New Bujold book!

[baratron]

For those who don't already know, the eARC of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is online. And the blasted free preview ends with the most frustrating cliffhanger ever, so I'm going to have to buy it. Now!

Also this bit (from Chapter 5) is possibly the best metaphor ever:

Ivan started the coffee, sat at his secured comconsole, grimaced, and fired it up to find out what all had arrived in the admiral’s inbox since last shift.

Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after the coffee) of the day. It was like opening one’s door to find that an overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one’s porch, all marked “miscellaneous.” In reality, they were all marked “Urgent!” but if everything was urgent, in Ivan’s view they might as well all be labeled miscellaneous.

Each box contained one of the following: live, venomous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape; quiescent venomous snakes; non-venomous garden snakes; dead snakes; or things that looked like snakes but weren’t, such as large, sluggish worms. It was Ivan’s morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency.

Brilliant :)

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Oh man! I SO recognise that task!

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that is an awesome metaphor and an awesome start to the book. But I think I'll manage to wait until publication day.

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

Interesting book. Thanks for mentioning it!

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip - I'm happy to see more "spin-off" novels like that, so I'll look forward to it. However, I don't like Baen's EARC policy: they charge extra money for something that probably has mistakes, they explicitly tell you not to report any mistakes, and then you have to buy the final release all over again.

By contrast, I think Microsoft Press have handled it much better with one of their new books (Programming Windows): you pay a fee, then you get the preview copy and all updates, including the final release version. The price starts out quite low ($10), then gradually increases as they get closer to the release date, presumably because the quality of the content will improve.