Two books.

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I hadn't heard of this before because I exist entirely outside the loop, but it looked cool on the goodwill shelf. I liked the story, setting, characters. I did not like that it's the first of a required trilogy. I have to divide my score by three because I only received a third of a book. I'm pretty over series at this point. I want to read a story, then maybe later pick up a sequel that's actually a sequel, not the rest of the story.

As an aside, there's some discussion questions at the end, like which of the four clans would you like to join? Except only one clan features in the book, one has a passing mention, and the others are just names in a list. How can anyone answer this? Who writes these questions? Anyway, still a good book if you're interested.

Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Heist mystery sci-fi. Also the first of a trilogy, but the story here is complete. Also liked this one.

Nearly all post singularity fiction devolves into word salad as it tries to describe incomprehensible AI superbeings, but I think it's moderated well here. Not as good as Fire upon the deep, which is the best exemplar, but it didn't annoy me. At times things are poorly explained because the author is trying to avoid info dumps, but this means a certain amount of confusion.

Recent fiction.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. 3.5 honks. A misfit crew with a heart of gold undertakes a perilous mission and hilarity ensues. I thought it was fun, but leans a little too heavily into I'm not like the other crew energy. I was fine with it, but the story telling is also pretty episodic. Each chapter is a new planet in which a new secret about a different crew remember is revealed and explored, and then it's okay, we still love you.

The Beggars in Spain. 5 honks. What if some people never sleep, and get super smart, and then everyone else resents them for their success? And what if the sleepless turn evil because of the resentment, but maybe some still try to be good? This echoed Atlas Shrugged far more than I expected, but not so obnoxious, a little less certain of its position. The story structure reminded me of Schismatrix.

The Black Cloud. 4.5 honks. A combination first contact and apocalypse story that asks wouldn't scientific despotism be the best government? Written by an astronomer, so lots of wavelength talk. I read Day of the Triffids earlier, and this shares a very sort of English righto chap end of the world voice.

Ossian's Ride. 3 honks. Not really sci-fi. A fairly mediocre spy thriller romp.

Amazon short stories. There's ten in total, but I really enjoyed these. The far reaches: how it unfolds, the long game, slow time between stars. Also, randomize by Andy Weir.

A Memory Called Empire. 4.5 stars. The Roman Empire, but in space, and also with memory machines so you can talk to your predecessor, with lots of political intrigue. So just like Dune, but also completely different. This was a random goodwill find, and I'm really happy with it.

Neuromancer. 4 honks. Spice alert. I think people love this book because they've decided they're supposed to love it. It's fun, but it's nonsense. Watching the Black Mirror Christmas special would be more relevant.

When Gravity Fails. 3.5 honks. Neuromancer in Islam, but more about a murder mystery. A bit weird that half the characters are trans, or sex changes as the author calls them, where it's mostly irrelevant to the story, and presented without judgement, just a lot of words for no apparent purpose. Not clear what the author was trying to do.

Last week tried and failed to read The Terraformers. Among other things, it's supposed to be an allegory about a hypercapitalist society that owns everyone and an unjust classification system, on a world being terraformed to resemble a pristine earth. I thought the premise had potential, but alas, it reads like something that won honorable mention in the local young marxist club's fiction contest. The eager author enthusiastically applied their insightful teacher's wise advice to reliably insert descriptive adjectives and exciting adverbs.

By coincidence, the next book I read was Solar Lottery, which turns out to have many of the same themes, but set in a very different plot. My complaints here would be that there's a lot of smoking (every scene is punctuated with the lighting or puffing of a cigarette, which feels anachronistic, both from a story and story telling perspective) and the usual Dick weirdness and ambiguity. There's a B plot which isn't really resolved.

I did like the original terraforming premise, I think there's potential here, so I might use it for a writing exercise. Going to write my very own very bad short story about the corpoverlords.

Book review: Void Star

Story: A new retelling of Neuromancer, updated for 30 years of tech advancement, and with the Japanophilia replaced with what if Elon Musk lives forever. With a little Westworld and Diamond Age sprinkled in. Are you excited to read about epic cyberbattles between cyber AIs cybershredding each other in cyberspace? There's certainly some of that, but not too much actually. It's not very action heavy, but still intriguing.

Characters: There's the street kid who learned everything there is to know from a laptop he found in the trash. There's the rich kid who's a bit lost, but drives around in a car whose fully autonomous mode includes the armor piercing gun turrets. And there's the AI whisperer, who tells the megacorpos what their electric sheep are dreaming about.

Style: It's very stream of conscious, and two of the three perspective characters have brain damage preventing them from always knowing what's happening, let alone reliably narrating it. The median sentence has 27 commas. Maybe that's your thing, just letting you know. It's a bit of a slower read.

Example: In fact the buildings are rotting, reverting to geology under their furs of vegetation, and over these ruins rises a tower, black even in the dawn's light, and his heart rises as his gaze follows it up to where its heights are lost in the celestial blue of morning, and the answers he needs are at its apex, if only he can reach it, and he'll hunt it down the nights, and he'll hunt it down the years, but he keeps losing his way among the cul-de-sacs and the endless winding streets, and it's not long until he realizes he's in the city's derelict periphery, and hasn't seen the tower in a long time, for the city is many cities, concentric and innumerable, and he's forever lost the core.

Overall: I liked it more than I thought I might at the start, so if you're looking for something new to read, it's one for the list, but if your reading schedule is already fully booked, probably skippable. Also recommended if you're the kind of person who refers to the left side of their car as the loboard.