I’ve had this novel on my list of books that I want to read for so long that I’d given up all hope of finding it. Many writers and critics loved it when it was published but it seemingly never found commercial success, few copies were printed and no ebook version was made. Now nearly 30 years later, it has finally been made available in electronic form. Naturally I’m among the first in line for it and like everyone else I am awed by how ahead of its time it was as a masterpiece. Even so, I can also see why it might have struggle to find success back then. Almost all of its grand revelations are from interviews by the protagonist, so it’s very much a case of telling instead of showing. This isn’t a good science-fiction novel in the conventionally marketable sense but it is breathtakingly original and unique.

Going back to the well of great science-fiction novels I should have read long ago but didn’t, here’s one that I now believe is the single best depiction of the literal end of the world. This book is singularly focused on a slow and detailed description of exactly how the Earth is destroyed and has little else. Even the identity and motivations of the alien attackers are left as mere guesses. The aliens are simply so much more powerful than humans that they don’t even need to explain themselves and there is no question of fighting back. The downsides are that it’s very USA-centric so we have little idea of what is happening in the rest of the world and there are no women point of view characters. But I admire its audacity and like it a lot.

I’ve read plenty of short stories by Harlan Ellison though I don’t consider myself to be much of a fan. His novels are not considered notable and I suspect that a large part of his legacy comes from his contributions to television shows like the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone. His Dangerous Visions anthologies were hugely influential however and this final book was announced in 1973 and never came out. Ellison died in 2018 but his estate’s executor J. Michael Straczynski continued working on it and so now here it is.

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.