Category Archives: Science Fiction

Use of Weapons

This is the third book of the Culture series and once again Iain M. Banks surprises me with how different it is from the previous two books. The first book showed the Culture from the perspective of its enemies. The second provided a look at a typical citizen of the Culture who is asked to help treat with another civilization. This one is again a story from the perspective of someone who is not born of the Culture and works for them as a sort of mercenary as part of their Special Circumstances organization. While there is a wider plot, the novel is largely a deep dive into the psyche of its protagonist. Personally while I commend the ambition and sophistication of this approach, I can’t say that I liked this novel terribly much as I don’t find examining the tortured minds of ex-soldiers that appealing and I question why the Culture needs to employ such people for their needs.

Continue reading Use of Weapons

The Invincible

I try to read a diverse selection of science-fiction but one of the biggest holes in my reading are the works of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. He is indisputably one of the greats of the genre and Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of his Solaris is one of the greatest films of all time. I chose not to begin with that as it seems a little obvious and I have already watched two adaptations of the novel. The Invincible isn’t as well known but I have read about how it’s eerily prescient about some science-fiction tropes that would become commonplace only much later.

Continue reading The Invincible

Metatropolis

This anthology has an interesting backstory in that it started out as an audiobook project that was only published as a written book as something of an afterthought. This is also a shared world project as the five different writers including editor John Scalzi worked together to create a world about rebuilding civilization after an ecological and economic collapse and then each wrote a story set in it. The appeal of this is immediately obvious to someone like me, especially as I’m always on the lookout for stories that purport to show what a post-capitalist utopia might look like on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately I found this collection to be mostly a disappointment, filled with the usual shallow critiques of capitalism and a description of the economic activities of the post-revolutionary world that feels oddly old-fashioned now only some ten years after it was published.

Continue reading Metatropolis

The Greatship

One can expect to see a Robert Reed short story in any decent science-fiction anthology but I’ve never been a particular fan of his work and I’ve never read any of his longer form writing. Then I read his story Good Mountain in The Very Best of the Best, liked it, realized that it’s part of a wider shared universe and so here I am. This is a compilation of stories about a gigantic ship that roams the galaxy, arranged in rough chronological order. This means however that the stories in here take place very early in the history of the ship while Good Mountain must take place much, much later, so much so that they don’t even feel that they belong in the same world at all. That, sadly, is just one reason why I don’t much care for this book at all.

Continue reading The Greatship

The Player of Games

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.

Continue reading The Player of Games

The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction

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.

Continue reading The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction

Project Hail Mary

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.

Continue reading Project Hail Mary