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.<\/p>\n
For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of Hardass Space Mercenary books. First there was Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels<\/cite>. Then Spin Control<\/cite><\/a>. Now I’m reading Morgan’s Woken Furies<\/cite> and pretty soon I’m going to reread the Doctor Who: New Adventures<\/cite><\/a> novel Deceit<\/cite>, in which Ace returned to the series. As a hardass space mercenary. I have no idea why I am doing this.<\/p>\n The main thing I learned from Spin Control<\/cite> is that series books really, really need to include plot summaries of previous books. Really. I read the preceding book (Spin State<\/cite>) 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<\/cite>’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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. 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<\/em> things.)<\/p>\n This is why I could never work in publishing: the forces that shape the industry are as mysterious to me as quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading Not Really a Review of Spin Control<\/span>