Debbie Moorhouse > Recent Status Updates

This is definitely one of those books you had to read at the time. Interesting, though.

We were rid of Kennit for a long time, so that's good. But there is a sense of GET ON WITH IT.

Althea is the most interesting character so far. Good conflict.

I knew Kennit had a magic ward but I didn't realise he also had a magic cock. The scene with Etta was so male-fantasyish (not Fantasyish, that's a different thing) that I felt the need to check this book was (over)written by a woman.

Lordy. Never mind ash dieback disease; this book has a terminal case of adjective disease. Also, what the heck is the antecedent for "it" in the opening sentence?

Thought I might get this finished last night, but my willpower gave out.

Maybe I just don't want to read this book.

Can't help thinking that if I'd read this book first, I'd never have got to Counter-Clock World or Martian Time-Slip or Scanner Darkly.

It's a bit like reading a book that explains, at length and in detail, why the animated series of Star Trek was (or wasn't) canon. With tiny sprinklings of story.

I suppose it was inevitable that this book would make my brain bleed with religious references.

Way out there.

Seems strange to me that Dick wanted his success to come from small, trite novels like this one rather than from his SF. Must be the ole 'superiority of litfic' fallacy, given this book is much less interesting than most of the SF he wrote.

It's always weird to read a mundane book by an author you associate with way-out-there SF. Altho this one is better than the last of PKD's mainstream novels I read.

Part of the fun of this book is that I know many of the places it's set.

Great, spoilers in the book description.

This book is very slow to get going. Usual PKD-type characters: losers and their (perceived as) evil wives. But there is something finally happening at last....

Before my eyes glazed over at yet another dose of Dick's erudite obsession with religion, this book gave me a jolt I wasn't expecting. A female narrator? I had no idea Dick had written anything with a female narrator. I always had the impression he regarded women as alien and incomprehensible beings. So, interesting.

When you learn the derivation of 'grog', you start asking yourself why you never wondered about it before.

Very readable and informative, as all the Adkins books are.

we ran here. we ran there. we saw bridges trees trails more trails. we ran he ran we ran. MAKE IT STOP

oh god, the banality

If this really is the 'best of' then the genre is finished. That was my feeling until I hit the Kage Baker story, anyway. Gah. Drivel.

Thought I might as well read this, given I've read Box of Delights. The magic system...well, it's not a system.

Well, I found out about the wasp women. Apparently they're slaves. Funny, that's not at all how I'd expect a culture based on wasps to be organised. Just goes to show.

I'm really not sure this book's central conceit is working for me. Every wasp male is in the army. Okay. So they're disposable. What do the wasp women do?

Modelling humans after insects was always going to require compromises, esp wrt the eusocial insects. But why, when we see the Wasps at the (not even thinly-disguised) Olympics, are they all male? Will time tell?

Modelling humans after insects was always going to require compromises, esp wrt the eusocial insects. But why, when we see the Wasps at the (not even thinly-disguised) Olympics, are they all male? Will time tell?

Most books go from small things to big battles. This one's gone the other way.

Sometimes makes a nice change to burrow into someone else's imagination instead of desperately mining your own.

Went back to the Malzberg story, which I found unreadable at first, and am now getting it more.