SF/F Books: Chapter Two - What Are You Reading?

[Mistral]

I am re-reading Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson. It's a novel set in his Mauri Universe. He tightens up and fills out much of the history of the shorts he wrote that were collected as Mauri and Kith. A good read about an ecologically challenged future.

 

[Shurik]

A collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories and novels, I started A Case Of Charles Dexter Ward recently.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Just finished City by Clifford D. Simak yesterday.

What's next? Perhaps Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi.

 

[MrAtoZ]

"Without Warning" by John Birmingham

 

[Mistral]

"Without Warning" by John Birmingham

Awesome. Waiting on the sequel, myself.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I finished reading last weekend "The Gathering Storm" Book Twelve in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson and I must say that I was back to being impressed with the series. After a few books being bogged down in barely any character or plot progression we finally get several EPIC moments in the book and a continued pushing towards Tarmon Gai'Don. I have been a fan of Sanderson's since i read his first book a couple of years ago so was quite excited that he was selected to finish Jordan's work. It would also seem that his editing and re-writing of the original manuscript for "Memory of Light" will serve the series finale well. Am looking forward to "Towers of Midnight" later this year.

 

[Mistral]

Just started Destroyermen: Into the Fire. A WWI destroyer, pressed into service in early WWII, travels to a fantastical land where the technology of their ship can make a difference in a war between two non-human races. Interesting so far...

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Paul J. McAuley: Four Hundred Billion Stars

 

[Flibble]

Summer Knight by Jim Butcher. Think I have a few more Dresden File books to read to get up to date!

 

[Mistral]

Paul J. McAuley: Four Hundred Billion Stars

Read his Cowboy Angels and liked it. How's this one?

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Paul J. McAuley: Four Hundred Billion Stars

Read his Cowboy Angels and liked it. How's this one?

Average so far. Not bad, but also nothing special. But I just started reading it.

 

[Mistral]

Paul J. McAuley: Four Hundred Billion Stars

Read his Cowboy Angels and liked it. How's this one?

Average so far. Not bad, but also nothing special. But I just started reading it.

That's how Angels started but it went off on a tangent like you wouldn't believe not long after...

 

[MyCylon]

In the edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich that I read the foreword related the tale of how PKD wrote the book. He found it impossible to write at home because his family were too much of a distraction, so every working day he walked down the road to a little bungalow where he'd set up an office. At the time he was heavily into drugs and every day on the walk down that road he had hallucinatory visions of a wrathful God with a metallic face glaring down at him from the sky. He wrote the novel in a state of terror, and once it was in galley form he never read it again because of how much fear it produced in him.

That was in my edition as well. On some level it’s really difficult to imagine the kind of life PKD must have lived. Fear and anxiety or ‘angst’ definitely seem to have been part of it as much as they were part of his books.
It’s weird. On some level, I perceive his writing as far more liberated than many other science fiction authors. He simply seemed to write what came to his mind, irrespective of whether or not people would think he was crazy or wacky.
At the same time, it would seem that the experience, in some instances, anyway, must have been anything BUT liberating. The “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich” story is a very good example.
I think PKD has probably become one of my favorite writers of all time. And it’s not just that I adore his writing. I think I’m also fascinated by the person and, at times, really feel for the man who was PKD on some level.

I think that this is supported by the sidebar about the cigarette lighter [there is no difference between the two lighters, ultimately; the difference is all in our minds, which implies that it may be just a delusion] and by the rest of Dick's work, which always seems to play with the issue of whether we can trust that what we see is true given how flawed our means of cognition is. [As in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and other works.]

That’s definitely something that permeates much of his work. Some of the ideas he develops in the process are truly fascinating, I think. I remember, for example, being extremely intrigued by the “… the Empire never ended …” quote and what it meant in “Valis”. Now THAT was an idea to contemplate.

I loved that particular angle, the alternate history novel within the alternate history. Plus it’s fascinating that it doesn’t simply describe our ‘real’ history but yet another alternate history. It almost makes you wonder if somewhere within “The Man in the High Castle” our history shines through somewhere.

Which in itself is partly a take on the irreality of the novel. How history would really progress had the Nazis won, and how a Philip K. Dick novel would depict that victory, are two different things.

True indeed.

On another note, I just finished “Martian Time-Slip”. I felt it had a slow start but became really intriguing. Again, it seems to pick up the question of how we perceive or reality vs. how we truly exist.
And I’d have to say this was one of his creepiest novels so far for me. The whole ‘gubble, gubble’ bit (as silly as ‘gubble, gubble’ might sound on its own) along with ‘AM-WEB’ was really scary, I thought.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

OK, so my wife came home from the used book place and handed me Heinlein's Glory Road and George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones.

I read about 50-60 pages of Glory Road last night, and I'm just wondering: When does the sci-fi part start?

Should I put this down and pick up the other one or what?

 

[stj]

Remembering the hero's explanation that he didn't have sex with Little Brown Sister because she might kill him is creepy in the extreme.

The scifi kicks in when "Oscar" gets hired by a beautiful woman.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Reading Mark Millar's Kick-Ass Book One right now and loving it. Then I'm going to move on to either the Iron Man Ultimate Guide from DK Books (WOOT) or Kick Ass From Comic to Film. Depends on which book I get first.

 

[Steve Roby]

ISTR that Glory Road was one of the Heinleins I really didn't much care for (a group that also includes Farnham's Freehold and I Will Fear No Evil). He wrote some classics, and anyone with a passing interest in SF needs to read some of his work, but Glory Road is not essential.

 

[Nerdius Maximus]

Reading "Foundation" right now. Got the first three books at a used book store. Never read them before, thought it was probably about time that I did.

 

[stonester1]

Just finished "So Long and Thanks For All The Fish". WONDERFUL book. Mostly about Arthur returning to the reconstructed Earth and how he has grown and changed. He meets a girl, who is well established in Hitchhikers lore (not Trillian, that's done).

The book reads like an end to the series, even though there are three more books. Most of the major characters get codas, and Marvin...has a moment where he is happy, or at least satisfied.

Oh, and you get God's final message to the universe, which I found both very poignant and Hitchhikers/Adams at the same time.

 

[S. Gomez]

The book reads like an end to the series, even though there are three more books.

Two more, only one of which is written by Adams.