I have been reading a lot this year, and nearly all the books I have read have had me thinking about being used and being of use. Daniel O’Malley’s excellent Stiletto, which revisits the Checquy and it’s collection of supernatural government servants, fits right into this pattern. For those who have not read The Rook, the background here is that Britain has a entire government agency made up of agents with mysterious powers, ranging from people who increase the fertility of those who surround them […]
Book 1: Malazan Book of the Fallen
When I was looking for new books to try, my friend recommended Morden’s Metrozone series and the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Of course, the Metrozone series veered off the rails for me, but I am buying what Erikson is selling here. Plus, Canadian! I started reading this on the plane to Hawaii, and although I had been warned by both my friend and Erikson’s foreword, I was surprised at how this book just drops the reader right in the middle of a very […]
Degrees of Freedom: The Metrozone Series, Book 3
The third book in Morden’s Petrovich trilogy finds our hero standing as a figure of rebellion, symbolically trying to rescue the AI that the Americans tried to destroy in the previous book. His city is starting to rebuild itself, but his personal life has slid into a series of of soap opera plots. Once again, there are a series of international conspiracies that all seem to circle around him – the Americans want to make sure the AI named Michael is done once and for […]
Theories of Flight: The Metrozone Series, Book 2
The first book in this series, Equations of Life, left us with young super genius mathematician Samuil Petrovitch standing in the ruins of what had been London after taking in millions of refugees from an international nuclear disaster. While the city had been virtually destroyed by an AI, Theories of Flight finds Petrovitch in a slightly better place overall. He has invented an anti-gravity generator that makes him world famous; he ends up having married the nun-warrior he had met in the first book, and […]