Reading in April 2006

First read of Heinlein

Just finished Hammered by Elisabeth Bear. My thoughts on the books is in the Book club thread! :)

Reading now: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. Actually read only 20 pages so far. Looks interesting. And it is my first Heinlein book!
 
I finished Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga, which was very good. One of the stories, "For I Have Touched the Sky," definitely goes on my all time top 10 favorite short stories list.

And now I have read about a quarter of Norman Spinrad's The Void Captain's Tale. The prose is very difficult, needlessly complicated and mannered ("baroque" comes to mind). I am trying to decide whether Spinrad thinks that's how you write (which would be pretty awful) or whether Spinrad's narrator thinks that's how you write (which might actually be pretty impressive).
 
That was quick, Zor!

Moon is a Harsh Mistress is great if you can get your head around the weird speak and libertarian ideas Heinlein was advocating very strongly at this time. First published in 1966, it was a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.

I loved Mike the computer. Compare with 2001's HAL, two years later.

For weird speak, see also Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn, 1994.

One I'm looking forward to reread when my lovely new HB copy from Meisha Merlin gets here later in the year, I think. I have a battered old NEL edition here.


Clong: Ah, yes, Spinrad. One of his books of 'the time', which held onto the ideas of the 'New Wave' in the 1960's, when pushing the boundaries meant being deliberately difficult in style and plot. :) Best of luck there!

Hobbit
 
Well, I started reading Hammered in March. I'm a slow reader... heh

Moon is a Harsh Mistress is great if you can get your head around the weird speak
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I thought my english was letting me down!! :)

The stranges words are making it funny to read sometimes. Was Heinlein wanted to mean something ? Is there a code to understand the weird language ?
 
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won the Hugo Award for Best Novel; in fact, it won the SuperHugo for Best Novel of All Time.
 
I hope to have time soon to read Hammered for the SF book group.
 
Finished 'Designed Targets' by John Birmingham a couple of days back. Haven't moved onto anything else yet, as I'm writing a dissertation at the moment and mostly focusing on non-fiction reading for that (albeit some really interesting stuff, on the physiological and psychologicall effects of stress).

'Designed Targets' is the second book in Birmingham's 'Axis of Time' trilogy and its a very solid sequel which jumps on with the story after a gap of several months. Birmingham's 21st century battle-group, thrown back into the middle of WWII, continue to have a heavy impact on their new world. Some of the most interesting sub-plots, however, deal with how they are in turn slowly worn down and chewed at by the social conditions they find themselves in: A female half-pakistani captain of a british attack sub, for example, finds herself dealing with a cabinet of war ministers who see her as a 'coolie girl' as opposed to a warrior, for example, and who want to strip her of her command.

Compelling stuff, although I think sometimes Birmingham is a little too 'right on', in the sense that he is very hard on his WWII-era characters. While "the greatest generation" are often presented in a very uncritical positive light, I think he actually swings too towards the opposite scale of things and presents them here in an almost unfair way.

A rudimentary mistake that some time travel writers seem to make is to confuse technological progress with intelligence in their writing. While they may intellectually know that is wrong, they inadvertently make that connection in their writing. The guys from the future with the bells and whistles tend to run rings around the poor back-time guys. Someone who avoids this trap is Eric Flint - its notable in his '1632' universe that his medievil european germans are depicted as having significant mental prowess, in particular in the area of languages etc. Anyway, basically I think Birmingham occassionally falls into the trap of belabouring how conservative his WWII-era guys are, and the result is that they end up looking like stupid hicks who need saving by the 'enlightened' battlegroup from the future.

I suppose there is an issue there, though. How much of a gap really is sixty or so years? Is the gap more significant in terms of technological development ... or social change?
 
fitz

Right now i am on page 92 of FitzPatrick's War.


So far it is a very good book. It starts off with the history of how this civilization came to be and introduces you to the great characters. I then will start Old Man's War.
 
Just finished the first three novels of the Poul Anderson's Flandry of terra series. They are : "Ensign Flandry" , "A Circus Of Hells" and "The Rebel Worlds". The first is a terrific fast paced read . The other two are pretty good but have some slow spots where the author throws in some hard sf text book discriptions of planets. For those who don't know, Flandry is a sort of James Bond of space trying to stop the fall of the terran empire. In between these books Ive been reading the novellas in the Robert Silverberg collection "Sailing To Byzantium". If you have never read Silverberg this is the place to start. Excellent!
 
Well, finished Blue Mars yesterday and with it, the Mars Trilogy.

I thoroughly enjoyed the parts about the terraforming, the scentific descriptions, but sometimes the story just dragged on. There were a lot of characters in the books, I liked some, didn't care for others. All in all, I thought it was average. It wasn't specatularly written, but it was ok. If you love the science behind SciFi (like I do :) ), then you'll probably like this series. There were times I was glued to it just saying to myself, "Wow! Whoa! That's really cool! (etc...) "

Red Mars, I think, was the best one of all. The whole series takes place over about 200 or so years, and where Red Mars takes place in the very near future which makes everything discussed seem extremely plausible, Blue Mars uses technology 200 years more advanced so it seems the series uses more Fiction than Science as it progresses.

Right now I'm about halfway through Heinlen's Stranger in a Strange Land. Randomly chosen from my "To-Read Box" and it's about Mars too! I just can't get off the Mars bandwagon! :D
Not my first Heinlen, I read Starship Troopers in High School and Friday a few months ago. I can see why this one's "The most famous Science Fiction novel ever written" as it says on the cover. I'm halfway through and I'm really enjoying it. Is there any historical context on this one? I recall hearing that Starship Troopers had some people disagreeing with the way Heinlen described the requirements for Citizenship and said it was Un-American. I think it happened around the Red Scare (or soon after) and people were a little edgy about "Un-American" things. Was there a lot of criticism with Stranger in a Strange Land or did he pull a kind of "Dan Brown" where everyone just loved it and it made it to the top of the bestselling lists?
 
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Hi Janos-

'Starship Troopers' was actually received quite well, winning the Hugo award for best novel in 1960.

It has attracted criticism in some quarters, but usually on the grounds that it is militaristic, as opposed to 'un-american' in the McCarthyite sense.
It obviously is militaristic in the sense that it really helped create military SF as a sub-genre, and remains unique in that it is the only science-fiction novel on the reading list for commissioned officers at King's Point, West Point, Annapolis etc. To me that's not a criticism, but John Brunner et all disagree. :)

'Stranger in a strange land' also won a Hugo award.No idea on what kind of figures it sold, but I assume an element of its success was in capturing some kind of crazy 60s zeitgeist, where everyone thought free love was just around the corner ('fraid not!), and we were all going to live like 'freaky beatniks', to quote Ned Flanders' dad.
 
Finished reading Accelerando by Charlie Stross. Whew! That is one dense collection of related novellas/novelettes! Not since American Gods (by Neil Gaiman) have I spent so much time on the internet, looking up spiffy references that the author has made so that I'll better understand what he's talking about. Most of the time it's not critical to understand Tiperlite ideas, Turing Oracles and Menger Sponges in order to understand what's going on in the story, but it certainly does enrich it.

It is not an easy read by any stretch; I found it hard to read for long spells. I tended to read a bit, put it down and then come back to it. In some traditional senses, it has a lot of problems: only at the end do you start to suspect the existence of an unreliable narrator, and even then you're not sure; there's a lot more "telling" than "showing," although I liked those bits the best; some things are unecessarily repeated since this was originally a collection of short stories published many months apart, you'd think they would've edited out the redundancies when making a book out of it but they didn't; the characters aren't terribly sympthetic, and some plot threads are built up a bit and then simply dropped.

Overall however, it is an amazing book. To me the pettiness of some of the characters and the dropped plot threads were an illustration of how messy life is and will continue to be, even in the post-human and post-Singularity future. Plus, the constraints he was working under are immense: in writing about a Singularity event, he has to deal with the fact that by definition, we should be incapable of understanding any being that has been through the Singularity (they'll be as advanced compared to us as we are compared to amoebas), so he has to have human characters like us stay outside the Singularity and observe it instead of joining it. It's a little awkward, but I think he handles it as best he can.

In the end I'm not convinced that a Singularity will happen or will happen soon, but I was really impressed by Stross' vision of it, and I learned a lot of neat things through accompanying research along the way. Wikipedia has a good companion article for the book here, sort of like the one for The Name of the Rose, although not nearly as extensive. ;)
 
Archren said:
In the end I'm not convinced that a Singularity will happen or will happen soon, but I was really impressed by Stross' vision of it, and I learned a lot of neat things through accompanying research along the way.
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Someone made a brilliant point here a few weeks back that reminded me of yours:
ironchef texmex said:
Anyone who thinks that mankind is evolving toward a state of pure energy just isn't watching enough reality TV.)
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;)
 
SF, wise, its been a busy two days for me. I reached saturation point with all this non-ficion I was reading and went back to finish off a very unusual collection of stories from Baen called 'Mountain Magic'. It contains short stories and a novella from David Drake, Eric Flint, Ryk E. Spoor and Henry Kuttner set in the Appallachian mountains. Sort of hillbilly fantasy and SF. I'd read the majority of it, but went back to complete David Drake's section, a collection of stories about Old Natan the 'cunning man', a sort of curmudgeony moutain-man problem-solver for the local hicks. Good stuff.

Also read Isaac Asimov's 'Rescue Party', which is a proper golden-age SF story included in another Baen collection titled 'The wold turned upside down', which is an anthology of Jim Baen, Eric Flint and David Drake's favourite SF.

I'm in the middle of Heinlein's 'The menace from earth', at the moment.
 
Janos said:
Right now I'm about halfway through Heinlen's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can see why this one's "The most famous Science Fiction novel ever written" as it says on the cover. I'm halfway through and I'm really enjoying it.
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Wow... I wonder what page I was on when I wrote that.....

It started out good. There was a guy from Mars who could do some cool things, there was mystery, corrupt government officials trying to get him, etc, etc....

And then all of a sudden, the pacing of the book slammed into a brick wall. After a certain point in the book, nothing happens! I think I was right on the turning point when I wrote that last comment. Once that point is reached, the main character, Mike, is in a house with a bunch of people, and that's where he stays until nearly the end of the book. And it was repetitive! Heinlen just kept telling the same story over and over and over again! I got to the point where I was thinking "Ok, here's the next chapter let me guess.... Mike's from Mars and doesn't understand Earth people.... Oh look, I was right again..." I want to say I liked it, the first part of the book had some real drive to it, but the second half was sadly lacking in.... well... interestingness (yeah, I made it up :D ). It went from Action to Philosophy which is a pretty steep step to take. It's almost like this is where Terry Goodkind got his inspiration to start putting his own personal philosophy into the book. I kept saying to myself while reading Stranger, "Jeez.. I don't care! Just tell the story"

So, if I were to recommend this one, I'd say read about the first half of the story, and then put the book down and make up the rest of it in your head.
 
I finished Ubik, which I'd have to rank as my favorite PKD book to date. And now I have started Cetaganda, one of the Miles Vokosigan books of Lois McMaster Bujold.
 
I've been having a devil of a time tracking down mirror dance by Bujold. May end up ordering it on the web.

Great series.
 
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