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Posting a reply to: Re: Pick & Mix challenge for 2026.

General Discussion -> Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge

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[QUOTE]dustydigger - 2026-04-25  12:30 PM

Did a quick reread of Scalzi's third Lock In series,Head On.It got a bit bogged down in sport corruption and had quite a large collection of characters which I found a bit difficult to keep track of. But I enjoyed the premise and the banter.
I indulged myself in a pleasant hour reading one of the most interesting and original Conan stories,The Tower of the Elephant. Full of some wonderful Howard prose some adventure including an encounter with a nasty giant spider ,and a delightful description of an alien with a human body but an elephant's head. Conan has neve seen an elephant before so its fun seeing his gobsmacked amazement at the strange character. Also some sadness and pity,so all in all a great read.
For such a short book,175 pages,it took me a long time to read Poul Anderson's Tau Zero Not just hard SF,but diamond hard,this novel speculates just what would happen if a ship off to colonise a planet 30 light years away,a trip taking about 5 years(five years missions of Star Trek come to mind,this was after all a 1970 Hugo nominee ). 2.5 years speeding up as near to light speed as necessary,then deceleration to reach the planet. On board time 5 years of course,outside decades will go by.. Of course catastrophe strikes , and the velocity inexorably increases,the ship's acceleration becomes impossible to control. Lots of relativity info here a bit hard for this science ignorant lady,and I often had to read a paragraph several times to understand,so progress was slow. I perhaps unkindly and unfairly despised the colonists who all fall apart mentally quite soon into the flight.Hah! Our dear old Enterprise folks would not have fallen to bits.lol. The protagonist is a security/police officer and its his job to encourage even bully people into having at least a smidgeon of hope .The cast of characters are rather bland barely sketched in. The science is the star here,not the humans.
Of course it all gets sorted,a happy ending but the last 30 pages were just bonkers,I was gobsmacked at the ideas . But the descriptions of the universe throughout were vivid and glorious.There were still big ideas being depicted in SF in 1970!
Tau Zero didnt win of course,Ringworld took the prize. More big ideas,a magnificent Big Dumb Object and a focus on a small group of well depicted characters naturally beat a story with a difficult premise and dull characters.
Still Tau Zero is a worthwhile read,and actually has been very influential on later hard SF writers
[/QUOTE]

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dustydigger