in-reading notes: black hole sun

The cover says it's like Mad Max, but it's totally not like that. It feels more like Firefly meets the down-fall side of 1984 or something like that-- the cleverness and moral ambiguity of Joss mashed up with the grey and crumbling distopias that are made of corporations and do their best to crush souls. Firefly if they were kids trapped on the Vogon homeworld by way of the Mars from Total Recall.

It's very interesting. My mind is already spinning off ideas for novels and histories and plotlines that could easily cover several books, and that's the sort of story I like best: the kind that sparks inspiration. Who wants a book that's closed and tells you everything? There's no room for your own ideas there.

I think this one will be done first (it's currently a rundown between this and Murder In Vein to see who gets read and reviewed first, but both are due by Sunday and come out on Sept 1).

migration by james p hogan

This book started out like a medieval fantasy and ended like a space opera, and in between, it skipped eleven years and often read like a treatise on the way people could build a better society. Even so, though, it was an interesting read, and I come out with only two complaints, and they aren't even that bad: one, I wish that it's transformation from classic scifi mode to modern scifi mode had been more complete and it had kept going, and two, I wish the situation of robot religiosity had been handled in a less definitively anthropocentric way, but even that, with all it's big words, isn't really a problem in the context of the book-- it's really the only way things could have gone.

JP Hogan died recently, and it's sad that it means there probably won't be more of these stories of these people and their trip to another world for the first time in human history, but it's a pretty optimistic way to leave the fans, I think. We really can make things better.