Category: Books

by C. T. Miéville

I devoured this book in three late-night readings and I couldn’t stop thinking of it during the days in between. It defies generic placement; calling it sci-fi would attach to it a load of unwarranted expectations, yet saying it’s just a noirish crime novel staged in a fictitious setting would hardly do it justice. It’s a captivating, unsettling and above all, incredibly original work of art and imagination.

Before you continue reading, be warned that it will be very hard to avoid spoilers in this review, and that your enjoyment in and appreciation of the book might be entirely ruined if you do get spoiled.

Continue reading The City & The City

I read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and liked it a lot. It’s a noir-ish SF novel set in a somewhat dystopian future where, thanks to the discovery of the relics of a technologically advanced alien civilization on Mars, humanity managed to spread over a number of distant worlds, and, more importantly, work out a technology of digital human storage which allows one’s mind and memories to be saved after the death of the body, and downloaded into another. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex spec-ops soldier who gets killed in the prologue and then ‘re-sleeved’ into a new body when hired by one of the most powerful people on Earth to solve a bizarre murder mystery. It’s through the challenges this tasks presents for him that we learn both about the setting and Tak’s not-exactly-amiable character.

Continue reading Altered Carbon

Acting on a hunch, and seeing how it won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, I picked up Jo Walton’s “Among Others” and – couldn’t put it down.

Continue reading Among Others

Several days ago, I wrote about my initial impressions with Tim Powers’ “The Stress of Her Regard”, making an effort to reveal nothing of importance to a potential future reader who doesn’t want to be spoiled. That post felt oddly unfinished and, honestly, rather lame, but it took me a while to figure out why. And now I’m going to tell you, in all the glorious, spoilerific detail.

Continue reading The Stress of Her Regard – Revisited With Spoilers

A book by Tim Powers that I just finished reading. I’ve read another one, “The Drawing of the Dark”, this summer, so I thought I knew what I was getting into; but “The Stress of Her Regard” surprised me in several ways.

Continue reading The Stress of Her Regard

I wanted to know what really crappy gay literature was all about, and after asking around for some anti-recommendations, I ended up reading “King’s Conquest” by a ‘Valentina Heart’.

And now I know.

Continue reading King’s Conquest