calltoreason.org

I’m still slowly working on reading the great classics of science-fiction that every fan of the genre should read at least once. I’ve been a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series ever since high school but I’ve read precious few of her more substantial Hainish Cycle novels. The Left Hand of Darknes, originally [...]

The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. In some markets, it is also sold as The Moat around Murcheson’s Eye, which is a mouthful for a title but perhaps makes more sense. It was released in 1993, a full eighteen years after the first book was published. (George R.R. Martin [...]

The Mote in God’s Eye is yet another book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. It’s co-authored by Larry Niven of Ringworld fame and is considered one of the finest examples in the sub-genre of alien first contact stories. I’ve been actively looking for stories of this type ever since I [...]

The Book of the New Sun is the insanely praised magnum opus of Gene Wolfe. It’s so well reviewed that it’s been called science-fiction’s Ulysses. Since the people praising it are fellow writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin and Alastair Reynolds, any serious science-fiction fan had better sit up and pay attention. [...]

Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose [...]

Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web: After a long hiatus, Less Wrong (Eliezer Yudkowsky) finally updated the ongoing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction work with a few new chapters. I actually didn’t care [...]

So it took some time, but I’ve finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy, consisting of the novels Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth. That’s quite a lot of text, especially the last book which is as hefty as its name suggests, so much so that the dead tree version was split up into two volumes for commercial reasons. [...]