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The Plague Forge: The Dire Earth Cycle: Three by Jason M. Hough

I'm just finishing the third book in this series.  What started out as a promising story has come to a grinding halt, buried under repetitive scenes in an effort to make a trilogy out of a single book.  There are only so many battle scenes I can handle over the course of 450 pages before I just start skipping some all together.  There are some interesting characters & ideas in this series but it should have been one book not three.

This has become a common problem with a lot of science fiction - can't anybody just write a stand alone book anymore?  What's the point of having an editor if every idea balloons into an unwieldy monster?  I know money is the reason for this behavior but, c'mon man!  Knock it off!

Well, I guess I'll go back & try to finish this book.  I can see the finish line, but my legs are dead and my will is gone.

One of my favorite ambient records from the last ten years is Disturbed Earth - Butterfly.  If I remember correctly Butterfly was originally recorded in 1977 with guitars, fx & two reel to reel decks.  It's a wonderful album that breathes & ebbs & flows.  You can now get it on Bandcamp here... Butterfly.

I bring up Butterfly because I today I just discovered that Disturbed Earth(Dean Richards) has a ton of releases, at only $3 each, available on Bandcamp here...Disturbed Earth.

I tend to like some of the older stuff so I started with these releases...

Disturbed Earth - A Crack in the Past
Disturbed Earth - Sleep Of Wonder
Disturbed Earth - Flowers of Goodness
Disturbed Earth - With This Night

VA - I am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990  -  I'm generally not a big fan of "new age" music but this collection is pretty darn good.
Blamstrain - Selected Ambient Dub Works  -  I've been on an extended ambient dub kick & just picked of this fine release on Bandcamp  -  http://store.blamstra.in/album/selected-ambient-dub-works-06-09
Oxycanta III - Curated by Mahiane  -  a nice collection of more ambient dub.  Also on Bandcamp - http://ultimae.bandcamp.com/album/oxycanta-iii
Benoît Pioulard - Hymnal Remixes  -  as long as I'm talking Bandcamp, here's another from there.  One of my favorite albums of the year so far.  https://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/hymnal-remixes

Speaking of TV's new golden age...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/media/fenced-in-by-televisions-excess-of-excellence.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=BU_BKU_20140310&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000

Optical Frameworks - Vibrant  -  more ambient & less musical than the other Optical Frameworks releases but still interesting.
cv313 - dimensional space  -  very typical Echospace music, good dubby beats & synth washes.

non-ambient:
Elbow - The Take Off And Landing Of Everything  -  haven't really listened to this yet as I just pre-ordered it today but got the immediate download.  First time through sounds excellent.
St Vincent - St Vincent  -  Excellent!  But then I have a thing for Annie Clark. 

Just finished "Sand" by Hugh Howley.  Similarly to how he released "Wool", "Sand" was published as a serial with all the books being collected in the omnibus edition. 

Howley is very good at creating unique worlds and in this tale old world America has been buried under shifting dunes of sand.  We never find out why the world is the way it is but that doesn't matter.  I got totally sucked in by this at once familiar and alien world. 

Some of the characters are "sand divers," they somehow literally dive deep into the sand to forage for relics from the old world.  Special suits allow them to move through the sand almost like divers in water.  The tech is never explained but, again, it didn't matter.  I totally bought every part of this story.  Highly recommended, as is his Wool Omnibus.

Julio,

Got mine on Bandcamp...

http://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/hymnal-remixes

Benoît Pioulard - Hymnal Remixes - excellent collection of artists & styles with remixes by Loscil, Remote Viewer, Field Rotation, Brambles, Segue, The Green Kingdom & more.
Recondite - Hinterland - late night, lonely electronic music with beats, maybe too upbeat for something described as lonely but overall it's a melancholy trip.
stormloop - arctic conditions - pretty much what it sounds like, drone-like arctic ambience.


And one non-ambient release:

Damien Jurado - Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son - the first great record of 2014.

Mike,

I just re-started "A Wise Man's Fear."  I can't remember why I put it down, maybe something new came out that caught my interest.  But I'm back into it now & am looking forward to finishing it off.  I really enjoyed the first in the series.  I'm not usually a fan of the fantasy genre but these books are excellent.

Other recent books...

"Something More Than Night" by Ian Tregillis  -  I absolutely loved Tregillis' "Milkweed Triptych" about Nazi supermen & British warlocks.  Yes, I know that sound ridiculous, but it works.  Definitely one of my favorite set of books in the ten years.  His new one is "Something More Than Night" & it's a bit hard to describe.  According to the Amazon description it's "a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven. It’s a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God."  Very bizarre premise and setting that actually works.

"The Human Division (Old Man's War)" by John Scalzi  -  I'm very happy to have new stories set in the universe of Old Man's War even if this book is a bit unfocused.  It started out as a 13 part online serial then was put together with a new coda as this book.  I still enjoyed it even though the stories jump around a bit.  Scalzi's writing is very readable & you can crank through the material quickly and it's a lot of fun along the way.

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu  -  A normal, everyday programmer wakes up with a voice in his head.  That voice is actually an alien life form that resides in human hosts.  The programmer gets drawn into a war being fought by factions of the alien race here on earth.  I liked this well enough & enjoyed the concept but I'm not sure yet whether I'll continue with the next books that are sure to come.

I haven't posted about any of my mixes in a while but I figured this one was worth calling attention to.

It's a guest mix by the Hypnos Forums' own chris23.  Chris had never done a mix when I asked him to do one and he was a little hesitant but decided to give it a shot.  the result is an outstanding mix of neo-classical ambient goodness.

Download it here:
Low Light Mixes

Stream it here:
Mixcloud

t r a c k l i s t :
Field Rotation - The Repetition of History
Ekca Liena and Spheruleus - Scrambling Radiosonde
From the Mouth of the Sun - Sitting in a Roofless Room
Orla Wren - Five Acre Ladder (Reprise)
Antonymes - Misshapen Beauty [ii]
The Seaman and the Tattered Sail - Her Whispers
Christoph Berg - Coda

Thanks Chris!!