Book Review: Starplex

Starplex has everything: a galactic empire; several human-comparable alien species; hints of at least one god-like, far-advanced race of beings; hyperspace travel and wormholes; space battles and time travel and the secret of the universe . . .

So by all means, read all about it (before reading “it”, itself, that is), in my review at AE.

Thanks, Baen

Somewhat out of the blue last week, I found myself thinking of picking up some Heinlein. Maybe it was because I’d recently started a re-read of Jumper (just finished tonight). I went back through my own reviews and realized the last couple of Heinlein books I’d read (a novel and a double-collection) were a good two years ago, when I went on a review request spree just before leaving for Costa Rica, and spent the next few months working through it all during the rainy, tropical days.

The Heinlein books I had requested from Baen Books, which does a lot of military fiction, but after covering those, I haven’t asked for anything from them since. (I was assigned Bujold’s latest some time after that but didn’t get it from directly contacting the publisher myself.)

I went back to Baen last week to see the new Heinlein releases they’d made available in the last couple years, and fired off a quick email requesting five books. I found a mid-sized package in the mail today and there was every single thing I’d asked for.

Baen, I think I love you.

I have a pretty decent-sized Heinlein collection already, including a couple of omnibuses from the Science Fiction Book Club which sometimes contain two, three, or four short novels in one volume. But I wish now that all of them were Baen editions, because with their steady release of new editions, they also get some nice intros and closing remarks, the latter from various individuals, the former from Heinlein’s biographer, William Patterson, who always has some interesting tidbits about the history of the writing of the work in question.

I started reading one of the juveniles tonight. With this latest batch, I have nearly every Scribner book, and the one major middle-period work my collection was missing. Expect to see reviews over the next few months as I’m able to cram the reading in. The old grandmaster has a way of fitting into the smallest cracks of time, so I don’t expect it will take long.

The Hugos! and Death

It’s Hugo nomination season again. That’s fairly coincidental to my perusing one of my more frequently-consulted Wikipedia pages: The Hugo Award for Best Novel. The reason I come back to this page again and again is that one of my long-term reading projects is to read all the best novel winners of the last 61 (and counting) years, as well as any notable books that were nominated as well.

I’ve read none of the handful of winners (and just one 1959 nominee) from the first decade. Half of the winners from the ’60s and ’70s (plus another half-dozen that were nominated). Only a handful of winners and nominees from the ’80s and ’90s. But almost every winner since 2000, and as many nominees.

It’s not an overwhelming task. The trick is to grab a book and read, and not let it go into a pile that I won’t touch in awhile. I’ll have to be equally careful for epubs, now that I’m making regular use of my new reader (a basic Kobo, if you’re wondering). It’s easy to quickly thrown a dozen digital books on there. Humble Bundles and all that. How long will it take to read them all, or will I?

This is the great tragedy of the reader who is also an existentialist: knowing you will never manage to read all those books. Sometimes counting the remaining years of my life in the books I could optimally read brings home the frailty of human life in a more immediate way than anything else.

This took a turn for the morbid, didn’t it?