So, what's good to read in SF lately?
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniI just had the occasion to review my wish list over on Amazon.com and notice something...peculiar. Excluding non-fiction, my book list is exclusively fantasy -- no, I'm wrong. Surely Palimpsest is science fiction. So, the Overwhelming Majority of my fictional wants is fantasy.
I can't help but think that there's something wrong with this. Back before I uttered the Fateful Phrase, "I can do better than this!" and so embarked upon my career as a writer, I was pretty much reading science fiction, having gotten there via a crooked path through mystery, classics, romance, and general literature. Granted, because I'm a natural mimic, I tend to stay away from reading SF when I'm writing SF, but I'm not even buying SF anymore (another exception -- the new Bren Cameron novel hit the mailbox this week). I have here in my TBR pile:
New Amsterdam, E. Bear (fantasy)
The Last Days of the Incas, K. MacQuarrie (non-fiction)
Nine Years Among the Indians, H. Lehmann (autobiography)
A Song in Stone, W. Hunt (fantasy)
The Animal Dialogues, C. Childs (non-fiction)
Thirteenth Child, P. Wrede (fantasy)
Conspirator, CJ Cherryh (sf)
The Source of the Nile, R. Burton (non-fiction)
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru,Till, Warkentyne, Patt (non-fiction)
...and I'm currently reading Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by G. Wood (which by the way is fascinating) -- nonfiction.
I remember hitting a thick patch with SF a couple of years back, where I was reading books that people whose taste I trusted raved about -- and finding them (choose all that apply): (1) dull (2) incomprehensible (3) Inflated with a sense of their own Importance (4) lack sympathetic characters -- and I guess I found that my itch for exciting! character driven! stories! got scratched better elsewhere. But, surely, there's SF that's worth reading out there. Right?
What're you reading that's good in SF? And! Special Bonus Question: What makes it good?
edited to fix spelling
I can't help but think that there's something wrong with this. Back before I uttered the Fateful Phrase, "I can do better than this!" and so embarked upon my career as a writer, I was pretty much reading science fiction, having gotten there via a crooked path through mystery, classics, romance, and general literature. Granted, because I'm a natural mimic, I tend to stay away from reading SF when I'm writing SF, but I'm not even buying SF anymore (another exception -- the new Bren Cameron novel hit the mailbox this week). I have here in my TBR pile:
New Amsterdam, E. Bear (fantasy)
The Last Days of the Incas, K. MacQuarrie (non-fiction)
Nine Years Among the Indians, H. Lehmann (autobiography)
A Song in Stone, W. Hunt (fantasy)
The Animal Dialogues, C. Childs (non-fiction)
Thirteenth Child, P. Wrede (fantasy)
Conspirator, CJ Cherryh (sf)
The Source of the Nile, R. Burton (non-fiction)
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru,Till, Warkentyne, Patt (non-fiction)
...and I'm currently reading Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by G. Wood (which by the way is fascinating) -- nonfiction.
I remember hitting a thick patch with SF a couple of years back, where I was reading books that people whose taste I trusted raved about -- and finding them (choose all that apply): (1) dull (2) incomprehensible (3) Inflated with a sense of their own Importance (4) lack sympathetic characters -- and I guess I found that my itch for exciting! character driven! stories! got scratched better elsewhere. But, surely, there's SF that's worth reading out there. Right?
What're you reading that's good in SF? And! Special Bonus Question: What makes it good?
edited to fix spelling
Recent SF I have read
Date: 2009-05-02 06:33 pm (UTC)Re: Recent SF I have read
Date: 2009-05-02 09:08 pm (UTC)Re: Recent SF I have read
Date: 2009-05-05 05:54 am (UTC)There are some major snarks in the book--at one point I disgraced myself snorting aloud in front of strangers as I was reading--when I came across the name Interstellar Master Traders, I couldn't help myself.... (I'm fairly certain it was In the Stormy Red Sky that I read that concatenation of three words....
The people in the books and the series have, um, idiosyncracies, that's it, idiosyncracies! They are not perfect, they are far from perfect, and some are very much more far from perfect than others--some of them have extremely severe character flaws. In some cases they are aware they have them and compensate by looking to other people who have some degree of better judgment, or at least, better socialization. In other cousins, their vices are their virtues and vice versa!