Friday, February 04, 2011

sf from cons - reply to tweet message

@pargery I'm so far behind in sci-fi. What do you recommend?

I’ve been too caught up in my own stuff to read a lot, but I guess Charles Stross is the current Gibson/Sterling heir. His Halting State is a mystery about stolen virtual money that I would like to take out of the library again to finish.  He was an engaging and amusing speaker at Readercon panels.

I did finish The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson whose main character’s hot flashes were paranormal events.  Somehow I found it a more compelling narrative.  She was also very sweet in person (at a Readercon “kaffeeklatch”.)

People do mention Scalzi. I read the first two of his books. There's an interesting alien race that seems to have war-making as a religion, not like Klingon-honor-code, but like, they want to spread the gospel of Really Bad War of the total annihilation variety. I'm curious if he develops them more in later novels. I enjoyed his blog post about borrowing an Oscar.

I read Elaine Isaak's trilogy because I kept seeing her at conventions, and she lives one town over from me. They're fantasy of the kings and pseudo-middle-ages variety, not sf. For some reason she denied her work was a trilogy, but when I read it out of order, the story really suffered. It was otherwise likable and sufficiently new.

And I keep seeing Jennifer Pelland too. I liked the story I heard at her reading a few years back.

No comments:

Post a Comment