More Filler in the Lorien Legacies: The Guard

The Guard - Pittacus Lore

Remember when authors published a book once a year – or even less often? You’d wait patiently for the latest from your favorite scribe, add it to your Christmas list, and you might have even waited outside the doors of your local bookstore on the release date. That’s not so any more – I blame it on James Patterson, who (with a stable of co- and ghost-writers) pumps out about a book a month. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one to follow that path.

At the small intersection of YA fiction and SciFi, there’s a little series called “The Lorien Legacies.” The first book in the series was made into the (fairly) popular movie “I Am Number Four.” Since then, author Pittacus Lore – originally the writing team of James Frey and Joby Hughes, but now apparently a bunch of ghostwriters – has pumped out novellas and short (very short) novels in the series at a furious rate. The latest – or at least most recent one we’ve seen – is a novella called The Guard.

DiNunzio's Big Day, with Bees

Accused - Lisa Scottoline

I’m sure there are other ditz-lit series out there besides Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, but in all honesty I think one is enough. That’s why I tend to cringe whenever Lisa Scottoline digs into her Rostato and Associates file and pulls out another Mary DiNunzio tale. But Lisa doesn’t ask me about my preferences, so she did it anyway: she wrote Accused.

Repopulating the Race from Seven Eves: Neal Stephenson Goes Post-Apocalyptic

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

You want to love Seveneves. You do. You want to love it because, well, Neal Stephenson wrote it and it’s a massive volume filled with big characters and massive (as well as micro) technology and huge ideas that are described in careful, glittering detail. You want to love it because it’s about as big a novel as they come, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction that pares the human race down to the bare minimum and then keeps on going. Most of all, you want to love it because it’s big, big, big!

But that just might be the main reason it’s so hard to love…

Something – no one will ever know what, we assume – shattered the moon into seven giant pieces. It looked awfully darned cool at first, until a couple of big domes realized that those big pieces would continue to bang into each other, chipping off ever-smaller chunks until millions of bits the size of Toyotas began raining down on Earth – and once that happened, it would be all over but the shouting. The hurry-up plan developed to save the human race? Ship a few thousand of them into space, accompanied by as many defining artifacts of humanity as possible and carrying the seeds (genetic material) necessary to start over: a Noah’s Ark, 21st-century style, built around Izzy: the International Space Station complex.

It Would Have Been Better with *Less* Magic

Bone Gap - Laura Ruby

The people around town called Finn O’Sullivan a lot of nicknames, most of them because of how he seemed so… distracted. Finn had plenty of reasons to be distracted, reasons like being deserted by his mother and the simple fact of being seventeen. But right now, he was distracted because Roza had disappeared: Roza, the beautiful Polish girl who’d just suddenly appeared in the O'Sullivan's barn one morning and had subsequently captured the hearts of everyone in Bone Gap, Illinois – especially the heart belonging to Finn’s older brother, Sean. And then she disappeared, and Finn simply couldn’t describe the man who had taken her, the mysterious man who moved like corn stalks waving in the wind.

Finn also found himself distracted by the beekeeper’s daughter, Priscilla Willis (who vastly preferred the name "Petey"). He thought her beautiful, even though everyone else thought her… strange-looking; homely, even. Petey was, however, the only one in Bone Gap who understood Finn’s distraction and his confusion, perhaps because Finn distracted and confused her, too. 

Mo Speaks (This Machine Kills Demons!)

The Annihilation Score - Charles Stross

It used to be that your local library (for you millennials, that's a building filled with books patrons can borrow for a couple of weeks) had a shelf or two of “science fiction.” In olden days, the books were about adventures in space and on alien planets. Some bright (not!) librarian decided to combine science fiction with fantasy: soon the shelves were overrun with sword-and-sorcery tales, many of them strangely similar to Tolkein adventures – you know, fellowships, talismans, epic struggles of good and evil; that rot. Now, even worse, the shelves are chock full of vampire and werewolf tales, far too many of them in the sub-sub-subgenre of VampRom.

But there is hope, albeit with a Lovecraftian bent (you kids who don’t know who H. P. Lovecraft was, head for Wikipedia…): Charlie Stross and the Laundry Files. File number six, The Annihilation Score, is now available.

When last we saw Dominique “Mo” O’Brien and Bob Howard, they had decided on a trial separation. It’s not that the two aren’t in love, it’s that their jobs – in the strange world of The Laundry – make them want to kill each other. Luckily (?) for Mo, she has a new assignment, one that (in theory) means she doesn’t need to unlimber her demon-killing bone violin, "Lecter." I told you it was Lovecraftian…