As I have previously noted, I finished this book last night.
It was a solid SF adventure, the kind typical of Alan Dean Foster. An interesting alien culture and world, exploration and discovery, political machinations, fighting, etc. I started the third and final book in the Icerigger trilogy.
This is the first time I remember a character in one of Foster’s Commonwealth novels actually referencing events from another novel. In this case, Skua September mentions that he wants to go to the planet Alaspin, in which he has an adventure in the Pip & Flinx series.
As always, there are issues discussed in this book but Foster doesn’t bash you over the head with them.
This week, while looking for articles on Alan Dean Foster’s Sentence to Prism, I found Andy Johnsons Classic Science Fiction blog. It is quite to my liking.
I don’t really reflect that much in my posts here regarding an author’s typical themes, prose style, etc. Andy delves into that a bit, and I like it a lot. Maybe I’ll start writing a bit more about the books I’m reading.
I’m very excited to find this blog. It perplexes me that more people aren’t into blogging in general.
I don’t write a lot about the Dumarest books. I just read them. They are solid pulp adventure tales and actually well-written. This one was different however, as the character Angado was the first instance of a gay man being interested in Earl. The author, E.C. Tubb, handled the character really well. There was no “oh my God he’s gay!” moment. It was simply there.
As I have noted, 2025 has been a rough year for reading. I actually deleted my reading blog about a month ago, but decided to bring it back under this new name. Thanks to @manton for 1)making it so easy to import blog archives and 2)making micro.blog hands-down the best platform for book blogging.
Looking at the imported posts it is clear that the beginning of my D&D game was the thing that destroyed my reading habit for the last year. No regrets. We are loving the D&D game, but there are only so many hours in the day, and starting a good campaign is labor intensive.
Over the last few months, however, I noticed that I’d gone back to my hold habits of sitting in my chair at night and just dicking around on the internet. Yes, I might write a blog post here or there, but I really have’t been spending all that time working on my gaming campaigns. Why? Because working on stuff like that is tiring, and I have a limited amount of energy. I’ve found that the campaigns (both of them) go just as well with two hours a week of prep time as they do if I sit and agonize over them all evening every evening. In short, agonizing over them is both unpleasant and unproductive.
I found myself, as in my pre-book blogging life, going to bed feeling like I’d not really done anything substantial “for myself” each day. So I have rediscovered the joy of turning off the computer, putting away the phone, paying no attention to the TV, and reading for an hour or two in the evening. Just as before, it lets me go to bed with a sense of satisfaction. It also prepares my mind and body for sleep a lot better than staring at the computer screen (even though I read on a Kindle for the most part).
Right now, this very moment, I have 3.5 months left in the year. My goal is to finish with 16 SF novels read.
Well, it has been a bad year for reading thus far. It is mid-May, 2025, and I’ve not read a single book.
The reasons? I returned to three times week aikido practice and I’ve been concentrating on running my Traveller and D&D campaigns.
The truth, however, is that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the games but not DOING much with them. Time I really should have been reading. My daily reading habit, thanks to this obsessive behavior, has fallen apart. That is about to change. I’m back on it. I have over six months left in the year, and I’ll read two books per month. So I’m setting my goal at 24 novels.
Well, I have taken a few months off reading. I have been giving my eyes a rest and working a lot on my new D&D campaign. But today I return to the 5% habit.
This is the second chronologically in-universe of Piper’s Terro-Human Future History novels.
Compared to the first one, the Uller Uprising, I thought this was a better novel. More intereresting and compelling characters. Told from the point of view of a young journalist on a somewhat hostile planet, this novel moves along quite well. Solid early SF.
In this episode, I talk about being too tired to read for the last week, and also about my role-playing game activities and some technology I’m planning to buy.
