| You're currently viewing the Jolene Blalock - We Want Brunette Jolene SciFi Fan Forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. We do not release ANY email information at the Brunette Jolene Board!! As a new memeber your access will be limited until you have 10 posts. Once you reach that level other sections of the Forum will open up. Due to spam we have blocked certain IP and email addresses. If you are having difficulty with registration, please email the board admin using the link and request to be added manually. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Jon & Lobo series | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: 6 Mar 2010, 22:06 (48 Views) | |
| Jedikatie | 6 Mar 2010, 22:06 Post #1 |
Rygel's Chief Engineer, Throne Sled Maintenance and Repair
|
After reading that list of books in that article that KTR posted in the movie randomness thread that the people on that site recommend they make movies out of, I thought that the Jon & Lobo series by Mark Van Name looked kind of interesting (it's the one about the guy who's got nanotech implants and can talk to machines). I'm curious to know if anyone has read those books, and what they thought of them, if they have. It's described over at Baen's site as being "military sci-fi with an adventurous flourish," for those interested in that sort of sci-fi. This is apparently a relatively recent series, with the first book (One Jump Ahead) having come out in 2007. There's three books in all out currently, with two more due out later this year... |
 |
 
|
| Jedikatie | 17 Mar 2010, 10:31 Post #2 |
|
Rygel's Chief Engineer, Throne Sled Maintenance and Repair
|
Well, I bought the three books (One Jump Ahead, Slanted Jack, and Overthrowing Heaven) that are currently out in this series for my Kindle last week, and finished reading the last one this morning. They're entertaining enough, though I do think the author could have cut out a few of the (many) times that Jon reiterates how he ended up with nanomachines in him over the course of the three novels. Yes, I get it--he's still traumatized by what was done to him on some level, but the reader doesn't need to have that reminder numerous times in the book, and has issues stemming from that experimentation on him (and others), as well as a healthy dose of survivor's guilt thrown into the mix, since everyone else died or ended up being killed as he escaped. I know the description on Amazon's book page for the novels describes it as "military sci-fi" but I don't think it really is. Jon isn't in the military: he was, at one point in his past, in a mercenary group that acted like the military, but in these books he is not. He does use military hardware and the like to accomplish whatever his particular goal is for the particular book is, but he's mostly a freelance guy who just happens (after his successful mission in the first book) to have a slightly-out-of-date military spacecraft, Lobo, which has its own secrets. We don't learn any of those particular secrets until the third book, however, and Jon still hasn't told Lobo his own secrets (like the fact that he's over 150 years old, despite looking like he was in his 20s). Right now, the books are actually reminding me (superficially) more of the Pip and Flinx novels by Alan Dean Foster, wherein the guy is traveling around in his ship and ends up helping (not always successfully) various people who are in trouble, while having a deep, dark secret of his own that would land him in a lab if the government(s) or others in power found out about him. However, Jon and Lobo are considerably more destructive (as you'd expect the AI for a military vehicle to be) than Flinx and his pet mini-drag Pip ever were. But overall, I rather liked the books, given that they aren't something that I would have necessarily have picked up myself off the shelf in the store and decided to read. |
|
|
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Novel Series · Next Topic » |
4:19 PM Jul 29
