(no subject)

I bought two books yesterday: Elizabeth Moon's new space-opera novel, Trading in Danger, which is exactly as cheesy as it sounds, and the first book in the Ash series by Mary Gentle. (I don't entirely trust Mary Gentle-- she's a good writer, but I read Architecture of Desire at a sufficiently young age to be scarred by the experience-- but the Ash book appears to be a novel that nobu needs to read, if for no other reason than that nobu's career plans parallel Mary Gentle's biography.)

I read Trading in Danger last night, too. My mind needed to be off; and Elizabeth Moon is one of the few writers I can assume will produce books that are cheerful, absorbing, utterly without artistic merit, and that I will not want to throw at the wall before I finish them. I think it's because all of her supporting characters (except for rich fathers, who appear to have the common sense of small red gerbils) are aggressively competent. Admittedly, the fifty thousandth grandmotherly character in a pink dress with a background in military analysis can be a little tiresome; but I find it terrifically relaxing to read about people who are actually trying to do the right thing by the book, etc. That, and people who have the sense to shoot the bad guy when he shows up, hostage or no.

Trading in Danger has the further merit that it doesn't appear to be connected to the Heris Serrano series, and therefore has only one viewpoint character, instead of sixteen. The main flaw is the way this character willfully ignores the Important Plot Point sent to her as a present in chapter 2 until she needs to discover that the model of a spaceship is (surprise!) not just a model of a spaceship. However, she does figure it out in the nick of time rather than angstily remembering it five minutes after the nick of time, so I can forgive her. She also starts every other piece of dialogue with the phrase "trade and profit." The first half of the book is essentially a lengthy profit-and-loss calculation involving an aging starship and a lot of agricultural machinery, which other readers might find dull, but which I quite enjoyed. (I am, after all, the daughter of an engineer.)

This is presumably the beginning of a series in which the main character will become a spy for the military. (She will also, of course, find a suitable young man, and fall into bed with him after the appropriate grandmotherly type tells her to stop being an idiot and get laid already.) The world is similar enough to the Heris Serrano - Familias world that I suspect Trading might actually be a prequel, in which case there will also be grand political plot in which the Familias is formed; but it's always possible that all of Elizabeth Moon's universes are very similar for no particular reason, and the Trading universe is entirely free of spacefaring Texans.