Reviews and Comments

In principle I should have really enjoyed this, but it was just a good book, not a great one.

KSR has done exactly what he set out to do, and does not deviate from his usual 'apply the technology & investigate deep character driven reactions'. Here he asks the question that ultimately is _the_important one of our times: how exactly do we get ourselves out of this climate mess?

I really can't fault any of this. The characters are interesting, the fact that we get to hear from many of the usually sidelined voices is great, there's a bunch of technology, humanity prevails albeit with a lot of sacrifice. What's not to like in a well written KSR story that follows this standard template?

After a lot of thinking on that I seriously cannot say. 'Nothing is wrong with that' is really the correct answer, but I just don't find myself enjoying this one as much as something like the Mars trilogy or Aurora. Maybe this one is just too close to home for comfort?

I knew nothing of the content of this book coming in, although it's been on my radar to-read for 20 years now. Being late to the party I suspected a somewhat dated cyberpunk hacker expose: similar to Gibson's Neuromancer.

This is true in some sense, although I don't think it dates as poorly as Neuromancer does. There's not a gigantic amount of technical jargon that's fallen out of use (PROM - programmable read-only memory) is perhaps the only concept that kids growing up now wouldn't understand directly (even though we still use it a lot in our daily lives, RFID for example).

What I wasn't expecting was the connections to ancient Sumer, religions and gnosis; language hacking, culture exploration and a whole raft (!) of other tropes tying together to uncover an answer to one of societies oldest questions.

A thrilling ride all in all.

The ending felt a little sharp perhaps. Things tied up, sure, but I may have liked a epilogue.

An exploration of consciousness by a prominent scholar in the field & an educational background similar to my own -- what's not to like? Well, for me, that was 'most of it' unfortunately.

The book was a slog to get through. I put it down about half way in and it took some time to come back and finish it of. I don't think that it was the subject matter; but the content, context and story telling that killed it.

VCRs, marbles, record players: I'm not that young that these things are before my time. For a book written in 2007 however these references still seem dated. That, for one was something that didn't mesh with me. Second: Hofstadter's heroes are not my heroes - and it seems you need to have a deep understanding of certain nuances & mannerisms of particular musicians that play Bach in the 'correct' way to gain a modicum of understanding of what consciousness is based on these tales. Third: dialogues between individual loops within a person, when you're having issues connecting with that individual are perhaps the least effective manner to get a point across I could think of.

There were so many examples that rubbed me the wrong way, many of which already by 2007 had strong rebuttals or counter evidence against the positions posited herein. As an example, a lengthy discussion about the colors red and blue concludes that categories within individual's minds may be different, but these differences can be remapped through dialogue. This is a serious surface skim and doesn't reflect even the most common findings concerning color perception of the times [see Friedman & Miyake, JEP: Gen, 133 (2004) for example].

A story concerning two universes with one robot that was conscious, and another where it was not, but mimicked what should be conscious behaviour: a child was scoffed at for showing empathy to a robot with no 'real' feelings. This is ridiculous. Since Hofstadter has a thing for antiquated phrases, "Don't cry over spilled milk" resonates here. One can show emotions about non-animate objects, let alone 100% convincing representations of animate ones.

Putting all of this aside even, nothing in the book was new to me. It was far more "memoirs and tidbits of an interesting career & the joys and sadness that a life brings" than a deep dive into consciousness.

I was so excited when this came out that I dropped the other book I was reading. It certainly didn't disappoint. If you've read the rest of the series, then there's really not much to say about this book. It stayed on track, delivers everything you would come to expect from the bobiverse: humor, intrigue, exploration of exotic space-lands, political tensions and the odd space war. In general, the same excellence as the last installments.

The focus on rescuing Bender made the story perhaps a bit myopic for a universe of Von Neumann probes; which was acknowledged by a number of elder bobs throughout the story, many of which are gearing up for a second expansion of the borders of known space. That's perhaps the only missing aspect of the standard tropes one comes to expect from the bobiverse in this book.

The internal bobiverse conflict was, at least to me, fairly transparent - although the motivations for the conflict remained hidden to me until the discussion at the conclusion. If you read this review before the book: knowing who caused the struggles does not detract at all from the thrill of the story.

A masterpiece, yet again. Well done Dennis!

This was fun, as all the Murderbot books have been. Quite happy to see a novel this time! There were no novella related shortcomings, although perhaps Wells' forte indeed lies in the thinner format. This book had multiple places where things were explained for the 15th time, or a joke was told over and over again. Don't get me wrong; this dry, smirk-worthy humor is what I came here for, but it got repetitive.

I certainly enjoyed the plot. It dug into the lore of the universe Murderbot exists within, and expands upon a number of old character arcs that were very welcomed. Murderbot itself begins to find a place in the world, even though it cannot be too sure of that.

The series now has a solid footing, with the characters ready to explore on their own terms, rather than being on the back foot all the time. Looking forward to the next installment!

This one was.. different. Not super spaced out hard sci-fi like most of Egan's work, but quite down to Earth and essentially near future. I was worried this may turn out to be another one of Egan's works I didn't like: Teranesia. I found it too close to home and too far away from Egan's wheelhouse. Happy that these first impressions were wrong.

The story is primarily set in Iran and steeped quite deep in Iranian culture, which for those not versed in it could be considered other-worldly enough to learn about customs and history, both of which Egan may have done really well throughout his own story telling. Maybe - I don't know. But compelling enough for me to hunt some of it down.

The science part of this fiction concerns digital brain analogues essentially. Not mind uploading, but some form of precursor synthetic mind. In general, the exploration concerning this topic in the book was interesting, but I think that there were perhaps two directions tugging on Egan here: the tech and the cultural. Generally he manages this quite flawlessly, although here his focus was definitely more on the culture (he states this explicitly in the afterward actually). To that end, I can't really say much more than I liked this book. It was good, just not great in the sense that many of Egan's works are.

When I first read Summa Technologiae I had never heard of Lem, but the power and timelessness of his intellect in that masterpiece of non fiction, and the small snippets he eludes to concerning what constitutes good science fiction there definitely put him on my radar.

Finally, I've managed to get around to reading what many consider his magnum opus. To put it mildly, I don't think that many, if any current sci-fi writers attempt to write about truly alien life the way Solaris did.

I think it's best not to speak much about the specifics that occur in the story. This is very much a piece that you'll want to read without knowing too much concerning the plot. Suffice to say though that it's incredibly well written. The characters are totally confused about what's happening, but you as a reader are not tangled up in their confusion if that makes sense? Sure, you don't know whats going on for the most part either, but Lem does a stellar job making sure the plot doesn't fold in on itself during this confusion to the extent that the reader cannot follow or enjoy the process.

Some truly deep and thought provoking discussions on who we are, what we are searching for and what we do once we find it. I'll leave you with this:

"We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more."

My thoughts about this book are quite torn. I loved many parts of it, but in total - not so much.

I think the genre here is something that authors really should begin to explore in depth: post climate-catastrophe society. Miller did a great job world building in that sense. I loved the complexity of Qaanaaq and the factions, politics, daily occurrences etc. Characters? I enjoyed most of their motivations - not all. There was quite an over-representation of LGBTQAI+ (which seems to be trendy at the moment), but didn't add any real unique perspective - seemed to be just ticking some arbitrary diversity box.

The middle section was fantastic. Where there was a bunch of stuff trying to be worked out over all the character's lives, what certain things were, where they came from, bridging these supposedly unrelated happenings and people together.

Then, it all fell in a heap. I mean this not in the way that the story was poorly written or nothing tied together - that's fine. It just really took the wrong direction. Instead of getting hardened people to sort out calamities in a hardened world, the author chose to build in a massive form of escapism - for both the characters and the reader. This was not some exploratory sci-fi, it was fantasy. That really irked me, perhaps too much so, but this story had so much potential and it seems like a waste to climax like that.

I don't think that Vonnegut writes poorly, nor do I think this work lacks inherent interest. It's more-so that this, alongside Catch-22 and the like, is a genre I just can't get behind. I understand the need for anti-war fiction, indeed even fiction mostly accounted from real life witness. With that being said, it seems that once you've read one 'war is futile and nothing makes sense, but that's what war is all about' book, you've read them all.

Am I so far out of touch with those in the story that I just don't get it? Well, actually no, and I don't think that this would be Vonnegut's aim either. I hope that war has been made so redundant to me that the thought of going through something like this in life continues to be a totally alien concept to me and everyone else. But I'd also hope that books of this manner would still resonate and serve as a reminder of those that did go through such events and a warning for the rest of us not to repeat such dark times. This didn't happen here with me, nor have any other stories I've read in this genre. Works like The Gulag Archipelago on the other hand - that's a tour de force to contend with.

There were some phrases in the book, some descriptions that I really did like. An overweight man sits down on a bed. Rather than stating that the springs creaked or some-such, Vonnegut writes 'the mattress springs had a lot to say about that'. Great! Witty! Funny! But overall I cannot recommend it.

It must be close on 25 years ago that I first heard about this book, and now finally I can tick it off the list. Surprisingly also, this is the first time I've read anything by Bradbury, even though I have a number of his works on my shelves.

The book is such a classic, that I'd be surprised if people don't know the general premise, and of course in that sense there wasn't too much wow factor or plot twists that one uncovers here. With that said, it is wonderfully written. The clarity of the landscape the characters see themselves in is simple and clear to the reader. Depressing, vapid and shallow as one continues through the story as it becomes more and more fatalist.

Such a simple phrase, such a beautiful phrase, as Montag meets the group by the fire at the end:
"... and Time was there." Truly gave me chills.