Finished Reading 2026: The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (Stainless Steel Rat Series) by Harry Harrison 📚

I’ve changed my mind about The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. It’s pretty good. Entertaining. I think I was just tired and grumpy the other night.

Bought this book - The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, written by @ayjay, and started reading it last night. A few pages into it and I am enjoying the insights. Will probably write a long blog post when I finish it. I am interested in reading as a health/mental health practice – I think it is good for you. I’m also interested in reading practices as a way to fight back the debilitating effects of screens, social media, and other forms of distraction.

I have no evidence to support this next opinion. I think if everyone in this country read 5 books per year we’d have a better country. Everyone needs to slow their ass down, breath, focus, relax, put the fucking phone and computer away for some increment of time exceeding (hopefully) 5 minutes, and get their brains into a better state. Reading can do that. I am positive of this.

More when I finish the book.

I am finally finishing the Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted.

Why has this relatively short novel taken me so long to read?

Well, it’s just not that good.

Normally if I start a book and it sucks I immediately put it away and start something new. In this case, however, it doesn’t suck. It’s just not that good. Now, I love the character of Slippery Jim diGriz. And now, about 2/3 of the way through the book it has gotten better. There’s just not really that much science fiction in this particular science fiction novel, and I think that is the problem.

HOWEVER - the character is memorable and great, and I am reading it as an example of what a really great rogue-ish character in Traveller might be, and that makes a difference.

Made some progress on reading The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted so far this week. Been pretty busy at night. I think I’ll finish by the end of the weekend.

Last week was not a good reading week. Just had a lot going on, and a lot of gaming. Finally got back to my current book, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, last night. It’s a fast-moving book. Lots of humor. Funny, with this kind of book the science fiction elements are all just backdrop.

Currently reading: The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (Stainless Steel Rat Series) by Harry Harrison 📚

Finished Reading 2026: Child of Earth by E.C. Tubb 📚

Finished Reading 2026: The Return by E. C. Tubb 📚

Went on vacation for a week, but managed to finish one book and get 60% through another. On Catalina Island I sat out an adventure tour that was likely to be pretty rough on me due to my anxiety about heights. I went to small but welcoming public library instead and read for 1.5 hours.

God I love to read.

Currently reading: The Return by E. C. Tubb 📚

Finished Reading 2026: The Temple of Truth by E.C. Tubb 📚

It turns out I have three books left in the Dumarest of Terra series! So cool!

Currently reading: The Temple of Truth by E.C. Tubb 📚

Finished Reading 2026: Symbol of Terra by E.C. Tubb 📚

It’s been a good week for reading. I only failed to get my 5% read on one day, but I’v read a lot more than that the other days. Will be finishing a book today, and probably starting a new one. After this current on, only books 31 and 32 are left in the Dumarest of Terra series. I’ve been reading it for several years. As longtime readers/listeners (haha - are there any?) of this blog/podcast know, the Dumarest series is one of the primary inspirations for the original Traveller roleplaying game, which is why I got into them.

When you read these, or other books in the Traveller bibliography, what you discover is that the game was mostly influenced by adventure SF. The game is about adventure, and that’s what the Dumarest novels are.

I’m leaving on vacation next Saturday - 6 days from now. I think I will start Dumarest 31 today. Maybe I can get it knocked out before I leave, and then finish the series when I get home. That would mean four novels finished in March, even if they are short ones.

Well, I have been getting my daily 5% of a novel reading done the last few days, and then some. It feels good. Last night I sat in the front room with my wife, the cat, and the dog. We watched (sort of) Around the World in 80 Days and I read on my Kindle. We talked and laughed. I read. It felt so much better that fiddling around on the web.

Reading is the best.

My prefered way of reading is still the Kindle. It is just so much easier on my eyes. The Kindle and eBooks from Amazon are really the only tie I have left with Amazon. It is very rare for me to order anything from them now, though I suppose they have the claws in everything. I ordered some shoes from Zappos last week – yep – Amazon. I also enjoy Twitch a lot, and I do subscribe to a couple of channels that I enjoy. Yep - Amazon.

I have very mixed feelings about Amazon. On the one hand the pandemic would have been a lot harder without Amazon. The company provided an incredibly useful service. We were very isolated as my wife was going through chemo during the worst part of the pandemic.

On the other hand, I don’t really love the idea of employees in warehouses having to pee in bottles due to their work expectations. I don’t like contributing to the income of a billionaire scumbag bootlicker. The truth is, however, that we live within this system, and we have to just do the best we can to get by and make good decisions when we can. Pick our battles, I suppose.

The other thing I hate about Amazon, and this is probably the case with other online book retailers, but is worse with Amazon, is the increasing number of AI slop books being produced. Amazon willingly allows this shit to continue. Worse – a real author publishes a book, then some scumbag scans it into an LLM and then uses the LLM to create “related” books which they sell for about a dollar. There are a million problems with that. Sadly I lack the means to kill all the LLM companies and imprison their owners/designers.

Last year I explored going to some other kind of eReader. I spent about an hour at a Barnes & Noble store clicking buttons and testing out a Nook. It was a greatly inferior device. Slow. Glitchy. Horrible user interface. I was disappointed, because while B&N is certainly not perfect, and is also run by business scumbags, I doubt that B&N employees are pissing in bottles and wearing leg irons. They opened – GASP – a brand new brick and mortar store about 3 minutes from my house, right in our neighborhood. We’ve shopped there. My wife buys and reads physical books, so it is great to have that store so close. It is nice to browse. It is nice to talk to the people who work there, like we did in the Before Times.

There is a certain locked-in feeling too. I have nearly 200 books on Kindle. It feels weird to think of moving to a different system, even though the truth is I’ll probably not re-read many, if any, of them. It reminds me of the pleasure you have of seeing your bookshelf full of books you have read, that takes up a lot of space, but man it is cool to look at. Truth is, of course, you really don’t own an eBook on Kindle or any of these other platforms really. I suppose if you download an ePub format book, keep it saved on a hard drive, and keep a reader than can download and read it, that might be “ownership.” But like so many of these digital media artifacts you really don’t own them like you do a physical artifact.

Now, every time I talk about wanting some non-Amazon eReader, people on social media chime in about this or that “superior” eReader. Here’s the thing. I just want to read the book. I don’t want to have to download it to the computer, convert it from some weird format possibly, transfer it to the device. The Poison of Convenience is a very strong poison, and I have been poisoned strongly.

But to immediately contradict myself, I do feel the pull of buying actual books. I mean, I have reading glasses. I am so - fucking - sick of supporting what is essentially a cloud-based streaming rental economic and creative ecosystem. THAT is why I’m so glad we never gave up or LPs or CDs. We never sold them. We buy new ones, and even better, now young people are tiring of the bullshit rental digital life as well. And with LLMs and the rest of the AI bullshit happening it is only getting worse. I feel like the only way to rebel, to have any sort of punk rock spirit, is to simply not participate. I am moving that way. It’s just rough because a lot of the books I read are 40 or 50 years old. I can download them to my Kindle in about 3 seconds, for 99 cents, or I can search the used bookstore and probably not find them, or I can order them from Amazon (see - we’re back to Amazon) or some other used book dealer and pay for postage, packaging that will might be recycled, and burn some gasoline having them delivered.

Life was simpler when I had good eyesight and there was no internet.

Ok, I need to stop typing now…

Currently reading: Goodreads by E.C. Tubb 📚

I’m nearing the end of this series, which I started several years ago.

I will start this somewhat long post by stating clearly that I am not a literary guy. I’m not that poorly-read, but I am not an expert on literary analysis of theme, characters, setting, or anything else. I’m a librarian, dirty old skateboarder, tabletop RPG gamer, and enjoyer of science fiction. So this post is really me, thinking “out loud”, trying to reconcile my enjoyment of some novels with the recently-revealed-to-me probable horribleness of their author.

So, the author of the Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons, died recently.

I’ve read the first three books. I’ve been waiting to read the fourth one as kind of a year-end “treat” one of these years. People who don’t like SF will pick them apart, of course, but I think they are really good. I enjoyed them. They are “out there” even as SF goes. They contain some wild SF ideas all worked into a fairly complex “world”.

I have to admit that while reading them there are some problematic elements. Stuff where I thought “hmmmm…this is kinda wrong.” I find that a lot of the more “literary” SF authors (Heinlein in particular) go off the deep end at some point and start exploring their own weirdnesses in their writing. Sometimes they do it early in their careers and it just gets worse.

Perhaps this happens in other literary genres? I have mostly read SF. That’s what I know. I’d like to think that current SF authors are a little more thoughtful and aware of when they are being creeps, or racists, or whatever. Example: It is hard to read Starship Troopers and NOT conclude that Heinlein was a fascist wannabe. And don’t even get me started with the sexual weirdness in Time Enough for Love. One can say that the author is “exploring” how notions of morality might change in the future, but again, it often feels like they are just indulging themselves.

There are some things in the Cantos, especially Endymion, that when I read them I thought “wow - he is really treading close to the line on this.” Uncomfortably close.

To be fair, that book also contains one of the most moving beautiful scenes I’ve ever read in a SF novel. A stunning, well-written, understated moment of care, tenderness, and rebirth on the part of the protagonists, especially when contrasted with its analog on the part of the antagonists.

Most of the time descriptions of sex, women’s bodies, etc are done really poorly by SF writers. At best they are clumsy. At worst they are offensive. That kind of thing is just really not in the typical SF writer’s skill set. I find it better if they avoid it altogether, or just minimize it. They just don’t do it well, and honestly if you are reading SF maybe that isn’t what you are looking for? [insert horny nerd comment here]

It’s no secret that HP Lovecraft was a fairly typical racist of his time. Actually maybe quite a bit worse than typical. I don’t buy the arguments that people back then “didn’t know it was wrong.” Still, I have read almost all his work, and I think I have listened to all of it on audiobook. It just feels like sometime between Lovecraft’s life and Dan Simmons' life things might have changed a bit more than they have.

So, back to Dan Simmons. I read the first three books in the Cantos over the last few years. I was told that his horror writing was good. Unlike many authors I enjoy I did not really read anything ** about** Simmons, other than a tiny bit about his background. Since his death a lot of criticism has been surfaced of both his personal views and some “problematic” stuff in his work. It seems like the personal views are, indeed, pretty bad. And when you read about his personal islamophobia and conservative dumbass-ism, it is really hard not to view even his better work through that lens.

And that is a bummer.

A lot of authors step in a big pile of dookie from time to time. One of my favorite SF novels, Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg, has a really clumsy intimate scene. It was written in 1970. Modern readers would certainly rip it apart. Silverberg was born in 1935. It’s clumsy, includes dopey descriptions of a woman’s body, but is about what I’d expect from a novel of it’s time. I will say that for all its clumsiness it is short and not just totally gratuitous. It’s a short, standalone SF novel. Now, it is certainly possible to write an incredibly offensive short novel, but I think when an author starts into these “mega-work” series of long novels maybe it just gives them too much freedom to indulge the dumber or more offensive parts of themselves.

It also feels like the more “noteworthy and literary” the author (Heinlein, Simmons, etc) the more prone they are to fall on their face. I have read well over a dozen SF novels by Alan Dean Foster over the last few years. Foster has written a ton of books. He is known for doing lots of movie novelizations. A lot of people consider him to be kind of a “workman” author. I’ll admit his work usually doesn’t change my life, but taken as a whole his Humanx Commonwealth novels present an interesting setting and the stories are fun, exciting, and imaginative. Foster writes adventures.

In all the ADF novel’s I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve seen a single description of a woman’s breasts. Somehow Foster manages to write entire novels without bouncing boobily down the street. The only description I can think of that is even approaching a “bad description” of a woman’s body is in the Icerigger trilogy, in which one of the woman characters is chubby. In one of the Commonwealth books Foster talks about a male Thranx (an insectorid race) admiring a female’s ovipositors, which are twitching as if she is interested in him. I have wondered if Foster included this as a joke – kind of a dig at authors who love to describe women’s sexual characteristics. Considering that none of the other novels I’ve read have any of that stuff, I feel like it is meant that way. I emailed Mr. Foster, who did respond to an earlier email, but he has not yet responded. He’s a busy man.

You could, and I’m sure someone would, argue that the Humanx Commonwealth suffers from being a paternalistic colonial setting. Maybe so. It is a futuristic interstellar government of different planets that have been terraformed, invited into (but not forced), or otherwise added to the polity. Humans have spread to to other worlds and over the course of centuries formed a close relationship with the insectoid Thranx species. Thus – the Humanx in the name. It is colonialism? Hell, I don’t know. Is the United Federation of Planets, in Star Trek? I don’t think it matters, really. I feel like if you write novels, currently, to never cross any accepted line you might have some pretty homogenous and boring novels.

This all reminds me of when I found out that at least a couple of members of the band X are morons. It is disappointing.

I will probably read the final book of the Cantos, Rise of Endymion, this year. I will of course be reading it through a different lens than I read the previous three books.

Finished reading 2023: The Deluge Drivers by Alan Dean Foster 📚

I’m getting kind of a slow start this year, but here’s book #1. This is the final book in the Ice Rigger trilogy by Alan Dean Foster. Like all his stuff I enjoyed this book.