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A few other people's posts that include "I am posting even though it feels like not much is going on" remind me that it's been ten days since I posted anything. The freelance stuff continues, today's most exciting moment was querying the kind of nail polish used (for a paper on medical applications of nanotech).
Recent reading, two books that are second in series where reading order does matter:
Prairie Fire, by E. K. Johnston. If I say more than "read this unless you need your dragons to be sympathetic, but read The Story of Owen first," there will be spoilers for that book, so have a cut tag.
This picks up the bard Siobhan's story after her hands are badly injured while she and Owen destroy a dragon nesting ground. [Seriously, don't read this if you don't want to read a realistic story about someone coping with that shape of disability.] Despite her disability, she insists on following Owen into the Oil Force, the quasi-military branch of the government that defends the oil fields against dragons, and protects cities and other industry if it has time along with that. The story is fast-moving, and fills in more of the alternate history in between music, military training, and the like.
The Philosopher Kings, by Jo Walton. This starts ten years after the end of The Just City, and a lot of the chapters are from the viewpoint of Apollo's now-15-year-old daughter Arete. I recommend it highly, but read The Just City first. There's a lot in here about grief, and revenge, and reasons why people might not seek revenge; the transplanted-in-time Platonists also wrestle with whether they can, or should, help the much-less-advanced people around them, given that Athene had deliberately set them up on Thera before the eruption, to keep the experiment from affecting the future. Having waited several weeks after it was published to buy this, I am now impatient for the third volume.
Recent reading, two books that are second in series where reading order does matter:
Prairie Fire, by E. K. Johnston. If I say more than "read this unless you need your dragons to be sympathetic, but read The Story of Owen first," there will be spoilers for that book, so have a cut tag.
This picks up the bard Siobhan's story after her hands are badly injured while she and Owen destroy a dragon nesting ground. [Seriously, don't read this if you don't want to read a realistic story about someone coping with that shape of disability.] Despite her disability, she insists on following Owen into the Oil Force, the quasi-military branch of the government that defends the oil fields against dragons, and protects cities and other industry if it has time along with that. The story is fast-moving, and fills in more of the alternate history in between music, military training, and the like.
The Philosopher Kings, by Jo Walton. This starts ten years after the end of The Just City, and a lot of the chapters are from the viewpoint of Apollo's now-15-year-old daughter Arete. I recommend it highly, but read The Just City first. There's a lot in here about grief, and revenge, and reasons why people might not seek revenge; the transplanted-in-time Platonists also wrestle with whether they can, or should, help the much-less-advanced people around them, given that Athene had deliberately set them up on Thera before the eruption, to keep the experiment from affecting the future. Having waited several weeks after it was published to buy this, I am now impatient for the third volume.
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...I kind of stopped paying attention to fantasy and sci-fi in a diligent way when I started college more than a decade ago. :-/ Catching up now.
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I read both the Walton's together a few weeks ago and have been mulling over them ever since. Important books.