Michael Connelly’s Introduction to The Butcher’s Boy, by Thomas Perry

Last year, I read Eddie’s Boy and marveled at how fleet it was. I learned it was the sequel to Butcher’s Boy, published thirty years earlier. So of course I had to read Butcher’s Boy. Wowee! Perry’s laconic main character is a one-man killing machine — there is nothing like him out there.

Here’s an excerpt from Michael Connelly’s Introduction to Butcher’s Boy:

• Over the years and the million of words, I have come to learn that it is all about character and velocity. A book is like a car. It pulls up to the curb and the passenger door swings open to the reader. The engine revs. Do you want a ride?

I am thinking about this Introduction right now because of my current read: How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. This book is certainly a ride. It’s supposedly a novel: it isn’t. It’s a collection of stories, each showing the effects of a deadly virus that was released from the ice by scientists in Siberia. It begins at the beginning: in Siberia. Then skips to the future, when the virus has spread. The stories are absolutely heartbreaking. But she is along for this ride, holy cow. She most definitely is.

Stay tuned.

Who Will Be a Hero? GONE, p.235

Astrid to Sam: He’s one kind of person, you’re another. When life is going along normally, you’re sort of the same. But when life turns strange and scary, when there’s a crisis, suddenly you’re completely different people. It’s not Quinn’s fault, really, but he’s not brave. He’s not strong. You are.

And the Next Read Is: The Homewreckers, by Mary Kay Andrews

Wow! Self zoomed through Eyes of the Void, she was so hungry to get caught up on the plucky crew of The Vulture God. Idris gets kidnapped again, but this time he sides with his kidnappers. Honestly? She was happy when he got slapped by a kidnapper who was so tired of his “gormless” affect. Solace manages to reach him and he goes No, I have stuff to do, I am not going with you. Solace, apart from being an all-around awesome Warrior Woman, also has the patience of Job, to put up with this kind of boyfriend! She says he went “all native.” To say the least!

Self pulled The Homewreckers out of an article on Beach Reads that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. A few quotes from the article, by Ellen Gammerman:

• “Beach reads” are “loosely defined as any engrossing tale released for summer.”
• Beach books sell well when people who don’t have time to read say, “This is the one book I’m going to pack when I go to the Jersey Shore.”

Anyhoo, this is the first title in a long list she pulled from the article, and she had it on hold for a couple of weeks before it finally landed in her hot little hands. So she won’t give out the rest of the titles, because that might make her wait for these books at the library longer!

Stay tuned.

Epic Battle Scene: The Vulture God vs Raptorid

The God was right on them. The one accelerator canon the Magdans could bring around in time, now they had weapons control again, chewed a nasty scar along the salvage vessel’s hull. Damage control said it was all cosmetic, and they’d given up winning beauty contests a long time ago.

— eyes of the void, pp. 512 – 513

Haever’s Colvari Is Acting Pretty Shifty

A Colvari is a kind of bug-for-hire that can go through masses of data (gobbledy-gook) and snag the threads that are potentially useful to an employer. Haever, who’s a private investigator (he works for the equivalent of the CIA, in this future universe), doesn’t have much time to go through reams of data. Hence, the need for a Colvari. Oh, and Colvari are plural, because there is not one giant bug — a Colvari is masses of bugs, all writhing together in one ugly mass, constantly shifting, with a ‘translator’ box for a voice.

Haever has a secret meeting with his former boss who may (or may not) be selling him down the river, and when he gets back to his quarters, he senses immediately that something’s different about his Colvari.

“You’re a lot more businesslike than you used to be,” he commented quietly.

“We have undergone a partial reinstantiation,” Colvari confirmed.

“Do I get the old ‘you’ back? I kind of liked the way you were starting to talk.”

There was an odd pause, as though he’d said something in bad taste, but he couldn’t read anything in the way the Hiver stood. In the end they told him, “That won’t be possible, Agent Mundy. That version of ourself has been overwritten. These things are unavoidable. It is how they made us.”

— eyes of the void, p. 352

You will notice, dear blog readers, that self has been reading Eyes of the Void at a scorching pace, much more scorching than the pace she set while reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. And that is because, in Eyes of the Void, self can’t believe she is halfway through the series, and Solace and Idris have yet to kiss.

How superficial of you, self! This is Adrian Tchaikovsky, not Georgette Heyer! Nevertheless.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Landing on a Planet (Populated by Bugs)

The bugs in question are the Hanni, same creatures as the Vulture God’s crew member Kittering. The planet is a “dry world” named Ittring.

There are no landing pads. The control tower has a gravitic engine. You maneuver your spacecraft close enough to let “the invisible hands of docking control” latch onto the ship.

Then Solace, Kit and Kris walked gingerly down the ramp with nothing but a three-hundred metre drop through empty air beneath them.

— Eyes of the void, p.300

Further, because the writer is Adrian Tchaikovsky, and he is incapable of creating a universe without also describing each and every inhabitant’s life cycle, here’s the life cycle of the bugs (Hanni):

All Hanni were male, until they finally went home and settled down. Which consisted entirely of fertilizing the eggs of a female. They then became female themselves and laid their own eggs. After which they died.

— eyes of the void, p. 303

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Much excitement to come.

Sentence of the Day: Solace

She felt a spike of affection for him, angsty little spacer that he was.

— Eyes of the void, p. 180

IS Idris Telemmier an angsty little spacer? Yes, yes he is.

There isn’t as much action in Book 2 of The Final Architecture, but self still loves the universe and the characters Adrian Tchaikovsky has created.

Stay tuned.

Kris Almier, Idris’s Dueling Lawyer

Love her. Maybe second only to Myrmidon Solace.

Wait, what about Olli Timmo, feisty captain of the Vulture God? Self loves her, too!

Whatever. This series has some really kick-ass women characters. Adrian Tchaikovsky better not off any of them in Book 3.

Ishmael Commercial Courts: Lawyers’ Duel between Kris and Mortin, an ignorant lout

Mortin took the initiative then, very direct, much like his advocacy style. She gave ground, hyper-aware of the space she had to work with. She was grinning, she realized. Also bad form but she couldn’t help it. She hated dueling, right up until the moment she actually found herself doing it.

— Eyes of the void, p. 58

Myrmidon Solace, We Meet Again

From which dear blog readers may correctly deduce that self has reluctantly torn herself away from Steve Jobs and the glories of Apple design, and has re-entered the universe of The Final Architecture. Woo hoo!

Book 2 is called Eyes of the Void, and in his usual coy manner Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps a lot of space — space as in actual space — between our two precious babies, the Int Idris Telemmier, and the Partheni Executor Myrmidon Solace. The two used to have a thing back in the day (for about two weeks), before Solace was put back on ice by her fellow Partheni (for forty years) and Idris became the tortured Intermediary, fleeing from his past with a fetching lawyer, Kris “Kick-Ass” Almier.

Idris and Solace have in effect changed places: Idris is in space with Solace’s Sisters, teaching them how to go through Unspace like a Boss, and Solace is slumming with the crew of the Vulture God at Drill 17 on Hismin’s Moon.

On Hismin’s Moon, Solace & Co. enter a Den of Iniquity — the lair of a black-market trader, stacked with crates of old tech.

Solace point of view:

It was something that sparked contempt in a lot of Partheni, the hoarding, pack-rat mentality of Colonials. Except Solace had seen their technicians — and spacers were all technicians to one degree or another — make gold out of dross in situations a Partheni tech would have given over as impossible. Her people had no idea, honestly, just how much invention necessity could be mother of.

— eyes of the void, by adrian tchaikovsky, p. 43

Quote of the Day, First Sunday of August 2022

Fortunately for dear blog readers, this quote is NOT by or about Steve Jobs!

Self has decided that, since it’s taking her forever to get to the end of the Steve Jobs biography, she will read another book concurrently. And that book is — DRUMROLL, TA-RA!

Quote of the Day:

Prayers didn’t fix spaceships.

— prologue, eyes of the void