When we left our heroes at the end of Richard K. Morgan’s fantasy debut, THE STEEL REMAINS, there was a sense that something big was coming, something far more sinister than the tentative invasion that was repelled at the end of that book.
The sequel, THE COLD COMMANDS, picks up some time after its precursor, and while it improves on many of the faults of Morgan’s initial foray into fantasy, readers once again are left holding the bag, with the promise of epic conflict still looming in the future.
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If you haven’t read THE STRAIN and THE FALL, I’m offering up a spoiler alert here: Spoiler alert!
Jesus, I hate people who complain about spoilers. Anyway, if you have read the above two installments of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy, you’ve got to be on board for THE NIGHT ETERNAL, right?
I mean, the end of book two was some pretty hardcore apocalyptic shit. Luckily, the third and final book provides a meaty examination of the new, vampire-dominated Earth, with lots of explanation of how things work now, two years after the events of THE FALL.
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Neal Stephenson’s books are huge out of necessity. In some cases, such as ANATHEM, he needs that real estate to describe a foreign world in which the laws of physics evolved and are described in a way much different from our own. In his “Baroque Cycle” begun in QUICKSILVER, a lot of pages were eaten up in explaining to readers the realities of historical ages.
His new novel, REAMDE, has neither of these requirements: The work is set in modern times, and its vocabulary is straight out of Webster or Merriam-Webster or — well, the words come from a real dictionary. But REAMDE is still more than 1,000 pages long, and none of that space is wasted.
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Charles Stross, somehow, in between putting out mind-blowing science fiction (like GLASSHOUSE and SATURN’S CHILDREN) and crazy, hilarious, Dilbert-meets-007-meets-Cthulhu “Laundry Files” novels (THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES and THE JENNIFER MORGUE), has managed to put out a volume of “The Merchant Princes” series on a more-or-less annual basis since 2004, from THE FAMILY TRADE to last year’s sixth entry, THE TRADE OF QUEENS.
Obviously taking a few clues from Roger Zelazny’s AMBER books and H. Beam Piper’s PARATIME sequence, this series starts with Miriam, an American journalist who discovers that she can travel to an alternate universe that stuck in basically a medieval level of society, and that, as a lost relative of a clan of world-hoppers, she’s royalty of a sort.
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Until I read MATTER, Iain M. Banks’ Culture series of sci-fi novels seemed daunting and unreadable. But MATTER proved me wrong, as often is the case, and I noticed that what I thought of as an unassailable literary cliff was really a gym climbing wall with plenty of handholds.
The series isn’t numbered, although there are some books that are rough sequels to others and some that share characters, in passing (or so I’ve read). Seriously opinionated Internet commenters debate ad nauseum as to what the correct reading order of the books should be; After MATTER, I basically chose the two that looked coolest to me: USE OF WEAPONS and CONSIDER PHLEBAS.
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