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dustydigger
Posted 2016-10-23 11:32 AM (#14474 - in reply to #14473)
Subject: Re: Pick and Mix 2016		Quote Reply



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Location: UK		Early in October I completed the awesome Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe.The further Severian travels away from Nessus the weirder,more surreal bewildering the saga gets! I would not believe that anyone could predict what will happen even a mere five pages ahead lol.Haunting,dazzling,extraordinary,bewildering and plain amazing,but never easy.
Another mindbending book this month was Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity,and I struggled with it,finding ample irritating examples of the usual flat characters and plodding pedestrian prose.But had to admire the fascinating and complex time travel premises,Asimov's usual turning things inside out,and the startling link with the Galactic Empire which underpins Asimov's whole opus,but seemed missing here till the very end.I wont even attempt a review,but I really was impressed by Scott Laz's excellent review here on WWEnd. What he said!
To continue the mindblowing theme this month I am working through Iain M Banks Use of Weapons,where the main story,in chapters prosaically called One,Two Three etc are interleaved with the digging out the reasons why the black ops protagonist is suffering burnout,struggling to reminder some deeply hidden forgotten horrors. These go backwards,being labelled XII,XI,X,IX and so on.Humour and horror cheek by jowl!
And last but certainly not least,I am loving Vernor Vinge's hugo winning A Fire Upon the Deep. Space opera on the widest scale intercut with a mediaeval society of very unusual aliens.Good characterisation too. Took a LONG time to puzzle out the Zones of Thought and what exactly the various alien races really were like.All in all this is proving a mindblowing mindcracking but fascinating and exciting month
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