June reading

[jorallan]

In June, I read:

• Orbital Decay (Allen Steele): mostly interesting take on the social dynamics aboard the first commercial (as opposed to ISS-style scientific) space station. While trying to avoid spoilers, there's one bit in the story which feels very grafted on as you go through - and then suddenly becomes a crucial plot device in the ending which let it down a bit. I've previously read Steele's Coyote, and enjoyed that many years ago so will probably read some more of his stuff at some point. I may be being a bit harsh here on what was Steele's first novel.
• Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson): really hard to describe what this is about without some massive spoilers. Let's just say that despite what's on the jacket, it's not at all the same as the Mars trilogy. That said, I can see how the first half of the book is a good set up for the second, but felt a bit let down by very end when the character I was identifying with became less important. Sorry if that's a bit obtuse...
• Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler): the follow-up / second half to Parable of the Sower (coincidentally see last year's June Reading post). Didn't enjoy it as much as Sower in that it felt there was a lot more filler in this one - I felt the first half of the book could have been cut back significantly without really affecting the story much, but the second half was pretty good. Talents still nicely filled in the travel bits of a work trip to Denmark.
• Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman): it's not big[1], it's not particularly clever, it's full of ridiculous "with one bound Jack was free" moments, but it's what kicked off my D&D (and RPG in general) habit and it's still quite fun.

[1] OK, the Dragonlance universe is ridiculously big, but almost all of the non-Weis/Hickman novels are pretty poor. And so are the Weis/Hickman novels after the first six.