Books in February 2021

On track at the moment.

Several novels and some RPGs (one of which still needs to written up as a review) this month.

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow (Robert W Chambers)
This is the third or fourth time I’ve read this book. I actually read the Project Gutenberg version rather than this one as it was better formatted and didn’t have the glaring typos.

The main King in Yellow stories are still great, but they’re not as impactful on rereading. They’re touchstones for several gaming lines like Pelgrane Press’s “The Yellow King” RPG and Arc Dream’s “Delta Green - Impossible Landscapes” so I’d wanted to revisit. I like the slightly weird and twisted visions in them.

The other books about life in Paris never rose above okay; I found them a bit tedious and needed to work at them to finish. I do wish the Chaosium version of this was available as an ebook.

Bear Head - great sequel to 'Dogs of War'

Bear Head (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Sequel to “Dogs of War”. Near future SF with action split between Earth and Mars. This moves some years on from the events of the previous novel, and pitches the characters into a world which has turned against distributed intelligences and is starting to reconsider whether collaring (installing hierarchies of control into mindware) is acceptable in some circumstances. The villain of the piece is a US politician with shades of Trump. The story explores some interesting elements on agency and politics. I enjoyed this a lot.

A thriller written to be a movie.

A Death in Sweden (Kevin Wignall)

Enjoyable thriller which definitely feels like it’s been written with at least one eye on optioning for a movie script. The protagonist, Dan, is a freelance contractor who spent a lot of time in the past carrying out kidnappings to support the CIA rendition process. Now someone has started to kill off his former colleagues and he soon finds them coming after him. He needs to find out who is after him, why they want to kill him and a way to survive. Above average, with an energy that makes it hard to put down. It’s more at the action end of the genre than the le Carré end.

3rd March 2021