January 2015 reading

Just thought I'd get the topic going for the new year.

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm about two-thirds of the way through Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man.

Still reading The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks...

I've finished The steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein and have continued in The outskirter's secret. Love those books, the SF elements are very will incorporated in this fantasylike world. In this second book, I especially like the outskirter community. I'm glad these books are finally more widely available now that they are out in ebook form.

Reading Robert J. Sawyer's techno-thriller The Terminal Experiment.

First up for 2015:

Brightness Reef by David Brin
All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (Eglish-language novelization of the Japanese graphic novel that is the source for the film Edge of Tomorrow, (a.k.a. 'Live, Die, Repeat') starring that infamously kooky couch-hopper.

Next up:
A Soul in a Bottle by Tim Powers
Infinity's Shore by David Brin

Reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I'm reading The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. Very good after a 1/3 of the way through it.

I'm in Magrathea with Arthur Dent and co. re-reading an old favourite, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I'm about 1/4 of the way through Symbiont which is a good read although not quite gripping me the way Parasite did.

I have just started to read "Where the Red Fern Grows" by Wilson Rawls

I've just jumped into Blue Mars with both feet, finally!

>7 seitherin: One of my faves. Hope you enjoy it!

Just finished Ancillary Sword. Liked it better than the first; it's tighter & more coherent. Still the interesting exploration of issues in having been big/many and now being just one; also AIs as individuals.

>14 rshart3: I had the same reaction to Ancillary Sword. Really liked the plot.

I've loaded The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman onto my mini iPad - best Christmas present ever, for a former Luddite who got her first cellphone ever last June - but haven't started it yet.

Still reading the non-SF The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, having zipped through several other volumes of this amazing series. Like a treasure chest full of fantastic authors I've never heard of!

Finally getting around to The Evolutionary Void - had been waiting on my shelves since forever...

Just started Gibson's The Peripheral.

Just started re-reading Skylark Three by E.E. "Doc" Smith. I vaguely recall skimming through it as a teenager because I wasn't very impressed by the Skylarks after the Lensman books. Maybe this is a good time for reassessment.

Read The Martian during 2 evenings. For an engineer type like myself, I enjoyed it.

Finished The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin and started Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.

Just started Karen Joy Fowler's collection Black Glass and thus far enjoying the title story about a hapless DEA agent who accidentally calls up the spirit of Carry Nation to help in the "war on drugs". Unfortunately she's a bit too zealous in her work!

I finished HHGG, listened to an audiobook of The Mound, a novella ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft, and now I have moved on to Dreamsnake. January is a month of re-reads for me, so these are all books I have read before.

Finishing up Going Home by Jack McDevitt, started For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams.

Finished Symbiont which was a disappointing read, lots of filler and repetitive internal monologue - but of course ending on a cliffhanger. Grrr.

I'm liking The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF so far: the contents mostly live up to the billing (even if it is a bit over-the-top).

I finished Behold the Man, which is as disturbing and iconoclastic an SF novel as I've read in quite a while. I liked it, but would definitely not recommend it to the easily offended.

Also read a couple classic short stories: Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" (a fine SFnal extrapolation of Cold War-era paranoia) and H.G. Wells' "The Star" (an early (and still pretty thrilling) shot at that whole apocalyptic thang). They're both available for free at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32032 ("Second Variety")
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27365/27365-h/27365-h.htm#Page_35 ("The Star")

Read Chanur's Venture, which I enjoyed much more than The Pride of Chanur - review of the former will be up on SF Mistressworks today at 11 am UTC. Then read The Mirror Empire, which I'm afraid I'm not convinced is the newest bestest thing in epic fantasy ever. It's basically torture-porn fantasy, which is not something I enjoy. I'm pretty sure the matriarchal societies have been done before, and the non-binary-gender thing is a blink and you'll miss it. Don't think I'll be bothering with the sequels, but I'll give her new sf series a go when that appears. Now about to start A Man Lies Dreaming.

Finished up Echopraxia (B+) this evening. At the end of Blindsight Peter Watts was wondering what consciousness is good for and his further contemplation of the question leads him to the answer of probably not much (assuming the unlikely chance that it exists), as in this book Humanity is entering the full-fledged post-consciousness singularity. Sheer cussedness still counts for something though.

Halfway through Good Omens.

♥,
Cat at Galaxy Press

Just started The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - so far it's surprisingly light-hearted but I'm only 3 stories in. What makes the SF mindblowing in the collection you're reading, Noisy? Are they like the books we've been talking about in the Strangest SF thread?

Finished Station Eleven this month and liked it very much.

I have Ancillary Justice and On the Beach in the wings to start reading soon!

Started The Gods of Mars as part of my project to finish reading the whole Barsoom series (https://www.librarything.com/series/Barsoom) this year. (I read A Princess of Mars last year.)

Getting back into reading some sci-fi with 2010.

Gave up on Black Glass because all the stories I read seemed to just fizzle out - and a lot of them were fairly uninvolving to start with. Maybe Karen Joy Fowler is just not for me.
Anyway, started on The Accidental Time Machine which has been on my TBR pile for a while - so far pretty enjoyable.

Finished A Man Lies Dreaming, better than The Violent Century, though perhaps not as good as Osama. About to read Edge of Dark, which I'll be reviewing for Interzone.

Finished The Wreck of The River of Stars, now in The Panic Hand

I am almost finished with Going Home by Jack Mcdevitt

I liked Leviathan Wakes well enough I've started the second book in the Expanse series, Caliban's War.

>39 seitherin: There's a tv series based on the books coming to the SyFy channel later this year. The trailer just went up in the last few days. It looks good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=8X5gXIQmY-E

>40 tottman: Saw that. Fingers crossed they don't muff it up.

Finished my Culture re-read with The Hydrogen Sonata. There was a long interview with Banks printed at the end of the book which I found especially poignant. In it, he said that he knew what the next Culture novel would be about, and later on he suggested an idea for a further novel (in the broadest outline).

I've started a re-read of Greg Bear's The Forge of God. What I'm finding interesting is this: the novel was written in 1986-87 and set ten years later. No-one has mobile phones, and only one character so far (a freelance journalist) has access to the Internet; even then, he prefers newspapers to news sites and comments that he could always use his computer (back at his hotel) to pick up the latest stories: in an hour or so, he could access "three or four" major news sites. Because the story is set so close to the present day, I'm actually finding the failure to see the societal changes brought about by the Internet quite jarring; more so than I would reading a story written in, say, the 1950s or 1960s.

I also just finished Hydrogen Sonata which I liked quite a bit, only the hardcover version I have didn't have the interview at the end so now I'm curious about it. For the story, I especially liked the deeper-dive into the ship-minds and their abilities and attitudes - almost pranksterish.

Regarding the Forge of God - a few years ago I started rereading many of the cyberpunk novels starting with Bruce Sterling's Artificial Kid and moving forward through the genre by publication date (I skipped the earlier PKD which didn't have quite the right elements for me). I had originally read most of these while they were being published and at the time worked in technology as I do today. It was interesting relating the stories to what I remember when originally reading them, comparing them to events and the contemporary speculation about where everything was going, then retrospectively comparing them to what actually has happened. And you are right about the impact of the web - I don't think anyone really knew what and how things were to become and some things (like jacking into a virtual existence online) hasn't quite gotten there while other things are well beyond. I especially like Vernor Vinge's take on much of this in Rainbow's End ...

have just finished reading "Where the Red Fern Grows" by Wilson Rawls, a very good book, well worth a read. Now I am going to read the Harry Potter series, for my younger daughter

>43 johnnyapollo: The Banks interview was in the back of the UK 1st edition hardcover.

I still quote Vinge's references to "The Web of a Thousand Lies" (from A fire upon the deep) from time to time...

Just finished Maplecroft (B+), in which Lizzie Borden is reimagined as a fighter of Lovecraftian horrors. Frankly, this novel was undercut for me due to a less-than-convincing romantic subplot, but I look forward to the series going forward (if it is meant to be the start of a series).

RobertDay @42, you may not be remembering 1996 the same way I am, but I remember it as "most people don't have mobile phones, and while some people have Internet access it's slow and not everything is online", i.e. more or less exactly what you're describing as 1986 + ten years. Unless you were on a college campus, internet would have almost certainly been dialup. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933563.html says that there were 44 million mobile phone subscribers in the US in 1996. So it would not have been unheard of, but not at all universal, either. Unless the characters are rich and/or techies, I wouldn't expect them to have mobiles. (It's been long enough since I read it that I don't remember one way or the other.)

Bear lucked out in only looking ten years ahead instead of fifteen, though, since I doubt his future would have looked much different if it had been set in 2001 rather than 1997, even though the real world would have looked very different.

I'm currently engrossed in The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It's the best classic old-school SF I've read in quite some time.

>31 EnidaV: 'Mindblowing' is a bit strong, but the stories were all intriguing, with most having a reasonable twist in the end. I don't think there was a dud amongst them, and I gave it 4.5/5 which is a pretty strong recommendation. 'Into the Miranda Rift' was my favourite: Ashley gave it a good intro, and it lived up to the billing.

>47 lorax: lorax, in the middle 90s I was working as support for a fairly high-profile UK Government department, and so the senior people all had mobiles, whilst we had a hardwired, permanent Internet connection in the office (and was one of the first Departments to roll that out to every desktop). It wasn't broadband as such, but it was a dedicated pipe into Birmingham's main hub, so it was fairly fast. Even when I got the Net at home, a couple of years later, because I was only 200 yards from the phone exchange with no other properties in between, my dialup was faster than the girlfriend's cable service in central Birmingham! So I admit that my 1996 may not have been the same as everyone else's.....

I was in the Middle East throughout the 1990s, and I remember mobile phones being taken up really quickly - so much so that people would ring me on my landline and ask, "Where are you?". The internet was rolled out much more slowly. We had an office connection by about 1997, and people were using dialup from home by about 1998. I returned to the UK in 2002 and went to work for an ISP - and even then, most of the ISP's customers were dialup. In fact, they used to write the names of broadband customers on the wall when new ones signed up...

In the mid-80's I carried a Motorola "brick" mobile phone. It had less than an hour of talk time (actually at end-of-life on the battery I was lucky to get about 20 minutes) before it had to be recharged, and previously I had a car-mounted contraption that could be made portable via a battery "package" - more like a small hard-satchel. I didn't start carrying something pocket-sized until the 90's - Nokia made a fairly decent unit that went through a series of numbers until it was a little-bitty thing - I "balanced" my utility belt with a Palm device. At some point I carried a blackberry and around the same time (early 2000s) my brother had a sat-phone for work - I remember thinking it reminded me of the old "brick" as it was big-heavy-clunky much more like a WW2 Walkie-Talkie than the sleet cellphones available by then. I've been carrying iphones since v2 which have now reversed the trend and have grown large again - my 6+ more of a phablet. Funny how all that comes and goes but with these latest generation the big phone is wiping out the tablet market and at some point I think it will replace most notebooks. The best notebooks seem to be replacing desktops - I think the heyday of that style will soon be gone - even home servers are getting tiny.

I've finished Dreamsnake which was as good as I remembered. This morning I started a re-read of Look to Windward which is the last book in the Culture readalong on the sfbrp podcast, as the podcast host decided on the order we should read them in, rather than going in publication order.

> 52

I loved Dreamsnake! I read it decades ago and should reread it myself

>52 isabelx:, >53 nrmay: Dreamsnake is on Mount Tbr, as I've heard so many good things about it. But I have a phobia of snakes and wonder if I'll ever actually have the nerve to start reading!

Currently reading an ARC of Echopraxia by Peter Watts.

Finished John Love's Evensong the other day and still trying to figure out why it got published to start with. Good premise and good start ruined by an author that had no idea what they were doing, how to get to the end or how to be subtle...

Time for a palate cleaner with A Murder of Clones.

Finished Caliban's War and started Abaddon's Gate.

Reading The Only Words that are Worth Remembering.

>51 johnnyapollo: etc: I worked at a university in Engineering in the 80's and 90's. I got to use the internet when it was very young, mostly used by techies and gamers so I got started in gaming and email early in the life of such things. Because I worked a lot of overtime for professors, I was given a Gandalf box and an ancient terminal with bad habits to use at home. From the first personal computer on, I spent a lot of time and money on PC's and games. Early in that period there were very few mobile phones but there was one techie who liked to show his off. He got a lot of calls that could be heard up and down the halls, but they were mostly from his wife asking for groceries. The professors didn't really want any of that equipment because it made them too accessible, so their grad students and secretaries got it all. I remember when we got a new telephone system with messaging on it, the older professors didn't want anything to do with it. They'd rather be chased down the hall by frantic staff and students ;)

Starting The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires, curmudgeon Bierce's sf/political satire and some editorials too. Co-edited by S. T. Joshi who seems to have added Bierce expertise to his work on Lovecraft.

>60 RandyStafford:

There's a fascinating Bierce-centric interview with Joshi over at (you guessed it) The Ambrose Bierce Site:

http://donswaim.com/bierce-joshi.html

Worth reading if you haven't already.

I read The Martian last year and loved it, so now I'm giving it a reread, on audio this time.

Finished The Gods of Mars, which has one whiz-bang of a cliffhanger ending. Fortunately I have the next book in the series (The Warlord of Mars) close at hand (I'll be reading that one next, of course).

I looking for ideas what to read next, I am going to try "The Gods of Mars".....

Having look at some Information "The Gods of Mars" Sounds interesting!

The first "adult" SF novel I read as a child was Gods of Mars backed with Warlord of Mars - I'm not quite sure how old I was but this predated my first "found" SF/F novel, the Hobbit which I checked out of my junior high school library so I'm thinking I was 10 or 11 years old. My father who was a huge SF/F reader and a member of the SFBC would kick back and read these books - at the time I was more concerned with comics as they had memes that were easier for me to comprehend - he was reading Burroughs and I could tell the book excited him so I asked him what it was about - when he finished he offered it up. I remember how fascinated I was with the Frazetta cover (I still own that same copy).

The book was surprisingly not that difficult to read for me at that age - I didn't understand many of the concepts and I had to infer what was going on with words I didn't know (which were many) - I guessed their meaning by context (and got much of it wrong). I do remember the thrilling adventure scenes and it's responsible for me still enjoying space opera. Picking up the Hobbit later (without much knowledge of the book - it was recommended to me by the librarian) just seemed like a natural progression.

I've since reread the book (and the entire series) several times. I remember my second read as a teen and how my initial perception was entirely wrong - however the adventure scenes were much as I remembered and I still enjoyed the book. My third reading provided new details (I think I was in my 20s) and I realized that the book changes over-time as my personal experiences and attitudes have changed. Much of this early fiction is like that - the base, romantic and adventure elements don't change very much but some of the "heavier" details that relate to politics, science and sophistry become more meaningful with age.

I believe I've read pretty much everything that Burroughs has written - I used to own many pulps that had obscure series (some of them a single issue) that I don't believe have ever been reprinted (and mostly for good cause as they aren't very good). John Carter is still, hands-down my favorite, followed by Tarzan and the Mucker. Carson of Venus, Pellucidar and everything else comes after as favorites but I haven't reread any of them in a few years. It's part nostalgia, part a yearning for a simpler life, and part feeding the need for a good adventure story, that draws me back.

Gods of Mars runs a close second to Chessmen of Mars for the Barsoom book that made the biggest impression on me as a kid.

Finished The Panic Hand, started Majyk by Accident.

Listening to the audio of Willful Child. Wow, such a difference from the Malazan books. It is a hoot.

Read the Lathe of Heaven years ago and found it thorughly enjoyable. Hope it was a good read.

I read the very popular book The Martian, but for some reason all that technical description got in the way of the story. I found it spoiled the rhythm. I guess engineers got a kick out of it.

Read the 3rd book, Catalyst, of the Insignia trilogy by S.J. Kincaid and thought it was the best book of the series. As with the other books - it was packed with action, violence and intrigue. The idea of a world where corporations warred with each other by using government academies with trained "pilots" who linked up with a war spacecraft via a virtual reality implant. In comes a black horse, a teenager who has lived with his gambler father and survived as best he can, but he has a gift for virtual reality games. That's in the first book, but by the third book the intrigue has escalated and the cadets are forced to take on a mad juggernaut. Personally, it was a thrill a minute.

Just started Soulminder by Timothy Zahn. It got my attention immediately. A grief-stricken father has taken his scientific training to trying to capture a soul when it leaves the body.

I hope to read Look to Windward very soon.

I'm currently reading Declare by Tim Powers. I so love everything that I've read by Powers but for some reason this book has been slow to start - starting to pick up about a quarter of the way through though...

>71 johnnyapollo: Declare was more of a slog for me than I expected, but it eventually gets to where you're probably hoping to see it go.

Reading the short stories / novelettes in The Wandering Earth collection by Cixin Liu.
Feels a bit odd but good.
Maybe a kind of storytelling and sense of wonder usually associated with earlier works despite a ~2000 release, but with little or none of the problems/elements that sometime make older SF a mixed bag to read now.

>72 ChrisRiesbeck: Yes Declare is starting to pick up, I'm nearing the half-way point and he's returned to the desert in 1963...

Just finished 2010 and now started on Neuromancer. Have to say I'm not enjoying Gibsons writing style so far.

Currently reading What The Doctor Ordered and remembering why I rate Michael Blumlein as a writer. My review of Cherry Wilder's The Luck of Brin's Five will be going up on SF Mistressworks today.

Reading Undivided by Neal Shusterman, last of his Unwind series.

Rereading city of stairs and city of pearl....
Hmmmm do I need to take a trip to a city?

Just re-read Heinlein's All You Zombies today after watching the movie adaptation, (re-titled Predestination), last night. The movie adds some things but stays very true to the source - especially in the details.

>79 ScoLgo: I really enjoyed that movie, just saw it a week ago. It's a great story idea, though I can't imagine how it all happened the first time round.
It did have me searching for something of Heinlein's to read as soon as the it was over.

>64 Claire5555:
>65 Claire5555:

You might want to read the previous book in the series (A Princess of Mars) first; otherwise, you might get kind of confused. Hope this message isn't reaching you too late!

>66 johnnyapollo:

I'm kind of the reverse of you - first read The Hobbit when I was twelve and didn't discover Burroughs until I was fifteen or so. The vocabulary is still more challenging than one might think - like his near-contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, Burroughs liked to use a lot of words that were archaic even in the early 20th century (and therefore seem really archaic now). I am very grateful to be reading these books on my new Kindle with its dictionary look-up function, as words like "ocelli" and "purlieus" are not ones that I tend to use in everyday conversation!

The subtext of these books (and, occasionally, the text) is really something else, especially in Gods, where it's often downright subversive. Satire on organized religion! Black folks with white folks for slaves! Extraterrestrial/Terran miscegenation! Pretty heady stuff for pulp fiction.