Recently Read...

[SM]

Aliens/ Predator - Deadliest of the Species: Re-reading this, it actually has a decent enough premise (Total Recall-ish mind fuckery) and is okay enough until we get to Deep Space Station Samara about half way through the 12 issue run.  After that it's utterly dumb.  Dumb plotting, dumber dialogue, an almost complete lack of Aliens, women with unfeasibly large bosoms, amateurish homages, endless dream/ virtual sequences, Caryn/ Ash constantly asking herself 'How do I know that?' several times every issue and general overall WTF-ness.

I've read some of Claremont's X-Men stuff which while not bad wasn't anything exceptional either.

Why is this guy so revered?

[deezelboy]

I can no longer remember what caused it, but something piqued my interest to reread John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century recently, and I found out it was part of a series - four novels, all stand-alone, but all featuring the same gruesome 21st Century future-history.

So I read the first one Barnes wrote, Orbital Resonance, and was a bit surprised to find that it was fairly Young Adult orientated (Kaleidoscope Century's about as far removed from that readership as its possible to get).

It's a coming-of-age story, both for the 13 year old hot-housed protagonist and the society she's part of, trying to make its home in the Flying Dutchman, a carved out asteroid cycling between Earth and Mars as part of a terraforming project. There's some nice stuff here - it's (perhaps - YMMV) a dystopian society but the protagonist, who knows no other, doesn't notice and, when she does understand that she and her friends have been manipulated from birth, isn't that concerned about the implications.

[NERMAL]

Up to the fourth book of The Song of Ice and Fire. I can not remember ever feeling so morose or melancholy as a result of what I'm reading. "Oh, God. They didn't..." I'm...just bummed out. Still only a third of the way through, and another two books waiting to get up to date. Hope Martin does not kick the bucket before finishing this series...

[SM]

Aliens Genocide - Dave Bischoff : This book only really improves on the comic by giving Daniel Grant more motivation to actually go to the Alien homeworld by having him being chased by loan sharks.  in the comic he just goes on an extremely dangerous mission because he feels like it.

But in every other respect, it's inferior to the comic.  Most of the dialogue is awful, making most of the characters come across as lame.  And you're a good 2/3 of the way into the book before they actually land on the planet.  Plus Bischoff used "damned" so much, that it gets laughable.

And he didn't manage to address the silliness (from the comic) of Grant beating up Henriksen, nor how a facehugger could implant a cloned torso - that has no head.

[deezelboy]

Ovipositor straight down the trachea! 

[Nev]

Purge, a Finnish novel about the "cleansings" Russians used to do in Estonia. The writer is a hypocrit and a rabid leftist-extremist cunt, but she's the kind I can actually tolerate; one who realizes how fucked up communism was and still is. There wasn't that big a difference between the nazis and the commies, and she makes it very clear.

My animosity towards the writer's personality aside, the book is quite well-written and gripping, and the characters are interesting enough. I'm just gonna go ahead and give it 5/5, it actually is an excellent book even without the political stuff.

[SM]

Ovipositor straight down the trachea! 

That seemed to be all sealed up.

Leaving only one other obvious candidate...

[deezelboy]

BUM HUGGERS!!!

[deezelboy]

John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century, which is an evil trick to pull off after the YA Orbital Resonance, being that this is one of the nastiest, most amoral SF novels I've read. 1984 may have had as its vision of the future 'a boot stamping on a human face - forever', but the protagonist of  Kaleidoscope Century stamps on that face for kicks throughout the whole of the 21st Century - forever.

Which is not to say that its rather good. Quare, our protagonist, wakes up on Mars in the early 22nd Century, and tries to piece the fragmented and conflicting memories of his long, extended life together. What follows is his story, often unreliable, through a 21st Century riven by plagues and wars and ecological catastrophe, culminating in a war between AIs that makes Judgement Day in The Terminator look overly optimistic.

Equally impressive is Barnes reluctance - although there are good reasons for this at the end of the novel - not to deviate from the future history he set up in Orbital Resonance. So even at the time of writing (which, I think, would have been 1994) it was an alternate present, George Bush Snr not winning a second time and AIDS not mutating into an airborne pathogen.

[deezelboy]

John Barnes' Candle, being the third in his Century Next Door sequence. At the latter end of the 21st Century the inhabitants of Earth and it's orbital environs are all integrated into a single AI, a similar situation presenting itself in Michael Swanwick's earlier Vacumm Flowers and Stations of the Tide novels.

Our protagonist is brought out of retirement to hunt down the last of the 'free' humans - that is, someone who hasn't been assimilated into the AI. But the plot's a series of reversals: initially assimilation doesn't seem that bad, might even be far more preferential to 'default' normal human life; then its shown to be extremely manipulative; then the alternative seems just as bad, perhaps even worse. And so forth, leading to a definition of the problem and a solution not dissimilar to Barnes' first novel in the sequence, Orbital Resonance.

[deezelboy]

Charles Willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy. A (possibly sociopathic) art critic is given the chance to interview a notoriously reclusive artist, a man so secretive that he has rarely even displayed any pieces of art, much less sold them. In return, the critic must steal a piece for a collector. Willeford attacks both modern art and art criticism in what turns out to be a glorious and tight piece of misdirection.

Still impressed by the line 'a woman is a woman, but 2,500 words is an article'!

[deezelboy]

Peter Watts' Crysis: Legion, mostly out of impatience for Watts' follow-up to his excellent Blindsight.

I haven't played Crysis 2, but this is the novelisation. Watts' prose, insight and humour make it worthwhile, but it can't escape the plot being little more than a series of waypoints.

[adinojones]

The Alchemist.....really intrigue...!!

[dude]

Ready Player One by Ernest Kline

Smashed this on a 9 hour flight. Bear in mind I read slower than my grandmother can sprint and I utterly killed it. It's the book of our generation. If you where a child of the 80's like me, there's something for you here. I absolutely loved it.

This book does something that few social commentaries accomplish, embraces how the internet has evolved society. Now we can indulge in whatever idiosyncratic obscure pop culture entertainment we want. And it's awesome, we should be indulging our creative sides with the wierdest shit.

Completely recommended.

[Company Man]

The only thing I smash on a flight is mini's.