Karsa Orlong

Shame about Ancillary Justice. I shall give it a try at some point soon. Must get back to the Ketty Jay books at some point, no idea when, though.

Aliens LA Confidential Star Wars (the original) Planet of the Apes (1968) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Ben-Hur The Thing Tremors Jaws Raiders of the Lost Ark The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) The Searchers Some Like It Hot Okay, that's 13

Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes. I hate it with a fiery passion The Will Smith version of I Am Legend. How to ruin my memories of a classic book in one easy lesson

Sheesh, I have so many I don't even know where to begin The Wire: 'The Cost' was the episode that really got me hooked. The whole of the 4th season is stunning. The X Files: 'Anasazi', 'Deep Throat', 'Conduit', 'Squeeze', 'Ice', 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', 'Beyond the Sea', 'Duane Barry', 'Die Hand Die Verletz', 'Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'', 'Drive' Farscape: 'The Way We Weren't', 'Liars, Guns & Money' parts 1 to 3, 'Die Me, Dichotomy', '... Different Destinations', 'Scratch 'n' Sniff', 'The Hidden Memory', 'Nerve', 'A Human Reaction', 'Crackers Don't Matter', 'Into the Lion's Den' parts 1 & 2 Band of Brothers: 'Bastogne' Buffy: 'Hush', 'The Zeppo', 'Doppelgangland', 'Becoming' parts 1 & 2, 'Passion', 'Bewitched Bothered & Bewildered', 'Surprise', 'Innocence', 'Earshot', 'Restless', 'The Body', 'Something Blue' Babylon 5: 'Severed Dreams', 'The Coming of Shadows', 'In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum', 'War Without End' parts 1 & 2, 'Objects at Rest', ' The Fall of Night', 'Sleeping in Light', 'Z'ha'dum', 'Signs and Portents', 'The Long, Twilight Struggle' Star Trek: 'The City on the Edge of Forever', 'The Naked Time', 'Space Seed', 'The Devil in the Dark', 'The Menagerie' parts 1 & 2, 'Mirror, Mirror', 'The Doomsday Machine', 'Balance of Terror', 'Charlie X', 'Errand of Mercy' Star Trek TNG: 'Yesterday's Enterprise', 'Darmok', 'The Inner Light', 'Family', 'The Best of Both Worlds' part 1, 'The Drumhead', 'The Defector', 'The Nth Degree', 'The Wounded' Firefly: 'Out of Gas', 'Our Mrs Reynolds' Game of Thrones: 'Baelor', 'The Pointy End', 'The Rains of Castamere'

Fantastic film

Arrow 2x20 Prisoners of War 2x01 - brilliant! Game of Thrones 4x04 Breaking Bad 2x03 & 2x04

As a straight ahead fantasy novel? I don't think that would've worked as it would've altered the whole structure of the story. She seemed to be trying to illustrate how easy it would be to change history, or at least to obscure it to meet various less than well-intentioned ends. A lot of people seem to complain about the framing emails set in the present day but, for me, they were some of the most interesting parts purely because they showed how Ash's story didn't match up with accepted historical facts.

The Shining's one of my faves, too - along with Cujo, The Dead Zone and Salem's Lot. Glad you enjoyed The Violent Century, Laura - it sounds very intriguing.

@ Fili Hope you enjoy Perdido Street Station, Laura - it's very different (in a good way) Have you read The Shining?

Yeah, I was, but the modern dialogue really killed it for me. I think, because I like historical fiction, I don't mind period dialogue - or at least a bit of an effort to make it feel authentic and give it a bit of atmosphere. There's no attempt whatsoever in Ash. Other people seem to love it, though.

Mark Lawrence's 'Broken Empire' trilogy to become tv series? http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/getting-call-from-hollywood.html

Nice! I'm planning on getting the first Foreigner book soon. I hope you enjoy them

# 31 Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle 2001 - Gollancz ebook - 1,120 pages From Amazon: For the beautiful young woman Ash, life has always been arquebuses and artillery, swords and armour and the true horrors of hand-to-hand combat. War is her job. She has fought her way to the command of a mercenary company, and on her unlikely shoulders lies the destiny of a Europe threatened by the depredations of an Infidel army more terrible than any nightmare. Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 2000 Thoughts: This book has, I think, one of my favourite first lines ever: "It was her scars that made her beautiful." When I was browsing on Amazon I read that line via the 'look inside' option for the book and knew I had to read it. It's a very daunting book, at 1,120 pages, but I do like epics. For once - shock, horror - that blurb doesn't really give much away Ash: A Secret History is presented as a modern day translation of a recently discovered historical document. Each part of the story is framed by email correspondence between the historian, Pierce Ratcliff, and his publisher, and this story runs in parallel to his translation of the document, which tells of Ash, the young woman who becomes the leader of a mercenary army in 15th century Europe. It's an alternate history story that tells of Burgundy and a Visigoth invasion, genre-hopping between fantasy, historical, and science fiction - largely, as the story progresses, the latter, for reasons I won't spoil - although, suffice to say, there is more going on than meets the eye. So that first line, above, isn't actually the first line at all, as it turns out, because there are in fact a couple of pieces of correspondence before that from Ratcliff. Once Gentle writes "It was her scars that made her beautiful", though, things promptly get ugly. She immediately tells us how Ash got those scars when she was raped as a child, and how she promptly killed her attackers. "Remember that she had already begun to train as a fighter" Ratcliff tells us. It is the first of some very harrowing scenes - and somehow not the most harrowing, by quite a margin. There are parts of this book that make for very uncomfortable reading. Once the prologue is out of the way we meet Ash at 19 or 20 years old, already the leader of hundreds of men, and the story really begins. And for the next 300 pages I found it completely absorbing. It's not a difficult or complex book to read, barring the harrowing parts. Gentle made some odd decisions, though. She has Ratcliff say early on that he is going to use modern colloquial language for his translation because he doesn't believe that the modern reader will want to wade through period dialogue. The result is that characters use modern swear words. A LOT. And for no reason. After a while it became tiresome and, frankly, juvenile. It also means that anachronisms, things that people of the 15th century just wouldn't say, take over almost completely. I think the point where I really started to switch off was when Ash said "I need to get my s**t together". Really? Purlease! I wanted to love it, I really did. But, sadly, I didn't. This is a book that has been released, here, in one volume, although elsewhere it was published as four books. I've read that it is meant to be read as one volume. Well, if that's the case, like most epic works (including a lot of my favourites) it could have done with a bloody good edit. In fact, for the amount of actual story here, it probably could have been half the length. There were times, after that initial 300 pages, where I nearly lost the will to live. It becomes so repetitive, so bogged down in inconsequential conversations that go on for page after page, so bogged down in Gentle's insistence on describing every single action or piece of armour or weapon, that I eventually started not to care. And I haven't even mentioned the footnotes! Yes, there are footnotes - lots of them. But they are purely Ratcliff's explanations of certain terms or historical references. There is none of the charm or humour of the footnotes in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, instead trying to come across as a factual history book. It makes for very dry reading. In the end, I was reading it on automatic pilot. The words were there, I understood them, I knew what was going on, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I was still persevering with it. I do wonder if all the repetition was down to it being released in other countries as four volumes, and I wonder, had I read it as four with a sufficient gap in between, if I might have enjoyed it more. I doubt it, though. I found it stodgy and annoying and boring. This is the second of Mary Gentle's books I have read, and the second I have disliked. I guess her style is just not for me For me, sadly, it never got better than that opening line. But what an opening line! 4/10

I don't know how you made it through a whole season of it

Nor me! Not for a couple of weeks, anyway

Jersey Shore Shark Attack. Genius.

^^ I gave up on it after a few episodes. Thought it was boring. Even Sarah Carter's presence couldn't save it for me

Oh, the fun you're going to have . . .

And I thought I'd bought a lot this year . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6YB8My1d4

The Gemmell graphic novels arrived: plus another visit to Forbidden Planet last week resulted in these: Now all I have to do is sort out a load of paperbacks to go to the hospice shop in order to make room for all these new ones

It looks like Farscape may well be on the way back, as there's a script in development for a movie, to be directed by Brian Henson More here and here - beware spoilers for the end of the original series, though.

Thanks, Ian I had to order a used copy from the US - only cost £2.81 so worth a look Oh dear. Well, it's their loss, they're missing out on some great authors I made a start on Luke Romyn's Beyond Hades last night. It was one I picked up in this 'Action Pack' for £1 in the Kindle sales at Christmas. Scientists, at the behest of the military (naturally), activate an ancient machine found in the lost city of Atlantis - and unleash hell on earth. Within the first few pages the main character is attacked by first a gryphon and then a cyclops. I gave up after 40 pages. I thought it would be fun, but I really wasn't in the mood - it's so silly, so bad At least I can take those two off the TBR list and delete them from the Kindle So I've decided to start on one of the many doorstoppers on my TBR list instead.

# 30 The Mountains of Mourning (Vorkosigan Saga Book 4) by Lois McMaster Bujold 1989 - Baen paperback - 90 pages From Amazon: Miles Vorkosigan is sent to a small mountain village to investigate the murder of an infant, killed because she had a physical defect. Thoughts: This is the first of Bujold’s novellas in the Vorkosigan Saga, and takes place roughly three years after the events of The Warrior’s Apprentice (I think – I don’t recall Miles’s age being mentioned in this one). It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella. Miles’s mother, Cordelia, is an alien on this planet, and her position through marriage within the Barrayaran power structure has allowed her to become a cause célèbre for change in the wake of her own son’s troubled birth and resulting disability. When a young woman, Harra, comes to Count Vorkosigan to report the murder of her newborn daughter, purely because she was born with a harelip and cleft palate, Miles’s father - Count Aral Vorkosigan - sends Miles to her mountain community to investigate and judge the accused. As you would hope, Bujold treats the subject of infanticide with great care. Through Miles, who himself would have suffered the same fate had his grandfather had his way, we see the bigotry and confusion exhibited by Barrayar’s mountain communities. Some of the younger members of the community want to break from the old ways but are being held back by the fears of their elders. Sent a ‘mutant’ Lord to pass judgement upon them, they close ranks, and Miles’s task becomes yet more problematic. Apart from the wonderful writing style and characters, the thing that’s impressing me about this series is how different each story is to the last (so far, at least). Here we have a deeply upsetting murder mystery, set quite deliberately in contrast against a beautiful setting. There is none of Miles’s effortless smartassery from the previous novel, thankfully - considering the subject matter. Instead, there is some brilliant character development. I found the closing stages of this story packed a real emotional punch, coupled with a heartfelt moral core. There are no easy answers to the dilemma and I couldn’t help feeling, in the end, that it was not just Miles who had changed, but the entire world of Barrayar around him. That, for me, is great writing. Fantastic. 9/10 ETA: The Mountains of Mourning can be found in the Young Miles omnibus, and also separately on Kindle.

# 29 War Birds by R. M. Meluch 1989 - Signet paperback - 253 pages Thoughts: This is the story of three planets: Tannia, Erde, and Occo. They are human colonies on the edge of known space. Tannia and Erde are twin planets that orbit each other, whilst Occo is closer to the system’s sun and is only heard from once in a while. Tannia and Erde warred with each other, but that was some sixteen years before the story starts – and Tannia won. Anthony Northfield is a professor on Tannia when he meets Maggie. She’s 17, he’s in his late 30s, she’s got the hots for a student called Brute who rents rooms in the professor’s house, and the professor has got the hots for her. This is the set up for this story by R M Meluch and, to be honest, it sounds awfully clichéd and pedestrian, and not a little creepy. Maybe it’s just the way I’ve written it down, but the first 50 pages of the book pretty much follow the pattern set above. It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, and it was decidedly iffy, in my opinion. But then, somewhere around that 50 page mark, something happens. It’s a twist that is actually given away in the blurb inside the book’s front cover but, fortunately, I didn’t read that until later – and it’s a twist that really shouldn’t be spoiled, because I found it kicked the story up several gears, and it went from decidedly iffy to actually quite riveting within a few pages. What I think Meluch did brilliantly was to capture a very distinct narrative voice. In some ways, it reminded me a little of Glen Cook’s ‘Black Company’ stories: it is told in the first person, and the sentence structure is terse, giving it a really punchy, gritty, almost noir-ish feel. This voice is maintained throughout, and I don’t think it faltered at all. It's quite an introspective novel. Once it gets to that twist things really open up in terms of the direction of the story, and it is certainly not about the rather icky romance at the beginning, which was my fear early on. Also, the setting is a fine, solid, believable creation. Like a lot of science fiction, it’s a very human story transferred to a fantastic location – it’s essentially about fighter pilots (Meluch apparently has a passion for WWII fighter planes, and that really shines through) – but like the voice it is maintained throughout and has an internal logic that stays consistent. In the end it is the opening plus perhaps a few too many contrivances, conveniences, and coincidences in the latter stages, that let it down somewhat, whilst the main character, his adversary, and that voice counteract those shortcomings and pull it through its old-fashioned, relatively brief page count. This is the first of Meluch’s books that I’ve read, and another author that was drawn to my attention by someone over on the Malazan forum. I don’t think I’ve come across a bad recommendation from there, yet. I'm kind of curious as to why Carolyn Janice Cherryh, and now Rebecca M Meluch seem to hide their gender behind their initials. Do they feel that, as women writing science fiction, they may get overlooked if potential readers know they're women in advance? Seems strange to me. I do hope people really aren't so shallow. If anything, my recent forays into the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, C J Cherryh, and now R M Meluch only serve to reinforce that some of the best and most refreshingly different science fiction I have read - and that has been published in the past couple of decades - has been written by women. If anyone doubts that, then I'd suggest having a look here 7/10