Joshua Young

Solid and well read

Reviewed: 07-07-22

A solid story from Niven, given a lot of life and warmth by a narrator who does almost as well as James Marsters does with The Dresden Files.

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1 person found this helpful

Decent precursor to X-Men

Reviewed: 06-07-22

Slan isn’t the best work that Van Vogt wrote, but it’s still a satisfying story of supermen and mystery boxes. I doubt if this is the first occurrence of the idea of mutation causing a sudden wave in human evolution, but you can certainly see the groundwork for stories like the X-men here.

The narrator does a great job of making it sound appropriately like 1940s pulp.

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One of scifi’s best

Reviewed: 05-26-22

This is probably the fourth time I’ve read Hyperion, and given that my paperback copies have always disappeared, probably the sixth or seventh time I’ve bought it. (Others were gifts.) It was my first time as an audiobook, and it didn’t disappoint.

Simmons brings a deft touch to a diverse cast by weaving all their stories together in a slowly emerging tale of how the distant, spare self populated colony world of Hyperion has affected all their lives in important and frequently horrifying ways. Underneath it all you begin to see the big picture of a conflict spanning thousands if not millions of years, and the forces moving against each other in their own unique bids to claim that victory. Atmospheric and character driven without disappearing into modernistic wallowing or focusing on characters to the detriment of story, Hyperion is immensely satisfying.

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Feels abbreviated.

Reviewed: 04-20-22

Neil Stephenson is a meandering sort of author who nevertheless has a lot of skill bringing plot threads together. He digresses on tangents and infodumps, but makes them warm and entertaining. His characters tend to be startlingly likable, even in terrible situations. He can be very even handed and fair on the most polemic of subjects. All those things are here, but incompletely. The book is fine, but doesn’t shine as well as some of his other works like Anathem or Seveneves do. I don’t regret the time I spent with it. I probably would’ve liked to have spent more.

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Rangers vs Dragon

Reviewed: 02-08-22

Well, we know the Rangers have been do for a confrontation with an evil dragon ever since he was mentioned in Book 1. And here it is. It is satisfying, and more than a little relaxing, as it is less the tea gets fighting for survival and more the Rangers being proactive and taking the fight to the enemy. In a second part, we dive into the origins of the Ruin, and we get a glimpse of why the Ruin is what it is— including why so many things line up with D&D. Satisfying all around, read beautifully by Grant.

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Great narration, iffy monster.

Reviewed: 11-24-21

Leading with the good: I don’t regret having read this book. At no time was I ever bored or impatient; King does well enough with his tale that it’s compelling enough. None of my complaints are really with the mechanics.

I think it’s Pennywise that I’m kind of ambivalent to. That might be personal preference, I guess, but I am definitely more intimidated by the impersonal, uncaring evils of Lovecraft’s monsters than I am the ones that spend time mocking and taunting the heroes. It’s hard to 1) be intimidated by a pennywise who has to spend so much effort making people afraid and miserable and 2), hard to buy pennywise as a being of the stature the text claims it to be when its doing these things.

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Nick does Starcraft — and something else.

Reviewed: 08-26-21

If you’ve red Galaxy’s Edge, you know Nick Cole is perfectly capable of putting his own spin on a very familiar setting. If Galaxy’s Edge is the Star Wars he and Anspach did, Strange Company is his Starcraft meets [redacted]. It’s not quite that the settings are identical, more that Strange Company would be at home fighting the Zerg and Protoss, and I couldn’t quite shake the feeling the whole time.

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Both comfortable and scary

Reviewed: 07-30-21

You know, I haven’t read a lot of horror, outside Lovecraft, so my knowledge of the tropes is limited to what I’ve picked up. Certainly this isn’t the first (or last) “small town kids vs ancient evil” story there is; so I don’t know to comment on that. What I do know is that the characters were sympathetic (or not, where applicable) with depth (or not, where applicable) and life (or not, where applicable). I know that I enjoyed it, and I’ll be looking forward to reading the follow ups.

The narrator was fine; he didn’t harm the story, but neither did he really help it all that much. A couple of scenes weren’t as tense as they could’ve been because of the matter of fact narration.

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Another fantastic trilogy from Wright

Reviewed: 07-01-21

If you are a fan of John C Wright, there are certain things you’ll come to expect. Super sciences. Battles of wit. Classical pulp tropes fused with philosophy, theology, and science. Small beginnings leading to epic endings. Superluminary delivers on all those, and infuses a decent helping of cosmic horror into the mix.

The narrator can chew the scenery sometimes, but overall, it’s a great listen.

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2 people found this helpful

A KTF.... cozy?

Reviewed: 03-11-21

If you can have a heartwarming novel that features stacks of dead bodies, this one is it. We have a cast of likable, honorable characters doing their duty and making an impact, and it’s strangely comfortable for a gripping story about a special forces operator. It’s almost like a cozy murder mystery— almost. That’s both it’s strength and it’s weakness— I kept waiting for the other shoe and it rarely dropped.

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