From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 08:16:17 MST
On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 11:39:06AM -0500, Smigrodzki, Rafal wrote:
> For the fans of Greg Egan:
>
> At midnight I started reading Greg Egan's new book, "Teranesia", and
> finished it at 5 AM. Quite good - with a neatly unfolding storyline, and a
> very smart, cutting-edge science concept as the main premise (I won't spoil
> your future reading fun by discussing it here). The ending is a little bit
> of a letdown, as if the author was building up the suspense for a real
> earthquake, something that had a distinctly extropian flavor to it, and
> backed off on the last 3 pages. But still quite good.
Egan is always interesting, but I think Teranesia shows that he is
better at handling posthumans and truly strange physics than humans - or
maybe that I prefer to read about posthumans and strange physics rather
than humans :-)
> BTW, what are the current sci-fi titles on your collective reading list? I
> noticed many list-member have very good taste in science fiction. Of my own
> readings I can also warmly recommend Iain Banks, with his "Excession".
Right now I'm looking for the next Alastair Reynolds book, his
_Revelation Space_ and _Chasm City_ had some very good stories and
(especially the first) interesting transhuman twists (even a new way of
stabilizing megastructures).
I'm reading Ken MacLeod's _Cosmonaut Keep_ - so far rather good and
promising more, but not quite as engrossing as _The Star Fraction_ and
_The Stone Canal_.
Ventus, by Karl Schroeder, is waiting in my bookshelf. Looks promising,
with Vernor Vinge saying "Dramatically effective and a milestone in
science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems".
Any book with 'fine-grained distributed systems' mentioned on the cover
is worth reading :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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