1st up, "The Reefs of Time", Jeffrey A. Carver, 2019, 539 pages, #5 of "The Chaos Chronicle". After a hiatus of 11 years, Carver returns to this series. The 1st 4 books are blogged here. This book is billed as Part 1 of 2 in the "Out of Time sequence", with the 2nd part coming in October. We merge a couple of plot threads, plus the universe of Carver's 2 Starstream novels. The team gets split into 3 groups, 2 rejoin, the big reunion presumably coming in book #6. They continue fighting the hostile AIs bent on wiping out organic life so it will quit wasting resources. This is 1 of those transition books that mostly just sets the table for the grand finale.
Next, "The Expert System's Brother" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2018, 139 pages. I liked the title. An interesting little novella, a tale of bioengineering humans so they can survive a foreign ecosystem. One of the plot elements I found somewhat unbelievable.
Next a fantasy, "Travel Light", by Naomi Mitchison, 1952, 136 pages. I think this was recommended by Tina Eisenberg (@swissmiss) or Maria Popova (@brainpicker). I figured that any fairy tale with Odin All-Father as a character deserved a look. I bought a paperback copy for my 8 YO granddaughter figured I'd read it before sending it on to her. I read about 1/3 of it and then went on and bought the eBook as well - it was what my old eyes wanted. Mitchinson definitely knows how to write a fairy tale - the prose has that numinous quality that makes you feel like an old, old story is being recounted to you. I was a little disappointed when christians were part of the plot as well as norse pagans, but they weren't portrayed very sympathetically. The heroine's adventures make for an interesting story. I have purchased the eBook of what appears to be Mitchinson's most popular work, "The Corn King and the Spring Queen".
Back to sci-fi and another short read, "Phoresis", by old favorite Greg Egan, 2018, 143 pages. Egan again builds an interesting world - and this time without particularly altering the laws of physics! The story moves along well. In what appears to be a definite trend, the characters are all women. The male role in this book is pretty creepy: women all have 1-3 horny little 6" guys in their womb, who fight to get to emerge and impregnate other females?!?!?
Last Tuesday my wife and I both came down with colds, apparently from 2 different sources. So time for rest and fluids. My sophomore year of college I remember getting sick and then spending 4 days in bed rereading "The Lord of the Rings" cover to cover. At the end of that, I couldn't walk through the woods without expecting to see elves, ents, orcs.
So in a similar vein, I decided to reread the Philip Jose Farmer "World of Tiers" series as I recuperated. I had picked up "World of Tiers Volume 1" - "The Maker of Universes" (1965), "The Gates of Creation" (1966), and "A Private Cosmos" (1968) - 820 pages, I think from BookBub for $1.99. I went on and bought "Volume 2" - "Behind the Walls of Terra" (1970), "The Lavalite World" (1977), "Red Orc's Rage" (1991), and "More Than Fire" (1993), 1200 pages.
The 1st 5 I had read before and were as I remembered - rollicking adventures on unusual worlds. Farmer wrote forewords, in a few of which he complains that title changes and edits were made with his being consulted - oops. There were some funny moments in the 1970 novel - Farmer reacted to the counterculture of the time about as you would expect a 52 YO white male to react.
1 thing that surprised me: I really liked the concept of "temporal fugue", I thought introduced by Roger Zelazny in "Creatures of Light and Darkness" (1969). Basically time-travelers getting ready to go mano-a-mano send multiple (1000s) of copies of themselves back through time to the time & place of the big battle. Then it's 1000s vs 1000s. I thought Zelazny had invented this, but there are time-traveling creatures who basically do this in the 2nd Tiers book, which came out in 1966. So Farmer was 3 years ahead of Zelazny.
The 6th book "Red Orc's Rage" is kind of weird. Apparently some psychiatrist came up with a therapy based on having the patient read the 5 World of Tiers books and then becoming 1 of the characters?!?!? Apparently this is a form of projective psychotherapy. The 6th book is about a teenager undergoing this therapy - but it fills in a lot of Red Orc's back story that gets used in the 7th book.
By the time I got to the 7th book, I was definitely ready for it to be over. Also somewhat annoyingly, the main character of the 1st 2 novels, the lord Jadawin / Robert Wolff, and his girlfriend Chryseis (of The Iliad) are left in limbo - missing for the last several books, still missing at the end.
On to the magazine stack. Then probably more of the same. I don't know if I'll be ready for reality until Agent Orange leaves office.
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