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.
Continue reading Instantiation
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.
Continue reading The Warrior’s Apprentice
Chalk this up as another one of those novels that I would never have read on my own and was glad I did. This is effectively a coming of age novel by Thai writer S.P. Somtow. Though Somtow’s first career was as a celebrated composer and musician, he has also made a name for himself as a writer who dabbles in horror, fantasy and science-fiction. This title itself however should count as a non-genre book being based on the author’s own memories of growing up in Bangkok in the 1960s. It does have more than a fair bit of magical realism, which now that I think of, seems to be pretty common in novels of this type.
Continue reading Jasmine Nights
As promised, here is the second book of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, though it has been more than half a year since I read The Just City. I loved both the premise and the characters in that book but after a while I do have to admit that it’s a bit of an intellectual lightweight when set against its ambition and promise. Similarly this book is a fun and highly satisfying read but ultimately ducks out of any real philosophical clash.
Continue reading The Philosopher Kings
Finally we come to the third and last book of George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen series featuring protagonist Marîd Audran. Everyone who has reviewed this talks about how the title is lifted from Shakespeare but I was delighted to discover that its opening quote is a Malay proverb even if I’ve never heard of it before. I think it’s a good sign of how widely this American writer roamed in search of inspiration.
Continue reading The Exile Kiss
This was a bit of an impulse purchase, one of the rare occasions when email spam advertisements worked on me. While all fans of H.P. Lovecraft could not fail to know of the sinister King in Yellow, I realized that I had never read the original source itself by Robert W. Chambers. The text itself is free to read on Project Gutenberg but this edition brings together some very eerie illustrations by Samuel Araya with annotations and appendices to help the reader better understand the text itself so I thought I’d give in and go with that.
Continue reading The King in Yellow Annotated Edition
So I finally finished the third book of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and it really took some effort as it is far longer than the previous two books. This is a true epic in every sense of the word, with a prelude that takes place before the previous two novels, covers events in parallel with them, and then picks up after them until what amounts to the heat death of the universe. It’s by far my favorite of the three books and lays out some genuinely terrific ideas.
Continue reading Death’s End