Quick Hit

1st, did a reread: "Vacuum Flowers", by Michael Swanwick, 1987, 324 pages, 88k words. I think it was on sale cheap. This was a great cyberpunk book from the early days and still is strong on a reread. Wetware - programs you can download into your brain, artificially constructed personalities, the earth a group mind - great concepts for the time, and still very strong. I never understood why this was kind of the only book like this that Swanwick wrote.

[Updated 2020-08-05 1:3 pm]

I had forgotten I had blogged about this book in my 1st few months of blogging, July 2003. And apparently I reread it shortly after that and mentioned it here. I also mentioned it here in 2007. It definitely is a keeper.

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Next up, "The Broken Earth" trilogy by N.K. Jemisin;

1. "The Fifth Season", 2015, 476 pages, 129k words;
2. "The Obelisk Gate", 2016, 422 pages, 115k words;
3. "The Stone Sky", 2017, 424 pages, 115k words.

These novels performed the incredible never-before-accomplished feat of winning the Hugo award 3 years in a row. Wow!

They initially present as fantasy, but you realize that they are science fiction, with very advanced science. The characters are varied and interesting, the concepts are interesting. As I noted in reviewing her "Inheritance" trilogy, she seems to like 3-somes with 2 men & 1 woman.

The plotting was not as compelling as I would have expected - I never particularly felt the urge to binge and stay up to 3 am to finish one. But, that may just be that my life has become very regimented living in SW Florida during the pandemic.

Finally, my monthly story from Tobias S. Bucknell was good as usual: "One Last Dance in the Ruins of Paris".

The magazine stack is slim this month, consisting of only Scientific American. Technology Review did a July/August issue - they are normally bimonthly - and Wired did a July/August issue as well.