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Antonis reads

lamnatos@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 4 months ago

Just reading along.

Also found on Mastodon at @lamnatos@mastodon.xyz

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Greg Egan: Diaspora (2008, Gollancz) 4 stars

It is the end of the thirtieth century and humanity has divided into three. The …

SciFi can't get harder than this

No rating

I've seen it described as "diamond-hard SciFi", it might even be an understatement. It starts off being confusingly abstract. After ~15% it gets more coherent, slightly more corporeal, though never entirely so.

Even through its abstract and detached universe, it revolves around modern issues of reality, subjectivity of perception and even memetic reality bubbles.

There's a lot to get from this, provided you can keep your mind clear enough to absorb the weirdness of it all.

reviewed The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (A Bantam spectra book)

Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age (EBook, 2000, Spectra) 4 stars

Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant …

Plotty

2 stars

Quite a thick plot, lots of characters, many plot twists and more world-building in a single book than you can shake your nanobots at. Also, if you're interested in a fictionalized primer (ha!) on Turing machines, this is the book you're looking for.

Iain M. Banks: Excession (Paperback, 1997, Orbit) 4 stars

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, …

Didn't mesh with the audio narrator

3 stars

I know it's not fair to the book itself, but I struggled to finish this one because the narrator's voice did not agree with my ears. It's quite interesting overall, a bit complex but I think necessarily so given the topic.