Wolfskin (Juliet Marillier)

The main reason that I bought Wolfskin was because I noticed that Marillier was a New Zealander (or at least was born here, although she lives in Australia now), and there’s not really very many NZ sci-fi/fantasy authors or books, and I’d like to support the locals as much as possible. (As an aside, my favourite NZ book is Beak of the Moon, by Philip Temple, also of Dunedin).

So I wasn’t really expecting that much – it wasn’t quite charity, but I would have been happy with a pretty mediocre story. However, I really loved this book. I’m not sure why so many fantasy authors feel the need to set their stories in/around the UK, but it’s so common that it didn’t really bother me here.

The characters in Wolfskin were excellently developed, and a pleasure to get to know. The antagonist was nicely grey – although you really could despise what he did, you could also understand his motivation for the most part. The magic was pleasingly subtle, and the battles sufficiently short.

One minor note that bothered me (minor spoiler alert): early in the book, a girl is attacked, and the attacker isn’t identified. The implication is that it’s the antagonist, Somerled. The way the scenes were written, it seemed likely to me that it would turn out to not have been (directly) Somerled at all, but rather the girl’s friend, led to a bad decision by listening to Somerled (so he was at fault, but only indirectly). Even later in the story, when the friend is re-encountered, nothing in the events seemed to contradict this theory. However, the book ends without coming back to it, so I suppose that we’re meant to just believe that it was Somerled who did the attack. I think it would have suited Somerled’s character, and improved the story, if we had discovered that it wasn’t directly his fault.

The story ends well, with the story nicely resolved, and although there’s clearly a hook left for a sequel, it’s subtle enough that the ending is satisfying and yet the hook doesn’t seem like the only purpose for that element is the sequel.

Overall I highly recommend reading Wolfskin, and intend to keep an eye out for anything else that Marillier produces.

Fallout (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Deason)

I quite enjoyed this (a lot more than I enjoyed Resurrection Inc.). This is really a pretty straight-forward action/adventure style story (the same sort of story as, e.g., 24). I read a few stories along these general lines (e.g. the Dan Brown books) over the second half of 2008, and they were a nice break (I read more in this genre a long time back), although nothing was mind-blowingly great.

I gathered that Fallout continues the story of characters from an earlier story (Virtual Destruction), but not having read that didn’t effect my enjoyment of this at all – as far as I can tell, the story is completely standalone.

The plot was a little predictable – it wasn’t hard to guess who the villains would turn out to be, but the mystery wasn’t really the appeal of the book, and the characters were likable enough.

Overall, well worth a read.

Resurrection Inc. (Kevin J. Anderson)

For some time, I was posting my mini-reviews on Pownce, which seemed to suit the short format . I’ve mostly switched to using Twitter instead of Pownce now, but 140 characters is a bit too short. I don’t really want to create a new account somewhere else, so I guess they can go here for now. Maybe I’ll start using one of the ‘library’ sites at some point, and switch to there, or maybe I’ll get my Delicious Library -> web system a bit more automated again and integrate it there somehow.

So, since it’s been a while, there’s a bit of a backlog. Firstly, Resurrection Inc., by Kevin K. Anderson.

I mostly bought this because I recognised the name from ISBW. It was reasonably enjoyable, but nothing spectacular. A lot of sci-fi deals with immortality, and this didn’t seem to introduce anything particularly new or compelling.

I liked the first half more than the second – it didn’t end up going where it seemed like it would. I think partly that I don’t have a huge liking for stories about such dreary futures, where humanity are essentially idiots.

Overall, though, I liked it enough to read more Anderson in the future.

Tekzilla

As suggested by Veronica Belmont herself, I checked out Tekzilla over the last week. In short: I’ve unsubscribed to the combined feed, but subscribed to the daily tips.

The show seems a lot like something you’d see on TV (or you would if NZ TV had any tech shows). I don’t enjoy watching those, so it’s not that surprising that I don’t like this (actually, I don’t think I watch any non-fiction on TV at all). The biggest problem probably is that it seems like it’s aimed at people reasonably unfamiliar with technology. So overall, if you do like watching TV tech shows, and you’re not all that tech-savvy, I think this would be a good show to watch.

Problems that I had with it:

It’s way, way, too long. It’s two to three times the length of CommandN, which I find too long. I just don’t have that much eye-time available.
I don’t know if it’s a deliberate style choice, or poor editing, or lack of practice, or something else, but seeing Patrick/Veronica change from looking at one camera to another is really irritating. I would much prefer either a single angle or an edit that changed angle but always had the host looking in the right direction.
Q&A style shows don’t interest me much, and it does seem to mostly be Q&A (I did only watch five of the full shows).
The quality of the shows on the iTunes feed is terrible. I’ve subscribed to the HD feed for the short shows, and that’s fine. I can see that there would be reasons to make the default a low-quality one, but it does give a bad impression first up (especially if you don’t realise that there are other options).
As above, the expected audience seems to be people much less familiar with how technology works than I am. Obviously this isn’t a problem with the show, it’s just a poor match for me.
I don’t mind commercials, but the ones they have seem extremely US-centric (do people in the US really not wear seatbelts? We learnt to “make it click” like 20 years ago!), which is annoying.

That said, I think the hosts are both good (and I do think Veronica is better here than on Mahalo Daily, although I think she’s better still when she guests on TWiT), and the intro & outro are good also (catchy music, short, reasonable graphics). The daily tips are also pretty good – most are things I already know or aren’t interested in, but they are short enough and well-done enough that I’ll watch 20 of them to get a single useful tip.