Sometimes I think I should update this more… so I’m going to try to review some of what I’ve been reading lately. Obviously I’ll have to try harder in future as in this case I did not end up with a review.

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of Hardass Space Mercenary books. First there was Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. Then Spin Control. Now I’m reading Morgan’s Woken Furies and pretty soon I’m going to reread the Doctor Who: New Adventures novel Deceit, in which Ace returned to the series. As a hardass space mercenary. I have no idea why I am doing this.

The main thing I learned from Spin Control is that series books really, really need to include plot summaries of previous books. Really. I read the preceding book (Spin State) a couple of years ago. At this point I remember nothing except that (A) I mildly enjoyed it, even though (B) it was fifty to a hundred pages over its natural length. Spin Control’s plot is independent of the earlier book, but kept referencing people and places and bits of future tech that I felt I should have recognized, but didn’t.

Beyond that… well, this one is fifty to a hundred pages too long again, but I get that feeling from a lot of science fiction these days. Meanwhile, fantasy is getting shorter. Charles Stross has had to chop his Merchant Princes books in half, and I get the impression that Paul Park’s Roumania tetralogy was originally supposed to be a trilogy. (Just the way the natural stopping point for the first volume occurs about a third of the way into the second. You know. Little things.)

This is why I could never work in publishing: the forces that shape the industry are as mysterious to me as quantum mechanics.