Another Three-View

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

Rattled through a few more books and they weren't too bad.

First up: The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. I'd seen this when it first came out about...five(!) years ago. Looked at the sample, wasn't blown away, but recently it was on offer for cheap so I took a flyer and decided to give it a whirl. Turned out to be quite a bit better than I remembered. You've got Loch, ex-Republic Scout and current thief looking to assemble a crew to sneak onto the flying capital of the Republic to reclaim her birthright. Things get a little complicated when she and her partner get captured and are forced to work on the underside of the capital cleaning the gems that keep it aloft. Loch engineers a break-out in short order and starts assembling a new crew to take another crack at the capital and the most secure vault modern magic can make.

Maybe I was a little burned out on fantasy caper novels when this first came out, but this is a really nice little take on the genre. In particular, Loch and her partners are active in their schemes instead of reactive and while there's a bit of "Loch is always one step ahead of you", it's doesn't entirely go her way and it never quite reaches Batman-levels of implausibility. The book sets a brisk, breezy pace and has fun with the various characters recruited to the cause. If you're looking for some easy beach reading this summer, you might want to check this out.

Next up, I read that book about walking the Keystone Pipeline last month and that prompted Amazon to suggest other long-hike books, including AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller. In 2003, Mr. Miller quit his job, left his family at home, and went on a walk from Georgia to Maine. The book talks about his experiences and includes photos of people and places he encountered on the way.

It's a pretty basic travel narrative and nothing especially stood out for me, but that's sort of the nature of thru-hiking in general, day after day of walking and sometimes you get a chance to stop and reflect or take in the wilderness around you. Still, it was interesting to read about the experiences of someone who's actually walked the trail end-to-end. The book was a perfectly good read, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless the subject matter really interested you as well.

Finally, I stumbled onto a real winner. Looking over the new releases this month, I came across Medusa Uploaded by Emily Davenport and the blurb grabbed me.  Oichi is a worm, a non-Executive member of the generation-ship Olympia who had been a servant to one of the Executive Clans, but then got tossed out an airlock for not putting out on demand.  Then she gets rescued and things get interesting.  Her savior is Medusa, an octopus-shaped AI companion designed to help humans collaborate with one another.  An important resource when colonizing an alien world but Medusa and her sisters were all presumed destroyed when Olympia's sister ship Titania blew up.  That explosion was no accident and Oichi and Medusa set about to break the Clan's stranglehold on the ship's population.  Part of that involves a plan to get the specialized implants needed to interface with Medusa-units into the heads of citizens and the other part involves quietly murdering Executives who stand in the way of that plan.

I enjoyed the hell out of this novel.  The characters are interesting, the dialog is pretty good, and the plot clips along and drags you along with it.  It is the first part in a duology? trilogy? but it ends at a pretty decent stopping point.  As you might expect, a fairly straight-forward plan is constantly being complicated with mysteries and surprises.  So there's lots to chew on as you read.  Well worth checking out and it name-drops a lot of classical music pieces which sent me to youtube for clips.  Always nice when a novel's enthusiasm's are catchy.  

later
Tom