Diversity

Spent my reading time last week reading a juvenile - Payal Dhar's A Shadow in Eternity. (Reading time is whatever I can squeeze out from my day for curling up with a book. Sigh.). Payal Dhar is one of the new breed of Indian fantasy writers, one of the prominent among them being Samit Basu.
Shadow is enjoyable, but what put me off was the shoddy editing - spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes - can't blame the author for them of course, but one would have expected better quality from a brand like Puffin. And children's literature surely deserves more attention to these things, doesn't it?
Other than that, the climax gave me a bout of deja vu - Basu's Simoqin Prophecies has more or less the same concept -

***********Spoiler warning**************
there's a prophecy, that an evil lord will rise, and that in the end the (good) hero/ine finds out s/he is one who's in the prophecy, and is the evil lord.
***********End spoiler*****************


There's a massive book sale in YMCA Secunderabad - not much sf :(. But loads and loads of those big reference books. Reader's Digest. McGrawHill. Yumm! Other than the usual stuff, got a one volume edition of The Golden Bough.
And The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by George Mann. Does not look so mammoth, though.

Filling the last two inches of my bedroom shelf

Earth - Final Conflict - Heritage
T2 Infiltrator - S M Stirling
Voyage - Stephen Baxter
Chronocules - D G Compton
The Demons at Rainbow Bridge - Jack L Chalker
The Star Trek Encyclopedia (50 bucks :D)
Star Trek Chronology
Star Trek DS9 (peekchure book)
Cemetery World - Clifford D Simak
Earthclan - David Brin
The Day of their Return - Poul Anderson
The Crystal Memory - Stephen Leigh
The World of Tiers - 1 - Philip Jose Farmer (I think I already have that)
A Thunder on Neptune - Gordon Eklund (ditto)
A Touch of Strange - Theodore Sturgeon
The Delikon - H M Hoover

That's the sunday book market stuff. From back home I got (non sf)
In the Meadows of Gold. Not what I expected it to be, with most of the book taken up by the translations of the buranjis (histories).
Atmojibonir Proyax - Dinesh Ch. Goswami - semi-autobiographical work by the writer known as the doyen of Assamese science fiction. (Pronouncing the 'X' in Assamese)
and some others.

The secret revealed

Just back from the vacation. Finished The Manticore's Secret by Samit Basu. It's the second in the GameWorld trilogy, the first being The Simoqin Prophecies. Some disclaimers before I say anything more

1. I don't read much fantasy

2. Whatever fantasy I choosily, occasionally read I usually like

3. I don't like the terms science fiction and fantasy being clubbed together, viewed as one and the same genre, or works being described as SFF (science fiction/fantasy).

Overall I like the book in a way, because I think it's in a class of it's own. I'm tempted to say that the series was conjured up to bank on the success of the Potter books/LOTR movies, just like Five Point Someone led to a horde of such books. TMS does borrow from wildly dispersed sources, as the back cover blurb itself says, but it does it in a way which is enjoyable and unique. That again does not imply that it's just a goulash of borrowed ideas - but the borrowed ideas are cheekily and enjoyably parodied. Maybe the author could have made it a little less obvious by not having a 'Dark Tower' a la LOTR.

The idea of a "GameWorld" and the justification for the name is actually developed in this volume. Even though the first volume had the trilogy name on the spine but it failed to mention anything which would explain the reasoning behind the name. (Hm on second thoughts better check the first volume again in case I missed it).

The propensity of the author to take well known names from mythology/the current real world and use them reversed to name his characters/locations is such that you'll end up checking every unusual name against this theory even though most of them do not fit this. The gods-in-the-sky routine pops up every few pages towards the end. A little tiresome, that. And evidently the book is bolder in it's treatment of "racy" scenes as compared to Part One.

My favourite aspect, however, remains the alternate world, or should I say the alternate Indian subcontinent. I think that's why I've stuck to the books.

Currently reading The Legends of Pensam, a gift from my cousin. A beautiful book, that's all I can say right now.

Am off on a weeklong vacation tomorrow - going home, that's Guwahati, and also to drop off my sister there for her exams. The idea of no work for 7 days seems fabulous. Thinking of reading a lot - in fact that's what I do whenever I'm home. Taking along Samit Basu's The Manticore's Secret (second in the trilogy) and The Dreams our Stuff is made of. Will hunt around for some Assamese science fiction works I've been looking for, this time.

Stuff

The Complete Robot - Asimov
TWG UFO and Alien Encounters
Alien Contact - Timothy Good
Metamagical Themad - Douglas R. Hofstadter
What's become of screwloose - Ron Goulat
Isaac Asimov Presents - Antibodies
The Moon and the Face - Patricia McKillip
The Berkley Showcase - 2
Soulcatcher - Frank Herbert
Downbelow Station - C. J. Cherryh
Winter in Eden - Harry Harrison
The Green Brain - Frank Herbert
Nimisha's Ship - Anne Mc Caffrey
Cold Allies - Patricia Anthony
Pegasus in Space - Anne Mc Caffrey
Lucky Starr and the big sun of Mercury
Tales from the white hart - Clarke
Begone Godmen - Abraham Kovoor (I remember Gods, Demons and Spirits in school - so just picked this up)