Dunmurderin'

oldtoadwoman

POST-CYBERPUNK: To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what 'post-cyberpunk' means. According to TVTropes.org, Post-Cyberpunk "picks up where Cyberpunk left off. Whereas cyberpunk is/was a Darker and Edgier riposte to older Science Fiction, intended to portray what might happen if we don't all destroy ourselves, Post-Cyberpunk is intended to present a less pessimistic, more realistic vision. Where Cyberpunk is anti-corporate and anti-government, Post-Cyberpunk is willing to give both parties redeeming features. Where Cyberpunk portrays the future as a Crapsack World, Post-Cyberpunk posits society will probably be about the same, just with cooler gadgets and crapsaccharine World aspects. Where Cyberpunk is futuristic, forward-thinking and on the cutting edge...so is Post-Cyberpunk." An example would be Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash -- which I remember reading and enjoying back in the day when I was going through my Cyberpunk phase (which mostly involved playing Shadowrun with some friends). Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is another example -- which I've also read and thought was ok. Apparently, some of Charles Stross's books are also post-cyberpunk as well. I haven't read any of those but I do like Stross's Laundry Files books.

TOM CORBETT SPACE CADET: I love old science fiction. I don't think I read Tom Corbett when I was a kid, but I did love Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf series and Asimov's Lucky Starr books when I was young. Also H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy books (Scalzi's rewrite is a good take on the world and definitely worth checking out, in my opinion). And Heinlein's juveniles are still among some of my favorite science fiction stories. Even Podkayne of Mars. OH! And Alan E. Nourse's Raiders from the Rings.

Last year, I went to Duluth for a wedding (I was the Best Maid, which is a job that allows you to create whatever duties you want to be part of it) and since we were flying up, I decided to start reading the Tom Corbett Space Caded megapack of books I had on my Kindle. And, to my surprise, the books themselves were not terrible. They're definitely a thinly veiled take on Heinlein's superior book Space Cadet and they're even more definitely products of a mindset that assumes science fiction is a genre for boys in general and white, middle-class, American boys in particular. There is ONE female character in these books who gets anything like screen time. She's a scientist who is part of the space patrol and is beautiful and responsible for many of the advanced pieces of technology that the Space Patrol uses -- but she's also the only woman in the Space Patrol. Despite these books taking place 500 years or so in the future.

The characters are cardboard, the plots are as deep as a drying puddle, the writing is as cheesy as a fondue pot but the stories are entertaining -- they were written to grip their readers and pull them along. The worldbuilding is entirely scientifically inaccurate but if you're reading old science fiction for scientific accuracy -- don't do that. You're going to hurt yourself.

WALTER EMERSON: This took some Googling to figure out who this was but I did it. Thanks again to TV Tropes. Walter Emerson is a character in the Amelia Peabody novels by Elizabeth Peters. These are historical novels that involve the adventures of Amelia Peabody, an opinionated well-to-do woman of the late 19th/early 20th century who meets and marries archaeologist Radcliffe Emerson while she's travelling in Egypt after the death of her father. Walter is Radcliffe's less misanthropist brother. The series is funny and unlike a lot of relatively cozy historical mystery series, time passes. Amelia and Radcliffe (who refer to each other as Peabody and Emerson) marry and have a child who grows up over the course of the books. Each book takes place during a season of archaeological research in Egypt -- and since Elizabeth Peters is an actual archaeologist, the details are historically and professionally accurate.

The first book in the series is Crocodile on the Sandbank and the series ran to something like twenty or so books -- all of which are worth checking out. They're also delightful audiobooks and I personally recommend the ones read by Barbara Rosenblatt who Does All The Voices so well that sometimes I forget that the books she's doing aren't being performed by several people. When a voice actor, particularly a female voice actor, can do a range of voices that includes young children to old men, that's a talent worth enjoying.