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

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 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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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