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FMK #36: Omnibi

Last week's F winner - in a close-fought battle with Hambly - was Patricia Wrede's The Seven Towers. The K winner was the Stasheff. Y'all really hate Stasheff!

The bad news is, I still haven't finished reading anything. The good news is, it's the end of January and I'm only seven books behind on my Goodreads challenge!

In the interest of getting even farther behind, this week's theme is Omnibi.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #19391 FMK #36: Omnibi

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

There Will Be Time/The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson (Signet Double)

F
8 (66.7%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
3 (25.0%)

W3: Women in Deep Time by Greg Bear (Three novellas)

F
8 (61.5%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
5 (38.5%)

Cities in Flight by James Blish (Cities in Flight 1-4)

F
4 (30.8%)

M
3 (23.1%)

K
6 (46.2%)

The Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova (Exiles Trilogy 1-3)

F
4 (33.3%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
7 (58.3%)

The Book of Skaith by Leigh Brackett (Eric John Stark 3-5)

F
10 (76.9%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
3 (23.1%)

The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust (Dragaera 1-3 pub order)

F
13 (59.1%)

M
6 (27.3%)

K
3 (13.6%)

Rissa Kerguelen by F. M. Busby (Rissa Kerguelen 1-2)

F
8 (57.1%)

M
1 (7.1%)

K
5 (35.7%)

Devil to the Belt by C. J. Cherryh (Company Wars 1-2)

F
11 (55.0%)

M
6 (30.0%)

K
3 (15.0%)

Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison (Deathworld 1-3)

F
6 (46.2%)

M
1 (7.7%)

K
6 (46.2%)

A Confederation of Valor by Tanya Huff (Confederation 1-2)

F
14 (73.7%)

M
5 (26.3%)

K
0 (0.0%)

Tales from the Flat Earth by Tanith Lee (Flat Earth 4-5)

F
14 (82.4%)

M
2 (11.8%)

K
1 (5.9%)

Three of Swords by Fritz Leiber (Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser 1-3)

F
13 (72.2%)

M
4 (22.2%)

K
1 (5.6%)

Moon-Flash by Patricia McKillip (Kyreol 1-2)

F
12 (66.7%)

M
5 (27.8%)

K
1 (5.6%)

In the Pocket and Other Stories/Gather in the Hall of Planets by K. M. O'Donnell (Ace Double)

F
4 (36.4%)

M
1 (9.1%)

K
6 (54.5%)

The Blind Geometer/The Return from Rainbow Bridge by Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace Double)

F
9 (69.2%)

M
2 (15.4%)

K
2 (15.4%)

Songs from the Seashell Archive vol. II by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (Argonia 3-4)

F
7 (53.8%)

M
2 (15.4%)

K
4 (30.8%)

The Sunspacers Trilogy by George Zebrowski (Sunspacer 1-3)

F
6 (54.5%)

M
1 (9.1%)

K
4 (36.4%)

Free Lancers (West by Orson Scott Card/Liberty Port by David Drake)

F
2 (9.1%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
20 (90.9%)

The Crystal Ship (The Crystal Ship by Joan D. Vinge/Megan's World by Marta Randall/Screwtop by Vonda N. McIntyre)

F
11 (78.6%)

M
2 (14.3%)

K
1 (7.1%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I love the absolute hell out of Devil to the Belt. I enjoy Cherryh in general, and it's my absolute favorite of hers. It's one of those books that will never vanish from my shelves (and I will always hope she'll revisit those characters in a future book). But her style is kind of love-it-or-hate-it.

I have had mixed reactions to Cherryh; some of hers I've tried I've loved, and some I've hated (and I haven't read any of her best-known ones.)

Hmm, really? I think I started it when I wasn't in the right mood and didn't get very far into it. I should try it again. I love a lot of Cherryh's books but I always find them rough going at the start. Her style is really strange.

Well, it's not really a happy book, especially since it starts off so dark. I think the thing about this one is that it paid off EXACTLY as I wanted, and that makes it easier for me, on rereads, to get through the emotionally draining and/or slow parts (which is, admittedly, most of it). I think this book might be one of the first times I shipped characters in a (non-canonical) poly way, without realizing that's what I was doing.

I also got the best ever Yuletide fic for it one year; it's 12K of plotty post-book aftermath with h/c and it's wonderful.

But yeah, her style is really weird and takes a certain amount of adjustment. I also think this is one of her more, er, Cherryh-ish books, as opposed to something like, say, Rusalka, which is a little more mainstream in style and less prone to only giving you 1/5 of what's going on in any given scene but ALL of the politics.

I also think another reason why I like this book so much is because it's one of the kind that has a variety of drastically different characters to latch onto as things fall apart around them. Do you feel like empathizing with the disillusioned ex-revolutionary who watched all her friends die the last time Bad Shit went down? The cynic with emotional walls a mile thick who gets dragged into it despite all his efforts to stay aloof? The out-for-justice Gryffindor? etc.

Edited 2018-01-31 10:54 (UTC)

FWIW, Tanya Huff's Confederation series (the "Valor" books) are Marriage material for me, though I know they don't rank quite that high for everyone. I have a fondness for MilSF, but a lot of what's out there is written by men, and for various reasons and in various ways that usually means I end up not being entirely happy with them. The Valorverse won me over and won me for keeps because it's so wonderfully and entirely gender-neutral. I felt like I could suddenly breathe. The writing is good rather than great, but that's okay; it makes me happy.

Yeah, they're not my favorite works of hers but they're definitely readable. Very trope aware as a lot of her later stuff is.

I ought to have a fondness for MilSf - I certainly have read enough books about Starfleet officers and X-Wing pilots and Dendarii mercenaries - but so far every other series I've tried has left me flat. I don't think I've read any others that weren't very clearly Men's Books For Men, though, so I should probably give those a try.

I haven't read the others in that omnibus but I LOVE "Screwtop." It's about the relationships of the prisoners on a prison planet, and it's very humane and also iddy in a hurt-comfort way. I like the worldbuilding too.

Vinge and McIntyre have both written books I really like (if I forgive McIntyre her Star Wars novels, which were good but not very Star Wars) so those should be good!

What's omnibi? I have never heard that word before.

Hypercorrected, humorous plural from "omnibus", i.e. an omnibus edition of several parts of a series.

Oh! Thank you.

Oh, I should have clarified! Yeah, omnibuses.

(Although really English should just give in at this point and except that -us to -i is the standard plural form for any multisyllabic word ending in -us. It's what the people demand! It's not like the grammarians haven't tried to shoehorn in random bad Latin grammar all over the rest of the language! And also -uses is super awkward anyway.)

So. Rissa. That series is an interesting time-capsule of a relatively? enlightened? 1970s male writing a woman. It's got some interesting things going on, but also some of those odd sexual ideas endemic in 1970s/80s sci-fi, though and rape appears more than once. I can tell you that the series has made it through roughly 20 years of book clean-outs and still sits on my book shelves and I read almost exclusively women authors and tend to pitch books that are rapey, if that says anything.

I know almost nothing about it but that kind of books of that era tend to either be hate it or love it for me.

I only read the first one, and it was ages ago so I don't really remember well, but I think I was somewhere in between. I recall the gender politics being really, really jarringly out of date.

My recollection is that the Scarborough books are not spectacular. One book draws inspiration from one of the songs in the same story family as "Black Jack Davy." I don't recall how often the slur for Romani is used, but I'd be extraordinarily surprised if it's not there. I think that that story is in v.1. This volume focuses on the children of the characters in the first two stories. I voted F, though, because I'm curious as to how bad it might be.

I read the first two in high school and really liked them. I think it was mostly because the main character is chubby, dark-skinned, and short-curly-haired and is fine with all of the above. And in a reverse of the standard fantasy heroine, she's a virgin who's under a ton of family and social pressure to sleep around, and I was like YES.

After she got with a dude I didn't care as much, though (even though I did like him) so I never got around to reading the later ones.

Of course, at the time I didn't yet register that Davy's name contained a slur, but IIRC the actual treatment of his culture wasn't *overly* bad (for the time)? I remember (vaguely) that it portrayed them as unfairly persecuted and making do, mostly.

If you're going to read one Scarborough, I'd go with THE HEALER'S WAR. The rest of hers I enjoyed but found mostly forgettable.

I used to ADORE Leiber when I was in middle school, but have no idea how those books would stand up to a re-read. Maybe I should dig them out.

I liked the first two Argonia ones a lot, but it's been awhile. I've never found a copy of Healer's War, sadly. I do have Nothing Sacred, which will turn up in one of these polls eventually probably.

I love Cities in Flight: Grapes of Wrath meets the Odyssey, IN SPACE. Plus long pointless rants on how Oswald Spengler was a genius.

Cities in Flight is in the same continuity as Welcome to Mars, which was once one of my favorite books IN THE WORLD.

....I cannot tell how sarcastic you are being about the Spengler part. I assume a lot?

Let's just say I love Cities in Flight but I could've done with twenty less pages on Spengler.

I love Brust, and more specifically, I want All The Crossovers with Brust, which is a want no one seems interested in fulfilling. So you should read it, in hopes of raising that number from zero to one.

I have heard many good things about Brust! Or, at least, early Brust. :D Certainly I am one of the better people to attempt to get crossovers written it is sadly true.

Canonical worldgates! And while some of the later novels have fallen a bit flat for me, I actually think the series continues fairly strong--the most recent entry was . . . odd, but I quite liked the one before that.

I really like Huff and Cherryh

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