u/SalishSeaview

I started reading New Earth by M.R. Forbes and stopped about 16% of the way in. Has anyone read it, and is it worth continuing?

The opening sequence has some real gems in the writing, but also has some earmarks of being written by A.I. I’m not necessarily against reading AI-written novels, though I want what I read to be good. My real problem is just how dark the opening chapters are. Without spoilers, there’s a lot of creeping doom in the opening. It’s fine to set the hook, but if the whole book is like this, I’ll leave it on the DNF pile.

I just finished Inheritors by Hugh Howey, a short novel about superhumans. Not “beams of light from their eyes, ability to fly” superhumans, but genetically-altered better-than-most people. It’s a fast read, hard to put down, and… ends abruptly. Typical of Hugh Howey short fiction (and his long fiction, now that I think of it), it leaves you hanging just a bit, but also leaves you with the feeling that you can see what happens next. Very recommended.

I’ve just finished Stranded by A.K. Duboff. Two stars.

I’m somewhat torn by this book. If it was indeed written by a human, I feel like they need to be a lot better at writing. On the other hand, if it was written by A.I., then I feel like AI has gotten a lot better at writing, and I look forward to the day when all of its A.I. storytelling edges have been filed smooth.

The first half of the book is about 4x longer than it needs to be. The “male lead” character had just a bit of an oily sheen on him, as if the author (if there was one) was fighting his natural urges to have his protagonist be a complete jerk to the “female lead” second MC. Happily she wasn’t entirely Mary Sue’d, though several times I questioned her internal monologue as genuine.

The story picked up about the 50% mark, and I was hoping it would work out. A few chapters later, however, the wheels started to come off. At 87% in, I nearly DNF’d it, but decided I was this far, watching the rest of the train wreck wasn’t that much more effort. It was a painful slog to get to the end. Apparently there’s a sequel. Not sure if my morbid curiosity will draw me to it or not, given my general disinterest in self-flagellation.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time watching YouTube videos about camping gear. It seems like every one of them that’s showing off a big inflatable tent, a trailer, or sometimes even an awning has a television, either built in or someone has brought along in a suitcase-portable version. I can’t tell if this is gear advertisers showing off that you COULD watch TV while camping or that people actually do it.

What’s your read on the situation? Do you watch TV while camping? Do you know anyone who does?

EDIT: I should say that while I’m surprised that people want to watch TV while camping, I’m not against them doing it. There was an instance in a crowded campground where someone showed up right in the middle of our family reunion (theoretically reserved array of campsites) and blasted a movie in his trailer at 2:00 a.m. That was just rude. I personally don’t care about TV while camping, but people should do what they want and enjoy so long as it’s not disturbing others.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher is the third in the Sworn Soldier novels. Set in a fictional late-nineteenth century Europe, these novels slot into the “mild horror” category and could easily be seen as alien first-contact stories.

I’ve really enjoyed all three. It’s not a spoiler to say that this third story is set in America, with Alex and Amos helping Denton out with a missing persons case. Definitely recommended.

We’re planning to visit the Painted Hills and the John Day Fossil Beds in late June/early July. Any recommendations for where to camp? There will be three of us with a car and a large tent. A site with toilets (vault is fine) would be nice. Beyond that we just need space, as we’re otherwise self-contained.

*UPDATE: After some decent feedback from people, I went back into the app and was able to update my second reservation (Site 40) to extend it to a second night. So thank you to this community for the assist. Now if I’m lucky, I can catch the resident of Site 40 before they set up and we can swap for the one night. If not, we move camp and I have learned a lesson.*

This is more of a rant than anything. But maybe I’m missing something that someone can educate me on.

We want to go camping at Mora Campground, on the Olympic Peninsula, in two weeks. Sites at Mora aren’t released until fourteen days ahead. Yesterday I found a site that would fit our tent, waited for the 7:00 a.m. Pacific time for the sites to be released, and hit Reserve for Site 57 for the first night fourteen days out. This morning I went through the same thing for the next day, because you can’t reserve a site for multiple nights, not even a soft-reserve, if one of those nights is more than fourteen days out. I waited, and I hit Reserve, and was told that someone else had already reserved the site. It had to have been two seconds ahead of me, no more. I was like a hawk on that button. So I cleared my search (no easy feat; I had to go use a web browser rather than the app) and found another site just around the corner. So now we have to pick up camp and move it 200 feet for the second night. And tomorrow I need to do the same damn thing, hoping the new site is available.

There has to be a better way. I get that recreation.gov doesn’t want people reserving huge blocks of nights at once; they want to avoid abuse. But their current system just shifts the abuse to another area.

If anyone has reserved Mora site 57 for Saturday the 20th and wants to swap it for site 40 for the same night, let me know.

Teaching the child to make kombucha. She likes green tea, so we went with that as a base, using GT ginger as the starter. She’d like to use honey for the F2. Will that work well? If so, how much? If not, what other suggestions do you have?

I’ve just finished reading “What Feasts at Night” by T. Kingfisher, the second in the Sworn Soldier series. Kingfisher writes brilliantly, which is what draws me to her work. Set in the late nineteenth century in a fictional Europe, the stories are horror(ish) in the way that Poe’s work was (indeed, the first book in the series, “What Moves the Dead” is a retelling of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”). Looking forward to the next book in the series.

Even if you don’t care for horror (I don’t particularly), give this series a read. The novels are short, so fast to read. Kingfisher’s wit and witticisms alone are worth the time, let alone her observations on the human condition.

Has anyone here read *Old Colony* by John Walker? I’m about 2/3 into it and am ready to DNF. Wanted to know if it’s worth continuing. There’s an indicator that it’s the start of a series.

It’s desperately in need of line editing (punctuation mishaps abound, particularly where quotation marks are concerned), and frankly it seems like I missed an entire chapter, if not two or three, between chapters 11 and 12. I have other concerns about it, but don’t want to spoiler it. The novel started out strong, which is why I got this far, even with the rough road to get here.