No, I felt the same way. I have read several Scalzi books and I find Redshirts to be the least engaging.
I do recommend Old Man’s War.
I just finished this last night and will echo everything you’ve said. I was in a panic the whole time I was reading it because it was all so brilliant and complex that I kept thinking it was all going to fall apart but it didn’t. There are so many layers, both in the story itself and in the meat themes Harkaway explores that I’m going to be unpacking it for weeks.
It’s definitely a challenging read though. I found myself going back and re-reading earlier passages to understand them in the continually evolving context. Gratifyingly, every time I did so I uncovered more hidden meaning and set up for things to come. I really had to work hard to wrap my mind around the implications of the ending. I joined a discussion group about the book on Goodreads and the very first question caused me to unpack so much more and realize how everything that goes on in the narrative also works on a meta level.
I just finished The Wrong Stars and thought it was pretty great. I got a real “Leviathan Wakes” (The Expanse) vibe from it. Fast read, fun characters, kinda cliched but I was OK with it.
I’ve been reading a lot recently.
Finished Oathbringer two weeks back and just finished up Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest over the weekend. Wow - I don’t think I’ve been impressed by a sci-fi series this much in a long time.
Cornwell’s Waterloo is great. I even thought Sharp’s waterloo was good.
Hey as an aside and consistent with my theme of marooned earthlings on an alien planet, try “Semiosis” by Sue Burke. Not finished it yet but I am loving it. Lotsa good new alien concepts. Plant power!
I’ll try to link it. Audible version is great, multiple narrators for characters.
The Annihilation Score, by Charlie Stross.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Annihilation-Score/dp/B0155IACTA/
Didn’t care for it too much. Really, REALLY slow in the middle and with some very British social commentary that was both alien to me (as a Yank) and also so painfully “on the nose” as to be suffocating at the very same time. Mo’s character was mostly sympathetic (if a bit self-centered) in the other books as a secondary character, but here she was kind of annoying.
It didn’t help that I was completely unimpressed with Stross’ attempt to shoehorn “Super Hero” fiction into the previously well-rendered Laundry mythos. It’s like he pretty much just decided that he wanted to throw out the whole “hidden world just beneath the surface” thing entirely. Bah.
The audiobook narration was a bit weak too. They (wisely) went with a female narrator this time because the book is in first-person and of course it’s Mo speaking. But the narrator went with a fairly over-the-top Scottish accent that sounded bad even to my US ears.
My Hugo nominations for best novel, in no particular order:
Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker
Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee
Jade City by Fonda Lee
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
Of the Nebula nominees, I also read Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty but thought it was only okay.
Huh. I hadn’t heard word one about this one before your post, but it looks super intriguing. On the list it goes.
Recently finished Metro 2035, what I believe is intended to be the final Metro book. After telling a largely unrelated story with 2034, this one returns to the protagonist of Metro 2033, a while after he defeats the Dark Ones and realizes they were never the enemy he thought they were. Uncomfortable with being regarded as a hero for doing so, he’s become obsessed with a signal from other survivors he thought he heard during the climactic events at the end of 2033 and makes regular trips to the now mutant-free but much more radioactive surface to try and make contact with someone, anyone managing to live on the surface of the ruined world, much to the chagrin of his adoptive father and wife. Then Homer (one of the main characters of 2034) turns up looking for him to try and get his take on the story of his defeat of the Dark Ones, and instead precipitates another perilous journey across the whole of the Metro, to find a radioman who also supposedly heard from the outside. It’s an incredibly dark and cynical book and there are some revelations in it about what’s actually going on that are staggering. And yet, not transformative.
One thing’s for sure, the FPS series has completely parted ways with the books.
Amberlough is very depressing, if that causes anyone pain, but it’s probably the best written of all those books. It recounts the collapse of a secondary world Weimar-type republic into fascism, as well as a gay state security officer’s fall from grace. But a sequel is coming out, probably a trilogy in the end, so there’s always the chance that nazis will eventually wind up getting punched.
I finally, FINALLY finished Fire and Fury. It was good, but I read non-fiction so. Very. Slowly. It just took me forever to get through.
So thanks to email newsletters and the like, I’ve got TOOOONNNS of books in my backlog. Thankfully I can arrange Kindle books in collections, so I’ve got one called “To Read Next” with the most interesting-looking stuff.
So this morning I chose The Ember War, the first book in the Ember War Saga by Richard Fox. Yes, Dick Fox.
The book starts off with a probe coming to our solar system and checking us out, to see if we have the potential to deal with this massive oncoming alien threat. Once it determines that we have a slim, but slightly positive chance of success, it contacts a human that it uses to grant us with marvelous technology, and in the sixty years before the invasion, we advance technologically a LOT, but not really in any other way. There’s still infighting and sabotage and espionage and the like, even though we apparently know the threat is coming.
So yeah, pretty fun so far.
Exactly why I stopped reading this series. Mo’s character changes into a harpy so quickly it made my head spin. Poor Bob.
Just started reading Blindsight by Peter Watts. It has thoroughly sucked me in.
So the first book was a sheer delight. Very fast, yet still dense with action and character. Will definitely be continuing the series.
I wanted something else epic, but a break from sci-fi, so I remembered I still had two more books to read in the amazing Temeraire series. Therefore I just began reading Blood of Tyrants, and wow is it good.
RichVR, Blindsight is one of the best sci-fi books of the last decade. Please post once you’ve finished.
Hard to believe it’s available for free online under Creative Commons. I can already highly recommend it. I’ll be buying the sequel, Echopraxia, as well.
Have I mentioned that I love your avatar? :)
Some person on another forum posted “What’s happier than a cockatiel with a french fry?” and I of course responded with Pinkerton the cockatoo chowing down on a nice hearty Wendy’s fry.
Huh, I put that book on the backburner when I got to the part of the background story where America launched a literal Christian crusade to save the Swedes from their Muslim overlords. It’s a very interesting premise though!
Yeahhhh I kinda brushed over that quick.
I’m trying to think of an author whose style reminds me of Watts. Maybe John Varley crossed with Mervyn Peake? Or maybe Gene Wolfe?
Blindsight is magnificent. The sequel not so much. It’s ambitious, but perhaps too ambitious and it loses track of itself.
As for other similar authors, I agree about Gene Wolfe. Acelerando, by Charles Stross, shares a lot with Blindsight, but the language and tone is somewhat lighter (the plot is not).