It’s been more than two years since I read Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great and I’m still mining it for ideas on what to read next. So when a thread on Broken Forum talked about big idea books in science-fiction and multiple commentators cited this as a great example, it felt apt to pick this up. As I only recently noted, big ideas are rather rare even in science-fiction and what could be a bigger and more ambitious than trying to create Plato’s famous Republic.
This is the next book in George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen Cycle chronicling the adventures of his flawed protagonist Marîd Audran. Though the first book didn’t really feel like science-fiction, I loved the cyberpunk noir setting enough to want to read its sequels and so here I am.
It’s been a while since I last read a proper anthology of science-fiction short stories. I came across this book quite by accident while browsing through Amazon Kindle recommendations and discovered that editor Jonathan Strahan has a whole series of these books. I bought this one because it’s first story is by Greg Egan and the last one is by Peter Watts. After finishing this, I wondered why I ever stopped buying anthologies.
I held off reading this for the longest time because I didn’t like the first one all that much and I’d heard that the English translation, by Joel Martinsen this time instead of Ken Liu, was kind of weak. Still I kept running across references to it such as how even Barack Obama is a big fan and went to meet author Liu Cixin. I also realized that even in the English-speaking world, big idea science-fiction novels are rather rare and this is nothing if not all about big ideas.
John Scalzi is pretty prominent in science-fiction circles currently and it wasn’t so long ago that he made his debut with the Old Man’s War series which I haven’t read yet. A big part of it is due to his holding the post of president Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and taking a strong stand on feminist issues and against Gamergate and related alt-right controversies. This particular novel won the Hugo Award in 2013 which brought it to my attention then. But the premise seems so obvious that it’s a wonder no one wrote this novel before this.
This was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards though it ended up winning neither of them. I was intrigued by a Broken Forum member describing its premise as a science-fiction mystery novel. Unfortunately the premise is the best thing about the novel. Though author Mur Lafferty sets up the mystery beautifully, the way it plays out wasn’t satisfying to me as the plot revolves around a single malefactor whose identity can easily be predicted by the reader but is pieced together by the characters only at the end of the novel.
So yeah, I’ve never read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books before this which is embarrassing for a fan of science-fiction. I’ve read plenty of his short stories and even one or two his Robots novels but never any of the Foundation books themselves. I’ve inevitably absorbed some of what it’s about through cultural osmosis but I suppose it’s high time that I actually read them for myself.
