Matter (Ian M Banks)
Sci-fi, 7/10 – Jul/08-Mar/09 This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with [...]
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein)
Sci-Fi, 8/10 – April 2009 [asa tomButton]0450002314[/asa] The story follows the revolution of a Lunar penal colony against earth for political freedom. The people of the moon don’t have any conventional weapons but it is “uphill” of earth (in terms of gravity) which means it can throw rocks down apon earth with a near-nuclear impact. [...]
Accidental Goddess (Linnea Sinclair)
Romantic Si-Fi, 5/10 – July 2008 Quite a ridiculous book, my first (and hopefully last) romantic si-fi. Even if the story wasn’t great I still find futuristic things interesting because they make me dream. For example, her ship, SIMON (Sentient Integrated MObile Nanoessence) is like a futuristic brain embedded Google. This kind of book is [...]
Look to Windward (Ian M Banks)
Sci-fi, 6/10 – June 2006 The Culture usually sounds like such a wonderful utopian place, but this book makes some good arguments that make the Culture out to be far more tarnished and corrupt than I have previously seen, one of them from a Hub mind itself. I found myself not being sure who I [...]
Inversions (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 2/10 – Spring 2004 Besides extra moons in the sky and stories of devastating meteor showers that toppled a former Empire, this novel’s squalid, pre-industrial world seems to have no sci-fi elements. I was constantly anticipating something cool to happen but it never did, or it did but was really really disappointing. I would [...]
Use Of Weapons (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 4/10 – September 2003 A culture novel with a few good bits but otherwise a weird story cut into incoherent ribbons that kept skipping here and there just as the boring part of the latest skip was coming to an end. The main character is a depressing guy called Cheradenine Zakalwe, with many dark [...]
The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
Sci-Fi, 9/10 – July 2003 This book is the second in the series of Banks’ Culture novels, set in a futuristic human/machine symbiotic society. Player of Games submerges itself in the society of the Game Players, those whose soul occupation is to play games to the best of their abilities, formulating new strategies, quite akin [...]
