3 + 1

The escapism ends - after this post. Seriously, I am on the magazine stack. Sky & Telescope done, reading Scientific American. Technology Review and Wired still to go. Then, on to an economics book! Note, I have switched all my magazine subscriptions over to digital only, and read them on my iPad. My decades of taking old magazines to the Dunbar HS library appear to be over.

So, 1st read "The War Dogs Trilogy" by Greg Bear: "War Dogs", 2014, "Killing Titan", 2015, and "Take Back The Sky", 2016. Greg Bear was one of my fav sci-fi authors for years. I was a little concerned about this being just some militaristic sci-fi, but he got into some other interesting concepts, including several alien races, and some interesting ideas about the dynamics of the solar system. So these were much better than I expected. Note, Bear throws some theism in, as he seems to be wont to do of late :-(

Then, the 35th and final "The Year's Best Science Fiction", edited by Gardner Dozois. The final collection because Dozois died in May. Well, he went out with a bang. The last couple of years I did not enjoy the collection that much. This year, a totally outstanding collection of stories, surprisingly enjoyable. 2 or 3 I had read before in other collections, but there were pretty much no weak stories in the lot.

I liked the story by Tobias S. Bucknell, so I bought a couple of his short story collections on Kobo. He had a novel trilogy, the Xenowealth trilogy, that looked interesting but was no longer available on Kobo. So I went to his website and emailed him, asking if the novels could be made available on Kobo - which I use because my local independent bookstore, Carmichael's, then gets 40% of the proceeds. He emailed me back, said he was changing publishers, and included as attachments epubs of the 3 novels! He was glad I enjoyed his stories! Wow, I love living in the future!