2012 Upcoming Releases-Science Fiction

**Danogzilla** · July 24th, 2012, 10:39 AM

I'll be finishing up Scalzi's Ghost Brigades today. Fun book. I'd read Old Man's War last year and meant to read more Scalzi, but forgot until a couple days ago. Ordered a couple more of his books.

**Kazz Wylde** · July 24th, 2012, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by suciul

Regarding the Mike Cobley series, the main issue is that if you want to write a PF Hamilton like saga (with lots of pov's and storylines) you need the pages too and Seeds of Earth simply does not have space for its content, so it feels cluttered, crowded...

The lack of balance - there is a quite unnecessary introductory part that takes place on an isolated at the time planet - does not help and the fantasy elements felt a bit canned, but as mentioned there was a lot of promise. However book 2 was even more cluttered instead of getting "cleaner", a lot of it started to feel "plot for plot sake" - eg I remember character A and B needing to meet, and A travels to B, but of course then something happens and B starts towards A so they actually miss each other quite artificially and all of A's travel seems to feel again extraneous to the story, just showcasing the universe - which is fine if you have 800 pages or more to tell the story but not if you have 400....

Ultimately though I think that the structure of the series just does not work at its length - there is a reason any sff series with tons of named characters and plotlines has tons of pages after all

Gary Gibson for example had a little of this cluttered feel in his debut Angel station - but I really like both his prose and characters and that counts for a lot - so in his Shoal series he stayed away from that and did a relatively simple 1-2 pov/storyline (gets to 3 later but not more) per book and the series felt a little like "Hamilton lite" true, but that can work both ways

KJA had the many characters/plotlines at 400 page length in his Seven Suns saga which was excellent for 4 volumes though went too long at 7 for its depth, but KJA writes functional NYT-bestseller list prose and that works in his tons of "little chunks" chapter style as the focus is purely on action

Thanks for this, Liviu. Just strengthens that Stealing Light is up next.

**AlisonPeters** · August 7th, 2012, 08:08 AM

As suciul discovered, i do not assume it's even 'M' Banks it absolutely was solely enclosed as plenty of SF fans appear to love his non-SF stuff likewise (and a good range of his allegedly non-SF books typically still have minor SF components to them).

**Danogzilla** · September 22nd, 2012, 11:12 AM

From Amazon:

Iain M. Banks "The Hydrogen Sonata"
Previous estimated arrival date: October 12, 2012 - October 16, 2012
New estimated arrival date: September 27, 2012 - October 01, 2012

edit: Sept 26 - it has shipped. Hooray.