47: Mardock Scramble by Tow Ubukata

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47: Mardock Scramble by Tow Ubukata

I'll be reviewing this at greater length elsewhere, and when I do I'll post a link here. For now I'll just say: this is a 775-page-long science fiction thriller, part of the Haikasoru line, set in the future city of Mardock, centring on the quest of Rune-Balot, former child prostitute, to retrieve the stored memories of the man who tried to kill her. It's a great big baggy rambunctious mess of a novel, occasionally glorious, often infuriating, full of wild shifts in tone and content. There are flying sharks. There's a gang of assassins who have the body parts of their victims surgically implanted on their bodies. There are many, many metaphors involving eggs. (E.g. the main characters are called Balot, Oeufcoque, Dr Easter, Shell, and Boiled. And there's a casino called Eggnog Blue and an egg-shaped flying home called the Humpty.)

I don't know if I recommend it, exactly; parts of it were enormous fun to read, parts were rather dull, and I don't know that it amounts to very much, all told. Still, it was an interesting ride.

I made it to 50

[vass]

It took me two years almost to the day.

47. Charles Yu, How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe
I've heard this book criticised as slight. I disagree. The structure really worked for me (if you're reading this for recommendations, be aware that I frequently like the structure in books that other people have described as having serious structural problems.) I really loved the whole issue of failure, and of reaching a ceiling on your life and having to go down from there.

48. Marjorie Liu, The Wild Road
I found the ending a little disappointing, but overall I liked it. If you like amnesia as a trope, this is the Dirk & Steele novel for you.

49. Marjorie Liu, The Fire King
OMG OMG! In this book, Marjorie Liu addresses my biggest narrative kink ever that I don't think I've ever seen addressed to my satisfaction before now, the one where a person from the present day explains their time period to a person from the past, in terms that they will understand. The person in question has awakened 3000 years into his future. The heroine is the only person living who can speak his language, and that's only because she has a psychic ability to understand any language provide she's in contact with someone who knows it. There's the usual running from dangerous magical and psychic folk and allying with the good magical and psychic folk plot, but that was much less important to me than OMG THAT TROPE.

50. Samuel R Delany, They Fly At Ciron
A very unusual Delany book. Unusual in that he didn't make the reader do much heavy lifting at all, there weren't a lot of new and mind-expanding ideas, and it wasn't very strange. To be fair, it was his second novel. Naturally, the prose was beautiful. It was still a good book. I'm just a little disappointed because from previous experience I expected a SUPER AMAZING book.

And now I start again.