I’m seeing if I can work up a functional review of The Hood. Not written one of those since I stopped reviewing for Locus back in 2002 or so.  I used to kid myself that I’d go back to it, but other things overran that.

Today was all about the day job, some project work, and working out what to read next. I thought it would be Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail or Martine’s A Memory of Empire. Turns out I’ve fallen into Tade Thompson’s new one, Far From the Light of Heaven, which I’m enjoying. Space opera is funny stuff. Stories of maritime adventure and global empire tossed into a sky they’d never fly in.

I find myself, possibly post Stan Robinson’s Aurora, unable to believe in any meaningful form of human space travel – it seems empty and unlikely and something we don’t have time for – but there are things in these stories I love and that offer us something. I’ve said space opera has become epic fantasy, and there’s truth to that. After all, in some ways, Kate Elliot’s Unconquerable Sun is a cousin of Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun. Hmm. Maybe Gary and I should talk to them about that. Also, the opening of A Memory Called Empire is awfully similar to the opening of Foundation. And so, we dance.

Anways, that’s Tuesday. Time for a little more whisky and reading, and then bed.

Just wrote this elsewhere on social media:

This is a strange time. Here in Perth, even for winter, it’s cold and wet. The east coast of Australian is locked down and Delta rages. I find myself rather nervously watching that and wondering when/if it will impact here. People are watching Olympics and making/plans and we’re doing a census. And we’re doing house stuff and I’m busy. It’s weird.

And it is weird. I check the news constantly, flit from this to that, and, all of a sudden, I’m turning from visual media back to reading (which might seem odd, given my reviewing and editing commitments), but I am reading novels.

I’ve mentioned here that I’ve been reading Lavie Tidhar’s The Hood, the second in his Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet following By Force Alone from last year. It comes out in October and it’s an interesting, dark, violent fantasy novel set in England toward the end of the Crusades.  I need to decide if I’m going to actually review it here, but I think it’s a book that Tolkien — the Tolkien who looked at the destruction of the forests as they were fed into the fires at Isengard and saw it as part of a coming tide — would have at least grokked, if not dug.

While I ponder that, I think I’m going to re-read the 2019 Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire. Not been re-reading much at all these days but we are talking to Arkady this weekend for Coode Street and I’d like it fresh. And after time in Shelley Parker-Chan’s China, Zen Cho’s Malaysia, and Tidhar’s Nottingham, a little off-world time sounds tempting.