October reading

Lately I finished C.J. Cherryh's Forge of Heaven. I was happily suprised that this book, second in a series, stood well alone. It's Cherryh at her best, written in the style that's all her own. Parts of the setting feel slightly recycled from Downbelow Station and other old novels in the Merchanter universe, but it's well enough different, with such an immense timeline behind it that it stays interesting. The nanotech/genetics stuff didn't really grip me, but other parts made me flash back instead to the best of Kim Stanley Robinson: Pure geology-porn. Yum!

Now I'll certianly have to go back and check out Hammerfall, as soon as I can extricate myself from the clutches of Neal's latest opus, which I'm 50% through. The System of the World is better than the previous book in that series, because things are actually happening, but not as good as the first and none of it has been as fun as Cryptonomicon. Perhaps if the Enoch Root thing actually interested me, I'd get more from these books. As it is I read them for the odd little facts, the humor, and because I'm well sucked into Neal's fan-base by now.