This Russian novel is probably best known as the inspiration of the video game of the same name though I have not played it as I rarely play shooters these days. It was however first made available online in the Russian language, making it an early example of the web fiction that I read so much of these days, and the author Dmitry Glukhovsky apparently started writing it at the age of 18. I decided to check it out after reading some good reviews of it and while it certainly feels like a Russian novel, I found that I don’t like it much at all.
You may not know who Christopher Priest is and I myself have not read anything by him prior to this, but I’d bet that just about everyone knows about at least one of his novels due to it being adapted into the film The Prestige by Christopher Nolan. This book is an anthology of some of his short stories spanning the many decades of his career. What is especially interesting about this collection is that each story is accompanied by a foreword telling something about that story came to be and an afterword recounting the aftermath of its publications. I’m sure that this would be invaluable to other aspiring writers.
I’ve been trying to be more up to date on current science-fiction books and this is one of the most talked about ones recently. It is the debut novel of its author, Rivers Solomon, who self-identifies using the pronoun they and them, and indeed many of the characters in it have atypical genders. I was also attracted to its premise of reimagining the scenario of black slaves in the America South on board a generation ship. In the end however I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would as it leans so heavily on its inspirational sources that it’s barely much of a story on its own.
New author for me time, with Daniel Abraham being today best known as one half of the duo who write under the pen name James S. A. Corey and are responsible for The Expanse series. I’ve never read that either but I love the televisions series. This novel was his debut and was recommended by many, being the first book of a quartet. Unfortunately while the world he creates here is indeed intriguing, I ended up not really liking this novel and I doubt I’ll read the rest of the series.
So I’m a huge fan and advocate of the Worm web serial and this is the much anticipated sequel. To be honest, I first started reading some months after Wildbow started writing it but bounced off after only a few chapters. I’ll go into why more later but it was so infuriating how everyone uses therapy-speak constantly and is so careful, like walking on eggshells, around each other. When I learned that he had finished it earlier this year, I decided to give it another shot and eventually powered through though it was at times quite a chore.
I had no idea this collection of short stories by Greg Egan existed until it popped up as a Kindle recommendation for me. Needless to say I immediately snapped it up though I had already read two of the eleven stories it includes elsewhere. I was also quite pleased that three of the stories, including Bit Players that I’ve read before and liked a lot, are all part of a larger story and could actually be taken together as a short novel.
I’ve had this on my reading list ever since I saw it being featured in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great but I’ve actually first known about it since I read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction The Methods of Rationality as his version of Harry Potter consciously patterns himself after the main character in this book Miles Vorkosigan.
