6!

Still doing a lot of reading while my bike accident injuries heal. I was able to go up and down stairs normally after ~2 weeks. Most of the bruising was gone after 3 weeks. Still have the knot on my right thigh. It's painful, but it's steadily getting smaller. I am still icing and heating. The stitch in my left back is still interfering with my sleeping. Nonetheless, I seem to be (slowly) healing.

1st off, I read the 1st 3 novels of the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, recommended by my son.

1. "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet", 2015, 498 pages, 135k words. Humanity has fled a trashed Earth. They have finally been allowed to join the Galactic Commons, but they are very low status. The galactic civilization uses a lot of tech from prior civilization(s) that they don't really understand and can't reproduce.
   Meanwhile, a young woman fleeing family disgrace joins the motley crew of a wormhole-opening spaceship. They have a couple of adventures.
   These books aren't real big on plot - not a lot of stuff happens. They are big on accepting others regardless of whatever (Chambers is a married lesbian). So there is a human-humanoid alien romance, a human-reptilian alien romance, and a human-AI romance.
2. "A Closed and Common Orbit", 2016, 406 pages, 110k words. I figured this book would be further adventures of the motley crew of The Wayfarer, but it totally isn't. Instead it follows a minor character in the 1st book (a techie) as she attempts to help an AI make its way in an (illegal) humanoid body, and find and rescue the AI that helped her escape from childhood captivity.
3. "Record of a Spaceborn Few", 2018, 391 pages, 106k words. In another sharp turn, this story focuses the culture of the human diaspora fleet, 1000s of ships that are still home to a large part of the remnants of the human race. 1 of the characters is the sister of the captain of The Wayfarer. Again, relatively little plot - there are some people doing illegal scavenging.

These books are well written, good characters, but not a lot going on. Still, I have purchased the 4th 1.

Next up, the 4th and final book of the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer: "Perhaps the Stars", 2021, 602 pages, ?k words. Kobo did not have the page or word counts, so the page count came from Amazon. This thing seemed longer that 600 pages. I described it as "dense" to one of my friends when I was half-way through. And dense it indeed is, it is really a slog at times. I guess all the Greek, Latin, German, and French help set a tone, but ...
It is a satisfactory conclusion for a very complex series. War comes to our almost utopia. For at least the 1st 1/2 of the book, I was increasingly annoyed - they were fighting the wrong war! But they did finally get that straightened out, and I enjoyed the conclusion.

After finishing that weighty tome, I wanted something smaller and lighter. So I started with a novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Elder Race", 2021, 148 pages, 40k words. A world settled many generations before by humans has lost its advanced technology and settled into a matriarchal feudal society. Weirdness leads a rebel youngest princess to contact the last human from a later anthropological team which came to study the planet - i.e., a wizard. A nice, quick, fun read.

That was enjoyable enough that I went on and read the sequel to Tchaikovsky's novella "The Expert Systems's Brother": "The Expert System's Champion", 2021, 148 pages, 40k words. Wow, same size as the prior book, that is craftmanship! I think I disliked 1 of the main premises of the 1st book, I liked it better in this 2nd one. Interesting conjectures about interesting alien races. Another nice, quick, fun read.

Meanwhile, Neal Stephenson's climate crisis novel, "Termination Shock" came in - 890 pages!!!. I think I'll go for some fantasy or maybe even a mystery before I wade into that.