I just dropped Brian Aldiss' Dracula Unbound; it has some of the elements Aldiss was a master of — deep time, dreadful landscapes, quiet biological horror — but his characters and handling of interpersonal relationships, at least in this novel, are unpleasant in a way that's not about unpleasant characters, but rather the author's unpleasant view of the world (nothing monstrous, this isn't Gor — it's mostly the typical hard-eyed tall strong individualistic rich male genius with the admiring young feisty women and so on, sort of lateish Heinlein, but as I grow older I'm less patient with these things).

( Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction (Hannu Rajaniemi, 2019/#1)Collapse )

[Outside the cut to protect the spoiler alert.] An important exception, and wildly enjoyable story, is Skywalker of Earth. It's not about Star Wars, but ( setting spoilersCollapse )


( Baroque Science (Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, 2019/#2)Collapse )

( Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Pamela O. Long, 2019/#3)Collapse )


( Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (William Caferro, 2019/#4)Collapse )

( The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (eds. Simon Schaffer et al., 2019/#5)Collapse )