Old Favorites

Back to reading sci-fi, I decided to read the stuff I had by authors who were old favorites.

Oldest was John Varley, whom I have been reading since the late 70's. Not that prolific an author. His latest is "Irontown Blues", 2018, 304 pages. This is set in his "Eight Worlds" universe which was my favorite of his stuff. It heretofore included the great novel "The Ophiuchi Hotline" and a couple of short story collections. This is a story of a wannabee cheap detective ala a film noir.

There was a bit of a curve about 1/4 of the way into the book when a 2nd narrator is introduced: she is a Dog Whisperer communicating with the protagonist's cybernetically enhanced bloodhound. The rest of the book alternates chapters between the detective and his dog. At 1st I thought this was not going to go well, but it turned out to be great! Who knew that cybernetically enhanced canines liked puns? And thought humans were stupid? Some really good stuff too about what it would be like living with a dog's sense of smell. Here's a passage I especially liked:

Irontown smelled like . . .
(I have to interrupt Sherlock at this point. I tried to tell him that most of what he was saying made no sense to me, but he was having none of it. Smells are so important that he spent most of an hour listing them for me. By the time he was done, there had been over two hundred separate and distinct smells. I had names for fewer than fifty of them, and many of those I had to guess at. It was made all the more difficult because many of the smells were new to Sherlock, too. He knew precisely where to file them, to categorize them by similarity to other smells, or by who-knows-what system a dog has of classifying smells. Once more, it’s a case of describing the ten thousand shades of “red” to a color-blind person.—PC)

A quick and enjoyable read, and not too much libertarian/heinlein nonsense.

Next oldest was Walter Jon Williams, whom I have been reading since "Hardwired" in 1986. His latest effort is "The Accidental War", 2018, 496 pages. This is his 6th book in the Dread Empire's Fall (Praxis) series, and starts a new trilogy of novels. An extremely regimented, hierarchical society, lots of military foo, space yacht racing, yada-yada... He does include a financial meltdown, with subsequent social turmoil, that is a well-told accounting of the 2008 meltdown and the Great Recession that followed. He writes well, but, I find the concept of feudal futures depressing. Still, a page-turner, and I will stick with the series.

Finally, Greg Egan, whom I have been reading since "Quarantine" in 1992. His latest is "Dichronauts", 2017, 312 pages. This story is set in a universe with 2 dimensions of space + 2 dimensions of time, rather than 3+1. So just all around weird. The story is about explorers trying a find a place to move their city after a draught makes their current location non-viable. The plotting is good, and some interesting social issues are raised, but still, I really felt that this whole 2+2 dimensions thing would have been much better carried out by an animated movie using intensive CGI. Egan does provide a web page exploring the physics of this universe - a bad sign maybe? Still, a fairly quick and enjoyable read.

Back on the magazine stack, then I think some fantasy.