirely new entry into the rather fabulous Asterix series, you had better know this is a foreign language edition of the first book. So why is it worthy of recommendation or even mention then? Well the language it’s in happens to be Latin.
I was fortunate enough to study Latin for 3 years at school. It was an extra curricula subject, lessons happened before and after school two times a week. And I was terrible at it. Much as I was terrible at German and French. But I did find it interesting and no more so than when I was reading familiar works of fiction translated into the dead language.
To this end, if you are familiar with Asterix, this is worth a punt and if you are studying Latin, it is also worth a read. It is exactly the same as the English language version, all that is different is the text. It wont make you a Latin guru overnight (I still got a GCSE grade D at the subject) but it will help your vocab and trick you into studying when you think you’re not.
As the title says really, if you get hold of a copy of the current issue of popular scifi magazine SFX, tucked away in the final third is a coupon for a free copy of hard scifi writer Reynold’s 2008 novel House of Suns. It’s a special SFX print, but the normal version is still on the shelves at £7.99, so it’s definitely worth a punt. It’s original coupon only for redemption though, so no photocopies.
The cover price of SFX is £3.99 or you may like to entertain this entirely fictitious scenario:
*Enter public library stage left
*pick up SFX
Oooh, a free book coupon!
COUGH *RIP COUGH *RIP*
*pocket coupon
*finish reading magazine
*stroll to Waterstones