What Are You Reading?

I blitzed through a load of SF classics that Id missed a while back, I am Legend and a load of others, A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of the ones I was most looking forward to and the biggest disappointment, just pure... pointless? It was so boring.

If you want something in a similar vein, monks keeping humanities knowledge alive through civilization rise and collapse, give Anathem by Neal Stephenson a go, I know his tech descriptions get on some peoples nerves and there are some architecture descriptions in this that go on for entire chapters but just skim that and enjoy the story, one of the best pieces of SF you'll ever read.

A little bit into book 2 and there must have been a short story or novella in-between. Bit of a jump in the storyline.

Starting to struggle with the lead character. To really enjoy a story I need to like my main protagonist a bit or else not get too attached. But this is opulent writing in first person narrative and the guy seems to turn more and more into a whiny arsehole. I'll give it another few chapters but I'm a bit turned off atm.

Started reading dune, losing interest now.

Read it way back when, in HS in the US in the 1970's. All time great read, but it was a book of its time with its emphasis on ecology, and a plot like a spy novel. Back then, there wasn't a lot to choose from - Tolkien of course, Heinlein and all the various military-style SF. Dune was different to a great degree.

I'd recommend keeping going. If you've seen the any of the movies, just forget them, Dune really wasn't about the spectacle of it all. TBH I haven't seen the "Timothy Chalumet/that WWE wrestler guy" version, I hear its pretty good but the trailers don't seem to be right. And the first De Laurentiis movie was laughably bad.

Just the first 3. The rest can be avoided with no loss. Frank Herbert really wasn't that great of a writer, had one good series in him.

better late than never!!

I'm in the middle of "Agency", the follow up to "The Peripheral". Same universe, some overlapping characters but it's a stand alone book.

Well worth checking out if you like The Peripheral.

Neuromancer was one of his earlier novels, and I think Gibson has gotten much better at gradually creating the world of his books while progressing the plot. In Neuromancer, I found he had to take large timeouts or detours to explain concepts, which didn't really flow with the plot.

Neuromancer was the first 'cyberpunk' novel though, had to explain a whole new universe. It was amazing to read back then.

Christmas reading was Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I was looking forward to it all year and I had no trouble reading it but it was nowhere as good as the first two, spent an awful lot of the book spinning its wheels and repeating itself due to the nature of the plot device which I wont spoil. The mentions of the ruined Earth launching desperate colony ships in this universe are pure gold dust and the best thing about this series but theres just not enough of it here.

Also read Weaponized by Neal Asher. I think thats me done with the Polity stuff now, Gridlinked and the whole Agent Cormack series set in the Prador War are some of the best sci-fi novels you'll read but he has been milking the universe with repetitive low effort novels since then. The amount of times he repeats himself in this book is criminal, for example there are these aliens that are hard to kill, they have to hit them with lasers until they turn "asbestos white" then hit them with a railgun or a missile so they explode. That "asbestos white" description of killing the aliens appears literally 50 times in the book word for word over and over again. It also has these pointless flashbacks to irrelevant stuff that happened a few weeks beforehand, its literally irrelevant to the plot and is just pure filler, I was angry reading this book which is sad because I always thought The Polity was second only to The Culture as my favourite sci-fi universe.

70% through final Malazan book and it's a struggle. Looking forward to finishing it up and moving onto something else. Not getting much reading time these days hope to rectify that during the week.

Think I'm going to tackle the Farseer trilogy next, it's been on my list for a while

Found her very very dreary indeed.

Transition from Iain Banks

Munching my way through Iains non science fictions books and so far they are all excellent. Some are just thrillers or so, some are a bit off-the-wall, but so far I haven regretted a single one. Quite the opposite.

While not strictly speaking science fiction I bring up Transition here 'cos it's not a real-world novel either. Could call it a real-world fantasy, maybe fitting the aforementioned bit-off-the-wall category.

Its premise is there are an infinite number of parallel universes created by all the different choices and happenstances and things that go this way or that way throughout history. Some are almost identical to our universe some are a bit different some are vastly different. An infinite number of them and the story plays on nowadays Earth and its parallel versions. No space faring or classic science fiction here.

There are people who can 'Transition' between the different universes and a so-called 'Council' that is meant to keep some sort of order to all that. But the Council goes rogue and bad and nasty and things go from there.

If you're a Banks fan like myself, but mostly went with 'the Culture' so far, this one is an excellent entry point into his non science-fiction books. Couldnt put it down.

Also excellent but definitely not science fiction or fantasy or even strange were Stonemouth and also The Crow Road. The Bridge is very good too but I found it challenging at times. Luckily I have a good few left to go through.

Here's more progression fantasy crack for lovers of Cradle.

Not particularly well written but, has that one-more-page vibe in spades:

Very enjoyable, if you like vamps.

Christ yeah, think I read three of them? Enormous books where just nothing interesting happens. A lot of fantasy authors are self-indulgent with page counts but that series just takes the biscuit. Nice world building as mentioned but everything I read could have been in one decently paced volume.

Fantastic books, some great concepts and the scope is vast.

i got through book one and two. never got around to book three weirdly enough. i did enjoy them but found them very slow going. as for the series, i know you're referring to the netflix series which is due out end of 2023, but the chinese series is airing currently. just waiting for a subtitled version tbh.