I 'joined' a Sci Fi book club online. I say joined but really I just read the first book and found everyone's commentary on the book shallow and distracted, so I'm still on the fence. I could read the next one and give them another shot. We'll see.
Book club: Provenance by Ann Leckie.
Provenance is at its heart, a mystery novel - the sci-fi dressing neither detracts nor amplifies the core mystery - that is, who is the murderer? The main character's internal monologue shows her anxious nature, which makes her really endearing as she attempts to distinguish herself and get out from her brother's shadow. The main story isn't particularly impressive, and neither is the world building, nor characters. However, the whole thing feels incredibly real. The character motivations make sense for people in their world - a sci fi far future. The murder mystery and greater plot is incredibly tied to the world that Leckie has built, but reads as if you're there as well, just along for the ride.
Leckie also has non-binary characters who us 'e, em, eir' pronouns. This took a while for me to catch, sadly, assuming it was an epub error, but it reflected Leckie's understanding of the future very well - the people in the book really do feel like us in the far future, with some of the same issues (anxiety) and with a lot of progress as well (identity politics are finished, everyone has employment offered, but realistically, much of it is shitty). Very happy I read it, overall.
Digimon Adventure Vol 1 - fantranslated
I...don't know why I read this. This was a retelling of the first 3 arcs of the Digimon tv show when we were kids. That is - the devimon black gears arc, then meeting etemon and forcing agumon to evolve, and finally defeating etemon and nanomon with metalgreymon.
Roughly novel length, it covered about 25 episodes of the anime. The story itself is fine, if not distinctly comic and cartoony. The best part was finding very awkward translation choices. Some, the fault of the original light novel author, and others by fan translators - an email from
delphonso@the-forums.bay12games, then a paragraph explaining that this must be an email from delphonso who we met at the forums. The forums for bay12games!
Echopraxia by Peter Watts
Echopraxia introduces The Bicamerals, a faith-based hivemind who make better predictions than science can, despite having no explanatory power - merely faith. They, and a rag-tag crew including out main character, fly off to the sun to run into an alien lifeform on a giant solar-array, then blast back to earth to see it all go to shit.
This sequel to Blindsight has some of the same issues I had with Maelstrom from Starfish. More characters, wider scope, larger scenario. Honestly there's just too much going on here - vampires, two additional types of undead, fear-based memory enhancement, The Bicamerals, Bleeding edge teched folks, pre-programmed soldiers, genetic mutation, tele-printing life-forms, predicting the future, a rampant disease that is mentioned in a single line, but is also the namesake of the book... I can go on, too.
Watts knocks it out the park when there's 5 people stuck in an elevator, but everywhere else I think he flounders a bit. That said, he is clearly a much more skilled author now than when he wrote Maelstrom. Echopraxia was very good, beginning to end, and hit more topics closer to home for me than what Blindsight did. Topics on faith and coincidence, things like 'what could overthrow the scientific method', and fear in the face of technological advancement. The stuff with vampires in this book I think went too far, explaining things better left unexplained, but Watts doesn't mitocholoreans the whole thing. Great read.
City by Simak
Abandoned this earlier this year and am so happy I went back to it.
City shares 8 short stories about the uplifting of dogs to human intellect and the removal of humans from earth - to avoid tainting their pure hearts with our inherent violence. This book predates a lot of tropes, and has a lot of novel ideas that I haven't seen frequently reflected in other material. Notably, what happens on Jupiter (I'll let you read it yourself) is poetic and perfect.
It has a lot of interesting ideas, especially coming from just a few years after the a-bombs dropped. People spread out to avoid cities, because they're giant bullseyes. There's a lot of solarpunk aspects to this book that predates most (if any) dialogue on climate change, and it hits on many of my personal favorites: uplifted animals, entirely different perception, and long-time tales. The whole book covers 12000 years, but is told as a annotated version written by some dog philosophers even further past that point. Super cool concepts!
30 done this year, I went back to my wife's hometown and finished 3 books in 6 days. I've got a lot of half started books on my list, so might just leisurely move through them from now on.
EDIT: Came back to rewrite everything because it's not a good synopsis of the books. I've finished Fahrenheit 451, and am now reading "The Last Castle" by Jack Vance