5 ms·
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 Div
by 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 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.