association-list

Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson

Ignor­ing the mis­step that was Nat­ural His­tory (it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as this one or Silver Screen), every­thing that Robson does seems to get both weirded and better. I am avidly await­ing her next novel. Really, go out and read this one, and pick up Silver Screen while you’re there.

Macro­life, by George Zebrowski

Pyr con­fuses me. On one hand, they pub­lish things like Silver Screen and River of Gods, the latter of which is easily one of the best SF novels to have come out in the last couple of years (I’ll talk about this one more in the con­text of the Camp­bell jury prize nom­i­nees). On the other hand, the spent part of their budget bring­ing back Macro­life, which, while it isn’t by any means a hor­ri­ble book, and is in fact filled with many wild and won­der­ful ideas, I’d rather have just read a pam­phlet of the ideas and skipped the bull­shit cozy cat­a­stro­phe story about an Amer­i­can immi­grant dynasty (we’re still pretty white-​​bread), who acci­den­tally destroy the world and then make good anyway. The second sec­tion is equally painful story wise, but you’re already past the new ideas until the third part, so what you get is some hand wring­ing about the First World’s aban­don­ment of the Third World and then a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion that it would hinder growth too much to stop and help every­one (anyone?) else out, and to stop grow­ing is to die, etc. Admit­tedly, this came out when I was a year old, so per­haps I’m miss­ing some his­tor­i­cal con­text, or things have changed in the interim, but top this off with an aston­ish­ingly grat­ing intro, and you’re left with a book that has some great ideas that are accom­pa­nied with a more inter­est­ing set­ting and much better writ­ing in Iain M. Banks’ Cul­ture novels.

The Overnight, by Ramsay Campbell

This is the first horror novel that I’ve read in a while (mean­ing around ten years). Incred­i­bly creepy and atmos­pheric, but tends to rely on the same tricks over and over again. Ulti­mately, it ends up being incred­i­bly grim. Worth it for the creep out at the time, though.

Vision­ary in Res­i­dence, by Bruce Sterling

For my money, the best of cyber­punk to come out of the orig­i­nal move­ment (sto­ries aside) in the ‘80s were Schiz­ma­trix, Vacuum Flow­ers and Count Zero (flame away). Ever since then, Bruce Ster­ling has been jerk­ing me around. Time to re-​​re-​​re-​​read A Good Old-​​Fashioned Future or Holy Fire. Chair­man Omniver­i­tas has not deliv­ered today.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech, by Neal Asher

I am a shame­less Asher fanboy. Read The Skin­ner read it all! NOWNOWNOW!!one1

The Bone­hunters, by Stephen Erikson

I’m not usu­ally a fan of the huge, never-​​ending fan­tasy sagas. So it is with vast embar­rass­ment that I admit that I bought this at great expense as soon as Bor­der­lands imported me a copy from the UK and I enjoyed it very much, thank you.

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

I’m wait­ing for The Lost Colony before I write about this whole sequence. Fun read­ing. I think that, while the antecedents to this and Old Man’s War are fairly plain, people do Scalzi a dis­ser­vice my com­par­ing him with Hein­lein. Mouth­piece char­ac­ters and wish ful­fil­ment sex are pretty much nowhere to be seen. I have the feel­ing that Scalzi, is one of those writ­ers who is pretty good but makes a mas­sive, mid-​​career jump upwards in qual­ity (good->awesome), must like Vernor Vinge with A Fire Upon the Deep (you should read that too, post upcom­ing, even­tu­ally). I don’t know why I get this feel­ing, but there, I’ve said it.

Ring of Swords, by Eleanor Arnason

I enjoyed this, but I cannot claim to be totally con­vinced by her argu­ment and or analy­sis of sex rela­tions. She seems to avoid all of the inter­est­ing stuff that’s referred to in the novel. Although it all makes sense on the level of story, it often fails to excite.

The Etched City, by K. J. Bishop

I’m assum­ing that Bishop is part of the whole inter­sti­tial fic­tion crowd and this may or may not be true. Regard­less, her stuff reads like their stuff, but while most of it leaves me cold, I quite liked this one. It put me in mind of One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. It’s stuffed full of gor­geous descrip­tion and telling details and calami­tous and incom­pre­hen­si­ble actions. What you were look­ing for if you were thrilled, then dis­ap­pointed by Veniss Under­ground

Dark­land, by Liz Williams

I am also a Liz Williams fanboy. She can do no wrong. You should buy ten copies of every­thing she’s ever writ­ten and give all but one copy of each to people that you know.

God­play­ers, by Damien Broderick

Meh. Kind of a less morally ambigu­ous update of Play­ers at the Game of People. Feels… I dunno, smug. Brod­er­ick isn’t nearly as clever or as orig­i­nal as he seems to think he is. I’d give it a miss.

Dusk, by Tim Lebbon

My first encounter with Tim Lebbon. Quite good, but I’m think­ing that I’ll have to wait for the con­tin­u­a­tion before I can make any calls about where this is really going. John Clute says it better and more ellip­ti­cally than I can in this brief space. I’m anx­iously wait­ing for the sequel, but for right now, I’m going to dig through his appar­ently fan­tas­tic back cat­a­logue (because I don’t already have enough books on the To Read shelf).