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.
This is the third novella of the series and by now I know what to expect. It largely follows the same formula in having Murderbot unexpectedly run into a group of humans who are hopeless at protecting themselves and ends up saving them. A welcome twist is that most of the opposition here comes in the form of implacably hostile enemy combat bots, which ramps up the threat level to Murderbot considerably. This is still a very simple and straightforward young adult book. It amounts to little more than introducing all of the new characters and then throwing Murderbot right into the action. It’s a rollicking good read, being fast-paced and punctuated by Murderbot’s particular sense of humor, but it’s nothing very sophisticated.
The first novel by China Miéville that I read was Embassytown which I enjoyed but found that it wasn’t all that it was hyped up to be. I did love the book’s premise though and, if anything, that of this book is even more far out. The City and the City is first and foremost a police procedural but I’d say it counts as science-fiction as well as the entire book is really about its unique setting itself. In the end, I feel that Miéville still doesn’t fully justify how the city could possibly work as he describes it but damn if he hasn’t gone most of the way and thought up all kinds of possibilities that I’d never even imagined in fleshing out the physical reality of his city.
Last year, I mentioned how the popular Murderbot Diaries series seems to make for a fairly entertaining read but it would be too expensive to buy each novella one by one. Then I realized that the series is available for reading on Kindle Unlimited which is cheap to get so now I can finally get the whole story. This is the second of a total of four parts that I believe should round out what amounts to the first book if it were published in a more traditional format.
I found the last non-fiction book I read to be so engaging and rewarding that I think I might make more of a habit of it, even though I already read so much online and from my ongoing subscription to The Economist. This particular book caught my attention from an online discussion of books that most revolutionized their respective fields. That’s a rather bold claim that I’m not sure this book is able to satisfy. But its topic of trying to address the question of why so many large-scale interventions to reengineer human society fail is one that intensely interests me. This is a rather heavy and substantial book so I took my time getting through it. In the end, I found that it marshals such numerous examples and case studies that its arguments are undeniable. Still it also seems to me that so many those interventions failed because the planners were dumb, not that there is some deep, systematic reason for the failures.
I’d written about this web serial a couple of times previously but it seemed only right to give this a proper post of its own now that it’s officially over. Author ErraticErrata (David Verburg) originally intended to complete the series by the sixth book but as with so many other fantasy series underestimated how much more work needed to be done and so had to add on a seventh book. Still it is well and truly done, even if the last volume feels a bit rushed and is rife with typos and unfinished sentences, and the author has embarked on a new writing project. I intend this post to cover the series as a whole, focusing mostly on the last two books, and there will be spoilers for the first few books at least.
