I picked up the Kindle version of Six Wakes while it was on sale last week and am about a third of the way through. Interesting premise and an easy read. Digging it so far!
Sold!
When I had ACL surgery scheduled right after college, I knew I would be in bed a long time, so I went to the library and borrowed the entire Vorkosigan Saga (up to that time, when Memory had just come out as a Hardcover). Man, what an action adventure ride that was. If you get the craving again, I recommend reading all the books in the saga. There’s a reason there’s so many Hugo award winners in there.
I am reading Sid Meier’s book. Only a few chapters in, but wow, it is really good.
It staggering to me that Civ5 was played for billions of hours.
That is how I felt about the series. He progresses into politics way to fast and away from the sci=fi exploration angle. I liked the first book and wanted more from the others.
20 years ago I dumped Red Mars halfway through, ripped it into pieces, and shredded the fucking thing. I can not stress just how much I HATE potentially interesting speculative science fiction stories ruined by tired, old political and religious plots.
In other news, I made it only 12% through this book before deleting it from my device.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0996308938/
Unless the I’m reading about T-2’s Sarah Connor, I am never going to willingly spend a whole book trapped in the chaosmind of a widowed paranoid mamabear who spends every single second of her life brittle and terrified of everything, and having coronaries every time someone so much as farts near her sweet helpless pookieboo. I hope her kid dies.
I loved all of the Mars books. I’m not sure how you write a plausible future without a significant political dimension. That’s what was interesting about them.
It would have been fine, except it made up whole new veins of politics with no real wold analogies. The Bogdanovists, Reds, Greens, Hirokos Aereophany group.
Certainly the politics shape how a Mars colony develops. The corps, nations, and supply ensure that. But that could be plenty interesting on its own. But the politics of the Mars series are specific fictional political movements invented for the book. And it is fair to say that there might be formation of Mars political factions independent of their origin nations, but the book becomes mainly about those. I wasn’t joking when I said the cyberpunk adjacent political shifts of earth, and how it relates to the Mars colony, could be a book. And one I might like more. And it’s kinda what the precursor to the Expanse series is.
Anyhow nice to know I’m not alone on that. It didn’t make it a bad book, it just made it one I was not quite hoping for.
I might at some point. It fits the same space as Discworld books do. Not super deep, but a fast and light read that works as a palate cleanser.
Totally agree with this take. Robinson is a very good novelist and the Mars books are his best work.
I read the books as largely a response to climate change and the failure of any existing political philosophy or system to address the crisis. Mars becomes an experiment not just in the mechanics of influencing climate but also in the kinds of human social and governmental and economic systems that might be better able to address crises of that magnitude. Put another way, the books aren’t about colonizing Mars, they’re about the freedom to invent new ways of living and the distance from authority needed to maintain that freedom.
If the books have a disappointment, for me that disappointment is that they portray (once again) that the solution involves a great future for a relatively select few. Are there any sf writers who imagine an alternative model for society that doesn’t involve either killing off most people to get there, or (as in this case) moving them very far offstage so that they no longer matter to the problem?
Great discussions and recommendations in this thread. Thanks, folks!
Earlier this year I went on what I can only describe as a “men’s reading” binge of three books.
It started with a re-read of The Breach, by Patrick Lee, a deeply fun current-world sci-fi book that came highly recommended from a friend who’d also loved Lexicon, which is twisty and turny and tricksy and great. The Breach is also great, and if you haven’t read it, the less known about it the better. Know that it’s light as a feather, hugely entertaining, and basically never stops moving. And the only speed it knows is a sprint. A tough guy goes for a hike and finds…something…that kicks him into a wild other world. Tons of fun.
That led me to pick up another book of Lee’s, Runner, which has the same ‘perma-sprint’ quality, the same ‘our world but with some crazy sci-fi shit’ milieu, and the same kind of hyper-competent badass main character. It’s also light as a feather, but has even more Holy Shit moments, from the best inversion of a torture scene I’ve ever read to a person using a paraglider to escape a skyscraper. A lonely man comes across someone who desperately needs help, pulling him into a wild, near-permanent chase. I kept exclaiming to my wife and going “you have to read this” until I explained a plot point, and she smiled and said, “is it pretty much an, um, boy novel?” and I sheepishly realized that yes, it absolutely is. Characters are quickly sketched, the main guy is hyper-competent, and plot is paramount. And it rocks. Highly recommended.
But my binge ended with Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz, which features another hyper-competent badass getting in over his head. You learn that our main character, the preposterously named Evan Smoak, was raised from boyhood in the US Government black-site “Orphan” program, trained to be a deniable asset who assassinates to protect US interests. He’s just too damn moral, though, and there’s some inter-departmental betrayal, and he disappears, becoming a super-rich, incredibly highly-trained, attractive, distant, single man. That’s right. He’s basically Batman, and rather than just let the allusion sit there, super clear, on the page, Hurwitz has to call it out, comparing Smoak’s hardened penthouse skyscraper lair to the Batcave. Which was clear from about page 10, when you get a detailed walkthrough of the premises. There’s lots of explanations of the technology that Smoak uses to be a liberty-defending badass, and there was a certain pleasure in it until I realized it’s all essentially magic “he figures stuff out” tools. This is not uncommon in “men’s fiction”, I bet, and I was largely cool with this in Runner because the plot is so breakneck and the essential conservatism of the premise–loner badass protects vulnerable young woman with unrelenting violence and superior intelligence–is somewhat obfuscated.
But it is not obfuscated in Orphan X, not nearly enough for my taste. The details above–single rich vigilante protector–are enough to make you shake your head, of course, but the plot doesn’t move quite fast enough to obscure the clunkiness of the wish-fulfillment. And then there’s the slow-burn love interest, a harried, chaotic-but-intelligent, lovely-but-needy single mother that allows our main character to be drawn to someone but still act mysterious and distant, and to tutor and protect a young, fatherless boy. (there’s also a ripping-hot damsel-in-distress he gets to fuck and watch die, of course) And wouldn’t you know it, this woman has Jordan Peterson quotes around her apartment. Ones that catch our hero’s eye and cause him to muse for a bit on what a helpful little bit of advice this woman surrounds herself with. This happens several times, and Peterson is thanked in the acknowledgments, for something like ‘guiding’ the author’s thinking.
I finished the book, but found the ending lackluster and the essential conservatism of the outlook overbearing and distracting, and it ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. It’s competently written and plotted, and a decent entry in the men’s fiction canon, but if you’re similarly turned off by overt wish-fulfillment and conservative ideology, stick with Runner, which at least has the decency to move too quickly to notice.
If you’d like another book that moves at the sort of pace you’re describing, I was quite fond of The Mirrored Heavens, by David Williams:
Basically one balls-out sprint through a cyberpunk heist with powered armor suits, hacking on the fly etc etc. It’s book one of a trilogy but I didn’t think the other two were nearly as gripping or interesting.
Oh man, the most “laddie” sci-fi I’ve possibly experience has got to be the Red Rising books by the extremely maleishly named Pierce Brown.
They’re YA adventure fiction, but so very to the xxxtreme that I’m pretty sure the main character is actually wearing a No Fear t-shirt in the author’s mind’s eye. Fun – super fun! (Tom doesn’t read this thread, thank goodness) – well-paced, action-packed, and my goodness is the main character just the most smartest and fastest and moral-est and bestest bro a bro could ever wish for.
But fuckin’ a, man, when “The Praetor calls for an Iron Rain!” and legions of power-armored space marines descend on Mars from low orbit and just fuck shit up, goddammit you can hear the interweaving of like six long-haired guitar solo
He is, almost exactly, Captain America
But, like, swole, bro.
Actually laughing out loud, @inactive_user, that’s a perfect description of Red Rising (which I devoured).
Couldn’t read the 4th book, tho.
Yeah, Adam_B turned me onto the Red Rising series. I also stopped after 3, because it was the end of that story. But Book 4 was recently on sale, finally, so I did buy it. Maybe I’ll read it from the book backlog someday.
Red Rising is awesome. When I read the first book the first time, I thought it severely dragged in the middle. But after I finished it I immediately reread it and loved the pacing. Go figure.
I stopped at the third I think - it just got wayyyy to gory and too much of everything. First book was pretty good, but the series diverge into something I have very little interest in.
I’ve been reading the Laundry Files and it’s… really pretty good.
Basically it’s about a guy who works for a secret British agency. That handles the problem of math and computers being the secret to contacting/summoning Lovecraftian horrors and magic.
The whole thing is basically: doing math and computing thins the walls between realities. Brains are computers. We have a shitload of computers these days. And billions of brains. Because of all that, the world is going to end. This is the story of a guy who works in one of the agencies that trying to stop that or at least prepare for it. But it’s also still a government agency, so he has to file paperwork for his paper clip usage and follow Health and Safety guidelines when summoning outer worldly horrors. Also he does IT stuff.
Oh my, that sounds right up my alley. I’ll have to check it out!
Have you scoped Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books? Similar theme where the protagonist is a police constable and apprentice wizard in the Met’s tiny little paranormal division, but he still has to deal with all the bureaucratic nonsense every London copper is subject to. They’re wonderful; I can’t recommend them highly enough.