Whats everyone reading?

[Professor Bear]

What makes it even more awful and dangerously forbidding is that Banks actually admires his monstrosity and considers it a model for future human development...

To date I have managed two Culture novels (one of which was Use Of Weapons - found it a bit dull), but they didn't really float my boat as there seems to be no real barriers to what can be achieved within the context of this society and there's no escaping the suspicion that any real challenge or struggle is for amusement either for the character doing the struggling or for their genteel taskmasters, and that might work once, maybe twice, but after that you need a new story.
Mind, I've only read two novels and that's hardly a basis for thinking I've got them all sussed, though I do recall some commentators pouring scorn on the idea that Banks wrote good female characters, most notably that he only wrote faux-action girls "in order to watch them squirm later", though I'm pretty sure this is basic drama writing for male and female characters both, otherwise you end up with a Mary Sue and likely little in the way of tension.

Finished Homefront: The Voice Of Freedom, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find it enjoyable on some level even though it is without a doubt one of the worst-written books I've ever come across, alongside that Terminator 2 movie adaptation and Shaun Hutson's Assassins.  It really is quite terrible, with the prose making Simspons-esque soundbites to the reader, such as when it's revealed that the Mississippi has been irradiated by the invading Koreans to create a natural (?) barrier between east and west (occupied) America and we're told "it was Old Man River no longer.  Now it was DEAD MAN RIVER."  I didn't expect much from a video game tie-in, but I did expect more from John Milius.  Still, there was something entertainingly bad about it all, like a Clive Cussler novel or something, though I was worried that even I was picking holes in much of the science, such as how radiation works, how tap water works, or how the Koreans crack the resistance's radio code in one chapter and the next chapter sees the resistance use exactly the same code to evade pursuit by the very same guy who cracked the code in the previous chapter, but damn it, this kind of stuff just made me like it more for the rough-edged pulp feel of it all.  It is not a good story, mind, and the dialogue is brutal, but all told I enjoyed it.

[Mikey]

What makes it even more awful and dangerously forbidding is that Banks actually admires his monstrosity and considers it a model for future human development...

I'm now well into Surface Detail by Iain M Banks and loving it. I'm an unashamed drooling Banks fanboy and this new novel is certainly doing the business so far. I really want to live in The Culture...

I'm with Bates Block! I think Surface Detail is actually now my favourite Banks and yes, I would also love to live in the Culture, the only construct or literary backdrop that I have ever said that about. I think the Culture set up allows, at times anyway, a more scrutinizing look at what 'people', be they Affront, Idirans, Humans or whatever are actually about. That and the tide of fun the books are, with big explosions and cool tech.

Oh! And I'm about to start reading 'The Third God' by Ricardo Pinto. Just catching up with a synopsis of the story so far now...it's been 8 years or so since I read the previous one!

M

[Robert Frazer]

To date I have managed two Culture novels (one of which was Use Of Weapons - found it a bit dull), but they didn't really float my boat as there seems to be no real barriers to what can be achieved within the context of this society and there's no escaping the suspicion that any real challenge or struggle is for amusement either for the character doing the struggling or for their genteel taskmasters, and that might work once, maybe twice, but after that you need a new story.

Yes, that's another issue I have with the Culture books - the sheer scale of the magical technow**k that pervades the setting kills any drama that the story might generate. Look to Windward was an appalling perpetrator in this regard - [spoiler]"The Minds will never read your thoughts!"; "Actually, we will. Sucks to be you, huh?"[/spoiler]. It may be said that the Culture books are about the social commentary more than thrills'n'spills, but you still have to trudge through all of the dreary novelising before you get to the next speech - I could get the same sentiments from a copy of New Statesman and it'd be cheaper and easier to carry around in my bag.

Banks can generate some imaginative and engagingly elaborate worldbuilding - I enjoyed Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist for this reason (although I notice he's starting to plagiarise himself, copying the sex-in-Morse-Code scene from The Crow Road into the newer book) - but his Culture books are desolate and uninspiring, sometimes even repellent.

[Mikey]

but his Culture books are desolate and uninspiring, sometimes even repellent.

Criminy! You really don't like 'em!

[Richmond Clements]

but his Culture books are desolate and uninspiring, sometimes even repellent.

Criminy! You really don't like 'em!

Heh. I's recommend not reading them in that case.

See, to me, the Culture as Banks portrays it, is a contradictory place, while it does have many cool elements, he is not afraid of pointing out that they are utter bastards most of the time.

And on a related note - I have just this very morning finished reading Surface Detail. It was, I have to admit, a bit of a slog at times, but when it hit the last hundred pages and everything, even most of the stuff that seemed like padding (although not all of it) started to come together, it really picked up.
And to be honest, I would have waded through another couple of hundred pages for that last line!

[Roger Godpleton]

Love and Rockets New Stories 4.

I don't know if this is the last Maggie story, but it's an astonishing ending. Read it now.

[Professor Bear]

The Tesseract by Alex Garland, in which several lives intertwine during one night in Manila, the story jumping backwards and forwards in non-linear fashion to show how everything is connected Degrees of Kevin Bacon style.  A bit lightweight and I could have done with more from some of the minor characters, but it was an enjoyable enough read even if I couldn't quite wrap my head around the locale beyond that it's supposed to be a bit warm and there's a lot of poor people knocking about.  Some threads - the psychologist - don't really contribute much beyond being related by some minor quirk to the other stories (file under Themes) and inform the title of the book, but perhaps I just didn't find him that interesting even with the stuff about Filipino psychology and western psychology being different by dint of culture being something I could have read more about quite happily.

The Quantum Prophecy by Michael Carrol, which I re-read in order to get get stuck into the rest of the series.  The story concerns the ten year anniversary of the disappearance of the world's superhuman population as their offspring start to develop powers of their own and square off against the usual conspiracy.  It's a younger readers book, but it handles action a lot better than 'mature' novels and brings a cinematic feel to action scenes that I didn't realise had gone missing from comic books to a great extent in the last decade or so.  I was a bit confused where it was supposed to be set in the early chapters (England somewhere), but apart from that, it's a good page turner.

The Finder Library Vol. 1 centers around a seemingly immortal cast and the lives eked out in the ruins of a civilisation they no longer fully understand but seem to be perpetuating nonetheless.  I'd never heard of this despite it being a long-running US sci-fi comic book and while it seems very European in sensibility the art avoids the ligne claire school in favor of a rough manga style that comes off as inconsistent and occasionally rough in places, but it does the job.  Seems decent enough so far, but there's a heck of a chunk of it to get through.

[Zarjazzer]

Just starting Salvations Reach by Dan Abnett. More Gaunt's Ghosts.

[SmallBlueThing]

Cant believe nobody's commented on Roger being back, as evidenced above! Yay!

Anyway, currently reading 'Red Mars' by Kim Stanley Robinson- which is a massive, very detailed doorstop of a novel, and the first part of a trilogy that together could easily kill you if it landed on your head unexpectedly.

For all that, it's begun in a truly magnificent way. The first two hundred and fifty pages packed with incident and science as mankind slowly crawls across Mars, beginning to make inroads into terraforming. The main character so far, a dumpy russian engineer called nadia, grows in your affections to the point where when she finally finds a spot of happiness in a stricken dirigible while trying to drop windmills onto the martian surface, i had a little tear in my eye and whispered a quiet 'you go girl'.

After a long run of books that were a struggle to get through, and several that just plain beat me, this is proving to be one of those rare novels that i'd happily live in. That ive got nearly 2000 pages to go til i finish the story makes me ridiculously happy.

SBT

[Ignatzmonster]

Love and Rockets New Stories 4.

I don't know if this is the last Maggie story, but it's an astonishing ending. Read it now.

Never miss it. How'd Beto do? I'm a big fan of his, and unlike many I've been enjoying his B-Movie phase, but his output in the New L&R hasn't always been his best stuff.

The Finder Library Vol. 1 centers around a seemingly immortal cast and the lives eked out in the ruins of a civilisation they no longer fully understand but seem to be perpetuating nonetheless.  I'd never heard of this despite it being a long-running US sci-fi comic book and while it seems very European in sensibility the art avoids the ligne claire school in favor of a rough manga style that comes off as inconsistent and occasionally rough in places, but it does the job.  Seems decent enough so far, but there's a heck of a chunk of it to get through.

I really enjoyed this. It seemed less manga influenced to me, as much as black and white independants from the late eighties and early nineties. Something about her faces reminds me of Evan Dorkin in his Pirate Corps days. I do like the way she draws people, they seem to have real substance. I say keep going, you don't want to miss the last chapter.

[I, Cosh]

Anyway, currently reading 'Red Mars' by Kim Stanley Robinson
...
After a long run of books that were a struggle to get through, and several that just plain beat me, this is proving to be one of those rare novels that i'd happily live in. That ive got nearly 2000 pages to go til i finish the story makes me ridiculously happy.

All three are good (and the way he gets away with having a lot of the same characters throughout is pretty neat) but the first is far and away the best. If you're still in the mood once you've worked your way through the lot, Antarctica is a pretty good prequel of sorts (in that I think they mention Antarctic training in Red Mars so it's clearly spun out of the same thread, but it doesn't use the same characters.)

[mogzilla]

Cant believe nobody's commented on Roger being back, as evidenced above! Yay!

Anyway, currently reading 'Red Mars' by Kim Stanley Robinson- which is a massive, very detailed doorstop of a novel, and the first part of a trilogy that together could easily kill you if it landed on your head unexpectedly.

For all that, it's begun in a truly magnificent way. The first two hundred and fifty pages packed with incident and science as mankind slowly crawls across Mars, beginning to make inroads into terraforming. The main character so far, a dumpy russian engineer called nadia, grows in your affections to the point where when she finally finds a spot of happiness in a stricken dirigible while trying to drop windmills onto the martian surface, i had a little tear in my eye and whispered a quiet 'you go girl'.

After a long run of books that were a struggle to get through, and several that just plain beat me, this is proving to be one of those rare novels that i'd happily live in. That ive got nearly 2000 pages to go til i finish the story makes me ridiculously happy.

SBT

rogers back! yay indeedy!!! welcome back rog

[SmallBlueThing]

Cosh: cheers for that, i had no idea. Will look that out if and when i get to the end of the trilogy (at this rate, due to distractions such as my wife SETTING FIRE TO THE CARPET TONIGHT, about next august.)

SBT

[radiator]

Just finished listening to the audiobook of I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan - the autobiography of Alan Partridge.

Predictably it's a bit patchy, with some truly hilarious stuff mixed in with a fair bit of padding. Interesting how it smoothes out the 'continuity' of Partridge, filling in the bits between all of his various roles and TV appearances.

Worth a listen/read, but I'd say it's for devotees only.

Bit of a guilty pleasure this one - the Space Marine videogame momentarily rekindled my interest in Warhammer 40,000, so I loaded up my iPhone with the first few Horus Heresy novels to read while on a recent holiday to indulge in a bit of nostalgia.

Of the ones I've read, the first, Horus Rising by Dan Abnett was by far the strongest. The two subsequent books were OK, but my interest started to tail off towards the end of the third. I'm now reading the fourth and can feel my interest really flagging. It's all very repetitive - battle, exposition, battle, exposition etc etc - and the characters - asexual, superhuman clones who live only to fight - all kind of blur into one after a while, to the extent that I'm starting to forget who's who. Abnett cleverly got round this by building a solid supporting cast of poets, academics and war reporters, and showed us the conflict through their eyes which made for a much more engaging read.

I might just skip straight to the rest of his entries in the series.

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Cosh: cheers for that, i had no idea. Will look that out if and when i get to the end of the trilogy (at this rate, due to distractions such as my wife SETTING FIRE TO THE CARPET TONIGHT, about next august.)

SBT

Them friction burns can be a killer.

Oh, and I just started Surface Detail yesterday. Read 90 pages on a flight to/from Stanstead. Which is good going for me as I find it hard to read on a plane. So colour me enjoying it.