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1. John Rees, The Leveller Revolution
I’ve had
a preview copy of this on my stack for a few weeks now and I’m just getting
around to making time for it now. The Levellers are part of a really
interesting moment in history when common people rose up against kings and
aristocrats and said, “Sorry, we don’t need you anymore.” This is the first
book in a long time that attempts a comprehensive history of the movement, and
it’s a fun story too, although I will say that the main characters didn’t fare
very well in the end.
This is
the beginning of a new series for Stross, whose Laundry Files and Merchant
Princes books have set a pretty high standard. It’s set in the world that he created
for Merchant Princes, but using different characters and set at a different
point in the timeline. I’m excited about this. His creative impetus in the
Laundry Files had been sort of running down and it seemed like he needed a new
challenge of some kind. This is near future type urban science fiction, and you
can expect the snappy, uptempo writing that is Stross’s hallmark and some
interesting speculation a what the next decades of human civilization might
bring.
I’ve
been trying to make some more time to read sci-fi and this new book by
McDermott looks fantastic. It seems like sci-fi writers have been doing a lot
better job lately of imagining how cloning and faster than light communication
might allow interplanetary travel and colonization. This is another one of
those books (Neptune’s Brood and The Voice of the Whirlwind are other
examples) that look at the complications of being a clone and how lives divided
into multiple bits can get very, very complicated.
There’s
been a lot of Wonder Woman buzz lately, especially with the new movie starring
Gal Gadot set for release later this year. The run of Wonder Woman comics
contained in this collection is part of DC’s Rebirth series, which have tried
to show some of their older characters in a slightly different light. The focus
here is on Wonder Woman’s origin story and on the ways that her life on
Themiscyra. For those familiar with other Rucka
projects (such as Gotham Central,
Lazarus, or the Star Wars comics he did), this is less dark and hard boiled, but
still benefits from his talent for tight plotting and interesting secondary
characters.
I really
like a sci-fi book with a bit of scope to it, and that it John Scalzi to a “T.”
If you’re going to tell stories set against the vastness of space they should
be (at least as far as I am concerned) big enough not to be dwarfed by their
environment. For fans of Scalzi’s Old
Man’s War trilogy this should be more of the thing that worked so well
already.
This is
the second volume of a projected trilogy that Hicks started last year. I’ve
been waiting for this ever since I got hold of a pre-release copy of the first
one last winter. This is a classic buddy story of intrigue in a mythical city
located at the heart of vast political conflicts. Drawn with richness and
subtlety by Hicks (who also did the wonderful Friends with Boys in 2012) and beautifully colored by Jordie
Bellaire, Nameless City was one of
the very best things I read last year and I can hardly wait to find out where
the story goes.
I’ve
read a lot of books about the Civil War, but among them Stephen Sears’s book
about Gettysburg stands out as particularly excellent. Sears managed to pull
together a startlingly large amount of information and to organize it in a way
that actually brought something new to the way I understood the battle. That
doesn’t happen often. I’m interested to see what he can do with this topic,
which seems like it will involve broader political and biographical issues. I
expect I will be entertained (and frankly you can’t say that about every
history book).
No one
does speculative futuristic sci-fi like Kim Stanley Robinson. This one looks
like it hits pretty close to the bone, since it looks at what life will be like
in New York City once the sea level rises enough to flood the lower parts of
the city. This is a thing that is happening, irrespective of whether you
believe that humans are causing it, so I think it’s intrinsically interesting
to speculate about what kind of civilization challenges that sort of
transformation is going to bring.
Admittedly,
I read this in the individual issues as they come out, but I’m looking forward
to reading volume two of the trade because the story line can get a little
fragmented when you only see it moving every four weeks or so. I absolutely
love this comic. Hellcat is a fairly minor figure in the Marvel universe, but they’ve
taken her and done something really different: they’ve made her fun. The
artwork is kind of old school and will sort of remind you of the old Archie comics. But the storylines are
updated and entertaining. It’s just one of those things that is really pleasant
to sit down and savor.
I know,
I know, Greg Rucka again. I only heard about Lazarus after it was well
underway. But it is one of the very best continuing series currently running.
Set in an alternative future in which liberal capitalism has given way to a
kind of neo-feudalism, presents a bleak picture of intrigue and violence. Make
no mistake, this story is grim and gory, but it is also weirdly beautiful and
compellingly plotted. This is some dark stuff, and it took me a couple of
issues to really get into it, but once I did I was hooked and I am on pins and
needles until the next one comes out.
~John F.
~John F.
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