Whatever it is, it’s well worth the price of entry. It’s a concept I’ve never read before with new and interesting tropes.
I’ll pick it up after I work my way through the Rifters books. Can’t beat that price.
I originally read that as ‘I’ll pick it up after work, through Rifters books.’ Thinking, Rifters Books? What a coincidence. Getting old sucks. :)
The conceit reminds me of Baxter’s more high-concept stuff particularly from the Xeelee sequence: Raft takes place in a universe where the gravitational constant is many orders of magnitude greater than ours, Flux takes place inside a neutron star, Ring’s protagonist is a 5 million year-old AI who lives in the sun, etc.
Yeah, it sounds really neat.
I’d never heard of this. Upon doing some digging I’ll certainly be picking them up in the near future. Thanks.
No worries. Check out Baxter’s NASA novels too (Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed) They’re all hard sci-fi. Voyage is an alternate history: what if NASA went to Mars instead of the STS program? Titan imagines a trip to Titan and opens with a hair-raising and eerily prescient accident aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. Moonseed is a disaster novel that is somewhat similar to, but pre-dates Stephenson’s Seveneves. Voyage is probably my all-time favorite hard sci-fi novel, just edging out KSR’s Aurora.
Wow, so I’m looking up more info about Peter Watts’ other books, I found a lot of info about his life. Did you know that in 2011 he had a nearly fatal encounter with necrotizing fasciitis, what we colloquially call flesh-eating bacteria? Careful poking around in his blog, he details his recovery in several entries and … there are pictures.
Oh yeah. I’ve read his blog. I was eating lunch when I came upon that. :P Have you seen the border guard story? Totally fucked up.
Yeah, that’s a bizarre story too. Regarding that, I also turned up this blog from an unrelated dude - sounds like Watts may be the inheritor of Harlan Ellison’s mantle.
Seems that way, eh? :)
Only if he starts suing people for “stealing” his ideas. At any rate that blog post made ne like Peter Watts even more.*
*= I am a crank, though.
Ellison sounded like he could be genuinely difficult to deal with and really unpleasant if you struck him wrong (and also really great, depending). Watts just seems particularly outspoken. IDK.
Ellison was an asshole who enjoyed turning the smallest personal affront into a major production up to and including litigation. He harassed women and damaged some writers’ careers out of petty vindictiveness. He also helped mentor other writers and was a great writer himself. So far as I know Watts hasn’t done anything as offensive as Ellison did routinely over his career.
Look, I’m aware of Ellison’s irascibility and his occasional unpleasant actions like the business with Octavia Butler, but it’s a hell of a diminution if his body of work to say he’s an asshole a harasser and character assassin and, oh yeah, a pretty great writer too.
plus one to this.
Although prefer “big SF” baxter (Raft etc) his Voyage was also really good.
It’s a good read, but much like The Wire, you have to stick with it and pay attention.
I enjoyed it too!!! The “From the author” notes at the end are worth the price of admission.
But I don’t want a sequel for Echopraxia. I’m unsure that series can go anywhere given where it left off. I just want a new series by him :)
I don’t know that I need a direct sequel to Echopraxia but I really hope Watts doesn’t abandon the universe he developed with that and Blindsight. If nothing else, he got me interested in vampires, and I never thought I would say that.
I could certainly envision prequels…