Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer

Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Regency romance. The one where our willful red-haired Earl's daughter is outraged to discover upon her father's death that her inheritance is entrusted to the man she jilted, whose permission she needs to marry.

This is interesting to me because it's doing some really mature work on a craft level. The hero and heroine spend the vast majority of the book apart, and we get a lot of back-and-forth about a handful of secondary romantic entanglements, while the main romance is told almost entirely in negative space. It's skillfully done – Heyer really was very, very good at this. But my problem was that I just didn't care about anyone else in the book. Whoops. And also this one just happened to slide a little too far over the line from 'they spend all their time snarling at each other' to 'it's supposed to be hot the way he kisses her without permission.'

Still. Clever.

View all my reviews >>

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Accelerando by Charles Stross


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Hard SF. Three generations of an entrepreneurial family invent and scheme and survive the singularity, the point where artificial intelligence power bypasses old-fashioned organic brains, and humans first augment themselves, then disassemble the planets to build a solar-system wide computer and become something else entirely.

What a disappointment. I can forgive unapproachable characters in hard SF, and frequently have. I tried hard to cut some slack, because the point of the book is the screamingly insane pace of progress and just how fast and how far we would change into something entirely different. But indeed, I did have the revelation, around the three-quarter mark, that not only didn't I care whether any of our protagonists permanently bit it or not, but the supposedly precarious fate of the entire human race also made me yawn copiously.

But when I forgive that failing in hard SF it's because the big ideas are awesome enough. And these ideas were big, sure, all intergalactic packet-switched router systems and AI cats and what all. But there was something so . . . smug? Self-involved? I can't really put my finger on it, except that a lot of this book was so in-jokey to such a specific stripe of internet-age scifi geekery that it tipped over from pleasing into masturbatory. Something like that.

Does Stross have anything better to offer?

View all my reviews >>