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May. 21st, 2012 11:29 amThe Hugo Voters packet arrived this weekend, which is awesome. I paid for my membership so I could go to the Con- to get a bunch of free ebooks as a bonus is pretty nifty.
I'm unlikely to read A Dance with Dragons by the voting deadline, and I need to read Feed before I try Deadline (Season McGuire seems to be following the goofy Cory Doctorow playbook of naming stories after past SF stories. For the longest time I didn't understand that her Feed was different from M.T. Anderson's YA cyberpunk marvel), but I started poking at Leviathan Wakes, and so far it's pretty excellent. Classy, action-packed hard SF space adventure. Nothing at all genre-breaking or genre-bending, which is among the many reasons I'm certain that when I'm done with it I'll still prefer Mieville's gloriously complicated space opera Embassytown, but it's a really gripping story thus far. Oh, and for whatever reason I didn't quite connect with Among Others the first time around, but will probably give it another shot.
I'm not sure I ever posted my review of Embassytown up here, but if I didn't, it's probably Mieville's best novel, and certainly his best novel since The Scar. I know people who were bothered by the implausibility of its central science-fictional conceit, but I just loved so many of the characters and I love the situation that the wonky linguistics put them in. There's a line between metaphysics and physics that Mieville skates maybe a little too thinly, but there was never a moment in the narrative where I didn't feel completely immersed in his world. I especially loved the immer, which could have just been a standard hyperspace drive but instead helped drive Mieville's theme that when we go Out There, there's no telling how we will be forced to cognitively reinvent ourselves as a species.
I'm unlikely to read A Dance with Dragons by the voting deadline, and I need to read Feed before I try Deadline (Season McGuire seems to be following the goofy Cory Doctorow playbook of naming stories after past SF stories. For the longest time I didn't understand that her Feed was different from M.T. Anderson's YA cyberpunk marvel), but I started poking at Leviathan Wakes, and so far it's pretty excellent. Classy, action-packed hard SF space adventure. Nothing at all genre-breaking or genre-bending, which is among the many reasons I'm certain that when I'm done with it I'll still prefer Mieville's gloriously complicated space opera Embassytown, but it's a really gripping story thus far. Oh, and for whatever reason I didn't quite connect with Among Others the first time around, but will probably give it another shot.
I'm not sure I ever posted my review of Embassytown up here, but if I didn't, it's probably Mieville's best novel, and certainly his best novel since The Scar. I know people who were bothered by the implausibility of its central science-fictional conceit, but I just loved so many of the characters and I love the situation that the wonky linguistics put them in. There's a line between metaphysics and physics that Mieville skates maybe a little too thinly, but there was never a moment in the narrative where I didn't feel completely immersed in his world. I especially loved the immer, which could have just been a standard hyperspace drive but instead helped drive Mieville's theme that when we go Out There, there's no telling how we will be forced to cognitively reinvent ourselves as a species.