The Good, The Bad and The Very, Very Delayed, Pt. 3: Discontinued, Deleted or Deselected
In keeping with past practice, I offer another part of my triage: books that haven’t made it through to the end, or which I’m suspending until I feel more like finishing them. The rule of thumb is that it can’t break suspense or disbelief too freely, or offer annoying problems which could have been avoided with more care -- I’m looking at you, multi-volume self-published space opera assembly line operators...
This is probably not all of the books I didn’t or haven’t finished since last writing in late September. However, changing out Kindles to a new unit resulted in me resetting the old unit before I’d noted what I was working through…
Special Report:
Space Opera Odyssey Bundle by Storybundle, December 2020:
I had a rough time with this bundle. Normally, my experience with Storybundle is better. For whatever reason, though, I just couldn’t make it through a good chunk of this one. I finished three: A Billion Earths, The Wild Space Boxed Set, and Realm City -- and was very happy with two of them. I’d already read one (on this list because it was skipped) and canned five without finishing. The tenth book, The Retrieval Artist, is in a series one of which I read and enjoyed and which I’m looking forward to trying.
True to its comic origins, both on and behind the cover.
Starbarian Conquest, Robert T. Jeschonek. Advanced humans play god for barbarian hordes repopulating a devastated Earth, in order to pluck their leads into space to face an unbeatable menace from beyond the stars. Even for the genre, the plot was contrived and characters wildly under-developed. This was a quick read, as far as it went, and was quickly sacrificed to appease the horse gods at 27% done.
Alien Seas (The Science Officer, #10), Blaze Ward. The blurb on Goodreads invites us to join the crew “as the adventures keep getting better.” Unfortunately, the seas on the planet the cast visits as the book opens aren’t the only thing murky about the book. I think the author tries to fill in backstory, but I still felt like I came in mid-way through a made-for-TV sci-fi movie on a channel in the far reaches of the free cable tier. Cord cut 12% through.
Nexus: A Novel, Mike Baron. This is an interesting book, just not in a way that makes me want to finish it. Baron writes with a breezy style and sketches a world that’s comic-like--because it’s from one. Baron is a fine comic writer, but his send-up of the genre isn’t my thing. Off to the used comic rack 16% done.
Veiled Alliances (The Saga of Seven Suns, #0.1), Kevin J. Anderson. The aliens are coming to visit the figurehead king of the Terran Hanseatic League, and he and the shadowy puppet master behind him, Chairman Stannis have a plan...or not. This doesn’t work. If you’re going to set someone up as Machiavelli in the 23rd century, they need to be, well, Machiavellian. The generation ship gone wrong was good, but the aliens were less inscrutable than not worth scrutinizing. Back to the Amazon cloud at 10%.
In the far future, most of us will have luxuriant, dramatic and flowing hair. But only most of us.
Project Nemesis: The Long Run: Book One, Leah R. Cutter. Judit is an interstellar trucker: the future version of an owner-operator, and she’s under the thumb of the Universal Trading Cartel. Cutter is a good writer, so the book flows decently enough. My problem with it is that Judit seems like she’s grafted into the universe from 21st-century America, as do tons of other small details. It’s hard to maintain immersion. Disassembled for parts at 10% done.
Optional Retirement Plan, Chris Pourteau. I read this earlier . Reviewed here.
And otherwise set aside:
Echoes of War: Books 1-3 (An Epic Space Opera) Daniel Gibbs and David VanDyke. David Cohen is a conflicted man. A corporal serving the Coalition in its war against the League of Sol, his dreams of becoming a rabbi are shelved when he displays uncommon valor repelling enemy boarders trying to take his ship. It’s not badly written, per se, but the inner struggle of the reluctant protagonist didn’t grab me. I’ll go back to it.