3 ms·

I 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 ago
Stross' 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 ago
  YMMV 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 ago
    Hah, 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 ago
Newton'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 ago
  I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    And Singularity Sky
- roryisok 10y ago
  ok, 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I'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 ago

Stross' 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 ago
YMMV 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 ago
  Hah, 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 ago

Newton'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 ago
I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  And Singularity Sky
roryisok 10y ago
ok, 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 ago

I 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 ago
I'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