I just finished George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral and am now hip-deep in James Blish's Cities in Flight.
I started with Destination Void a few months back and figured I would "marathon" the whole series. Frank passed away before this last book in the series was complete and Bill Ransom finished it. It's evident in certain orthographic quirks that Frank would never have used. So - many - ellipses.
Hey, I read that, or nearly read it, didn`t quite get to the very end. It got very mathematical. I don`t think I have ever heard of anyone else ever reading that. It`s a very intriguing novel. I`m reading Railhead by Philip Reeve. Very good, even if it`s a YA novel; I think.
I'm reading it too!!! I'm really enjoying it. 'even if it is a YA novel' makes it sound like it should be bad though
Sorry, I honestly didn`t mean it to sound that way. It`s just that a lot of them have appeared in the past few years and not so many have been really good. I`m really enjoying it. Also if you get the chance to read Patrick Ness`s Chaos Walking series, then you simply must, no question. I loved the first and have bought all three for Christmas.
I just finished reading a book called love & treason and it was terrible! Which is a shame cause it started out so good
Don`t they always. I`m also in the midst of a Don Winslow book, California Fire and Life, an early one of his, quite a lot of the use of "like", California style I guess, but pretty good.
- LOVE ORSON SCOTT CARD!! Does this book follow Bean? Or Ender/Peter reincarnate? I love this book! The way each character described one single event... it was brilliant!
I know you didn't ask me this, but: Speaker for the Dead is by far the best book in that series. In fact it's the only one I'd say I really enjoyed (I read the first three). As for me: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. It's good, but I wouldn't call it staggeringly genius or anything. I would say that the thing that really commends it is the plotting, which is extremely intricate but manages to come together at the end in a way that leaves you wondering just what happened--in a good way, if that makes any sense. Possibly unrelated, but Eco's "postscript" to the novel, in which he describes his writing process and thoughts on writing, is some of the best writing-about-writing I've seen anywhere. Maybe just because I share a lot of his opinions, which not everyone will, but it's a very clear and convincing exposition of a certain way of thinking about the writing process.
Thanks for the reply, I`ll try and check it out, if I ever get to the end of my stack of both virtual and physical books to read. I swear it never gets smaller.
Still digesting my last read. Can't really care about anything else right now. This mood will pass - latest when my new mailorder arrives
YES! The Ender's Shadow series is, by far, my favorite! It follows Bean - NOT ENDER - and Peter. Ender's adventures had him going into deep space. I did enjoy Speaker for the dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind - but it stops there - don't know which way Orson was going to take him. Still waiting on that
Reading "The Greening of America" by Charles Reich. I just can't keep a straight face sitting in the washroom every morning reading how far off we have strayed. America, what will you do next ? Hopefully you won't say "fuck it" with Trump in charge. And hopefully you will not say that we got nothing left to lose since our leaders sold most of what we so arrogantly called and built and believed was a new world on a young and hopeful basis that no longer makes sense. How will we ever explain to our children that there was such a thing as freedom.
I am currently reading "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins. its an old one but I found a free (and legal) PDF on-line. as far as fiction goes I am in need of a good read right now, the last book I read "Rabbit in Red" left me unsatisfied, wanting more then it could deliver.
I read Cities In Flight several years ago, and really liked it. Hope you will, too. Right now I'm immersed in Simon Scarrow's series about ancient Rome ...the Cato and Macro stories. While these have certain story flaws—mainly that the ongoing characters and plots follow a certain (sometimes predictible) pattern in every story—they are great fun to read. Scarrow really knows his stuff. I get bored with the intricate details of hand-to-hand combat, served over and over, so tend to skip some of these bits. But I do feel I'm learning a lot. Scarrow is the kind of historical fiction author who reveals, in the appendix that follows each book as well as the forewards, how his fiction fits in to the real historical situation in Rome, during the first century AD. It's a good window on how Rome won and held on to its empire for so long. Also how the seeds of its eventual downfall were sown. As expected, it's down to corruption at the core. This isn't high class literature, but as page-turners go, it's worthwhile and engaging reading.
Hey!.. finally, someone else has read the Destination Void books. Though Dune is my favorite book, the series went to Hell in a hand basket by the third book. Overall, I much preferred the Void books, The Lazarus Effect being my favorite. The Ascension Factor just got a little too weird at the end.
I read them back in the Devonian Era and recently found myself bookless, and I just settled on Destination Void from my digital library as some light bedtime reading. It's funny how the way one reads changes with time. I didn't really pick up or think about the Man creates God idea at the core of these books the first time through. Ship was just Ship. I didn't really make the connection that Ship is actually God. God God. The Abrahamic god. I think maybe the idea that once they had created Ship (God) and it was not tied to linear time, this meant it had always existed from our linear perspective was a little to meta for me at the time. Herbert found his stride again in God Emperor of Dune, book #4. I feel like Children of Dune and Dune Messiah were sort of his attempt at Kerouac's Desolation Angels, in a very broad sense. In D.A., Kerouac expounds his drifting away from Buddhist concepts with which he had been terribly fascinated for a time. Remember that Herbert and Kerouac are contemporaries and both of them were, for a time, swept up in the karma, dharma, jump on the Krishna wagon vogue that we typically associate with the 60's, but which has its roots much, much earlier. DUNE, as I am sure you will recall, is rife with motifs and story elements clearly taken directly from the Indian subcontinent and Middle East. GEoD seems - to me - to be a very different thing he was trying to say in the same universe, since he was already done and burned out on his prior well of inspiration. It seems to be much more about the West, expansionism, divine right, colonialism, dealing with your one-time colonies now that they are as big or bigger than you are, etc. The Destination Void books are less colored by Buddhist and Hindu motifs, but there's no missing the way he uses the idea that pretty much everything on Pandora is a facet of Avata, to include the humans who now have kelp genes, which reflects the Hindu idea that the pantheon of gods are merely facets of a greater all-thing called brahman, of which we too are a part.
Well now I have to read them darn it. (Adds another half dozen books to the pile.) I`m sure when I lie on my deathbed I will look back and rue the day I joined a writers forum.
By the way have any of you read anything by Neal Stephenson? Have been looking at his novels for a while but still not sure.
LOL!! I know ... it can be overwhelming. Try reading Ender's Shadow first... if you like the adventure, then continue on. If not, read Speaker for the Dead. Although, there is another book that followed Ender straight after the war... Ender in Exile. I have lukewarm feelings for that book. Did not enjoy it as much.
