Posted on October 2, 2020 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
Let’s start off the first weekend of October with this very fine collection of new books and ARCs! What here would you like to read over a crisp autumn weekend? Tell us all in the comments!
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John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, contributor – AMS
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I just finished Machinehood — I enjoyed it, lots of neat high-tech action and some social aspects to it, plus the main character actually has a family and interacts with them.
As an over-70 reader, most of the authors you feature are new to me. I wish I could say the same about the themes and content of the books. If “space opera” is a horse opera with spaceships, what kind of category label goes on a predictable shootemup/blowemup war story with spaceships?
Surprise me, please. Give me a story about the challenge of mining Helium-3 from lunar regolith and delivering clean fusion power on Earth. Or about uplifting the squids by extending their pathetically short life spans. Or dealing with the huge numbers of landfills full of degradable plastic being submerged by rising seas, by hauling the contents back above projected final sea level and doing — what? — with them? And what do you find when excavating toward moving them, Jimmy Hoffa?
I’m looking forward to the Natania Barron and S.B. Divya!
You’ve got none of the ones I’ve gotten this week: Battle Ground by Butcher, A Deadly Education by Novik, Left Handed Booksellers of London by Nix, and Constant Rabbit by Fforde. I don’t know which to read first, they’re all top of my list (and I’m in the middle of two other books).
I’d definitely give the Corsairs one a read!
I’ve got Machinehood on pre-order. Great to see it for real!
Hey, Hank Roberts, there’s plenty of that out there. Check out the weekly “new books” listing at locusmag. I’d bet there’s fifty books right up your alley published every year. (Our alleys are similar.)
The top 3/4 of the stack is pretty much all new to me, but there’s a couple that look interesting (esp Crownchasers), and then we get to the last two books and yeah, so another Ring of Fire book and I never thought I’d say I’m bored with RoF, but I am. There’s just so much of it now that nobody can keep track outside of (hopefully) the people involved in creating it. And then the less said about Kratman the better. Somebody obviously likes his work, but it ain’t me.
Every time I look at your new book photos, now, it makes me sad because in the past I would always scan the spines to see what titles I would soon have to go over to Uncle Hugo’s to buy.
And now that august store is no more.
Machinehood looks amazing!
The Charlaine Harris book caught my eye but when I googled it I found out it was a reprint from 2004. I did the same thing with one of the prior stacks – wow, Jacqueline Carey wrote another Kushiel book – and, no, it was an old one. It seems a bit wierd to me that publishers are sending out those books for review – does it happen a lot? Does it accomplish anything?
Can’t say if it increases sales but publishers do do it quite a bit at least to judge from Scalzi’s stacks. It’s often a new printing or just before a new release in an older series (which might also mean a new printing of previous books).