What SF/F Book Are you Reading? .. Redux

[stonester1]

timothy wrote:

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love the honor harrington books fantastic universe I just wish they were aviable in english on the nook color.

also what is your avatar by the way?

Interesting you should notice that. I just finished a deployment to Thailand, with US troops training with the Thai Royal Armed Forces in an annual exercise called Cobra Gold. Next to us, Thai boy and girl scouts were having their Jamboree. That was a mockup of a tiger's face, surrounded by flourescent lights.

[wahwahkits]

I'm about a third of the way through Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. On the downside i'm finding it hard to get into but on the upside I love Plagueis, he's a serious badass who has loads of charisma.

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Following on from Carrie, I listened to the audiobooks of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (read by Ron McLarty) and The Shining (read by Campbell Scott).

[stj]

Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky; Nancy Kress, Crossfire; Seed by someone whose name I've already forgotten (but then, I'm only one page in,) and, finally, finally, after all these years Robert J. Sawyer, Hybrids, finishing the trilogy. I just finished all the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books on Kindle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars. Started Thuvia, Maid of Mars but the further I got away from movie images the more tiresome it got and I quit. And I'll be going back to Linda Nagata, Vast, but I'll probably finish re-reading Sherlock Holmes first. After that, I'm thinking I'll get Adam Roberts nonfiction book on SF. Things are going pretty badly and distractionn is very important.

PS Forgot Joan Slonczewski, Children Star.

[Klaus]

Getting into the last third of Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, and really digging the multitextured context he builds for the world.

And for those few of us here who care lol, Stephen Donaldson finished the first draft of The Last Dark in December... we're probably still two years away from finally seeing Thomas Covenant's and Linden Avery's long strange trip wind to an end. And coming from someone who read [and still has] the first printing of Lord Foul's Bane, which came out from the SF Book Club before the regular edition, it has indeed been long and strange.

[Klaus]

Well I finished Stand on Zanzibar at last... wow, what an incredibly detailed and disturbing vision of the present as it might have been predicted in 1968. The plot and main characters are not as absorbing as the world, but I still found them interesting as it went along. Things are not as bad as they were in Brunner's vision, but they well could have been in many ways... he got the commercialization and media insanity of the modern world JUST right. His view of future eugenics legislation is off [luckily], but mainly because we're still able to [kind of] feed seven billion people... so far. If you appreciate coherent world-building, this is a unique experience.

Now on to a horse of a different color, Tim Power's new book Hide Me Among the Graves, a sequel to his 1989 book about succubi feeding off of and inspiring Romantic poets called The Stress of Her Regard. I love me some Powers, this should be fun.

[Kegg]

So finished Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny earlier in the week. (The assault on Brin goes surprisingly slow, I'm somehwere in the middle of Uplift War - good times, mind.) Lord of Light is precisely the kind of book it'd be easy to classiy as fantasy - with its heaving drawing on Hindu mythology and battles of the gods, demigods and demons of the underworld - if it didn't throw a lot of science and pseudoscience around to explain most of its miracles and the peculiar underpinnings of its world.

It's an interesting book, refreshingly technology-positive by and by (and with many striking ideas, theologically and conceptually in the world-building) though Zelazny's writing tends to be very florid - the casual punctuations that bring his bombast down to earth again are much appreciated.

Klaus wrote:

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Well I finished Stand on Zanzibar at last... wow, what an incredibly detailed and disturbing vision of the present as it might have been predicted in 1968.

Quite. Stand on Zanzibar was one of the best books I read last year (and I read a lot of good books that year.)

I actually thought the book had a gift for characterization. Norman House, Chad Mulligan, there were so many memorable and colorful characters in that, some who only get to be sketched out in a handful of chapters (an old British man trying to connect with a young girl, distinctly incestuous French colonial twins...)

Also:
Christ, what an imagination I've got.

[Lowdarzz]

I just finished Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.

As far as I know this book, and it's two sequels, are Lewis' only stab at science fiction. Though the text contains a significant amount of Christian imagery, there are also clear homages to the works of H.G. Wells as well as Jules Verne.

[stj]

^^^Any homage to H.G. Wells by C.S. Lewis is strictly canceled out by Lewis' portrayal of Wells in the last volume of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Lewis played Wells as a Cockney journalist (Jules something or other) who gullibly relayed everything fed to him by the villains. Also, I'm pretty sure that Lewis was taking aim at speculations by J.B.S. Haldane in Daedalus and Possible Worlds, which I think provided Aldous Huxley with ideas for Brave New World, such as ectogenesis.

I would be more definite but even the university library wouldn't carry Daedalus or Possible Worlds.

[Klaus]

Kegg wrote:

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Also:
Christ, what an imagination I've got.

Probably the best line in the book...


...and I read Creatures of Light and Darkness years back [Zelazny's Egyptian mythos book], but not Lord of Light.

[Nerys Myk]

Rereading Brightness Reef by Brin.

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

Since I last checked in I've read A Case of Conscience by James Blish and The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, and listened to the audiobooks of The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read by Matthew Rys), The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (read by Tony Jay) and Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (read by Simon Vance).

[RAMA]

Ben Bova Titan

[RAMA]

Nerys Myk wrote:

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Rereading Brightness Reef by Brin.

Just love his work. I re-read the whole series last year.

[Klaus]

^^I'm psyched for his new book Existence, it's out soon!