Book Recommendations

[Oatik]

I liked both The Martian and Seveneves.

I was just talking to someone at work about The Passage and think I'll reread it on vacation.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/6690798-the-passage

[Morreion]

Glad you liked Vance, Laethaka!


Some more sci-fi books:


Dune by Frank Herbert- a total classic

The Known Space series by Larry Niven

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle


Blindsight by Peter Watts (available here for free)

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

[Oatik]

I just finished reading Ready Player One...if are of a certain age and the 80s were your decade then it's a lot of fun to read.

www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-A-Novel/dp/0307887448

"Ready Player One expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.

The story is set in a near-term future in which the new, new form of the Internet is a realistic virtual multi-verse called the OASIS. Most human interaction takes place via goggles and gloves in millions of unique worlds, including the boring (and free) “public education” world from which our teenage protagonist must escape."

[Laethaka]

I'm reading The Last Kiss, the Polish 90's book that the Witcher games spun off from. And I'm on hour 119 of Witcher 3. I'm starting to dream as Geralt...

[Oatik]

I read Blindsight and really like it...a while later I read the follow up Echopraxia...I should have read this review first, it sums up most of my feelings.

This is a terrible book. A book should tell a story. This one does not. It leaves the reader confused and feeling like they wasted a bunch of their time. Better than staring at the back of a seat on an airplane, but not by much. Blindsight was wonderful - it was eye opening, had well-developed characters and forced you to question damn near everything about yourself. It manages to turn topics like sentience and evolution right on their head. Blindsight is fantastic, and it is free! Echopraxia - arguably a sequel to Blindsight, does nothing well and feels half-baked in order to make a buck or ten. For an author whose brilliance and intelligence is obvious, this is a poor showing. I was continually re-reading sentences and scenes trying to understand "what the hell just happened?" At the end of the book - I understood very little of what happened or why.