octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Genuinely likeable novella that I've read in order to complete Task 16 for Book Riot's Read Harder 2019 challenge: a historical romance written by an author of colour. I haven't read any of Milan's work before, but I've often heard her praised as an excellent romance writer and I think the praise is justified. Her prose, especially, is just so smooth - it feels thoroughly polished, and the whole novella slipped down easily in a single sitting.

I liked both Serena and Hugo in this, which naturally makes me more invested in their happy ending. I liked, too, that they both ended up changed, and in positive ways. I do think that the romance moves a little quickly to be quite believable, especially in the early stages, but then this is a novella and space is limited, so needs must. Still, I understand that this is an introductory teaser to a series, and that much of that series is full-length novels. I think I'm going to put them on my reading list, because now that I know Milan has such a facility for prose and character I definitely want to read more from her, and longer works at that. So thanks, Read Harder challenge, I probably wouldn't have picked up this author but for you. Which is the point of the challenge, after all...

This is the best of Poe's short stories I think, and it comes a close second place to "The Raven" for the best thing he's ever written. The murky, unhealthy House of Usher, inhabited as it is by the sickly remnants of a great family, is deeply disturbing. The imagery, here, too, is very strong - particularly that related to the tarn which eventually swallows the house. I do feel it's slightly over-written in places (Poe's prose does have a tendency both to the purple and the over-explanatory), and I'm never quite convinced as to whether Roderick Usher is a well-drawn character or not, but the whole creepy thing is still immensely entertaining.

Look, I know he's very famous and I know he's written some good stuff but hear me out: this is not the Poe collection that you want. Yes, it contains "The Fall of the House of Usher" which is a five star horror story if ever there was one. Yes, it also contains a selection of his other short stories, which admittedly I do not find as excellent as many do, but which I would still give a solid three stars in general. HOWEVER. Fully one half of this particular edition is not a short story at all. It is the entire 200 pages of Poe's only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" - and I have no hesitation in saying that it is a strong contender for the worst novel ever written. Seriously, the thing is dire. It's patched together and badly edited. My favourite example of how disastrous this is comes in the death of a man aboard ship. His arm has been injured. It turns gangrenous and nasty, starts to putrefy in a number of disgusting ways. Yet when this poor victim dies and is in the process of being tossed overboard, it's not his disintegrating arm, black to the shoulder, that falls off, no. It's his leg. Poe did not notice. Clearly neither did his editor. I imagine they'd both given up by then.

I'll not give anything that contains "House of Usher" a single star. But neither will I ever give any book that prints "Arthur Gordon Pym" any rating that approaches likeability. Save yourselves, and find another edition of his stories to read...

This is the best of the series since the first volume - it had been getting a little stale. And to be perfectly honest, there's still a bit of repetition here. These books do tend to follow a pattern, but this one breaks out of it, a little, to give a conclusion that folds in the Foundation books with Asimov's Robot series. I'd heard, via osmosis over the years I suppose, that Asimov's works tended to occupy the same universe so this wasn't entirely a surprise, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy the synthesis. That folding in seemed like it would be easy to over-work, like it would be something of a gimmick, and while it verges on that at times here this is still a thoughtful exploration of different possible futures, the mindsets behind those future, and the backstabbing that takes place in each of the main Foundation ideologies. (Plus a very entertaining treasure hunt for Earth, using the mythologies of its colonies.) It's a very political book, which is the sort of thing I find appealing, and it would be an unreserved 4 stars if the author could only have cut down on his need to exhaustively explain things, because this was a good 150 pages longer than it needed to be, I reckon.

Cyberpunk is one of the subgenres of science fiction that I've read vanishingly little of, and if this anthology is representative I probably won't be going out of my way to read much more of it, to be honest. There were three or four stories here that I actually liked - they are what dragged my rating up to three stars when it otherwise would have been two. The rest of the stories I was either entirely indifferent to or mildly disliked. Notable (to me at least, with my very vague understanding of what cyberpunk actually is) was that two of the stories I liked best had very little technology in them at all. They read more like fantasy, to me, than anything else. Those stories were "Petra" by Greg Bear, which was outstanding, far and away the pick of the bunch, and "Till Human Voices Wake Us", which had some lovely moments but a weak ending. Of the stories here that matched up with what I perceived cyberpunk to be - tech and body modification and a sort of pervasive misery of surveillance, I liked "Stone Lives" by Paul D. Filippo, for its sympathetic character, and "400 Boys" by Marc Laidlaw, which was enormously weird but had fantastic imagery. The rest... meh.

Oh, this is lovely. It's fair to say I'm slightly biased - I've been salivating over this story since I first read part of an early draft - but the whole thing together is just wonderful. It's the prose that gets me the most. It's so lucid, and so enormously, quietly powerful that it's just perfect for this story... although let's face it, lovely prose is something the author is becoming ever more known for. There are a few short fiction writers who can routinely make me sick with jealousy at the shining beauty of their prose, and Andi is one of them.

This is just so highly recommended. It's beautiful and thoughtful, and there is so much care given to both character and structure that it's going to end up being one of those books I read again and again, finding something new in every time.

There's no getting around it: I found great swathes of this unutterably tedious. There's 32 stories here, I believe, and of those 32 there were a grand total of 6 that I actually liked. They were "Flies" by Robert Silverberg, "The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice" by Howard Rodman, "The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven, "Lord Randy, My Son" by Joe L. Hensley, "Go, Go, Go Said the Bird" by Sonya Dorman, and "Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany. The Silverberg had an ending that made me wince, the Rodman and the Hensley were quiet and sadly beautiful, the Niven and Dorman stories were genuinely creepy, and the Delany was both original and interesting. All of these I would read again.

I would not, however, read through this anthology again to get to them. I grant you that it was put together close to 50 years ago now, and perhaps it was more shocking then, but some of what Ellison clearly considers to be dangerous comes across now as just silly, and some of the rest are trying too hard. How some of them got published at all is beyond me - there's a handful here that are just not very good. I've often heard this marketed as one of the great sci-fi anthologies of all time, but all I can think is that I've read more challenging, dangerous pieces being published on a regular basis today. Finally, I would have preferred not to have the two unprepossessing novellas shoe-horned in. I've never read Philip José Farmer before this and I have to say: my country is in lockdown at the moment, due to pandemic. We are all supposed to stay at home and see no-one. It's been two weeks, it feels like two years, and even pandemic-time moves quicker than that endless goddamn trainwreck. The clock stopped while I read it, and that is not a compliment. "Riders of the Purple Wage" won a Hugo for best novella, apparently. I cannot imagine why.

This is a weird little story I came across in a list of haunted house tales. Except it's not really a haunted house story, and it's not really a vampire story, and it's not really a werewolf story, although there are intimations of each. There's a bit of fungal horror in there as well, but mostly it's one of Lovecraft's "giant terrible thing makes its way out of the deep" stories, and if only said giant terrible thing could have done it more quickly I might have been more impressed. For a short story, this had an awful lot of padding in it. I mean, Lovecraft does have a tendency to belabour his points, and while some people find that atmospheric it kind of goes past atmospheric and into tedious for me. I wanted to shake the protagonist and say "Get on with it man, why are you not digging up the floor already, surely that has been the obvious thing to do from the start?!" But alas: he would rather bloviate.

This is the second Gothic romance I've read by Holt, and while two books isn't much of a sample to draw from she comes across as very consistent. Her prose is smooth and very easy to read, and her plots seem much of a muchness. In this one, which reminded me in many ways of her Mistress of Mellyn, a musician moves into an isolated mansion with a disturbed family, ostensibly to teach their children the piano, but in reality to search for her sister, who disappeared suddenly from the area and hasn't been seen since. As with Mellyn, the end is somewhat overwrought and very abrupt - that's where my suspension of disbelief took a hit in both books. This one is also, I think, a little flabby about the middle, but there are a couple of genuinely creepy characters in here and the imagery surrounding the quicksands is pure horror. Pity the hero is such a dick... but she does seem to be drawn to arseholes (her late husband being no prize either).

Entertaining popcorn read, though, very suitable for lockdown (bloody pandemic!).

It's been a while since I've read the first eight books in the series - truth is, the local library didn't have the ninth, and while being temporarily in a different city for a residency programme, I found it in their library instead. So I thought I better read it, before the chance slipped away... and I'm glad I did, because it's one of the most enjoyable of the series. I think it may be my favourite thus far. Partly because a lot of the focus here is on the political and scientific meanderings of Stephen Maturin, who is by far the more entertaining of the two protagonists. (Being interested in politics and science, and being not interested at all in ships, you can see how my preference developed.) As for that sailing, I am pleased to say that much of this book took place on land, but there was still the odd interminable battle and wittering on about different sail types, and really, I know this is a sailing series, but I cannot bring myself to care.