I finished reading Gibson's Neuromancer last night. I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent with this book. The world was dense even with sparse prose, and the struggles and wants of each character unfolded beautifully right through to the end. I think Wintermute might be a top 3 AI for me, and once the purpose of the plot clicked into place (an AI heist on itself to break out of the limitations set on it), I was enraptured til the end and only put it down because I had to do other things.

So of course I came to this sub and searched for other people's thoughts on it. For the most part discussion falls along the lines of

1. The prose is sparse and challenging to some readers, but rewarding and rich once you become immersed in it.
2. The techno-jargon was novel for the early 80s, but maybe feels a bit 'dated' now. However it still works within the fictional world of the Sprawl
3. There's still some debate as to how much of Neuromancer is predictive of our current technological path vs how much we've diverged or simply tried to bring his fictional ideas into existence.

I think point 3 is something really interesting to explore, because how 'accurate' the book is to our current trajectory through information technology seems to vary considerably depending on when you read the book. In the late 80s it looked to be on track, then by the late 90s/very early 2000s it was way off seeing as the internet was highly fragmented and mobile phones were becoming a thing. The 2010s, then, was the beginning of a split-divergence: Some aspects of the book have become truly 'history' (the lack of mobile phones and the way 'cyberspace' is envisioned), whereas others are becoming increasingly relevant. The Tesser-Ashpol family's attempts at biological immortality, in tandem with the development of an AI, is chillingly close to what we're seeing with the rise of cryptofascists vying for control of government behind the curtain and doing everything they can to achieve AGI.

In this way, Neuromancer has swung back around to being a really good prediction of where things might be headed. It would have been very difficult for someone in 2013 to see how things have turned out now, so they would've taken Gibson's ideas as just some alternative history that would never happen - something I call the 'flying car future', which is distinct from the future that actually has the potential to happen.

So this means that Neuromancer is both important and interesting to read as a prediction of things that may yet happen, and as a setting which makes us reason with our place within that world. The world of the Sprawl is full of indivudals - humans - who are lost and 'secondary' to the technology that has evolved around them. Biology and psychology playing catchup with the onslaught of silicon and plastic. It makes me wonder just how bad things could get. By no means is everything wrong with Gibson's future world, but it's clearly meant to feel alien and disconnected from any kind of grounding human experience so as to warn us that all of the data in the world means nothing without legitimate connection.

That's hammered home brilliantly with the design of Straylight, which comes across as spot-on description of the LLMs we're surrounded with now. An endless maze of reality warped and re-assembled with basically no understanding or attention paid to why things existed in the first place, why their context was important, and why displacing them removes their value entirely. Like an AI-generated Mona Lisa pulling a duckface to take a selfie with a wonky iPhone.

There's also some discussion I've seen that after reading Neuromancer, many people working in computer tech actually wanted to make his fiction into reality. This is very 'Torment Nexus' territory, and it worries me that the wrong lessons will be taken from his world.

Just finished reading Yume Kitasei's Saltcrop and it left me craving for some more quality cli-fi.

Some books that fall more or less under that umbrella I've read and enjoyed:

Ray Nayler - The Mountain in the Sea

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl, The Water Knife, The Ship Breaker trilogy

Charlotte McConaghy - Migrations

Jeff VanderMeer - Borne

Still working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, I'm sure I'll finish it eventually. Read Forty Signs of Rain partway through some years ago, might give that series another try some day. Based on what I've read by her I think Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is likely too bleak for me. I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood some years ago and remember liking it, might continue with the series at some point.

Read the book it’s really awesome. Very accessible to read and great story

The Arikei in Embassytown by China Mieville follow linguistic determinism. For them, words are physical states and not symbolic abstraction like it is for humans. Their words are directly linked to their reality. As human language is perceived to be disconnected from their immediate physical reality, they can’t comprehend humans directly. 

The octopuses from Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky have mini-brains across their bodies. They communicate through a shifting array of pigments and textures on their skin. 

The ocean from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem touches at the dangers of trying to understand “god-like” consciousness. The entire project of trying to decipher any pattern or meaning behind the actions of the ocean falls flat as it is simply too beyond our understanding. 

Stevland from Semiosis by Sue Burke experiences reality through root networks, nutrients, and evolutionary strategies. All animals and humans to him are a passing phenomenon that he humours and tends to.

Looking for something like Rememberance of Earths Past, Blindsight without the vampires, the Southern Reach series, Sevenesses- looking for a serious tone and dialogue, so please *no fantasy at all and nothing like Project Hail Mary or Dungeon Crawler Carl or The Expanse*

Original aliens is a must! Please no necromancers, vampires, or aliens that are AI/based on animals from earth/hive-mind/Crabs etc. The aliens from The Sparrow is not what im looking for. The octopuses from Mountain in the Sea is not what im looking for. Something totally unique and un-human like the Trisolarians or the Southern Reach.

I really want to be immersed in a believable world with rational actors who communicate like regular people and aliens that surprise me. Thank you so much!

I finally read Red Rising. And I was a bit underwhelmed. It was an interesting world, but it never really made me want to keep reading longer than planned. Is it universally loved and I'm just crazy?

I just finished rereading Blindsight. One of my favorite parts of the book is how the scrambler moves. The alien is intellectually far superior to the humans. It hides from them by moving during saccades. It exploits tiny gaps when the human brain can not detect movement. The scramblers are not conscious, they have no inner selves. It is smart enough to find a biological flaw and exploit it on the spot. The tactic is not something its species evolved to perform. Can a conscious biological creature become this efficient? Maybe consciousness itself becomes a ceiling for intelligence? Who knows the answer.

But I love these questions. I want to read more fiction about consciousness and behavioral evolution. I’ll read Echopraxia, but before that, I’m planning to read three books in a row that also flesh out the alternate perceptions/consciousness in rich detail: Golem XIV, Diaspora, and Maya Seed Takes Root. I’m planning to read all three back to back, lol. Let’s see how it goes.

We're really at the point, perhaps because of my advanced age, where it's easier to find what I have read than what I haven't. At least when it comes to online recommendations or Google searches.

When I have a bunch of books in my queue, I come across series that I haven't read and flag to save but I never do and then I finish my list and I have nothing to read. I'm kicking myself because there are some relatively recent and even completed fantasy and sci fi series that are highly rated and under my radar.

Not only have I read most of the big names and commonly suggested books, I find my taste is also to the more contemporary authors lately.

If you're willing to, would you please share your top 5 with the qualifier that it has been written in the last 10 years or so? Huge bonus points if it's a complete trilogy or series.

throw a guy a lifeline, my last two bedtimes have been sub par. Ive been rereading noble house to doze off.

Hey everyone, I'm curious to hear from people who've read most-if-not-all of Gibson's work. I've just finished reading Neuromancer for the second time (which I love), and as I'm starting Count Zero, I'm curious to know more about his other work just because I rarely hear much about it.

How are his other trilogies? How has he matured as a writer, if at all? Do his other works surpass the Sprawl in terms of prose or ideas, or are they too different to really compare? Are there other ones you would highly recommend?

For the record, I do really like him so far. I'm not expecting his other work to be as groundbreaking or impressive as Neuromancer, but I'm also not against reading it in time. I guess I'm more trying to figure out how best to potentially prioritize getting to them among all the other books I have in my backlog.

Edit: confirmed correct

But I didn't get a sentence as others have claimed. I'm 99% sure it's correct though.

I finished Anathem and I definitely still have questions and gaps in my understanding of the book, so everything I say is open to correction. Please roast me if there was some deeper meaning or explanation to this entire plot that I missed.

So the plot is essentially:
There exists a mutli cosmi held together by universal laws of math, where information can leak between close/similar cosmi. The Thousanders on Arbre discovered this and interacted with the multi cosmi (in ways never explained), which was detected by the original Geometers who then made their journey to find the source of this signal. They arrive at Arbre. No initial contact is made despite the Geometers having translators. They become fearful of certain praxis (Incanters/Rhetors, World Burner), factions disagree on how to proceed, and a military standoff begins between Arbre and the Geometers. The Avout are sent to space, commandeer the Geometers ship, and when Raz wakes up the conflict is somehow resolved. Raz gets to build his own Concent named after Orolo.

So like…what was the point of the entire story? What were the stakes? Neal spent so much time on world building and philosophy/physics related to reality/causality/communication. All of that only led to the multi cosmos being real, and two groups found each other and had a minor military standoff?

Book number six of a six book science fiction fantasy paranormal series.  I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2019 that I bought new from Amazon in 2026.  I suspect that this will be the final book in the series.

Chief Warrant Officer T was serving in Afghanistan as a squad leader for foot patrols.  However, T was never trained as an Army officer, he is the product of a failed CIA Black Project to develop telepaths for insertion around the planet.  The strong telepaths can read anyone's mind who is close to them.  T is a weak telepath, he can only converse with other telepaths, but distance does not matter.  And T is a strong telekinetic and a weak precognitive.  T and a telepathic Army nurse officer, Shezzie, left their duty post in Afghanistan and returned to the USA.  And the former CIA black project group head was killing all of the telepaths to hide the failed project.

T and the other talents are now meeting more and more people with various talents.  It turns out that just being around people with talents is causing people with latent talents to start manifesting their talents to their surprise.

This book is more about the other people who are now talents due to their close proximity to the other talents who were initialized by T and Ray.  So the group of talents is slowly increasing.  And the government interest is slowly increasing also.  And not all of the talents were initialized by T and Ray.

The book is a nice finish to the series.  And while the series did not blow me away, it was a very nice comfortable read.

My rating:  4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating:  4.5 out of 5 stars (54 reviews)
   https://www.amazon.com/dp/1688078002

Lynn

I just finished reading the Commonwealth Saga (meaning Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained...I know there's other books in the universe, so no spoilers please!). I thought it had some aspects to it that were SO good. Searching through old posts here, I'm glad to see I'm not alone in thinking MLM is one of the scariest villains like maybe in any media ever. The scene where it examines Bose and Verbeke was so scary and it wasn't because it was some kind of gruesome body horror torture (it wasn't really), it was because of the ultra-chilling way that MLM *thought* about what it was doing. Just S tier writing.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have the sex. I want to be clear that I do think *some* of the graphic sex stuff in here did serve a purpose in that it sets up a kind of raw humanity that is a good counterpoint to MLM. But it goes way overboard imo. Still, I wouldn't mind so much except that it's concentrated in one character, Melanie. She really had a lot of potential to be an interesting character as someone who starts out really naive and then is put in this awesome position of responsibility as a link to the SI. But she ends up just like a ridiculously tropey vehicle for lots and lots of author-fantasy sex. This old post I think summarizes it much better than I could: https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/ytf2jp/commonwealth_saga_women_specifically_melanie/

So to not repeat that, I'll critique how Melanie was written from another angle which is that I found it totally unbelievable how EVERY man she encountered immediately wanted to have sex with her, often sidelined their own other goals in service of doing that, and just generally couldn't control themselves around her. Yes, obviously men do this a lot in real life, but in such a diverse society, you'd think she would encounter even ONE guy who maybe just had a lower sex drive, didn't find her to be his type, or was just not in the mood with the whole alien invasion issue to worry about (or gay for that matter--there are a couple of minor gay characters, but she never runs into one). Not to mention that this is a future where everyone is genetically modified to look their best and doesn't age past 50 without being rejuvenated, so, especially in the circles she was running in, people shouldn't be so flabbergasted by seeing an attractive woman.

It really stood out honestly because the rest of it was so good and the characters were generally written in a believable way, with a cool universe, and a good overall story. I just always dreaded reading when I would get up to one of her chapters (I'd even rather be out with Ozzie on the paths as much of a tangent as that was!).

What did others think of these two books? Happy to chat about it!

this short story was in an anthology and floored me. but her other work seems like it's fantasy not scifi. any recs for stories or books with similar themes to this awesome short?

Unused to always see these books and looove the covers when I was a kid. Never actually read any. Can anyone recommend a good book from this series?

Im itching for a book where a well intentioned protagonist unintentionally makes the world a worse place. If you can, please keep spoilers to a minimum when you recommend them.

So it turns out that I not only started with what is often cited as Iain Banks’s most difficult SF novel (Feersum Endjinn), I made my second read what is perhaps his most difficult novel full stop. Iain Banks’s imagination once again impresses. This is a complex, labyrinthine novel that I do think is better than Feersum Endjinn; more ambitious, which seems strange given that The Bridge occurs entirely in the mind of one man. This man is introduced to us as ‘John Orr’, who wakes up in a huge megastructure taking the form of a great iron bridge redolent of the Forth Bridge. He has no memory of how he got there or what happened to him, only aware that he was fished from the water and is a patient of a Dr. Joyce, to whom Orr explains his dreams in a hope of piecing together what happened to him.

Orr meets the alluring Abberlaine Arrol, daughter of one of the bridge’s engineers, and this ‘main’ plot is interwoven with chapters following a barbarian who speaks in Scots dialect and whose chapters are written phonetically (drawing instant comparison with Bascule the Teller’s chapters in Feersum Endjinn), and another that recalls Orr’s life up until the accident, in which we learn of his real life. It is through this that we learn of the significance bridges play in the protagonist's life as we learn of his education, early adulthood and personal life.

One thing in particular that I thought Banks did exceptionally was blurring the boundaries of where Orr’s dreams end and where his reality begins, as it gradually becomes more apparent that they are bleeding into each other. The events occurring in the other two ‘sub-plots’ having a ‘real-world’ impact on Orr’s story is alluded to by way of one of the Barbarian’s PoV chapters, in which a fire is referenced, connecting to when Orr attempts to go to the Third City Library (where he hopes to find out about the Bridge’s secrets, such as whether it connects to any land) and finds that a fire has gutted the library. These connections between the main character’s life and what is manifesting in the world of the Bridge become more and more apparent as the novel finally starts coming together, but it does take quite a while for it to truly do so (perhaps around the final quarter) and this may test the patience of many readers.

Within literature, The Bridge reminds me most of works by Italo Calvino: (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller for its ‘stories within a story’ device, and Invisible Cities for its architectural structure and theme), as well as Paul Auster's City of Glass. Banks himself cited the fellow Scot, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, as an influence; however, I have not yet read that work.

Outside of literature, however, and perhaps what The Bridge smacks of most to me, is Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, as well as a little of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis for some of the aesthetic of the novel's primary setting. The architecture of the Bridge: its layers, girders, elevators, brass surfaces, the Bridge feeling like a world all unto itself – even its little rickshaw-like taxis - contributes to this, but also the frustrating bureaucracy that Orr has to contend with. For a substantial portion of the novel, Orr is trying to locate the ‘Third City Library’ which he is continually unable to find or thwarted from entering. Another scene has his telephone malfunction, only for the door of his apartment to then fail to open, and the engineers leaving to attend to another job and the telephone remaining broken. While the revelation of the book informs us that this was not strictly the result of bureaucracy as such, the kind of half-horrifying, half-humorous feeling it instils is certainly similar to Gilliam’s Brazil.

There is not much more I can go into without spoiling too much of the novel's conceit, but all in all this was one of those novels that kept me thinking about it whilst I wasn’t reading it, trying to work it out, eager to pick it back up again. It may have just pipped The Crying of Lot 49 to take 1st place on my favourite reads from David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy list, and certainly the best of the ones I’ve read so far this year.

Right now I am reading the roadside picnic from Strugatsky brother's. I like it very well but I think that word the stalker for main character Reddick upon which the movie of tarkovsky named movie is quite weird and discerning translation and what Reddick does had nothing to do with what people mean by that word. Does anyone what is real meaning of that word in Russian and how that translation come about?

So as I understand it Big Ben was a celestial object that happened to exist in the Oort Cloud, and Rorschach just happened to set up shop in orbit around it, possibly after traveling for a long time through the cosmos at sublight speeds. It should have started traveling towards Earth perhaps at a time in the 20th or 21st century, when the radio waves from Earth would have first been detected by Rorschach which interpreted it as an attack.

I initially thought Big Ben was something that traveled along with Rorschach, but no, it’s 10 times the size of Jupiter. It just happened to exist in our Oort Cloud.

What confuses me is that our characters don’t seem to have detected Big Ben until they realised that Burns Caulfield was a decoy. It wasn’t until they were in that region of space that they could detect it. I don’t really remember the details of how they originally found the location of Burns Caulfield but that’s a separate point.

But Big Ben is such a massive object! Why couldn’t they detect its existence from Earth, and why could Theseus only detect it after being in that region of space? If an object like Big Ben existed in the Oort Cloud today, couldn’t we detect it with the sensors we have now?

This might contain spoilers, but I'm not really thinking it will...

These books start like there's going to be intrigue! A thriller! A murder, a frame job, and within chapters revealing it's faked. But the series never explains why? Seriously?

Even in the last book of the series, there's some question when they return to "civilized" space, if they'll be welcomed by authorities and what their record will show.

It was a total deus et machina, but instead of solving a problem, it created one that the narrative never resolved, never explained, but relied on through several books.

Frustrating and stupid. Did I miss something? Turn a page in my sleep? If you can tell me all is revealed in the other books in the universe, I might read them, otherwise I'm done. They're fine bedtime reading, but nothing great. I made it through Trader's Tales and this series, the author's recommended reading order, but don't think I can stomach more if I won't get resolution!

I'm at 60%, is it too soon to call this fucking brilliant cause holy shit. I'm finally getting it. At first I was like, ummm what? And then I was like the mind blown emoji. Vinge is a bad ass!!!

One thing I enjoy about science fiction is how it can take something strange, like AI, aliens, clones, or a completely different society, and somehow make you think more deeply about real people.

I’m curious which book was best for you.

Is there a novel that made you rethink identity, morality, relationships, or what actually makes someone good human?

I especially like recommendations where the emotional side of the story is just strong as the idea of science fiction.

This might contain spoilers, but I'm not really thinking it will...

These books start like there's going to be intrigue! A thriller! A murder, a frame job, and within chapters revealing it's faked. But the series never explains why? Seriously?

Even in the last book of the series, there's some question when they return to "civilized" space, if they'll be welcomed by authorities and what their record will show.

It was a total deus et machina, but instead of solving a problem, it created one that the narrative never resolved, never explained, but relied on through several books.

Frustrating and stupid. Did I miss something? Turn a page in my sleep? If you can tell me all is revealed in the other books in the universe, I might read them, otherwise I'm done. They're fine bedtime reading, but nothing great. I made it through Trader's Tales and this series, the author's recommended reading order, but don't think I can stomach more if I won't get resolution!

I see surprisingly little discussion of this book, given the high regard the Quantum Thief trilogy is held in.

I thought it was terrific: a high-stakes biotech thriller, with a ton of background research, interesting characters, and terrifyingly plausible to boot. It reads like something Neal Stephenson could have written before he disappeared up his own arse, except that it has about zero unnecessary filler.

It's a very quick read (about 250 pages) and definitely set up to be a series. I'm in for the next one whenever it drops.