There are giant ice blades on Pluto? Who knew?
Pluto’s surface hosts blades of ice that soar to the height of skyscrapers — and researchers have narrowed down exactly how the dramatic features form….”When we realized that bladed terrain consists of tall deposits of methane ice, we asked ourselves why it forms all of these ridges, as opposed to just being big blobs of ice on the ground,” Jeffrey Moore, a New Horizons team member and lead researcher on the new work, said in a statement. “It turns out that Pluto undergoes climate variation and sometimes, when Pluto is a little warmer, the methane ice begins to basically ‘evaporate’ away.”
Pluto turned out to be much cooler than I’d have expected for such a tiny, cold planetoid.
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So I just reread a “perfect book”: Unbidden Truth in Kate Wilhelm’s Barbara Holloway mystery series. Kate Wilhelm is very much a Northwestern Liberal–which is fine. So am I. But sometimes it gets in the way of her writing. (I really don’t need to know the details of some fictional HS student’s global warming science project, as occurred in a later book.) But in her 2.5 carreers (SF, Mystery like, and a hybrid of the two), she wrote some phenomenal books. Two stand out: Welcome, Chaos in SF, and Unbidden Truth in mystery. The latter is very much structured like Martha Wells’s “perfect book”, Death of the Necromancer. The bad guys are led delicately to their dooms, check. The good guys use some questionable methods in getting them there. Check. The bad guys really deserve it. Check. There’s a feeling of claustrophobia that shows up from time to time. Check. Both of these books just push all the right buttons for me.
Another recent reread for me: Joe Abercrombie’s “Best Served Cold” grimdark masterpiece. Yeah, the main character is a real piece of work, a damaged antihero with no scruples in getting her way. Yeah she’s committed to some really nasty vengeance, towards murdering 7 enemies with no care for bystanders. On the other hand, it’s a bracing corrective to a couple of seriously overrated YA series from back in the day, which turned a couple of mercenaries into the heroic good guys (Elizabeth Moon l, Paksennarion and Mercedes Lackey, I can’t remember the name.)
Abercrombie turns this on its head: you want a female mercenary from a fictionalized Renaissance? OK. Here’s one. And he throws in a fictionalized female poisoner, too, to go along with the whole Renaissance Italian city-state era. Just brutal stuff, and… probably a whole lot closer to the truth than the Lackey and Moon fantasies. A really well crafted book.
A claustrophobic feel to a book is . . . not a plus. Other than that the mystery series sounds good!