Re: The Wiz books -- yeah, Wiz Zumwalt learns how to hack reality itself as if he were living inside the Matrix... but he also gets to learn what a divide-by-zero error looks like from the *inside.* Then there's a ALife experiment that gets a little out of control....
My recs? Oh, how to pick from so many....
Well, the 1632 series is good -- a middlin' sized West Virginia coal-mining town gets slung back in time to central Germany in 1632. Some of the best parts of this series aren't even *in* the series -- instead, Flint created a sort of side-series for officially sanctioned fanfic *and* serious fact articles on how people in this situation would have to go about re-inventing some very basic technologies. I swear the "Grantville Gazette" is like a texbook on the evolution of technology, but entertaining. For example, do you have any *idea* what it takes to create an run a basic, Old West style telegraph line? My respect for previous generations has gone up whole notches -- this stuff ain't nearly as easy as it seems from our current-day perspective.
Charlie Stross has some good ones that a very different from each other: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise take place in a rather Balkanized post-Singularity universe with a lot of pre-Singularity societies. The books cover the experiences of two sort-of secret agents trying to prevent the equivalent of WMD proliferation (time travel -- the post-Singularity being called the Eschaton tends to nova the stars of people who dabble in it). Lots of high-concept stuff.
The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, OTOH, combine computer geeks (sysadmins save the world!), James Bond, and Lovecraft. The central conceit is that sufficiently advanced mathematics of certain types actually create communications links, or open doors, to stuff that Lovecraft hinted at. Folklore magic was based on cases where people stumbled into just the right combinations by accident. But by the late 90s, the British agency in charge of suppressing this knowledge (The Laundry), is being stretched, b/c it's getting to the point where pimply-faced hackers can almost derive the underlying math from scratch before anyone notices. The 'hero,' Bob, is a sysadmin for the Laundry, who ends up getting 'promoted' to Field Agent (as a side job -- he still has to keep the network running). TAA is a collection of connected shorts -- TJM is a full-size novel where Bob gets shoehorned into a honest-to-gosh attempt to force... well, I better not say. Lots of interesting play on the intersection between Lovecraftion Mythos and Weird mathematics, also lots of computer jokes and problems with British beauracracy (Bob saves London, but gets in trouble for not properly filing his expense report for same).
I've been enjoying the Harry Dresden series lately -- it's a lot different than the TV series on SciFi. Starts out a tad slow, but by book 3 or 4 it's really rolling. I'm behind, got a whole stack yet to read at home.
Lee&Miller's Liaden books. Before writing the "next book," they're putting out a side story that's necessary to set up the next novel. The interesting thing is, they're doing it on the net, on a donation basis -- they stated they would post a new chapter every time the tip jar hit $100, and anyone who donated more than $20 would receive a print copy once the book was complete and sent to the printers. Well, they got so much money the first couple weeks they can't stretch the story far enough to cover that many chapters. So instead they're posting one a week (barring RL events), and the money will go into getting the book professionally edited and printed once it's complete.
Lawrence Watt-Evans has done something similar with his latest two Ethshar books.
Oh, yes! Patricia Hodgell's "Jaime" series -- Baen just re-published the whole lot as Ebooks, plus the newest one, and I E-consumed the whole series in tiny bites between tasks at work over about two weeks or so. It's hard to describe these books, but I love 'em to death. The series starts with "God Stalk," where an partially-amnesiac young woman named Jaime staggers into a large, rather wild and unpredictable city at exactly the *wrong* time, gets taken in by a generous hotelier, ends up apprenticed to the city's greatest master thief, and (oh yes!) has to figure out how to get on with a mission she can't entirely remember, except that she has to find her brother and deliver some special items to him. B/c Jaime and her brother are both part of the Kencyrath, a people who have been mounting a fighting retreat across the multiverse, fleeing from world to world as an ancient all-consuming force devours each world they try to defend. On the last world, things went VERY bad, and the Kencyrath are fractured, factionalized, and in danger of collapse. Jaime, meanwhile, just wants to find her brother and get a chance to live a semi-regular life, but it looks like she's been chosen to save the Kencryrath... or destroy them. Fortunately for Jaime, she's *lousy* at doing what she's supposed to. These books are a lot of fun -- the Big Serious Stuff is mostly seen by the way it keeps intruding into the small human affairs of Jaime and her circle of friends, who tend to suffer from her unending Chaos Magnet effect, but stick by her anyway. Hodgell has a very deeply-realized world built here, and manages to get it across without resorting to infodumps. Strongly recommended -- at least check out the first one.
My recs? Oh, how to pick from so many....
Well, the 1632 series is good -- a middlin' sized West Virginia coal-mining town gets slung back in time to central Germany in 1632. Some of the best parts of this series aren't even *in* the series -- instead, Flint created a sort of side-series for officially sanctioned fanfic *and* serious fact articles on how people in this situation would have to go about re-inventing some very basic technologies. I swear the "Grantville Gazette" is like a texbook on the evolution of technology, but entertaining. For example, do you have any *idea* what it takes to create an run a basic, Old West style telegraph line? My respect for previous generations has gone up whole notches -- this stuff ain't nearly as easy as it seems from our current-day perspective.
Charlie Stross has some good ones that a very different from each other: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise take place in a rather Balkanized post-Singularity universe with a lot of pre-Singularity societies. The books cover the experiences of two sort-of secret agents trying to prevent the equivalent of WMD proliferation (time travel -- the post-Singularity being called the Eschaton tends to nova the stars of people who dabble in it). Lots of high-concept stuff.
The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, OTOH, combine computer geeks (sysadmins save the world!), James Bond, and Lovecraft. The central conceit is that sufficiently advanced mathematics of certain types actually create communications links, or open doors, to stuff that Lovecraft hinted at. Folklore magic was based on cases where people stumbled into just the right combinations by accident. But by the late 90s, the British agency in charge of suppressing this knowledge (The Laundry), is being stretched, b/c it's getting to the point where pimply-faced hackers can almost derive the underlying math from scratch before anyone notices. The 'hero,' Bob, is a sysadmin for the Laundry, who ends up getting 'promoted' to Field Agent (as a side job -- he still has to keep the network running). TAA is a collection of connected shorts -- TJM is a full-size novel where Bob gets shoehorned into a honest-to-gosh attempt to force... well, I better not say. Lots of interesting play on the intersection between Lovecraftion Mythos and Weird mathematics, also lots of computer jokes and problems with British beauracracy (Bob saves London, but gets in trouble for not properly filing his expense report for same).
I've been enjoying the Harry Dresden series lately -- it's a lot different than the TV series on SciFi. Starts out a tad slow, but by book 3 or 4 it's really rolling. I'm behind, got a whole stack yet to read at home.
Lee&Miller's Liaden books. Before writing the "next book," they're putting out a side story that's necessary to set up the next novel. The interesting thing is, they're doing it on the net, on a donation basis -- they stated they would post a new chapter every time the tip jar hit $100, and anyone who donated more than $20 would receive a print copy once the book was complete and sent to the printers. Well, they got so much money the first couple weeks they can't stretch the story far enough to cover that many chapters. So instead they're posting one a week (barring RL events), and the money will go into getting the book professionally edited and printed once it's complete.
Lawrence Watt-Evans has done something similar with his latest two Ethshar books.
Oh, yes! Patricia Hodgell's "Jaime" series -- Baen just re-published the whole lot as Ebooks, plus the newest one, and I E-consumed the whole series in tiny bites between tasks at work over about two weeks or so. It's hard to describe these books, but I love 'em to death. The series starts with "God Stalk," where an partially-amnesiac young woman named Jaime staggers into a large, rather wild and unpredictable city at exactly the *wrong* time, gets taken in by a generous hotelier, ends up apprenticed to the city's greatest master thief, and (oh yes!) has to figure out how to get on with a mission she can't entirely remember, except that she has to find her brother and deliver some special items to him. B/c Jaime and her brother are both part of the Kencyrath, a people who have been mounting a fighting retreat across the multiverse, fleeing from world to world as an ancient all-consuming force devours each world they try to defend. On the last world, things went VERY bad, and the Kencyrath are fractured, factionalized, and in danger of collapse. Jaime, meanwhile, just wants to find her brother and get a chance to live a semi-regular life, but it looks like she's been chosen to save the Kencryrath... or destroy them. Fortunately for Jaime, she's *lousy* at doing what she's supposed to. These books are a lot of fun -- the Big Serious Stuff is mostly seen by the way it keeps intruding into the small human affairs of Jaime and her circle of friends, who tend to suffer from her unending Chaos Magnet effect, but stick by her anyway. Hodgell has a very deeply-realized world built here, and manages to get it across without resorting to infodumps. Strongly recommended -- at least check out the first one.