serpentine smiles

It is snowing! And I have a Cricket-cat on my desk and a Mantis-cat on the cat tree behind me; ever since we got back from our Thanksgiving vacation trip they have been sweetly clingy, especially to me. (Though I have to give props to the cat-sitter we hired through Rover.com; though I warned her that our neighbor, who had cat-sit for us previously, had never actually seen our cats, she coaxed them out of hiding on day 2 and by the middle of the week they were literally eating treats out of her hand - part of the Rover deal is daily pet photos, so I have proof!)

What I've recently finished reading:

In audio, We Are Legion (We Are Bob), book 1 of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor, which B had downloaded from the library for our long drives to and from Scottsdale because he'd seen reviews that compared it to Murderbot. (Spoiler alert, it was nothing like Murderbot, other than that the main character is a sort of human+computer hybrid, has drones as auxiliaries, and did the equivalent of hacking its governor module - uh, removed the controlling code? - early on.)

Bob is a nerdy engineer in the early 21st C (i.e., now). After selling his tech company to a bigger one for a ton of money, he signs up to have his head cryonically frozen to be revived in the future - and straightaway gets hit by a car, killed, and frozen...and revived in the mid-22nd C into a world where the US is now a theocracy competing with the Brazilian Empire and China for world dominance. Eventually Bob's brain-copy is put into a space probe and launched amid an incipient terrestrial nuclear war, at which point the story branches out into exploration of a variety of SF staples: sentient space ships, exploration of strange new worlds, terraforming, first contact with primitive alien life, space war among competing powers, space colonization, and so on.

It's very obviously written by an engineer who is a science fiction fan, with copious homage to various classics in the genre. Lots of handwaving around the science, including one bit I have a hard time accepting, that copies of Bob (and Bob eventually makes lots of copies of his brain, which are then further copied by his copies) all differ slightly from the get-go. It seems to me an exact copy would only begin to diverge once it started having different experiences. The viewpoint characters, all iterations of Bob, don't have particularly interesting or extensive arcs; it's more that each one picks a different mission and goes after it, and we get their narrative. There is no romance or sex.

I think I probably would have abandoned it somewhere in the middle had I not been listening to the audio version, but it was sufficiently entertaining to carry us through two long drives. It's the first of a series but has a reasonable ending, even though there are many threads left hanging for future books.

In text, I started but did not get all that far into Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. Cool premise, smooth writing - but I disliked Alice, the viewpoint character, and there was just something off-putting about the whole thing. It's possible that I'm just not a fan of "dark academia" - it feels vaguely unfair to me, please keep dangerous activities for fully-grown-up adults! Anyway, I put it down, and picked up...

The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman, which was a recommendation from P. Djèlí Clark as part of the NYT "What to Read" series, in a set of "Great Fanatsy Novels With Unlikely Heroes." Which turned out to be a nice reminder that I should not read things that I don't enjoy and should read things I do, because I totally fell into this book and loved it a lot! Medieval-ish crapsack fantasy world in which the thief Kinch Na Shannack must go on a quest for the Taker's Guild in order to clear the debt he's incurred through his education in thievery.

What hooked me into the story was the first-person narrative voice, which is rambling, profane, and funny as hell. The other characters are entertaining as well, and there are a lot of truly excellent female characters. I also really liked the worldbuilding, from the weird magic, to the linguistic and geographic details, to the slowly-unfolding history of the goblin wars. There are a lot of tiny guns hung on the wall early that go off to great effect late, which I always appreciate. There is also a cat.

Alas this is the first book of a series in which the second is expected to be published next year, but it does end in a reasonable place. Also there is a prequel which I have already checked out.

What I've recently finished playing:

I completed Monument Valley 2, which was just as delightful as the first game! However, I'm having difficulty getting Horizon Forbidden West to run now, for some reason, so I may have to abandon my NG+ and find something else to play. ETA Whew, it finally worked! Though, we'll see how long I manage to replay before wanting to do something new.