After finishing Reach for Infinity, I said I’d check out the other anthologies in the series and here I am with the first of them. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it includes fifteen stories by a host of familiar names. I’m pleased to see that it opens with a story by Peter Watts, one of my current favorite writers. None of the other authors I especially like though I’ve read their stuff here and there.
Continue reading Engineering Infinity
This fantasy novel was a recommendation that I saw on Broken Forum and is a very new release. It’s also the debut novel of its author Breanna Teintze. As usual it’s billed as the first book of a series but I happily found it to be very self-contained. The main plot is completely resolved in this book with no real loose ends so subsequent books will likely be about the further adventures of its main character. That’s a good thing as while this book is not bad, it’s nowhere good enough to interest me in reading any sequels.
Continue reading Lord of Secrets
This is somewhere in length between a novella and a novel. Despite being sold as a standalone, it forms part of the so-called Sunflower cycle which I failed to realize for some time and might be difficult to understand on its own. Conveniently one of my favorite stories from the Reach for Infinity anthology that I read only a few months ago is part of this series. The other two are readily available online. Since this book leaves many questions unanswered even at the end, reading those other stories helps quite a bit.
Continue reading The Freeze-Frame Revolution
It occurs to me with this book that I haven’t properly finished reading a traditional trilogy of novels in a long while. I still think it’s ridiculous that every book in the trilogy won the Hugo and I don’t agree that it stands on the same level as the true greats of fantasy and science-fiction. But I would happily agree that this is a rollicking good read and this last book does bring the series to a more or less satisfying conclusion.
Continue reading The Stone Sky
We’re back to recommendations from Jo Walton here and it’ll be one of the rare books I read that aren’t science-fiction or fantasy. It’s also really old, being first published in 1935 and apparently is still in print. It’s actually the tenth book in a series of detective novels that mostly feature Lord Peter Wimsey as the main character. But as the foreword here notes most of these books are fairly standard staples of the genre and it isn’t until this book that the author Dorothy Sayers reached for something more.
Continue reading Gaudy Night
It’s been more than two years since I read Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great and I’m still mining it for ideas on what to read next. So when a thread on Broken Forum talked about big idea books in science-fiction and multiple commentators cited this as a great example, it felt apt to pick this up. As I only recently noted, big ideas are rather rare even in science-fiction and what could be a bigger and more ambitious than trying to create Plato’s famous Republic.
Continue reading The Just City
This is the next book in George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen Cycle chronicling the adventures of his flawed protagonist Marîd Audran. Though the first book didn’t really feel like science-fiction, I loved the cyberpunk noir setting enough to want to read its sequels and so here I am.
Continue reading A Fire in the Sun