After finishing Reach for Infinity, I said I’d check out the other anthologies in the series and here I am with the first of them. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it includes fifteen stories by a host of familiar names. I’m pleased to see that it opens with a story by Peter Watts, one of my current favorite writers. None of the other authors I especially like though I’ve read their stuff here and there.

This is somewhere in length between a novella and a novel. Despite being sold as a standalone, it forms part of the so-called Sunflower cycle which I failed to realize for some time and might be difficult to understand on its own. Conveniently one of my favorite stories from the Reach for Infinity anthology that I read only a few months ago is part of this series. The other two are readily available online. Since this book leaves many questions unanswered even at the end, reading those other stories helps quite a bit.

It occurs to me with this book that I haven’t properly finished reading a traditional trilogy of novels in a long while. I still think it’s ridiculous that every book in the trilogy won the Hugo and I don’t agree that it stands on the same level as the true greats of fantasy and science-fiction. But I would happily agree that this is a rollicking good read and this last book does bring the series to a more or less satisfying conclusion.

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.