This week's reading

[andrewducker]

Just finished the new Iain M Banks (Surface Detail), which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'd been worrying about it a bit, as I've given up on the mainstream Iain Banks novels a while back, but it hung together incredibly well, and I found the book incredibly hard to put down. Recommended (although I'm not sure how well someone who hasn't read some of the previous Culture novels would get on with it.)

Now I've started The Quantum Thief, which was recommended by a couple of people who got advance reading copies. Only about 10 pages in so far, but it's ticking all the right buttons (the opening scenes are set within a virtual prison based around The Prisoner's Dilemma). Oh, and the back cover has a recommendation by someone called "Charles Stross", who also seemed to like it.

Comments

[soon_lee]

This may be of interest: it's A few notes on the Culture by Banks which provides background to the universe (easily serves as source material for a RPG). It's non-spoiler except for a couple of oblique references to something pertaining to "Consider Phelbas".

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this link, and, ugh, on reading it, it makes me wonder why bother. I liked the parallel worlds concept he was doing in Transition, so perhaps i can stomach the harder sci-fi of the Culture to get through to to speculative concepts he's working with.

[andrewducker]

If you don't like SciFi then I suspect you won't like it. I love it to bits, but if SF bounces you then I can't see you getting past it.