This Week's Reads
The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis: Grandmaster Willis is in true form here, with one of her classic romantic comedy SF farces. This one is remarkably grounded, taking place in the relative here and now of Earth in the 2020's, where our heroine is in Roswell trying to support her friend's wedding ceremony while keeping up with her unspoken contract of convincing said friend to not marry the latest in her series of bad decisions - in this case an obsessed UFOlogist who wants the wedding held in the Roswell UFO museum - when she is abducted by an actual alien. Shenanigans ensue. This is a light, fun, funny summer read.
Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers: another recent novel by someone who had long since proven their chops beyond any measure, Powers is returning to the Haunted Los Angeles of the Vickery and Castine series. It's kind of hard to recommend a Powers book without explaining it, and explaining it ruins some of the fun. So in brief this has to do with Hollywood, Cecil B DeMille, 1960's B movies, Egyptology, and a return to Powers' motif of people trying to find a way to avoid the afterlife and subsequent judgement. It's not his best work, but that's a really, really high bar and I'm looking forward to finding book 3 with these characters
Due to my commitment to only comment positively on things I will not be mentioning the other recent read - something from the cheap dimestore paperbacks of the 1980's D&D/SG stories that would now be called Isekai - but gee howdy did the light pure plot writing style contain some absolutely horrible elements and pushing through to the end deus ex machina was a mistake.
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