- A Matter of Oaths, Helen S Wright
This was great! I was sucked in almost immediately to this. I really loved the technology of the web and how everything revolved in it and how it, in a way, tied into the climax as well. I would have liked to see even more of that in the mystery components of Rafe's past, which was a bit inelegant in its unfolding. I think the main character was a little lost on me personally, I cared WAY more about Rallya and Joshim than I did about Rafe, who was a bit woobie for my tastes. But I really like the 80s/90s scifi feel where not everything in the narrative is explained to you. I think this could've stood for a little more explanation here and there, sometimes things in the plot felt like non sequiturs, but it was just such a pleasant read in comparison to more modern stuff where I feel like the tendency is to overexplain and overexposition-dump. Not here!! Would highly recommend, and I'm really sad it seems like Wright never wrote anything else (at least, nothing published (maybe nothing so far?)).
- Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
This existed. I don't think I dislike Zelazny's prose per se, but I don't really dig his characters (and their - largely - lack of characterisation - like I almost cared about Yama and Taraka. Almost.), or the low-key sexism and/or transphobia, or the fantasy gods narrative style (I just don't care about reading about gods), or the orientalism/appropriation. This book kind of feels like a mish mash and at some times it feels like it's lampshading itself to do so but I just don't think it pulls it off. Maybe it was among the first to do the whole, 'they were not gods but they acted like they were' thing which Stargate was super big on, but I don't feel like that's enough. I also don't think it was obvious enough what was actually going on sometimes and while I normally don't mind that (I don't like to be super hand-held as a reader) it gets to the point that you can't actually identify the raygun ... as a raygun. It's like it's Schrodinger's sci-fi at this point. It works better as a fantasy, but I think it's dissatisfying as one, too. And it also felt like a series of chapters he'd strung together at the 11th hour to try and make a novel out of. With that in mind you can kind of read the chapters in isolation, and if you do that, then the most entertaining chapters were 3 and 4. By the time I finished chapter 4 I was thinking, wow, finally it's getting good! Nope. Slog to get the rest of the way through. Don't recommend. The
wikipedia article about it is actually a more interesting and coherent read. Sorry if there are Zelazny superfans out there reading this, but this wasn't for me. It could just be Zelazny; I don't remember disliking Eye of Cat this much 🤔️ ... but I haven't read that in awhile and I might be forgetting all the things I hated about it, too.