This is one of the vintage science-fiction books I’ve been dipping into from time to time, one of the recommendations I got from YouTube. I found it notable in that it can be sharply divided into two parts which are very different from one another. I’d characterize the first part as a fairly stereotypical military SF story of the era that feels like it’s working towards the protagonist becoming an action hero. But then partway through he gets killed and then things get really crazy. Unfortunately I didn’t really like either part and I disliked the low-key sexism throughout. The best thing that I can say is that it’s a short book and so was easy to get through.

I’ve been wanting to read this entry in the Culture series for ages but couldn’t because for some unknown reason it is not available on Kindle when all of the other books are. In the end, I was forced to buy a paperback book for the first time in years. I particularly wanted to read this book because it supposedly describes how the Culture responds when it encounters an entity far more powerful than itself. It’s easy to uphold your professed ideals when nothing actually threatens you so the real test is when you face at least a peer of equal power. Unfortunately this book did not adequately answer that dilemma at all as the entity is just not that hostile. It is arguably more about how the various factions inside the Culture itself exploits the opportunity the entity presents as well as a love story that I find distracting and not very interesting.

I loved the Pantheon series and seeing as I’ve never read any of Ken Liu’s original fiction, I thought I’d check out the collection of short stories it came from. In fact, only three of the stories in this collection form the basis of the television series and the written form is very different. The rest are a mixed bag. Some explore alternative versions of similar ideas. Others are purely fantasy stories. My favorites are when he explores questions about identity in which the speculative fiction elements are almost incidental. There’s no real central theme to this collection however so it must have been composed of whatever work Liu had that was available and I have to say that on the whole, it isn’t a particularly brilliant book.

Greg Bear has been one of those science-fiction greats whose work I’ve always put off reading and I felt vaguely guilty about it when he passed away in 2022. I only got around to it when I saw Blood Music being listed among the greatest novels in the genre ever written. My first impression here is that Bear certainly is an author who knows a lot about biology and even though this was written in 1985, it still feels up to date and modern. However I’m not sure I care much for the plot, such as it were. I was amused when I checked the Wikipedia entry for this book and saw someone comparing the ending to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End because that was where my mind went to as well.

After last month’s hefty non-fiction book, I thought I’d go with something lighter. It’s an expansion of an award-winning short story about climate change to novella form. Some have complained that it doesn’t add that much to the already great original story but since I’ve never read it, this works well for me. I actually think that it could stand to be expanded even more as it is set entirely in one particular part of Vancouver Island and characters appear in media res with no introduction. Since the geography and ecology of the area are so important, it was tough for someone like me who has never even been to Canada to get into. I had to read up information on the setting but it absolutely is a beautiful and moving story about the slow-moving climate catastrophe.

Greg Egan is continuing to produce a fair amount new writing. I bought this book because it’s been a while since I last sat down with a good collection of short science-fiction stories and they’re how I first encountered Egan’s work. Unfortunately while many of the ideas in the stories here can be interesting and thought provoking, they’re also very small in scale. So small that they might rate a short blurb or a blog post but struggle under the weight and expectations of even a short story. Combined with Egan’s penchant for writing plain and straightforward stories with no dramatic twists, I’m left wondering: okay, so that happened, is that it?

Saving this science-fiction classic until now was unexpectedly fortuitous because I have better idea of its influence having watched films such as Vesper and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind that were clearly inspired by it. Right off the bat, it blew me away with its depiction of a far future Earth in which what remains of humanity must eke out a precarious existence against the plant-life that predominates. The amoral perspective, since there is no room for anything other than survival, is sobering and this is pretty much purely a survey of the ecosystem of the era. My interest did fall off somewhat once it establishes a pattern of its characters being continually forced to confront unfamiliar environments due to a series of misadventures, rather than staying in one particular biome to explore it in-depth. But it remains one of most eye-opening and original science-fiction books I’ve ever read.