I just finished reading Linda Nagata's new book, Silver, which is the second book of her new Inverted Frontier series. It's a sequel to the first book, Edges, which I recommended earlier this year, and Memory, which I described and recommended a few weeks ago. Characters from both books feature heavily in the new story. … Continue reading Recommendation: Silver (Inverted Frontier Book 2)
Tag: Space opera
Recommendation: Altered Carbon: Download Blues
I posted a while back on the Netflix series, Altered Carbon, based on the books by Richard K. Morgan. The series presents a universe where everyone has a device implanted in their brainstem shortly after birth that records their personality, so that if they die, the device can be moved to either another human body, … Continue reading Recommendation: Altered Carbon: Download Blues
Recommendation: The Warship
Back in January, I recommended Neal Asher's The Soldier, the first book of a series called The Rise of the Jain. The series takes place in Asher's Polity universe, a future interstellar civilization run by AIs (artificial intelligence) and featuring androids, various degrees of posthuman citizens, and lots of aliens, both in AI and organic … Continue reading Recommendation: The Warship
Recommendation: Children of Ruin
Last year I recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, a novel about the far future involving a struggle between an interstellar ark of refugees from a dying Earth and an accidental civilization of uplifted spiders over the one terraformed world known to be available. Children of Ruin is a sequel, although a substantial portion of … Continue reading Recommendation: Children of Ruin
Recommendation: The Nanotech Succession
Okay, having already recommended two of Linda Nagata's books, Vast and Edges, I finally got around to reading the first and second book of her Nanotech Succession series. (I haven't read the "zeroeth" book so this recommendation doesn't include it.) The first book, The Bohr Maker, takes place a few centuries in the future on … Continue reading Recommendation: The Nanotech Succession
Recommendation: Edges (Inverted Frontier Book 1)
A few weeks ago I recommended Linda Nagata's novel, Vast, the final book of her Nanotech Succession series. Edges is both a sequel to that book, and the first episode in a new series, Inverted Frontier. As in Vast, this is a future where mind uploading and copying is possible, where multiple copies of someone's … Continue reading Recommendation: Edges (Inverted Frontier Book 1)
Recommendation: Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse Book 8)
Tiamat's Wrath is the eighth book of The Expanse series. This is definitely a series you want to read in order, so if you're just starting, I'd recommend beginning with the first book, Leviathan Wakes. This is the penultimate book of the series, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that things are seriously heating up. We … Continue reading Recommendation: Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse Book 8)
Recommendation: Vast
I have a bad habit of buying ebooks and then letting them sit in my Kindle account unread, sometimes for years. I'm sorry to say that the book that was in this state the longest was Linda Nagata's Vast. I picked it up back in 2011 based on Alastair Reynold's glowing recommendation. However, when I … Continue reading Recommendation: Vast
Recommendation: Prador Moon
I've recommended Neal Asher's books before. This one is pretty much cut from the same pattern: superhuman AIs, fearsome aliens, exotic future technologies, and epic space battles covered in detail. In terms of the chronology of his Polity future universe, Prador Moon is the earliest story, although it was written after several other books and … Continue reading Recommendation: Prador Moon
Why faster than light travel is inevitably also time travel
I've always loved space opera, but when I was growing up, as I learned more about science, I discovered that a lot of the tropes in space opera are problematic. Space operas, to tell adventure stories among the stars, often have to make compromises. One of the earliest and most pervasive is FTL (faster than … Continue reading Why faster than light travel is inevitably also time travel
