House of Saints starts slowly, dealing mostly with oppressive politics, subterfuge and straining relationships.
It took me a while to get through the first half of the novel.
Things heat up in the second half, and we get to see more cool engineering as our beloved characters try to survive under the oppressive conditions of Venus, the government and the bank.
I finished the second half of the novel in one day.
I especially enjoyed Pascal's continuing transition story, it is nuanced and beautiful.
Note that This is not The Quantum Magician, it is slower, it broods.
"The Great Retrofit is a near-future version of the city of Messina, in Sicily. Its science fictional element is the rise, and success beyond expectations, of a new type of economic agent, a form of for-benefit company that follows a quintuple bottom line approach, having the objective to improve its own performance across five dimensions: surplus (rather than profit), people, planet, beauty and truth, or knowledge sharing."
The fifth chapter of Stardust: Labyrinth is out! Horrifying event after horrifying event happens as the five tries to find their way back after the fourth chapter's incident, threatening to derail the expedition completely. Will they manage to regain their bearings?
Well, well, well, this was quite a fast one. And I didn’t even push, I just ran on. At one point I noticed that I felt slightly out of breath, then I looked at my watch and was going 4:35/km, so it was alright. Today‘s audiobook was DARK MATTER by Blake Crouch, which I‘ve read some weeks ago. The book was brilliant, the audiobook is as well. I‘m looking forward to the AppleTV+ series of it. Have a great Thursday, y‘all! #Running#applewatchultra2#audiobooks#sciencefiction
#PennedPossibilities 323 — What's a piece of advice for writers that you listened to and are glad for?
An Australian author, Lucy Sussex, told us at Clarion West 1998 to be shameless in promoting ourselves. Being a shy person, networking and promotion has been a heavy lift, but I working on it and I know it's going to help. Mastodon: ☑️
#PennedPossibilities 322 — What piece of advice, as an author, did you once receive but hadn’t followed? Looking back on it now, you might wish that you had.
Advice: Don't only write novels. Write lots of shorter pieces.
When I started I saw that you could only make a living if you sold novels, so I wrote novels. That completely discounted the fabulous practice you get completing lots of smaller stories. Completing a novel takes lots of time and there's a mounting anxiety that in the end the plot will fail or no publisher will be interested. Yeah, true with short fiction, but the investment is far lower (or should be if you're doing it right). There used to be lots of magazines you could sell short fiction to... for pennies a word, but it was something, and it offered a chance to build a brand name and a following. Such notoriety could help you sell novels, too.
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO Jasper Fforde’s enigmatic 2011 novel Shades of Grey is a fascinating, mysterious science fiction picaresque where decoding the secrets behind the worldbuilding is part of the fun. B PLUS
Alex Schomburg's interior art for Robert Borski's "The Apocalypse of Harry Jones" in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine (September 1977) #art#scifi#artist#sciencefiction
Doyle didn’t just write #CrimeFiction … Alan Brown looks at Arthur Conan Doyle’s “vain, volatile, & brilliant” Scottish adventurer-scientist-explorer & dinosaur hunter Professor George Edward Challenger
After THE LOST WORLD, Challenger’s other adventures include the novels THE POISON BELT and THE LAND OF MIST, & the short stories “The World Screamed” & “The Disintegration Machine”. Alan Brown digs deeper into Doyle’s #sciencefiction
(Conan Doyle personally preferred Professor Challenger over Sherlock Holmes – even dressing up as the Professor for a photograph of Challenger’s Amazonian expedition)
#WordWeavers 2405.22 — Is your antagonist more a dragon or a dragon rider? CW: Innuendo
This question has me rolling on the floor laughing, but then you'd have to know the context of the story Fire Brand is in. The antagonist's type of human is called a... You guessed it. The MC has described his "attributes" cough intimately, having let herself be captured by him... And, well... "riding" is a euphemism she's well acquainted with. So, will she become a dragon rider...? 😊
I wrote about the dynamic between these two characters in the tootfic Ms George and the Dragon https://eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/110603595653290409. Please read it, if you haven't already. It should amuse you in this context...