This morning Casey wiggled around like a wild creature and I finished PLAGUE SHIP, which is one of the digital freebies I nabbed right after I got my first ereader and never read. It was my first Andre Norton and I found it interesting both as a story and as an early(ish) step along the road that is science fiction.
panApprentice gemmologist Murdoc Jern's master is killed as a sacrifice. Can Murdoc escape from Koonga and find out why?
A strange mixture of fantasy faux-mediaeval tropes (apprentices, arcane rituals, quests, rings of power) set in a science fiction world of spaceships, rockets, spacesuits, interstellar travel, and aliens. There were too many threads left hanging and unexplained. They may be explained later, but I'm not sure I will bother.
pick(1956) Second in the author's “Solar Queen“ series, which follows the adventures of an independent trading spaceship. In this one, the Queen's crew deal with claim jumpers and then, en route back home, with a mysterious illness that incapacitates most of the crew. The plot has them defying quarantine regulations in ways that sometimes made me cringe, but the adventure is solid and the pace steady.
so-so3✨ I‘m glad I stopped to read the first book. This one I wasn‘t as engaged in, but it still had a lot of adventure. It continued exactly where the first book left off and had “the flaw” which brought them to another world with floppy eared people. It had a multiverse feel to it where we saw people from their home dimension. It wasn‘t bad just not as good as the first book #roll100 @PuddleJumper
pick(1955) This opener to Norton's "Solar Queen" series, following the adventures of an interplanetary trading ship, is one of my favorites from her. In this one, the crew make a risky gamble buying the trading rights to a newly-discovered planet sight-unseen. They are devastated to learn the trading rights are practically worthless -- and then the adventure begins.
pick(1999) Space station Jocasta is in a system under siege, though the besieging aliens are not clear about what they want. Just as Jocasta's commander devises a plan to sneak a drone out of the system, another ship sneaks *in*: an ancient 21st-century corpsicle ship that really shouldn't be there at all. And from there things get really weird, with murders, monsters, and interspecies politics. Good fun for the crowd that liked Babylon 5 or DS9.
Two books I bought today judged solely by their covers.
The Alien Way has a cover by my favourite sci fi artist, Bruce Pennington, so the contents are secondary, but for what it's worth, it's an alien invasion story which sounds like it could be pretty good.
A Book of the Sea beguiled me with that sailing ship, but the contents are not short stories, which I'd assumed, but extracts from longer works, which I tend not to like, but 🤷♂️
pickMy #BookSpin for September was a lot of fun. I could see it being made into a movie. I loved the Star Trek jokes/references. It was a great last book of #SciFiSummer for me (even though the reading challenge doesn't end until the 21st) and a great light-hearted start to #RIPXIX (even though I've already got a fair number of short stories under my belt for that reading challenge).
