Booknook

I was in the mood for some vintage science fiction so I started browsing through Hoopla. I have loved several books by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky so I chose one I hadn't heard of The Way to Amalthea or it was called in this translation Destination: Amaltheia. A hard sf story about a supply ship on it's way to a station on a moon of Jupiter, it was one of the worst translations I've come across. Very clunky, felt like the translator was using high school language skills and a Russian-English dictionary. If I come across a more recent translation of this I might give it another try because the Strugatskys have written some really great stuff.

I'd read some J. G. Ballard in a History of Science Fiction class in college so I thought I'd look for something else by him. I was surprised there was nothing by him at my library so I looked in Hoopla and found Concrete Island. What a disappointment. While driving home from work the tire on the main character's car blows out and he crashes off the freeway into an abandoned area under an overpass. There are only two other characters and all three of them are a combination of incompetent, unsympathetic, and cruel.