Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/16/20

It's been a while, hasn't it? All of my usual mechanisms for getting new books have been, as we say around here, fakakta lately. I had mostly fallen off publishers' mailing lists before they were all sent off to their homes and stopped mailing physical packages at all. Libraries are shut down in this neck of the woods. And I haven't been buying much because I haven't been reading, well, anything.

But I did start reading, a bit, this past week or so, and, to celebrate that, I bought two books (also, and possibly primarily, because I was already buying something from Hegemonic Internet Retailer). These are them.

Tales of the Dying Earth is an omnibus of Jack Vance's four "Dying Earth" books, published in 2016 by Tor. It has a copyright page that lists the original dates of all four books, and even includes some details of the magazine publication of portions of Eyes of the Overworld, which is probably overkill at this point but warms my heart. That page also notes that the four books were first assembled as The Compleat Dying Earth by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1998, which is entirely true and bittersweet to remember. (Reader, that was me. I also managed to get a cover that was more appropriate than this one -- I love Berkey's work, and it's appropriate for a lot of Vance, but not this book.) I have, obviously, read these books before. But I've felt like re-reading some Vances, and I lost all of my old Vance books (including my copy of Compleat) in my 2011 flood.

Network Effect is the fifth book and first novel by Martha Wells about Murderbot -- see this blog for my gushings about the previous novellas. This may actually be the next thing I read after the book I currently have a bookmark it; we shall see. And I don't have much else to say about it: I like the series; I haven't read this one yet; I intend to.