Rating: 3/5 Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art (London: Orbit, 1991). Well this book is more of a novella. It’s grouped with a number of short stories, not of all of which take place in the Culture universe. They do sort of belong together, though. The main story “The State of the Art” is a recounting of the Culture’s...
Rating: 4/5 Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Doubleday, 2011 [1977]). I studied Philip K. Dick’s (PDK) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner) in a college English class and just loved it. I went out and read a bunch of PKD’s short stories. I had heard the title A...
Rating: 4/5 Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (London: Orbit, 1992). Well this was a huge step up from Player of Games . The characters in this book are very well defined and engaging, the action is visceral, and the whole story just keeps you reading. The structure is challenging and requires careful attention while...
Rating: 1/5 Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice, The author’s preferred edition (New York: Bantam, 2004). This book was profoundly disappointing. I finished it simply because I had started it, and I will not be reading the second installment, Magician: Master. To be fair, this was Feist’s first foray into novel...
Rating: 3/5 Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Orbit, 1988). This is the first of what Banks calls his “Culture Novels.” These consist of standalone novels set in the same essential milieu. The centre of this setting is the society known as the Culture: advanced humans with highly advanced sentient machines and...
Rating: 2/5 Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (London: Orbit, 1989). Being a gamer myself, I had high hopes for this book. I was a little disappointed. It was pretty good overall, but the specific game aspects were highly romanticized and frustratingly non-specific. I did find his views on randomness in games...
Rating: 4/5 The Death Gate Cycle is a series of seven books. I remember starting it years ago and never finishing. I picked it up again in the new year and yesterday finished the last book. The story is fundamentally about fear—about different manifestations of and reactions to it. It was an enjoyable read with some...
Rating: 5/5 Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (New York: DAW, 2008). I have a general rule that forbids me from starting a series of books that’s not already finished. It can take years for a sequel to make it through production, and by that time I’ve read so many other books that I basically have to start over...
Rating: 5/5 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (New York: Avon, 2011). Originally published in 1950, The Martian Chronicles is another of those classics that I have known about but never taken the time to read. This is a true piece of literary art—poetry. The core story is of the colonization of Mars. It doesn’t...
Rating: 3/5 Larry Niven, Ringworld (New York: Del Rey, 1985). Before starting the second leg of our trip, I looked up some lists of top sci-fi and fantasy books and picked a few up. Ringworld was the first I finished. It’s a story about an alien race called puppeteers and how they discovered an artifact they call the...