james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-08-28 02:10 pm

Sponsored Reviews


The Steerswoman Quartet                             Acquired          Posted            
The Long Run                                        Acquired          Posted                                
Riddlemaster of Hed                                 Acquired          Posted 
Voyage of the Shadowmoon                            none              Posted
Footfall                                            Acquired          Posted 
Max Gladstone's Trilogy                             Acquired          Posted
Wheel of the Infinite                               Acquired          Posted
A Desert of Stars                                   Acquired          Posted
KJ Parker's Shadow                                  Acquired          Posted       
Geraldine Harris's Seven Citadels quartet           Acquired          Posted
Rocket Ship Galileo                                 Acquired          Posted
Lucifer's Hammer                                    Acquired          Posted
KJ Parker Pattern                                   Acquired          Posted
KJ Parker's Memory                                  Acquired          Posted
Rocket Ship Galileo                                 Acquired          Posted
Space Cadet                                         Acquired           Posted 
Search for the Star Stones (Norton)      Ross Smith Acquired          Posted
Red Planet                                          Acquired          Posted
Digital Divide,                                     Acquired          Posted
Golden Witchbreed (Mary Gentle)                     Acquired          posted

Heinlein Juveniles                                  Acquired
Sewer, Gas and Electric                             Acquired
Ash (Mary Gentle)                                   Foraging
Another Parker                                      Foraging
The Russians Came Knocking,                         Acquired
Maker Space.                                        Acquired
Kathleen O'Neal Gear Powers of Light trilogy        Acquired
Them Bones                                          Acquired

[identity profile] nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com) 2014-08-28 06:30 pm (UTC)(link)
It doesn't have to be on this post, but at some point a hotlinked directory of reviews would be useful. Just now I wanted to go back and re-read one of your reviews, and I had to use google to find it.

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
LJ does have an archive option. And I will try to tag all reviews with review. And soon the site will go live.

[identity profile] kithrup.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Isn't Ash a quartet of 600 page books?

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 06:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Apparently, yes. And so far I have not had much luck actually finding a copy...

[identity profile] kithrup.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 07:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Hm, looks like they were published as a single book. At least as ebooks, anyway. And as four other books (US$1.99 each as Nook books).

The combined book is on amazon.ca for CDN$7.99.

So that's a couple of ways to get it.

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 07:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Are the nook files DRMed?

[identity profile] kithrup.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 07:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Probably, but that's not a huge issue right now, just like Kindle.

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 07:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I figure the time I lose on monster books I can make up for with a flurry of short older books.

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 07:11 pm (UTC)(link)
That said, I allocate 40% of my review for long books to moaning about how the books could have been shorter. NOBODY CARES ABOUT TOM BOMBADIL!

[identity profile] w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com) 2014-08-28 10:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Dang, Poe's law just got me there--I was halfway through typing an angry retort, when I read what you said more carefully. Kneejerk reactions can be very revealing.

[identity profile] yhlee.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 10:38 pm (UTC)(link)
This reminds me of something that I once saw in a discussion that may have been a tangent on the conlang email list. Someone made the claim that Tom Bombadil was "obviously" a representation of a--religious? mythological? figure and that anyone paying attention to the text could figure this out. I am not a lit major and I begged this person to just spoil it for me because I remembered Tom Bombadil (vaguely) but had no earthly idea who he "really" might be. The person refused to do so on the grounds that it was obvious and I would receive more pleasure in figuring it out for myself. Over fifteen years later and I still have no idea, or maybe the person was just pulling my leg, and I'm still curious. Anyone?

[identity profile] graydon saunders (from livejournal.com) 2014-08-29 01:14 am (UTC)(link)
There's more than one value of obvious involved; people get different answers. Some of the popular ones are that this is Aule and Yavanna, or unspecified Maiar, or, well, there are theories.

My favourite is to recognize that there was a point in time where Tolkien wrote "all I have to do is get them to Rivendell" and for that scope of Hobbit-sequel, the visit with Tom and Goldberry and the Barrow-downs would be a different structural part of the book, and certainly a reminder of the great age of the landscape the hobbits are moving over.

[identity profile] cshalizi.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 01:24 am (UTC)(link)
Let me have the pleasure of introducing you to Oldest and Fatherless (http://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html).

[identity profile] yhlee.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 02:24 am (UTC)(link)
That is wicked cool, thank you!

[identity profile] kla10.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 02:37 am (UTC)(link)

When Jackson's done stretching The Hobbit out like butter over too much bread, he'll do a Bombadil movie or two while he's ramping up for the Slimarillion.

[identity profile] chrysostom476.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 04:26 am (UTC)(link)
Bombadil is 1.5 chapters out of a book that is 22 chapters long. It's really not that much of a burden.

[identity profile] roseembolism.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 06:26 am (UTC)(link)
A brick wall need only be 1.5 meters high, but if one's car hits it at 60km/hr it still does bad things.
ext_58972: Mad! (Default)

[identity profile] autopope.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 09:48 am (UTC)(link)
Not exactly; it was a single 1300-page doorstep in the UK. Due to production handwavium, the US publisher decided to split it into four volumes -- something Mary inadvertently facilitated because, as she put it, "when writing a really long novel you need to deliver a regular-novel-sized pay-off at regular-novel-sized intervals, or the reader will lose interest".

Then the US publisher remaindered book 1 the month before book 4 shipped ...
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)

[personal profile] jazzfish 2014-08-29 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
!! My UK omnibus edition is only ("only") 1100 pp.

(I can't possibly see how breaking it into smaller books would work, for a reader I mean. That would be the very definition of bound book-fragments.)

[identity profile] tavella.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 08:09 pm (UTC)(link)
Is anyone interested in going in on a Andre Norton juvenile series? I was thinking of sponsoring either the Solar Queen stories (just the originals, not the later sharecropped ones) or the Zero Stone books, as those had a huge impact on me as a child.

[identity profile] tavella.livejournal.com 2014-08-28 08:11 pm (UTC)(link)
...and I get further down the page to see that the Zero Stone books are already sponsored, so I guess it's Solar Queen.
julesjones: (Default)

[personal profile] julesjones 2014-08-29 06:32 am (UTC)(link)
I did drop $50 into James' PayPal at the start of this with a note that eventually I'd think of something I wanted to contribute to. I think I have just found that something.

James, my as-yet-uncommitted $50 goes towards the Solar Queen stories if anyone else wants to chip in.

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 02:44 pm (UTC)(link)
You mean the classic ones, right?

Sargasso of Space
Plague Ship
Voodoo Planet
Postmarked the Stars

Huh. Postmarked the Stars might be a problem. Not seeing an edition after 1985 and that's one I don't own. And the school whose library I got it from is gone (although at least that one didn't burn down, so maybe that HC is out there somewhere....)

[identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com 2014-08-29 02:45 pm (UTC)(link)
One of those, I caused to be edited slightly because I asked Norton a question about it.
julesjones: (Default)

[personal profile] julesjones 2014-08-29 06:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Originals and not share-cropped for me, and you realise that we want to hear the rest of that story about the editing?
julesjones: (Default)

[personal profile] julesjones 2014-08-30 08:34 am (UTC)(link)
Probably depends on how many other people want to chip in for the series. i'd like four, or a detailed series review looking at how it developed over the four classic stories (Vodoo Planet isn't long enough to call a novel); but I'm also aware that publicly stated contributions are $75 at time of writing.

[identity profile] martin-wisse.livejournal.com 2014-08-30 08:23 am (UTC)(link)
I'll drop in another $25 for that.