SF Novelists, who floats your boat?

[El Spurioso]

Reading 'Against a Dark Background' felt like an enormous con..  You spend however many hours trawling through loads of fun ideas and twisty turny plot points then it just suddenly finishes.  Call me old-fashioned but I like a couple of pages of fallout following the climax.

'The State of the Art' is a fun collection of Iain M. Banks short stories.  I'm still to read 'Feersum Enjin' (or whatever it's called), but it doesn't look that good from the cover blurb.  Haven't checked-out any of Banks' non-scifi stuff.  Any good?

One thing I *really* hate about a load of fantasy/sci fi writers these days is that they can't bring themselves to write a single good book, without turning it into a big fuckoff saga of x-number volumes.  Classic situation:  you go out and impulse-buy a book which turns out to be vaguely interesting, get to the last chapter excitedly wondering how all these plot-strands are gonna be tied-up in three pages, only to be presented with the inevitable "This story continues in book two of the Bollockium Saga, availiable from Gotchasucka Press in 2005".  Nnnnnrrrr!

[Slippery PD]

IMHO I think "Complicity" is his best book and its almost a straight murder mystery, well for Banks anyways.  Well thats my recomendation.  But any of them are good, some like the bridge are almost sci-fi/fantasy.  Im sure someone will disagree :-))))  
 

[Art]

Avoid the dodgy film version at all costs. The TV version of "The Crow Road" was pretty fun though.

[Slippery PD]

Didnt think it would make a good film. All those first person perspectives.  Just wouldnt work.  Agree on the Crow Road and it got Dougray Scott a part in MI2.