Mini-Letters and Procrastination Poll

[ase]

Dear everyone: please encourage me to do my homework. Which does require a computer. Curses.

Dear book junkies: please update me on what Steven Brust, Kage Baker, and Rosemary Kirstein have been up to. Also, when's the last book in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science in the Capitol" trilogy coming out?

Dear Cherryh fans: according to her online journal-ish thing, Cherryh's working on the Cyteen sequel again. (Best way to check for yourself: use a text function to search on the obvious.) Join me in laying odds it will see publication in this decade.

Actually...
[Poll #848988]

Homework. Evil. But necessary. Sadness, despair, gnashing of teeth, and possibly ripping the ethernet cable out of the lab computer.

Edit: poll error. Obviously, scale should be one to ten, not one to five as in question.

Comments

[ase.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm answering my own post. Because I want to say Grant, who's supposed to be all the good supportive things in the world, but I really want to give a shoutout to Yanni Schwartz, who is an angry loud scientist-bossing administrator, and is sick of the Warrick problem, and still tries to do right by Justin, and Grant, and Jordan. Yanni is one of the B-list characters, and is totally a B-list personality in Reseune, but you get the impression that when you give a problem or responsibility to Yanni, he's not going to let it go until it's resolved or he's dead.

And did I mention the loud scientist-bossing? I could do a whole post on my love for level-headed fictional scientists who know that something is really not right and they have to understand and fix it. And this is where I slide into Mars trilogy reminiscences if I don't stop myself.

(This is just turning into a long backwards slide into Novels I Have Loved, Ages 23 and Backwards, isn't it. Ngh!)

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Yes, both Grant and Yanni are great characters, but we don't get to see enough of Yanni. I chose Ari II for standard reasons. (wipes saliva off face. Which I suppose is half Pavlovian and half drool)

Could one do a Cyteen sequel? I'm hoping for a Tristan sequel. It sounded like she had one written - where is it??

Get to work.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Ask and you shall receive--

http://www.amazon.com/Fortress-Ice-C-J-Cherryh/dp/0380979047/sr=8-2/qid=1161312067/ref=sr_1_2/102-6968429-7806541?ie=UTF8&s=books

Tristan sequel merely days away.

Me, I'm waiting for the next Foreigner, in February. And I think it's a pretty sure thing that the Cyteen sequel will see print this decade. More of a gut feeling than anything else.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

I owe you.

I've been checking her site every couple of months for years.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Always glad to help. :)

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

Kage Baker just released "The Machine Child" in which Alec Checkerfield gets unstuck in time. The next(final?) novel is "Gods and Pawns" which ought to be released 1/23/07.

The next KSR book, "Sixty Days and Counting" is slated (last I check) for 2/27/07. The paperback of "Fifty Below" is out 1/30/07.

All these dates are from Amazon, and haven't been rechecked recently. I've got a list on my computer that extends out to May (July, now with Bujold's next)...and that doesn't count books that have come out in HC that I want to buy as PBs.

Brust just released "Dzur", which was tasty but quite unsubstantial (all style, little substance) about a month ago.

Never heard of Rosemary Kirstein. Should I remedy this lack?

And on a scale of 1-10, how desperately should I try Cyteen...given that I love the "Foreigner" series, but haven't been sucked into any other Cherryh that I've sampled? ;-)

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Cherryh writes a lot of different stuff.

1. I'd say 8.

2. You may find the first quarter (the first 2/3 of the 3 book version) a little hard to slog through. Do so.

3. At that point it turns into a story of a kid trying to find out WTF is going on. THis lasts from age 5 or so to 16. She is a precocious kid. I enjoy this sort of story, so am biased. If you don't, disregard #1 above.

4. I like a lot of Cherryh stuff, for different reasons. Getting inside the lionoids in the Chanur series I found quite interesting. The other aliens in that series were well realized also, I thought. I liked her witch in the Asprin Sanctuary free-for-all. Some of her other stories haven't grabbed me that much - I have had trouble slogging through the Foreigner series, so maybe you should disregard me.

[jimtbari.livejournal.com]

Kage Baker just released "The Machine Child" in which Alec Checkerfield gets unstuck in time. The next(final?) novel is "Gods and Pawns" which ought to be released 1/23/07.
How did I not know this? <looks at Amazon>. It's been out for a MONTH‽ Want now! And I'm buying four other hardcovers right now, too, while trying to save money *sniff*....I'm such an addict.

Never heard of Rosemary Kirstein. Should I remedy this lack?
Yes. If you're of the extreme spoiler averse variety, do not look up anything, just read the first one. Then you'll be surprised when <rot13>vg gheaf bhg gb or uneqfs</rot13>

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

*Amazons* Oh, that Rosemary Kirstein. Yeah, I've read her. Good stuff, but nothing at all showing up for future publication.

[khavrinen.livejournal.com]

Minor correction of what herewiss13 said: "Gods and Pawns" is the next Kage Baker book, but it is a collection of Company related short-stories, like "Black Projects, White Knights" was. The concluding novel, listed as "forthcoming" but without a date yet, is "The Sons of Heaven" ( according to her web site (http://www.kagebaker.com/) ).

Despite periodically looking for her using several different search engines, I have been unable to locate any further news of Rosemary Kirstein. Despite ( or perhaps because of ) the fact that she supposedly was working in the computer industry during the hiatus between her first and second pairs of books, she seems to have no presence on the web at all. Her interview in SFRevu, in which she states that the next one is supposed to be called "The City in the Crags", is dated August 2003, and there's a Locus interview from May 2005, but nothing more recent online. I seem to remember someone commenting in papersky's LJ that they had heard her reading excerpts from it during one of the cons this year, but that's only hearsay. I suppose it's probably a good thing that I live on the wrong coast, or I'd be hard pressed to prevent myself from driving by her house and peering in the window to see if she were seated at her desk writing...

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

"Gods and Pawns" is the next Kage Baker book, but it is a collection of Company related short-stories,

Another compliation? Aw, _man_! Granted, she's got a lot of balls up in the air that need the occasional nudge, but can we get some resolution _please_?

At this rate, she's going to need another compilation _after_ the finale just so we can keep track of what happened to who.