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This collection was a good way to sample a bunch of fantasy series.

Spoiler Alert: Fantasy characters don't seem to have much luck having relaxing, fun vacations.

Bonus: One character spends much of the story as a talking dog.

I've liked the Martha Wells Murderbot books so much that I thought it would be a good idea to try one of her older books.

It turned out to be a good decision, and also a surprise. Because City of Bones is nothing like the Murderbot books.

You know in Calvin and Hobbes when the image would switch from the simple line drawings of the regular cartoon to incredibly detailed painting like images, so you'd realize that Waterson could draw any picture he wanted to? This is like that. Murderbot although incredibly powerful is sweet and naive and the adventures are like something in a comic book.

City of Bones has a Byzantine culture and the main character is a jaded outsider who has mostly learned how to navigate his way to survive. I found it entirely satisfying.

Martha Wells can clearly write any kind of story she wants to.

These guys are certainly not just coasting. I'm looking forward to #8

Until I looked this up on Goodreads and saw "The Tales of Pell #1" I didn't know there would be more books in this series. That there will be at least one more is excellent news.

If you like kind-of-goofy fantasy stories that aren't all dark and gloomy where characters have a remarkably modern sensibility, this is for you.

Warning: There are puns. But not too many for me, and I'm known for not liking puns. I think I'm okay with them here because it's the characters who say them, not the narrator, and it's not like when you're talking to someone who is only listening for words you say that they can make puns on and don't really care about what you're actually talking about.

Bonus: There is a talking goat. And he's a lot of fun. Easily as much fun as a talking cat. Perhaps not as much fun as a talking rodent, but he's good. This talking goat, Gustave, has a personality that is consistent with the personality of goats that I met in my youth.

This is hard science fiction in the believable space ship sense.

It's also social science fiction in how it deals with politics and political movements.

It's also, and this is the main thing for me, a story about people that I found myself caring about right from the beginning.

I really like how in Robinson's recent fiction he shows how systems could change to make things better.

Until I looked this up on Goodreads and saw "The Tales of Pell #1" I didn't know there would be more books in this series. That there will be at least one more is excellent news.

If you like kind-of-goofy fantasy stories that aren't all dark and gloomy where characters have a remarkably modern sensibility, this is for you.

Warning: There are puns. But not too many for me, and I'm known for not liking puns. I think I'm okay with them here because it's the characters who say them, not the narrator, and it's not like when you're talking to someone who is only listening for words you say that they can make puns on and don't really care about what you're actually talking about.

Bonus: There is a talking goat. And he's a lot of fun. Easily as much fun as a talking cat. Perhaps not as much fun as a talking rodent, but he's good. This talking goat, Gustave, has a personality that is consistent with the personality of goats that I met in my youth.

Set in the same empire as the "Thorns" books, but a completely different protagonist, this time, one who was inspired by Harry Flashman of [b:Flashman|142458|Flashman (The Flashman Papers, #1)|George MacDonald Fraser|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320656064s/142458.jpg|1137467].

Now, I read all the Flashman books back in the 80s, and I'll admit, I got a bit tired of him, but I never tired of Prince Jalan.

Plus he travels with the bravest and strongest Viking you could imagine, and who doesn't love a good Viking?

It's fun reading about a character who seems to have all sorts of amazing experts living in his head. It was particularly cool how he considered what others thought was a mental illness to be an asset.

These were well written stories, but they were bleak. And lately, I'm not in the mood for bleak stories.

It's fun reading about a character who seems to have all sorts of amazing experts living in his head. It was particularly cool how he considered what others thought was a mental illness to be an asset.