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

Finished Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch... wow, another searing and fascinating book. It's about an experiment to make prisoners smarter by infecting them w/a disease that makes them genius before it kills them, done as entries in journal by a fellow inmate charged to report on them. It's set in a slightly-alternate 1970s where Robert McNamara is president (!) and the US is engaging in biological and tactical-nuclear warfare against Soviet client states around the world. A smart and disturbing book, and the most words I've ever had to look up in a book not written by Stephen Donaldson. :lol:

Next: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, finally getting around to it. Gotta pick up the pace, Camp Concentration deserved a faster read. :D
 
nvek86 said:
"Engineering Infinity" - ed. by Jonathan Strahan

This book is an anthology and not quite what I expected when I read the description at the back (I don't think any of the things mentioned there actually happened in the book). There were good and bad stories with my favourites being "Mercies" by Gregory Benford (about a man travelling to parallel dimensions and killing murderers before they can commit their crimes) and "The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees" by John Barnes (about a discovery at the bottom of the ocean - well, it's a bit more exciting than that).
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The book had mixed reviews at a site I visit-they said the same thing. Those 2 stories were singled out.

I'm re-reading Ian Slater's WWIII series out of boredom but I want to go get The Mirage and the new Stephen King.
The Mirage is a "mirror world" Where the United States of Arabia is in charge and Christians are terrorists-it got a wonderful review.
 
Mistral said:
The book had mixed reviews at a site I visit-they said the same thing. Those 2 stories were singled out.
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What site are you using for reviews? I visit "Worlds Without End" quite often, but they only cover books that won/were nominated for awards.
 
Finished Ender's Game, in Card's "Author's Definitive Edition" from 1991.... well I can see why it's so popular, it was quite the interesting read. A fascinating take on the problem of making someone into an ultimate soldier and whether its possible to retain one's humanity in the process. In the end, I think I liked the last chapter even more than the rest, when he finally got to understand the enemy. I'm not going to read any of the sequels at the moment, but I've been told to be careful of some of them lol.

Sidenote: one of my jobs is a retail one, and I've never gotten such a reaction to having a book visible next to my register as this one. It's a college town, and I got several people every day remarking that it was one of their favorite books. One volunteered that he'd only read half of it, as that was what it had taken to get him laid. :lol: [That would have been the Darkover books in my undergrad days. :D]

Back to the past again for my next one -- on to John Brunner's The Whole Man from 1964, a story of telepaths.
 
Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Why don't Fforde, Christopher Moore and Tom Holt get the attention and praise they deserve?
 
This week, I have been mostly reading - Star Trek: The Disinherited by Robert Greenberger, Michael Jan Friedman and Peter David
 
^Thanks for the link, seems like good and extensive site at first glance.

Klaus said:
Finished Ender's Game, in Card's "Author's Definitive Edition" from 1991.... well I can see why it's so popular, it was quite the interesting read. A fascinating take on the problem of making someone into an ultimate soldier and whether its possible to retain one's humanity in the process. In the end, I think I liked the last chapter even more than the rest, when he finally got to understand the enemy. I'm not going to read any of the sequels at the moment, but I've been told to be careful of some of them lol.
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At least Speaker for the Dead (the first sequel) is also very good.
 
Just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Going onto Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw to cheer myself up.
 
I'm reading Darkness Descending by Harry Turtledove.

It's the second of a six book series that retells the events of World War II in a fantasy setting. It's told from a third person omniscient perspective which seems to be the format that Turtledove prefers.
 
After a spell of reading just non-fiction and non-SFF fiction, I've got back to reading SFF with A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. van Vogt.
 
Lowdarzz said:
I'm reading Darkness Descending by Harry Turtledove.

It's the second of a six book series that retells the events of World War II in a fantasy setting. It's told from a third person omniscient perspective which seems to be the format that Turtledove prefers.
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Read those. Beginning of the Terminal Turtledove Boredom Syndrome for me. I'm still in the process of expiring from it... ;)
 
Klaus said:
I like HT, but I only read his alternate history stuff... :D
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I didn't read the Indian Wars or Atlantis series but I read all of the rest-the WWII and the Great War sagas. The first Nazi book, but not the last two. He does get repetitive and I discovered John Birmingham, who's far more exciting.
 
Turtledove has interesting ideas occasionally but is a horribly slip shod, painful writer. His best books are standalones like Ruled Britannia, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump or Agent of Byzantium. His work as H.N. Turteltaub is better written but marred by an apparent tendency to really get off on moral primitivism. His series about ancient Greek merchants who embody the libertarian free market ideal are notably stupid even in the SF and fantasy fields, particularly for someone who went to a real university/college.

Tried to read China Mieville's Embassytown. The first time I ran across psychic powers/personality traits as the key to interstellar travel, in Cordwainer Smith, it was really exciting. Then when I ran across it in a Robert Sheckley short story, it was amusing. The third time, in Samuel R. Delany, it was getting rather old hat, and kind of hard to accept but there were other things going on, so I perservered. Then, when I came to it yet again, it was downright stale. It was vaguely insulting to be treated to such fatuous nonsense yet again. But this time the other thing going on was a first person narrator who regaled the readers with fine writing of the trendiest sort who announces to us that she isn't a literary person! You don't have to believe the narrator is reliable but you do have to be able to imagine that the narration is coming from an actual character. As it was, it seemed it was just China Mieville, who for some inexplicable reason occasionally pretended to be someone else who I could not believe would ever, ever, talk or write like that.
 
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