It’s been over a year since I read the first book of Greg Egan’s Orthogonal trilogy and I make no apologies for that. I can enjoy pretty much every single one of this author’s book but they require significant mental work and consequent preparation to fully appreciate. Reading The Eternal Flame requires having read the first book as Egan wastes no time in explaining how the physics of this universe work or the biological details of the alien species who are the protagonists of the story. Consequently I also assume this prior knowledge in this post.
My wife had been bugging me for ages to read this book, arguably China’s best known science-fiction work for the moment. Written by Liu Cixin, it was first serialized in a magazine some years back. Of course I had to first wait for it to be translated to English and for it to be released at affordable paperback prices. In the meantime, the book went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year, though it was amidst the chaos created by the Raid Puppies and the Sad Puppies. The version that I eventually got was on Google Play Books. Note that this write-up will be full of spoilers as it will difficult to say much about it otherwise.
I was a big fan of Blindsight and really enjoyed discussing it in various places so it’s no surprise that this sequel was one of my most anticipated books. Unfortunately even after I’d gotten my hands on it (I chose to buy it as an ebook from Google Books), I took my time reading it because I ended up being very annoyed by it. After finishing the book, I went around the Internet to read up on various discussions. The regulars at Broken Forum mostly liked it but on Reddit and other places, I find that mine is not an uncommon opinion.
As the impending release of the movie based on it makes obvious, this is one of the most prominent science-fiction novels in recent years. It started life as a piece of original fiction freely available on the web and was picked up by a publisher only after it gained popularity. Appropriately enough for our time, the print version of the novel is the last version to become available as both the ebook and audio versions preceded it. Personally I became interested in reading this because it shows up often in lists of recommendations in rationalist fiction circles, a sub-genre that is now burgeoning thanks to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
As I’ve mentioned many times, I still consider Greg Egan to be my favorite science-fiction author though his best work was published in the 1990s and some of the latest novels can be quite boring (I’m looking at you Incandescence and Zendegi.) Still, I’m likely to read everything Egan writes eventually and so here we are at The Clockwork Rocket, the first book of the Orthogonal trilogy that was first published in 2011.
Once again, I am forced to concede that I read embarrassingly few books these days and that even when I do, I fall back on the authors most familiar to me. At least in the case of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, it’s a solid, widely praised, book that all fans of the genre are probably expected to be familiar with.
For the first time in a very long while, I’ve gotten ahead of the curve on writing a post for every movie that I watch. This gives me extra time to write about other miscellaneous stuff. So I thought this would be a good time to make a list of some of the fanfiction I’ve been reading and enjoyed. As always, the list is sorted in no particular order. It’s a long list because I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff over the past two years or so.
I’ve posted about this before here and it’s still ongoing. The plan is apparently to finish it this year. I still enjoy a great deal but it’s now much darker and serious than when it started. Oddly enough, it’s also gotten so caught up in its plot that it’s much less of an author tract than it was originally intended to be.
