association-list

I only fin­ished one mag­a­zine last night, mostly because I spent too much time re-​​reading Iain M. Banks’ first SF novel, Con­sider Phle­bas. It sucked me in, and I ran low on time. Unfor­tu­nately, I bounced off almost every­thing in this issue, with the lone excep­tion of the Robert Reed story, “Eight Episodes”. I read at least half of every story, and the whole of a couple of them, but noth­ing grabbed me. To be fair, even the Robert Reed story wasn’t one of his better ones, just another med­i­ta­tion on light-​​speed and the lone­li­ness of organic species. Ele­gantly writ­ten and inven­tive as usual, but not some­thing that we haven’t seen from him before. As an aside, I really want to wit­ness a drunken argu­ment between Reed and Ken MacLeod about the place of human­ity on a deep time-​​scale. I feel that it would be deeply amus­ing, as long as they weren’t too respect­ful of each other. The most inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion would come from what I per­ceive as MacLeod’s hope­ful­ness and Reed’s pes­simism (yes, I know that Reed has immor­tal, vital human­ity in the deep future sto­ries too, but they are, to me, less deeply felt than MacLeod’s, as if Reed were trying to sell us a future that he des­per­ately wants to believe in, but cannot).

Anyway. Not an aus­pi­cious begin­ning. Hope­fully I’ll resist the siren call of Con­sider Phle­bas/​Look to Wind­ward tonight and make it through two of them.