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A frank exchange of views is my favourite. Whenever I hear key terms in the media I think they'd make good ship names. One example is how the BBC says "so calle
by hkt 10y ago
A frank exchange of views is my favourite. Whenever I hear key terms in the media I think they'd make good ship names. One example is how the BBC says "so called Islamic state" - if I ever own a boat (or a sentient AI) I might call it that.
For those who miss Iain Banks, Ken McLeod is a good read. The Cassini Division is a great post-singularity novel with interesting tech ideas and ideological musings. Iain and Ken also wrote a book of poetry together which is worth a read.
- Iv 10y agoMy favorite is Ethics Gradient. It sums up so well the interactions between civilizations...
- roryisok 10y agoI read Newton's Wake by Macleod last year and didn't like it much. Put me off reading anything else by him. I would recommend Charlie Stross to fill the void.
- lmm 10y agoStross' early stuff is good, but he seems to have lost his way and got a lot more political. His last few novels felt very polemical.
- arethuza 10y agoYMMV I thought The Nightmare Stacks was extremely entertaining - invasions of fascist elves, air to air combat with fluorine breathing dragons, extremely tense family dinners - what's not to like?
- lmm 10y agoHah, I must admit that after being disappointed with the previous two or three I didn't bother with The Nightmare Stacks (and hadn't in fact realised it was out yet). If it's a return to form (and to be fair Stross has always been pretty variable) them I'll check it out.
- david-given 10y agoNewton's Wake is kind of variable. Some bits I like, some bits are meh. If you feel like giving Macleod another try, I think his best books are The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal; they're part of a quartet, but these two books are the best and are very much a thematic pair, and if you read one you should read them both. (In part they show us the same setting from drastically opposed viewpoints, both done sympathetically.) Giant spaceships, explosions, god-like beings, wormholes through space and time, sentient robots, non-sentient robots, maybe-sentient robots, full on ultralibertarian capitalism, full on ultraliberal socialism, nanotechnology, pre-, post- and intra-singularity technology, and some very big guns.
- grkvlt 10y agoI just read a copy of his latest, "Dissidence" which is part one of the corporation wars series, part two "Insurgence" will be out at the start of December. I thought it was a great return to his harder post-singularity SF styles like "Cassini Division", but still plenty of political and social commentary. Another good author is Michael Cobley with his humanity's fire series: "Seeds of Earth", "Orphaned Worlds" and "Ancestral Machines" - if you like Banks and Macleod I think this would also be appreciated...
- hirsin 10y agoThe pre/intra/post singularity + econ systems is also filled masterfully by Stross's Accelerando. It's available online on his website - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
- roryisok 10y agoAnd Singularity Sky
- roryisok 10y agook, based on this I'm going to give him another go. Wake had some great ideas but I thought they weren't knitted together particularly well. And all that stuff with the two folk musicians and the playwright was pointless. Edit: Now that I think of it, if Song of Stone had been the first Iain Banks book I read, I would not have read more.
- dghf 10y agoI prefer Macleod's near-future stuff to his space opera: e.g. The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions, The Restoration Game, Intrusion. Given he's an avowed socialist, the political battering he deals out to left-wingers in his work is interesting.
- arethuza 10y agoI've been catching up on Macleod's output recently - I particularly liked Learning the World: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_the_World
- lmm 10y agoI'd recommend Neal Asher as the closest substitute for Banks, though he can be quite variable. Hilldiggers in particular is the best Culture novel I've read, so to speak.
- david-given 10y agoIf you can find a copy, Ben Aaronovitch's _The Also People_ is a Doctor Who tie-in novel set in a Culture-with-the-serial-numbers-filed off. If you like both fandoms, it actually has interesting things to say about both.
- tjic 10y agoI agree w the Ken Macleod recommendation. > One example is how the BBC says "so called Islamic state" Ugh. I hate editorializing like that, and I find it especially loathsome when people are forced to support it with their tax dollars (as Brits are with BBC and we are with PBS / NPR).
- arethuza 10y agoIn the case of the BBC I assumed it was a political line that they were being forced to follow - still annoying though.
- DanBC 10y agoThe BBC is not funded by tax money[1], and is independent from government. [1] little bits of the World Service radio station get some government funding.
- tjic 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC "Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households... the fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament..."
- DanBC 10y ago> which is charged to all British households ...only to the households who either watch live tv as it's broadcast, or who use the BBC TV iplayer VOD service. It's not collected by the government and it's not enforced by the government.
- Angostura 10y agoDon't think so. I assume it is straight editorial decision to cope with the fact that although the organisation calls itself 'Islamic State' it isn't recognised as a state. If I were to call myself "The world's best lover" they would probably do the same.