I’ve been a big fan of Patricia McKillip’s stories since the ’70s, and I’ve been generally pleased to see her stuff come back into print.

But I’m not going to pay premium prices for reprints, and even more for a DRM’d ebook, so “fuck you, Random Penguin”.

Back in the days when the Star Trek franchise allowed a lot of room for creative novelists, Diane Duane penned a series of extremely popular novels about the Romulans. The omnibus edition of all four is $3.99 right now. Book five, written much more recently, is $8.99, but given the steep discount on the first four, who cares?

1. Last week’s odd soliloquy worked as part of the teaser, but was dropped into the actual episode with all the grace of a flaming bag of manure.

2. This week’s fourth-wall-breaking was… jarring, to be kind. Vaguely condescending as well, which would be fine if it were Doctor-to-companion rather than writer-to-audience.

3. Hey, at least Missy didn’t show up.

The latest version of Amazon’s recommendation page is built around tiles of categories, with one or more items composited as the representative image of the category. I find this less-than-useful, because I generally have no interest in the representative items, making me less likely to click and see what the other recommendations are as I skim across the page.

Also, the categories seem to be based on user-supplied tagging, so that things end up in unusual places. For instance:

The 7 “children’s books” were: Zelazny’s Madwand, four of Smith’s Lensman novels, Sabatini’s Captain Blood, and some random guy’s Sherlock Holmes story. So, the representative image is something I don’t need to buy (an $8 ebook of a novel first serialized in 1939), the category name is something I don’t want, and the actual search results are mostly things I already own.

My actual wishlist for the Amazon recommendation system is a “less like this” button, so that the first N pages of results won’t be dominated by things related to a single recent purchase, like a watch, a box of coffee pods, or (ghod forbid) a Destroyer novel (seriously; never buy a book in a lengthy series (150!) without marking it “don’t use for recommendations”).

I’ve been reading good science fiction and fantasy recently, by which I mean “the sort of thing that used to get nominated for awards” (in some cases not that long ago, before the Nebulas turned into the Women’s Award and the Hugos turned into the Superficial Diversity Award). So, Bujold, Powers, Daley, Watt-Evans, Hambly, the Liavek stories, etc.

This has led to the discovery of all sorts of new short stories and novellas released as ebooks. Last night’s was Tim Powers’ return to the world of The Anubis Gates, Nobody’s Home. It’s a pleasant little ghost story featuring Jacky Snapp. A bit pricy for only 80 pages, but it’s not like anyone else is writing Tim Powers stories…

Why is the Kindle edition of a 15-year-old Banks novel selling for $15.99? Why is the trade paperback of it selling for $21.59? And, why, for the love of all that’s Culture, is it currently #9 in Star Trek adaptations?

Mind you, I think $9.99 is a bit high for the other Culture novels, but Look To Windward doesn’t stand out as being worth 60% more than the rest. And it’s not like you let Amazon set the price.

I see from your web site that you’re mostly a romance/porn publisher, but FYI, Milo Morai is not Fabio, and the Horseclans novels are not bodice-rippers. Also, you’ve got him holding his sword like a baseball bat.