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.

This is another mainstream novel that I picked up because it has a somewhat science-fiction premise. It’s even new and was included in The Economist as one of their best books of the year. To me however this is another case of a mainstream book that isn’t really about the technology at its core at all but how its presence and its invention altered the lives of a group of people the novel chooses to follow. It’s also a stylistically clever book in which each chapter is drastically different, including one that is written entirely as text messages between characters. I was impressed by the quality of the writing and the complex psychological profiles of the many weird characters in it, but this was never intended to be science-fiction at all.

This is a science-fiction book that everyone will have heard of if only because of the vast number of adaptations inspired by it. I similarly have never read the book itself before this, thinking that I already knew all there was to know from the adaptations. Watching a discussion of the top science-fiction novels however made me realize that there still is a lot of value in revisiting the old classics because they are classics for good reasons. As such I’ll be adding some science-fiction classics into my reading rotation beginning with this one by H.G. Wells.