SF and Fantasy wot I ave been reeding

[Inspector Norse]

Yeah I don't think the Hyperion books are that similar to Banks, just in the same kind of intelligent literary space operatic ballpark, but for me they were some of the best space SF books I've read - perhaps a bit pretentious with all the literary allusions but fascinating, strange and compelling.

[phosphoresce]

Currently reading Solaris by one Stanislaw Lem. Don't be put off by the interminable Tarkovsky and meh George Clooney films, it's actually really brilliant.

Kelvin is a psychologist who arrives at a space station orbiting the mysterious planet of Solaris; his mission is to ascertain whether research should be terminated due to lack of progress. He finds the station all but deserted, its straggling crew seemingly haunted by hallucinations of figures from their individual pasts. But then Kelvin himself is visited in the middle of the night by a woman who is outwardly identical to his dead wife. Will Kelvin be able to resist the disturbing ambience of Solaris, and the emotional pull towards the living, breathing likeness of the woman he loved?

Solaris might be one of my top 10 sentient planets in a novel. Possibly top 5.

[ajsmith2]

Solaris (the book ) is great, all those weird genuinely alien presences he encounters on the planet. I never read it was ages cos I got int him via The Cyberiad and I was a bit trepidatious about a S. Lem book that wasn't funny haha to some extent, but it's good old stuff in it's own way.

[phosphoresce]

Yes, the bits orbiting the planet with its weird creations were some of my favorites. The part where the pilot is recounting seeing the ocean recreate the memories of a hapless scientist it absorbed. Quite bonkers!

I didn't know Lem wrote a lot of funny satirical works. I suppose there's some sly satire of scientific attitudes in Solaris too.

[Famous Mortimer]

I just read Lem's "Tales of Pirx The Pilot" the other day, and it was very light, not sure I'd call it funny but I enjoyed it.

[Alberon]

Escape From Yokai Land by Charles Stross A novella (and a fairly short one too) covering what Bob was up to during The Nightmare Stacks. And the answer is basically Cthulhu crossed with Hello Kitty in Japan. As a story it's quite brief and simple and it comes to a finish at the point a novel would throw in a twist and go somewhere interesting. Nice to see Bob back, but not a return to the old quality level of the earlier Laundry novels.

[Alberon]

Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky Another novella, but this one is closer to the length of SF books in the 60s and 70s than an extended short story.

Torquell Is the son of the headman of his village. As the story opens the village's landlord is coming for his tithe. You don't disappoint or oppose the landlord as he is an ogre, at least twice as tall as a human and much stronger. The first hint that this isn't a fantasy is when the landlord arrives in a motorcade.

The headman's son is soon thrust out into the wider world he had known nothing about and learns more about the ogres and their rule.

Often I feel a little shortchanged by novellas but I think this one was entertaining. Not the best Tchaikovsky but better than the Stross novella I read before.

[Alberon]

The This by Adam Roberts Through several different time periods this details the rise of a hive mind (initally through social media) and its dealings with standard humanity.

I've read a few of his books over the years and I often feel like a dog being shown card tricks and not fully understanding them. With Trillion Leagues Under the Sea, for instance, I felt like I didn't get what he was trying to say. This one I felt I did.

Most of the novel follows a socially isolated individual, called Rich, in the very near future who lives for his games and his social media. I was wondering for a lot of it which name he posts under here. It also follows another man, called Adan, a couple of centuries later who lives in a very similar situation except he has a humanoid phone he has sex with and relates to far more than other humans.

Both of their lives are upended by the hive mind, The This in Rich's time and HMϴ in Adan's. Weaving in and around this is a third indivdual.

All this is a framework for discussions on the nature of space, time and reality revolving around Hegel's philosophical ideas which I do not pretend to grasp.

For all that it's often light and amusing in the worlds it portrays and I recommend it.

[Alberon]

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch The ninth Rivers of London novel and a lot is the same as always - the travelogue around London, an attempt to portray real policing practices (usually undermined by magic), dry humour and at least five gratuitous Doctor Who references.

The title and chapter headings come from mostly one Monty Python sketch and the relevance to the plot soon becomes obvious.

Urban Fantasy seems to have come and gone as a subgenre, and while as a whole I've never liked it this series is an exception. This book is very much more of the same as the rest of this series and I don't really have a problem with that. There are hints that things are changing towards the ends of the book. Whether that is leading to a revamp of the series or a conclusion remains to be seen. Though I don't think any ending is in the near future yet.

[Alberon]

Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken Macleod

I've never read Ken Macleod before, I don't know why as it is just the sort of thing I like. Proper hard SF with FTL submarines (yes, submarines), strange alien intelligences, androids, AIs, and a floating habitat in the clouds of Venus. All with a possible splash of time travel.

The world of 2070 is divided between the Alliance (most of the English speaking world including the UK minus Scotland), The Co-Ord (Russia and China) and The Union (essentially the EU but with Scotland).

The book starts with a scientist getting a letter written in her hand purporting to be from the future. In it are equations that lead her to develop an FTL drive. It turns out the Alliance and the Co-Ord have had the drive for fifty years and have colonised a planet that has substantial deposits of a strange crystal that seems to be moving inside if you look in it. Smaller deposits exist on Earth and Venus.

Inevitably the first of a trilogy, and while not absolutely top flight it's a good story and I'll be along for book 2 when its released.

[Zero Gravitas]

Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken Macleod

This was the first of Ken Macleod I'd read in a long while having fond memories of the Fall Revolution series, there's some absolute gems in there both in the setting and the action, but even in the 'world' that the Union states know about it seemed a very uneasy combination of contemporary and floating space platform that the jokey style that infuses his characters with did very little to cohere for me. Not at all to the ruination of the book but weirdly niggling.

After enjoying that I also gave the first two of 'The Corporation Wars' by him a go, which suffers from pretty much the same tone problem even if it does have in-universe anachronism to excuse it, perhaps I just wasn't in the mood to have cheeky joviality mixed in with my hard-scifi.

[Famous Mortimer]

Never read any Ken Macleod, what do people reckon is a good "in" for his stuff?

[All Surrogate]

His first book, The Star Fraction, is as good a start as any, I think.

[Zero Gravitas]

I actually started on 'The Cassini Division' which I was also my favourite, action packed and don't recall feeling it was confusing or needing the previous books to make it work the society and factions are presented well...or at least In think the fat naked argumentative space man wasn't too confusing.

[All Surrogate]

Yes, but I think the impact of the disturbing revelation at the end of The Cassini Division would be lessened without the context of the first book, and I do think The Sky Road should be read last of the series.

That said, The Cassini Division is probably my favourite too - gimme that True Knowledge.

[Glebe]

Just started reading Dune.

[surreal]

Just started reading Dune.

Thoughts and prayers

[willbo]

I've noticed amazon seems to have taken away its "readers also bought" recommendations lists. I used to browse them for hours to find new books. They still have your personal rec list, but none just for books.

[Glebe]

Thoughts and prayers

Heh! Fear is the mind killer!

[Alberon]

Rosebud by Paul Cornell Another novella. This one is about a tiny ship in the outer solar system nudging useful elements into orbits back to the company that runs everything on Earth. The five crew run in digital form in the ship.

"The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects."

The story concerns them running into a possibly alien ship and their exploration of it. Not a bad little story, some humour though the science quite quickly becomes quite fantastical leading to a rather quick ending.

[touchingcloth]

I read Foundation recently. I can't say I'll hurry back, but that's mainly because I feel like I didn't get the most out of it. I set myself a target of 30 books this year, and with not having too many hours available to read in that just means I'm rushing things more than I ought to.

I will be back, though, probably next year with a less ambitious target in mind.

I really enjoyed the complex decades-long game they played on the Empire. The fact that I can't say for sure that it was decades and not centuries or millennia tells me I definitely didn't absorb it all properly. Some very nice plot points and twists in there that I really don't think I've read anywhere else.

I gave it 3/5 on Goodreads based on what I got out of it, but I suspect I might revise that on a re-read.

[Famous Mortimer]

Asimov did a whole future history series, which I read as a younger man. Without checking, I think the robot from "I, Robot" goes all the way through to the end of human history? Something like that, anyway. Plus, when you finish, there's a few movie versions of "The End Of Eternity" to enjoy.

It's possible it's not aged well, though - when I read older stuff, like Robert Sheckley's, there are brilliant bits and quite sexist / racist bits side by side.

[touchingcloth]

I've just reread Northern Lights. Was going to do Blood Meridian next, but I was enjoying Lyra's world so much I went straight to The Subtle Knife.

[Alberon]

Notes From the Burning Age by Claire North

Centuries after our world was destroyed by the Kakuy (spirits of the land, sea and sky) a young boy, Ven, sees one while sheltering in a river to avoid a burning forest. He grows up to become a priest in Temple. His job was decipering texts recovered from books, magazines and hard drives of the old world.

This isn't the usual post-apocolypse dystopia. Technology hasn't been lost, but it is carfully regulated by Temple. Any knowledge dangerous to the world such as Oil Drilling, fracking, atomic weapons or even machine guns are stored away. People of the world live more sustainably leaving offerings and prayers to the Kakuy even though they believe the spirits care nothing for them.

At some point Ven has left Temple and is working in a bar. He's forcibly recruited by Georg who, along with his Brotherhood, wants to return mankind to the dominant position on Earth and bring back the old ways. He gives stolen texts to Ven to translate, looking for technology to use against the Kakuy.

The story revolves around the two positions of mankind first and respect for the environment. And here is where the main problem for the book comes into view. It's preachy. The mankind-first group are portrayed as greedy and not thinking of the future, and while it is largely true of people today it does come across too much as if they're idiots.

Claire North is a writer that seems to be aimed at the mainstream audience. Her first book under the North name (she's written Young Adult work under another name) was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was reviewed by Richard and Judy. It's also an excellent work. Her books though have always been solidly genre and often very good though sometimes she misses the mark. Which sums up this book quite well.

[Pranet]

I have recently read the first two books of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. I spent most of the first book trying to figure out what sort of book I was reading, and wasn't sure I liked it. However, I had worked out the tone by the end of it and enjoyed the second one much more. Looking forward to the third book in a bit.

Also been reading some of Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar stories. Should have read these when I was 10 really, but I'm getting a decent amount of enjoyment from them. Can see why there are so many RPG supplements based on this setting each story is like a D&D scenario.

[Norton Canes]

Just finished Hyperion. Got a feeling this might be most people's reaction but the first story, with the lost tribe, is far and away the best - so much so that the rest suffer by comparison. It was the only one that gave me the same sort of creeping horror I got from (the television adaptation of) Simmond's The Terror.

[touchingcloth]

I started Hyperion but wasn't really into it by the end of the setup section where they're all introducing themselves to each other on the ship, and I wasn't hooked by the first few pages of the first story proper so I put it to one side.

Worth carrying on with? It sounds like it might be diminishing returns given your review and my experience with the setup.

[Norton Canes]

Well, definitely finish the first tale, then see if you feel like there's any momentum carrying you through to the next. I don't want to give the impression I'm damning the book too much - the prose is perfectly readable and the various tales, though apparently unconnected at first, gradually construct a picture of the over-arching plot. It's not short of imagination and though the whole thing is quite dry (the scattered humorous passages didn't work for me), each tale has a different tone. It's a great epic universe-builder mapped effectively onto human stories and though some of it's a bit laboured, it's worth getting to the end.

[touchingcloth]

Thanks, I might pick it up again at the first story and see how I get on.

[Alberon]

The Quantum Garden by Derek Kunsken Second in (of course) a trilogy. This time Belisarius, the Homo Quantus conman, has to go back in time in an effort to save the rest of the Homo Quantus sub-species. It's all perfectly okay, nothing great or memorable. Just okay.

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky Second in (of course) a trilogy. This time Idris, one of the last of the original Intermediaries (people who can navigate freely in Unspace and are the only slightly-effective weapon against the world-wrecking Architects), is caught up in various conspiracies involving the two branches of the human race, the very alien Hegemony and Ash, the mysterious alien that first warned humanity of the threat against them.

I raved about the first book but it wasn't so well recieved here. The second book sagged a bit for me seeing how a lot of it was involved a lot with racist human politics which I just find depressing. It seems the third one will return to the Architects and the unknown master forcing them to reshape worlds. As before, though, there's plenty of action sequences and the whole thing, like the first book, is quite episodic. It's almost like Tchaikovsky is pitching it as a television series. It would make a good, if expensive, one.