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.
Embarrassingly for someone who claims to be fan of science-fiction, it’s been a while since I last read a sci-fi novel. Most of my fiction reading these days are on the web, either web-based originals or fanfiction. I picked Charles Stross’s Halting State to read recently both because I’d previously read his Accelerando and thought it interesting and because this particular novel’s tie-in with online gaming worlds seems like a good fit for my own interests.
This last book of the Mars trilogy is the most epic in scope, covering some one hundred years worth of events and extending the saga to the rest of the Solar system and even beyond. At the same time, it feels frustratingly parochial, with its strong focus on the same old set of characters who are forced to deal with new iterations of familiar problems. As much as we readers have grown to love these characters over the course of the previous books, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that this book isn’t just a retread of what has come before with added proviso that many of the characters are now so mature as to leave little room for additional character development.
When I first read the second book of the Martian Trilogy, I was immediately struck by the epic sense of history it embodies. Set fifty years after the end of the first novel, it shows how the real Martians are the children of the settlers who have never known Earth. Standing over two meters tall, they move with a grace that those born on Earth can never achieve. Moreover, their profound disinterest of all things Terran and unselfconscious Martianness marked the passing of an era.
So here we are at the end. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the final book of the Wheel of Time saga. That’s more than 20 years since I read the first book. The whole series amounts to fourteen books and over four million words. So it’s with relief that I can bring this chapter of my life to a close.