2014 American Regency romance, first of a linked series. "Lucky Ned", the Earl of Ashby, refuses to believe his friend and secretary John Turner when Turner tells him that people love his position and wealth more than his person. So Ned proposes that they swap roles while on a business trip, and bets Turner that he can make a woman fall for him even without the trappings of his status. Meanwhile, the governess Phoebe Baker has a particular reason to hate the Earl, whom she has never met…
2010 historical detection, eighteenth in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia). Phryne is on holiday, with daughters and maid, in the seaside resort of Queenscliff, where the servants meant to come with her rented house have vanished (along with the furniture); and that's only the first mystery.
You can't go wrong with a good witch hunt.
2013 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Breq is less than she was; she has memories of being the AI controlling the huge troop transport spacecraft Justice of Toren, and of being one of its "ancillaries", human bodies with personalities overwritten by said AI and used as soldiers. But she still has a job to do.
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.
2005 thriller/mystery; sixth of Granger's novels of Fran Varady, would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. Fran didn't want to get involved again with Mickey Allerton, a strip club owner whom she's run into before, but he wants her to track down a dancer who's run off. And he's keeping her dog to make sure she does it.
Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's travel, and its perils and adventurous possibilities.
1997 science fiction, first of The Company series. In sixteenth-century Spain, Mendoza is plucked from the dungeons of the Inquisition by time-travellers who have need of local labour.
This episode would like you to know: Amazon is Scary.
After some strong hints, I joined Steam and bought Tabletop Simulator.
2006 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, second in the Logan McRae series. A house is burned down, with the doors fastened shut so that the occupants can't escape; a prostitute turns up battered to death; and DS McRae deals with the aftermath of a bungled raid, and tries to serve two masters.
I spent another Saturday playing solo games. St Theoktiste of Lesbos, whose feast day is 10 November, supposedly spent 35 years in solitude, so seems an appropriate person to commemorate in this way. (Not to mention there aren't that many Lesbian saints.)
With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2013 science fiction, second in the Chronicles of St Mary's series. Max, time-travelling historian, kills Jack the Ripper, sorts out an attack from the future, and puts history back on course by making sure Mary Queen of Scots gets married on schedule to Bothwell.
2017 science fiction, final volume of the trilogy. As Disconnected Worlds and Fusion combine, reluctantly, to fight the rebel AIs, politics continues.
2011 crime drama/comedy, dir. John Michael McDonagh, Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle; IMDb / allmovie. On the rural Connemara coast, Sergeant Gerry Boyle has no time for people who don't want to let him do things his own way, but he still gets the policing done. Now, with the possibility of a huge cargo of cocaine coming in, there's an FBI agent in town…
1990 mystery, third in the Robert Amiss series. Having resigned from the Civil Service on a point of principle, Amiss doesn't have much luck getting a job; an old police friend asks him to look, informally, into a School of English where one of the teachers has died under suspicious circumstances. More deaths follow.
What a difference a new writer makes! Yes, this episode's not perfect, but it mostly gives the cast something to do, it uses the setting for more than mere background prettiness, and it has an alien menace that's resolved by talking rather than fighting.
I spent a quiet day yesterday.
Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
Still a bit weary after Essen, I spent a Saturday playing solo games. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Apex is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Jason Sizemore among others.
Chibnall writes one more time. And he writes an awfully generic "something nasty on the spaceship" story, which I suppose is another way of saving your creative energy for something you find more interesting while still getting paid for the job you're half-arsing.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was having two computer-related exhibitions. Images follow: cc-by-sa on everything.
This post is about what I brought back from Essen – as well as some things I'd been thinking about but ended up not buying.
1984 SF. In a distant future, humans are desperately settling worlds as their alien-donated FTL ships become increasingly unreliable. Only native human-level life will prevent the colonisation of a new planet, and no life has ever been judged to be human-level. But the evaluation team on Belthannis is faced with something entirely new.
This is the second of the new GURPS Steampunk supplements, updating and extending the old book; it is primarily a book of equipment.
1988 cozy American detective fiction; eighth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. Sarah and Max have been invited to a Renaissance Revel at the Billingsgates', to work out what's happened to their missing 1927 New Phantom Rolls Royce.
Chibnall writes yet again. He's sole scriptwriter on four of the first five episodes (and of course the season finale), and co-writer on the fifth. And he's supposedly controlling the overall direction of the show. It's too much for one person to do well on a TV production schedule.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: I hate everything.)