Tag Archives: sf
Book Review – Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
Surface Detail
I recently finished Surface Detail, a Culture novel from Iain M. Banks – entertaining but not up to his usual high standards.
The overall plot concept had great potential, but I think it suffered poor implementation and editing – in particular it has a couple of seemingly important characters who weren’t really explored in any detail and were mostly irrelevant to the story. Banks also did a bit of a Gemmell – wrapping everything up in the last 5 pages. The anti-hero felt bland and a bit stereotypical of the villains in Culture novels (e.g. Matter, The Player of Games).
The positive was (more…)
Calling SF/Fantasy Fans
Tor are running a poll to find the best SFF books of the decade 2000-2010*. To vote, list your favourite books of the decade in a comments section on this post, before 11:59 PM EST on Friday, January.
The comments are also worth a look if you’re searching for inspiration on what to read next!
*kinda like a trilogy with four parts.
New reading materials (sf and f)
I was just complaining on Twitter that I’m all out of Charlie Stross and I need some new scifi to read. I am a pretty avid scifi reader (to say the least: it’s like crack cocaine to me).
Ross, Janet and Joanna had some great suggestions and we had a good chat about various options. This blog post is mainly a Note to Self for me on what they suggested so I can fill up my shopping cart next time I’m book shopping.
Here’s suggestions of stuff (that I haven’t read only) so far:
- Cowl by Neal Asher
- Grass by Sherri S Tepper
- Simon R Green (both fantasy and scifi were good esp Deathstalker and Hawk & Fisher)
- The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas (some comments on that: “most perplexing book I have read in a while” and “@JoannaSchaff oh dear Jo that’s just cruel, I know it’s Alister but still, actually given that it is him it’s worse” – hmmmmmm
Ok, give me more.