Now that I’ve caught up with the Avery Cates series and am still awaiting my pre-ordered copy of The Pericles Commission,* I’m looking around for new reading material.
The Tor newsletter is always helpful for this** and one arrived in my e-mail inbox yesterday. Karl Schroeder has a new book out—Pirate Sun—and the library had the first book in the series,*** so I took a chance.
Sun of Suns is set inside Virga, a vast balloon in space—chunks of land and globs of water float in the air that eddies around the central artificial sun, which is the component mother of other, smaller suns that give much needed light and heat to nations made of small orbiting towns that spin, if they can, to provide artificial gravity.
The world building is incredible—everything from potties to politics stems from the lack of natural gravity. The first scene has a character plucking a “fish”, though wetfish are later seen in the hollowed out lake that surrounds a town. That concept alone is worth the price of admission. And so far, the politics are as complex and twisted as the characters—it’s like Dune in there, and Swordpoint, maybe a bit of Honor Harrington, and that something unique that is always supplied by Mr. Schroeder’s imagination.
I’m also reading The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal, which describes the culture of religious tolerance in fourteenth-century Spain. It’s preliminary research for a percolating idea, but it’s also fascinating reading. Medieval Spain was anything but insular, and for a time, Muslims, Jews, and Christians worked together to make their country flourish. I’m just soaking it in now, not bothering to take notes . . . but maybe someone should.
And for some reason, my collection of Robert B. Parker books are all migrating to the bathroom counter. I do tend to pick up books as I encounter them, read-walk them to another part of the house, and discard them ’til we meet again, but it’s usually more random than this. And Mr. Parker’s books are like comfort food for me—so apparently my subconscious believes I need comfort . . . in the bathroom.
Anyone have the number of a good bibliotherapist?
And hey, what are you reading right now?
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*It left Lexington, Kentucky this morning and will take an estimated week to get here. Since I know for a fact it’s about a ten-hour drive, including pit stops, from here to there—Go Wildcats!—I assume it’s being delivered by a passenger pigeon on a bicycle.
**And for re-watch discussions of classic Star Trek and Cowboy Be-Bop episodes. I love me some Be-Bop.
***I don’t know where I was a year or three ago, but I apparently missed a lot of series debuts.
Earful of Cider 