I bought this largely because it’s a meme book and I was curious what the fuss was all about. This was originally published in 2019 and won some awards. But it only went viral earlier this year due to a tweet and shot straight up to the top of the bestseller charts. It’s a science-fiction romance story written in an epistolary format by its two co-authors, so really not something that I usually read. The pattern of the correspondence felt obvious and repetitive to me early and there’s really only one way a story like this can end. Still, the quality of the prose and the intensity of the emotions it evokes just about won me over towards the climax.

Continuing on my tour of the greatest science-fiction novels ever written, here is Norstrilia, the only novel published by Cordwainer Smith. Smith is genuinely one of the greats of science-fiction and is mainly known for his short stories. His real life is arguably as fascinating as his fiction, being an East Asian scholar who called Sun Yat-Sen his godfather and an expert in psychological warfare who worked for the CIA. I found this book to be an impressive example of building a complete fictional future history setting and a incisive dissection of what it means to be human. Due to its characters and moral sensibility, I can’t say that I enjoyed it very much. It’s yet another book that really is a product of its time.

As I’ve always said, short stories are where the newest science-fiction ideas first appear and it’s been too long since I last read a decent collection of them. qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes who seems to be a self-published author and makes many of his stories free to read on his personal website. I haven’t read those stories before but I do know that he is a contributor to the SCP Foundation website and I have read many of the stories there. This is a very short book and the individual stories are not so much stories as scenarios. That’s fine by me as I’m here for the ideas, not the dramatic arcs.

Unsong is a web novel by Scott Alexander who is best known for the popular Slate Star Codex blog. I’m not really a regular reader but I do pay attention to it. The saga of the blog and the person behind it makes for a fascinating story in its own right but I won’t go into that here. This novel is set in an alternative history in which the Apollo 8 mission breaks the firmament around Earth as described in Biblical scripture and causes disruptions in the nature of reality. It turns out that everything described in the Talmud is literally true. Angels exist, the laws of physics are broken and the United States is broken up into fiefs led by local powers. People who learn to speak the Names of God can invoke magical effects and a worldwide organization called Unsong is formed to regulate their use.

Greg Egan is still my favorite science-fiction writer and I’m glad to see that he is still producing work. Even so his more recent work has been disappointing and this one with a length somewhere between a novella and a novel, is so underwhelming that I find it impossible to recommend to anyone. It’s still a quintessentially Egan story in that longtime fans will immediately recognize what it is in here that interests him but it’s such a narrow conceit that it’s hard to imagine many people would be similarly enthusiastic and Egan fails to develop an interesting story around it.

Finally, I’m back to working through the list of the great science-fiction novels of all time and this must be one of the weirdest entries on the list. It was originally published in 1956 under the title of Tiger! Tiger!, named after William Blake’s poem. The newer title makes it feel more like science-fiction certainly but the original title really captures its spirit better: an unapologetic paean to the individual superman. As a tour de force of pure imagination the book is marvelous and no wonder it’s considered a classic of the genre. Still I must admit that the deliberately wild ride that is its plot and and the odiousness of its protagonist makes it a difficult novel for me to enjoy.

As promised, I finishing the final part of what ought to really be the first complete book starring Murderbot. I do believe this may well be my favorite entry of the set of four as there is somewhat less combat in here and instead Murderbot mostly has to deal with infiltrating a large space station while posing as a human and spends a lot of his time agonizing over meeting his original crew again. Finally we get the conversations and emotional closure I’ve been longing for over Murderbot being accepted as a person. This doesn’t redeem the series as a whole in my eyes but it does make bring it to a suitably fitting end.