By rights, I should be a huge fan of Iain M Banks’ Culture books as everything I have read about the setting makes it sound very appealing to me. Unfortunately I read the first book of the series Consider Phlebas a few years back, found it to be a not very impressive space opera and stopped right there. Recently I came across discussion of the Culture setting again and decided to give it another shot. This is of course the second book in the series and to my surprise, I absolutely loved it. This should be the first proper book to the series and introduction to the civilization of the Culture. It’s just downright wrong for the first book to be written from the perspective of characters who are the Culture’s enemies.
After reading the last one of the late Gardner Dozois’ science-fiction short story anthologies, it’s time to move on to this best of the best series as I’d missed many of the annual ones and I’m not likely to go back for them. The subtitle is a misnomer however as this is apparently the third volume of the series and hence it covers only the years 2003 to 2017 and not actually the full 35 years of his career. It’s been so long that I can’t remember if I actually already own the first volume published in 2005 but I do recognize most of the short stories. I definitely haven’t read the second volume published in 2007 so I suppose that’s one book to look forward to.
I’ve been getting better lately about reading newer books and what could be more current than the newest book by Andy Weir that has just been released and is already at the top of all of the science-fiction sales charts. I liked The Martian enough that I probably would have picked it up eventually but after Amazon offered me a special discount after I had downloaded a sample but stopped short of buying the full book for a week or so. I wonder if this promotion was offered to everyone or the algorithm just picked me, anyway so here I am.
Geoff Ryman isn’t an author who I’d read previously but this novel is so good that I feel like I’ve been missing out this whole time. The thing is his work doesn’t seem to get nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards and I’ve long contended that there is a frustrating sense of sameyness in the works that do get nominated. This novel feels refreshing different and wears it more fantastical elements lightly enough that it could pass for a mainstream novel. But it is a solid science-fiction novel, not just in its use of novel technologies as a plot element but in its attitude towards change and progress.
Ever since I made a more concerted effort to keep up with the winners of recent awards, I’d had mixed success. It’s probably because I prefer hard science-fiction above all and this preference doesn’t track very closely with the type of work that usually wins in awards ceremonies. This book won a lot of awards and was Ann Leckie’s debut novel to boot. It’s more space opera than science-fiction and I have some issues with how casually it treats the existence of AI. But it is a very strong novel that does make me want to read more about the universe it is set in.
I bought this a little earlier than I wanted after reading Under Heaven due to Amazon’s tricksy 1-Click system but never mind, I would have bought it eventually anyway. This book is set in the same fictionalized version of China as the first one but several hundred years later. The characters from the first book have passed into legend and though the empire of Kitai persists, it is now much weaker as strong generals are looked on with suspicion and so Kitai is forced to treat with the northern barbarian tribes as equals.
Martha Wells is another one of the a relatively recent crop of writers whose work gets nominated for awards over and over again. This year, her latest Murderbot Diary book Network Effect was nominated so I thought I’d check the series out beginning with the first book. Unfortunately it looks like this was only a novella and while this first one is priced cheaply on Amazon, the other three ones which complete arguably the first volume are each sold as full-price books. That explains why the reviews are full of complaints about this exploitative marketing practice.
