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Speaking of climate fiction, I just read Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana Hudson, and it was really good. The conceit is the same story told five times, the same set of characters meeting at COP60 in Buenos Aires 2054, but each story is set in a different IPCC climate-modeling scenario, and the dramatic conflict and their perspectives shift. I stayed up way past any sensible bedtime finishing it, which is about the strongest endorsement fiction can get. A lot of climate fiction is resolutely Delugist. Industrial civilization has sinned against Earth, a storm will come which will destroy the last vestiges of a corrupt Earth, and a new beginning will dawn, with a chance at innocence. I'm thinking mostly of Oryx and Crake here, but this pattern shows up a lot (and then there's KSR, who's doing his own thing). The deluge story is tired. It's boring. And it's wrong. Hudson makes a case for the necessity of climate fiction, and delivers a drat good example.
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Jun 6, 2022 20:53
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I guess I'm a Goodreads power user (1400+ reviews, most of them pretty thorough), but it is an absolutely deranged social media platform, especially given the low stakes and the LiveJournal circa 2005 web design.
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Aug 5, 2022 18:50
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One of my very favorite books in this vein is Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, which takes places over decades of political and technological conflict between the space-faring descendants of humanity, divided into the major clades of genetically enhanced Shapers and cybernetically augmented Mechanists, as they evolve towards something as far beyond intelligence as life is beyond dead matter.
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Sep 19, 2022 06:40
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McCoy Pauley posted:Void Star by Zachary Mason just makes it under the wire as a 2017 release. I thought it was pretty much the best William Gibson book I've read that was not written by Gibson, which I mean as the highest compliment. Necro from a few pages back, but I just finished Void Star and absolutely agree. It might be the best William Gibson book I've read since Neuromancer. Just an incredible vibe!
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Oct 31, 2022 17:01
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Have you seen everybody else recommending The Spear Cuts Through Water? Well, it's a love story down to it's dented bones. Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace have a romance at their heart, though there's also a lot of other political intrigues and sociological exploration going on.
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Mar 7, 2023 23:43
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For books like Void Star, I'm thinking SpIn State by Chris Moriarty, which has UN Operative Catherine Li investigating a fatal accident on the Dickensian industrial planet of Compton's World, the only source of the quantum entanglement crystals needed by FTL. Except that Li is literally losing her mind, including a life full of awful secrets, because FTL degrades human memory and she doesn't trust her UN employers' digital backups. Reynold's Chasm City also has a protagonist with amnesia recovering their memories while searching for revenge and getting drawn up in webs of intrigue. All three books have a very similar vibe of cyberpunk noir unfolding of secrets. And in Exordium posting, I'm about 20% in and I haven't been this terrified since I took waaaaay to many hits off a weed vape while reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. How is the start of this book as intense as the end of Traitor? That shouldn't be narratively possible.
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Jan 28, 2024 23:27
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Yeah, I'm going to add a (weak) defense for Hamilton in that I really enjoyed Fallen Dragon, and Mindstar Rising and The Nano Flower are both solid cyberpunk. Good, not great, but Hamilton has a grasp of setting that has a stylishly gritty vibe, and he can write a drat fine action set-piece. The short story collection A Second Chance at Eden has Sonnie's Edge, which is definitely the best thing he's written. But the Reality Dysfunction mega-series and Commonwealth Saga are bloated messes, where the meandering plot collides with his Squicky Scifi Author Sex Stuff, a lot of setting material doesn't work, and the whole thing is just way too many bad words around the fun bits. It'll never get better.
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Feb 3, 2024 19:08
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Ahahahaha! That was my review of Exordia on Goodreads. I’m glad someone appreciated the turtle.
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Feb 27, 2024 05:36
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I recall the first few of the Seventh Son books being pretty interesting, or at least having a great premise. Basically, Jesus is reborn in an alternative 18th century America where magic is real and Britain won the American Revolution. But the protagonist is just a kid, albeit one with immense potential, and the Adversary keeps trying to kill him. Of course the series falls off fast and hard. I think we’re all used to series that just limp on and on, or authors who had one good book amid a mediocre careers, but Card has an particular talent for a strong start and exponentially decaying sequels.
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Mar 27, 2024 03:34
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Effinger is amazing. For more recent stuff, Void Star by Zachary Mason is very cyberpunk, very noir, and very good. Fake edit: and with Gibson, get the Burning Chrome short story collection. Gibson has written some great books, and his short stories are even better.
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Apr 1, 2024 06:58
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pradmer posted:The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J5X5LVQ/ Buy these books. The Bruner stories are fantastic proto-cyberpunk. Sheep is one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read in a good way. Schismatrix is my absolute favorite novel, Heavy Weather smells like the future, and Islands is weird but good in an early 90s end of history way.
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Apr 2, 2024 19:05
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