This title is up on my reading list from What Makes This Book So Great though it’s arguable whether it even counts as science-fiction. I mentioned in the earlier post about how Jo Walton thought it odd that this book failed to achieve much success when it was first released yet immediately upon reading it, one quickly realizes that it is a work that deserves to be taken seriously.
Nearly two years after first starting the series, we now come to the final book of the trilogy by Greg Egan. This brings to an end the journey of the Peerless and its inhabitants across many generations as they look forward to reuniting with the homeworld. I believe that this volume has the least mathematics and physics of the three but makes up for it with a conception of free will that is philosophically very mind-bending.
So I promised after reading What Makes This Book So Great that I would slowly work my way through some of the picks in it that I found most interesting. I’ve read some of Jerry Pournelle’s work before, notably his collaborations with the better known Larry Niven, but this was quite recent and I somehow I missed out on reading any of his stuff back when I was first discovering the genre. I picked this one because it has a premise that turns up often in crack fiction or fan-fiction and shows what can be done in the hands of a professional writer.
As you might expect this rereading of the stories of Ted Chiang was prompted by watching Arrival. In fact, I didn’t just read the eight stories collected in this book. I read pretty much everything that I could find by Chiang since plenty of his stuff is readily available online and easily found via the author’s Wikipedia page. I’ve read almost all of it before of course with the notable exception being The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.
Back in the early days of fiction being published online, one of my favorite sites was the Infinity Plus repository of quality fiction. The original collection still exists but has stopped being updated ages ago and now exists as another portal for selling ebooks. One of the most memorable stories I read there was Charles Stross’ A Colder War. That’s why I paid attention when Stross later turned some of the themes and ideas from that story into a series of books called The Laundry Files. I never did get around to reading it and since I resolved to read more published fiction this year and less online fanfiction, I thought I’d start here.
It’s been nearly three years since I introduced the web serial Worm in this blog. Cue the usual expressions of disbelief at how quickly time flies. It’s hard to be sure but my opinion is that due to the amazing popularity and success of that work, many other authors have since started to try to emulate its author Wildbow and write serials on their own, using it as a platform to earn money whether through direct donations or as a way to promote books that are for sale. For readers, this means a wonderful explosion of stuff to read for free. Here are a few of my favorites from the ones that I’ve sampled so far.
I’ve had this book on my wishlist for a couple of years now but only recently bought it on Google Books. This one is a collection of essays, all of which you can actually read for free on the Tor website as a series of blog posts by Jo Walton. The original idea of the column was that, as the subtitle states, she would re-read the classics of science fiction and fantasy and write about her thoughts on them. I found it more convenient to read a curated set of the best ones in the form of a book and it turns out that it’s not so much about the classics of the genre as some of Walton’s favorite books.