Reviews and Comments

📚torstein📚

torstein@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 4 months ago

Too little time; sleeping when I should be reading and reading when I should sleep. Mostly English language SF/F, but I occasionally read other fare.

What it means when I rate something: ★★★★★ - This moved me in a way that changed my life. ★★★★☆ - I loved it. ★★★☆☆ - It was OK ★★☆☆☆ - Meh, it was entertaining at least ★☆☆☆☆ - Complete trash (if I dislike something, but it is well written I'd rather not give it any rating. The single star is reserved for the real trash). Addendum: I will not rate badly written stories by obvious first time writers. If you have managed to self publish your first story and people actually read it, I'm not going to piss on your parade. I'll reserve that single star for your next book (or the fifteenth one for that matter).

Note: I have heaps of books imported from another database where the rating used was 1-6 (dice), so some books are rated higher than I would normally. I'll be adjusting stuff as I work my way thru the list of books (once I have fixed the 300 or so books that didn't import automatically :P)

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Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith: A City on Mars (Hardcover, 2023, Penguin Press, Penguin Publishing Group)

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away - …

Started on this ages ago, completely forgot it because of some other release I wanted to read first, picked it up again recently. Only a few chapters in, but the book has already persuaded me that anybody advocating for colonies on Mars within the forseeable future are delusional idiots with no regard for human life.

Andre Norton (duplicate): The People of the Crater (Paperback, 2009, Wildside Press)

"Send the Black Throne to dust; conquer the Black Ones, and bring the Daughter from …

Good grief this felt even more dated than the Stoker tripe I read recently. And it's not written very well either. For the next Norton read I'll just skip ahead a few decades and hope the writing improves.

Bram Stoker: Dracula (2015, Sterling)

As others have pointed out - this novel must have been wild to read when it first came out. Today the concept of the vampire is so well known, that even if you have never consumed any vampire specific media, you still will be very aware of Dracula just by cultural osmosis. The first few chapters would have hit completely different if you had never heard about Transylvania.

finished reading The Andromeda Evolution by Julia Whelan (The Andromeda Strain #2)

Julia Whelan, Daniel H. Wilson, Michael Crichton, Daniel H. Wilson, Daniel Wilson: The Andromeda Evolution (Hardcover, 2019, Harper)

The Evolution is Coming.

In 1967, an extraterrestrial microbe came crashing down to Earth …

Oppfølger til Chrictons "The Andromeda Strain", skrevet og satt 50 år etter den første. Wilson gjør et godt forsøk på å etterligne Chricton, men skillet mellom pastisj og parodi er syltynt, og ofte glir det over i det komiske.

started reading Parasite by Mira Grant (Parasitology)

Mira Grant: Parasite (Hardcover, 2013, Orbit)

Ah, jeg er en sucker for slike "Crichton-lite" bøker - når jeg ser første kapittel heter "Stage 0: Exposure" så er jeg solgt med en gang.

Bram Stoker: Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm (2002, Deodand Publishing)

Absolute dross

It was a slog to get through this, and in the end it was a complete waste of time with no payout. An interesting idea with some potential, butchered by extremely poor writing and presumably no editing. The syphilis must have affected Stoker's brain by this point, because it is hard to fathom how this could be the product of a famed novelist.

To quote HP Lovecraft: "The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile."

One thing Lovecraft fails to mention is the over the top - almost to the point of satire - racism in the novel, but then again he might have approved.