Just a quick note to affirm that I’m sticking with the plan of reading new novels at their own speed, and blogging a re-read at some later point.
Salvage Right would have been a rough one to read for the first time at one chapter a day: it’s like Accepting the Lance, with lots of tiny chapters — only more so. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation says it would have taken six months to get through. I’m much happier to have read it at the speed I read it.
I haven’t yet set a date for a chapter-by-chapter blogging of Fair Trade. The current plan is “a few weeks to a month before Trade Lanes comes out, whenever that turns out to be”.
This, you will have noticed, is a departure from the way I’ve been doing things.
The thing is, when I started this blog, it was all about re-reading the Liaden novels chapter-by-chapter, finding new things in old favourites and giving old not-favourites a chance to change my mind. Then eventually I ran out of Liaden novels I’d already read, but there were new ones coming out, and I was feeling so enthusiastic I decided to just keep on reading Liaden novels and blogging them chapter-by-chapter. But I’ve been increasingly feeling that this isn’t sustainable and has been injuring my ability to enjoy the new novels in the way they’re meant to be enjoyed. (Accepting the Lance, in particular, wasn’t done any favours by being chopped into a hundred pieces and spread over three months, and I’ve regretted that I didn’t give it a fair shake on its own terms.) On the other hand, I do enjoy revisiting the novels and finding details that I didn’t notice before.
So what I’m going to try is a return to this being a re-reading blog. I’m going to read Fair Trade by myself, at whatever speed it wants to go. And then, in the lead-up to Trade Lanes, I’m going to re-read it and do the chapter-by-chapter blog then.
There’s a certain symmetry to the new Jethri books being the ones where I try out this plan: one of the reasons I started this blog when I did was to give myself an excuse to re-read Balance of Trade in the lead-up to Trade Secret coming out.
In case you missed it elsewhere, it’s been announced that Change State, the 32nd Adventures in the Liaden Universe chapbook, will be published on 15 March 4 March. It will contain “Command Decision” (originally published in the anthology Release the Virgins a couple of years ago) and “Dead Men Dream” (new for this publication).
“Command Decision” was one of a cluster of Liaden Universe stories that were first published in anthologies. There is now only one that hasn’t subsequently been reprinted in one of the usual venues: “Dark Secrets”, published in Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers; I am sticking to the hope that it’s only a matter of time and I won’t have to go out of my way to obtain a copy.
In case you happened to be interested, Accepting the Lance is 96 chapters long, including the prologue and epilogue. That’s a lot of chapters. (It’s a third again more than the next-longest Liaden Universe novel, and about twice the series average.)
It’s enough to keep this blog going all the way through January and February and into March. By then, I may have figured out what’s going to happen next.
In advance of the publication of Accepting the Lance, there is a new Liaden story up on the Baen.com homepage, titled “A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom” and described as “within the timeline of Accepting the Lance“.
I won’t be reading and posting about it until after Accepting the Lance, because my experience has been that when I read the forerunner short story first I spend the entire novel being distracted waiting for something related to the short story to show up, but you go ahead and read it whenever suits you.
This site has now made the switch to using a secure transfer protocol, which is considered best practice for sites that have audience interaction even if we don’t ask for any sensitive information.
The only visible difference this should make to your user experience is that the site address now begins with “https” instead of “http”. Old links and addresses beginning with “http” will be redirected automatically, but links that change colour to show that you’ve visited a page will reset to the unvisited colour until you visit the new address. If you were using the link colours to keep track of which pages you’ve visited, we apologise for the inconvenience.
Sharon Lee’s latest blog post contains news likely to be of interest, including the contents of A Liaden Constellation Volume Four, and two upcoming anthologies containing new Liaden Universe stories.
Three new Liaden stories have been announced for release in the near future:
According to one of the announcements, “Degrees of Separation” is a prequel to “Block Party”.
I have found that it works better for me to cover the novel before the associated short story, so I’ll be doing Neogenesis first, probably beginning on 6 January, then “Block Party”, then “Degrees of Separation”.