Recent reading
Mar. 28th, 2004 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramI’ve finished the fourth Kane book, Thirty Ninth, so no more new Kane for me till the Image reissues catch up and pass the Dancing Elephant Press ones, which’ll probably be a few years. <whimper>
It’s a great book. It reprints six issues (#13-18) rather then the four of each of the previous volumes, and Kane himself shows up only at the end of the last (saying “It’s been a while”). The book starts with a story shown entirely from a limited viewpoint — the reader is looking over the shoulders of a pair of cops out on patrol, as if we were sitting in the back seat of their patrol car. One of the cops is a rookie, and he’s being introduced to the world of petty corruption and cruelty that is policing in New Eden. The end of this story sets up the main plotline for the volume, in which a gang takes over a housing complex, but there’s more to it than that, and a host of characters from earlier stories — the mayor, the rat catcher, and even Mister Floppsie Whoppsie — get drawn into things. As usual, it’s funny and gripping, like Hill Street Blues, and visually inventive, like nothing else I can think of.
I also read R.I.P.D., which I regret having bought. It’s a thoroughly derivative piece of crap, a lame rip-off of Men in Black and Good vs Evil, and not as funny as either of them. The storytelling is muddled and the plot and dialog come out of a can. Avoid.
For prose, I had been reading my old Baen collection of manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories, John the Balladeer, but I got bored with it. So I picked up The Golden Age by John C. Wright. I’d been worried about this one, since an interview with the author that I’d read had left me with the impression that he was a bit of a prat, but I’m almost halfway through and having fun. You know you’re reading about a transhumans when you get sentences like “I remind Your Lordships that what we do here will be remembered not just for a century or a millennium but for all the rest of our lives.” And then you get the discussion of inheritance law in a post-mortal society. My only complaint is that the plot moves very slowly, and mostly consists of characters talking to each other.
It’s a great book. It reprints six issues (#13-18) rather then the four of each of the previous volumes, and Kane himself shows up only at the end of the last (saying “It’s been a while”). The book starts with a story shown entirely from a limited viewpoint — the reader is looking over the shoulders of a pair of cops out on patrol, as if we were sitting in the back seat of their patrol car. One of the cops is a rookie, and he’s being introduced to the world of petty corruption and cruelty that is policing in New Eden. The end of this story sets up the main plotline for the volume, in which a gang takes over a housing complex, but there’s more to it than that, and a host of characters from earlier stories — the mayor, the rat catcher, and even Mister Floppsie Whoppsie — get drawn into things. As usual, it’s funny and gripping, like Hill Street Blues, and visually inventive, like nothing else I can think of.
I also read R.I.P.D., which I regret having bought. It’s a thoroughly derivative piece of crap, a lame rip-off of Men in Black and Good vs Evil, and not as funny as either of them. The storytelling is muddled and the plot and dialog come out of a can. Avoid.
For prose, I had been reading my old Baen collection of manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories, John the Balladeer, but I got bored with it. So I picked up The Golden Age by John C. Wright. I’d been worried about this one, since an interview with the author that I’d read had left me with the impression that he was a bit of a prat, but I’m almost halfway through and having fun. You know you’re reading about a transhumans when you get sentences like “I remind Your Lordships that what we do here will be remembered not just for a century or a millennium but for all the rest of our lives.” And then you get the discussion of inheritance law in a post-mortal society. My only complaint is that the plot moves very slowly, and mostly consists of characters talking to each other.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 03:58 pm (UTC)mark