Books: March 2005 Archives
To celebrate Ian McDonald winning a BSFA award for River of Gods, how about reading one of his short stories? Some Strange Desire i sonline at Inifinity Plus along with a couple of novel extracts from his earlier novels.
Parallel Evolution and Two Big Dumb Objects - an infinity plus feature by John D Owen
A comparison of Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven and Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Good title.
[Via Locus]
Gwyneth Jones has won the Philip K. Dick Award for her novel Life. Here's a few thoughts about the book from Gywneth's (wonderfully poetic) blog.
Ian McDonald has won the BSFA award for best novel for his magnificent River of Gods.
And *all* of the Hugo Nominations for best novel are for British writers! (Although Ian McDonald moved to Northern Ireland when he was young so maybe saying UK writers might be more exact).
• The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
• Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
• Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
• River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)
I can see the headlines now... "British domination of Hugo awards"
Cheryl at Emerald City is blogging Eastercon. The BSFA awards are announced on Satrurday night.
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross (UK/US)
This books starts with an amazing first line, but then instantly began to confound my expectations. The only previous fiction I had read by Charlie was Lobsters which completely blew me away. So to be suddenly plunged into the intricacies of the technologically repressed New Republic came as a bit of a shock. Then, the detail of running a starship was more Das Boot than Star Trek and the action detailed in a way that I imagine Tom Clancy books to be (although I've never read a Tom Clancy book, so perhaps more accurately I should say that it almost reminded me of stuff in Robert Ludlum books).
But the ideas keep coming, loads and loads of ideas. Maybe too much? By the end I was blase´ about a human size rabbit arguing with a cyborg! The plot ended well and there was lots of action but somehow it felt a bit flat. It seems a bit churlish to criticize because there's some truly great SF in this book, but I never fell in love with it. It's grown on me as a I think more about it, but at the time I never cared enough about the characters, it felt a bit emotionally shallow to me.
The good news however is that Iron Sunrise (UK/US) is supposed to be a better book (whatever that means) and everything I've heard about Accelerando sets it up to be phenomonal. (On top of that Charlie's fantasy books are getting good reviews).
So in summary, a decent debut novel that I never really fell in love with, but I look forward to reading more of the author's work.
It's my birthday today. Hurray.
I got some lovely presents, including Singularity Sky by Charles Stross and The Confusion and The System Of The World by Neal Stephenson.
That's probably enough to keep me going this year! My TO-READ pile now looks like this...
Singularity Sky - Charles Stross (UK/US)
Gridlinked - Neal Asher (UK/US)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell - Susanna Clarke (UK/US)
The Confusion - Neal Stephenson (UK/US)
The System of the World - Neal Stephenson (UK/US)
After that I've got lots of other unread books that I got second hand (mainly in the SF Masterwokrs series).
I finished reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card(UK/US) yesterday. It was okay. I mean, I enjoyed it but it was nothing special and felt a bit dated. More boys-own-adventure than science fiction. Oh and that last chapter was terrible! It felt like such a bolt on, was that just to kick off the next book in the trilogy?
If you want Science Fiction with games I'd recommend the superb Player Of Games by Iain M Banks (UK/US) instead.
Forbidden Planet now has a blog, courtesy of Joe Gordon who got fired from Waterstone's for blogging. Ho ho. [Via Charlie Stross]
John@SFSignal has created a LiveJournal style SF meme, so here we go.
