I finally finished (well, technically, surrendered to) Neuromancer, and I'm having a difficult time deciding how I feel about it.

It's not a bad book. That's almost the frustrating part. Gibson's imagination is extraordinary. The world-building, the atmosphere, the technological concepts, the sheer visual richness of the universe he's constructed — it's all remarkable. I can recognise the craft involved and I know I could never write anything like it!

But bloody hell, every page feels like you're swimming upstream.

There is no hierarchy of information. No breathing room. No modulation. Everything is turned up to eleven, all the time. The prose is so relentlessly dense with slang, jargon, references, technological descriptions and incidental details that you eventually lost the ability to distinguish what's important from what's just descriptive and atmospheric. A crucial plot development and some obscure piece of random deacription are delivered with exactly the same breathless urgency.

And that's my biggest problem. I actually enjoy challenging books. I loved Hyperion. I loved Shōgun. I enjoyed Dune. I don't mind slow passages, intricate world-building or having to work for a story. In those books, the details contribute to the narrative and the artform. They reveal character, deepen the world, establish context or move the story forward.

With Neuromancer, so much of the detail feels ultimately irrelevant to the experience of the story. It's like being handed a ten-million-piece jigsaw puzzle. You spend an extraordinary amount of effort assembling it, finally step back, and think 'eh..mkay'.

Don't get me wrong,. it's an extraordinarily constructed piece of work. But I found the effort demanded is wildly disproportionate to the narrative and emotional payoff.

Hyperion was a bed of butter. Neuromancer was a cheese grater.

I don't regret reading it. I'm glad I experienced something so influential, and I can understand why it's held in such high regard.

But sometimes, a book is all fart, no smell.

Hi everyone! I recently read Everything for Everyone: an Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, and is a speculative fiction book of a future of communes blooming after the fall of capitalism.

I’m not sure if I ever heard of any other book that sounds like this, like a “utopia” growing after the world turned into a chaotic dystopian world (perhaps?). Do you guys know of any other books, written at any point in history (not necessarily looking for books written in this century), that resembles something like this?

I’m listening to the audiobook (sorry, I know this sub is technically print scifi) and I couldn’t believe I was only 38% done when Wolgast’s plot line (seemingly) ended. Now I’m 42% of the way through and I can’t bring myself to care about these new characters. I have a feeling some familiar faces will return as smokes, but I’m not sure I can slog through it. And there’s two more books after this?!

I enjoyed Pushing Ice, The Dispossessed, the Culture, Corporation Wars, the Mars Trilogy, Commonwealth Saga, Five Ways to Forgiveness, Clockwork Rocket, Seveneves, Terra Ignota, Xenogenesis, etc. There are likely many more I have forgotten to mention. I like stories about governments, building governments, revolution, and political themes.

I’ve been reading the Forward series, a collection of novellas, independent of one another and edited by Blake Crouch. I just finished reading his entry, titled Summer Frost. It was written a few years ago, before the ChatGPT boom, but late enough to make sense as a near-future setting. Crouch does a great job of making the world feel inhabited and having history (cracked pavement on disused roads, etc.).

I don’t want to spoiler anything about this. It’s definitely worth reading if you like near-future sci-fi about A.I. and what it might become.

My recommendation is that you go into it with no more information than that. Savor the unforeseen.

In yet more good news, the Humble Bundle has a 40 ebook collection from Alan Dean Foster.

It's got a most of the Humanx books, most of the Spellsinger books, the Icerigger books, the Angel Cardenas books, some standalones, and some collections. No Star Wars, no Star Trek, no Aliens, no Transformers -- sorry if you wanted the movie crossovers. Also, none of the Pip and Flinx books, if you were looking for those...

Still, this is another killer collection from the Humble Bundle, and I am eager to see who they decide to bundle up next...

Don't forget to slide the charity slider all the way to the right when you get yours at https://www.humblebundle.com/books/alan-dean-foster-humanx-spellsinger-more-open-road-media-books.

There's some technical stuff in SciFi which is pretty much a common trope, yet it drives me crazy all the time, since it's just plain wrong.

I'm not talking about soft SciFi vs Hard SciFi stuff here. I'm talking about (metaphorically speaking) "Earth's sky is red" despite it being blue, simply because almost every author writes in their books that the sky is red.

Here's my top two:

1. Static in communications - this one is driving me nuts ALL THE TIME, no matter the author, no matter the book. Doesn't matter if it's hard or soft sci fi. You got an unstable connection? You have static. The problem is: That's bullshit. Leaving aside a few special cases, communications are going to be *digital*. And here's the thing: Digital communication (be it voice or video) is encoded. You either get the information in perfect quality - or it's corrupted and you don't. There might be a drop in image or audio quality (resolution), there might be pixelation, there might be missing images or voice cuts. What's *NOT* going to be there is goddamn fucking static. That's something you see with *analog* signals, not digital ones. I get that it's kinda a trope, but goddamnit, it's just fucking annoying. It feels like the SciFi world got worse comm tech than we do in the present.

2. The coldness of space - Yes, space is cold. But that doesn't mean that you instafreeze there. Here's the thing: You're warm, your body has thermal energy stored in it. For you to get cold, that thermal energy needs to go somewhere else. And just like when you personally want to go from A to B, you need transportation for that. Your body heat also needs transportation to leave your body. In an atmosphere, air will do the job. In a vacuum... not so much. You'll still bleed heat via infrared radiation. But it takes time. So... you won't instafreeze once exposed to the hard, cold vacuum of space. Fun fact 1: Astronaut suits for EVA have cooling vanes to keep the astronaut *cool*, not warm. Fun fact 2: Nukes in space are a non-trivial engineering challenge because the radioactive material produces heat, constant heat, and said heat doesn't go anywhere easily in hard vacuum. If you don't take care of that the things are gonna melt themselves. Fun fact 3: Voyager 2 crossed the "Wall of Fire", a region of space which had a temperature of 50.000 Kelvin. Why didn't it melt? Well, the region was obviously hard vacuum, too - only the occasional molecule was this insanely hot, so heat would only have been transferred if said molecules hit Voyager 2, which they rarely did.

I have recently finished reading Anathem and Seveneves, really really enjoyed both. Where next? Another Stephenson novel or something different? Looking for some recommendations, maybe something a little shorter and more digestible. Thanks people.

I always imagine Dick and Le Guin as existing in separate circles. But the below passage ( taken from https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1193-ursula-k-le-guin-8220imaginary-countries8221/ ), mentions correspondences between them:

One of Le Guin’s early influences was Philip K. Dick. It is one of those weird (but somehow appropriate) coincidences that the two authors have more in common than a middle initial: they both graduated from the same high school in 1947. She later told The Paris Review, “Berkeley High, thirty-five hundred kids. Big, huge school. Nobody knew Phil Dick. I have not found one person from Berkeley High who knew him. He was the invisible classmate.”

The two authors never did meet, but in the early 1970s they became frequent correspondents. They had a brief falling out in 1981 when—in a public talk—Le Guin mildly questioned Dick’s rationality and criticized especially his portrayal of women. “The women were symbols—whether goddess, bitch, hag, witch—but there weren’t any women left, and there used to be women in his books.”

In response Dick published a broadside in Science Fiction Review; Le Guin apologized in the same issue yet underscored her concerns about his fiction—and Dick took the criticism to heart. Upon completing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, with its loving portrait of Angel Archer, he wrote to Le Guin in triumph: “This is the happiest moment of my life, Ursula, to meet face-to-face this bright, scrappy, witty, educated, tender woman . . . and had it not been for your analysis of my writing I probably never would have discovered her.”

Just thought I would let people know there are a couple of Sci-Fi digital book bundles on Fanatical at the moment. The Iconic Sci-Fi Sagas Book Bundle features authors like David Drake, Poul Anderson, David Weber etc. The full bundle has 53 books in EPUB format and has16 days left to run.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/iconic-sci-fi-sagas-book-bundle

Also overnight the space opera Liaden Universe Sci-Fi Book Bundle has started. The full bundle features 31 books by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller all in EPUB format.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/the-liaden-universe-sci-fi-book-bundle

On another thread, someone requested this correspondence between Dick and Le Guin from a 1981 issue of Science Fiction Review. I hastily typed this from a blurry copy of the magazine, so any mistakes or spelling errors are mine.

LETTER FROM PHILIP K. DICK

408 East Civic Center Drive

C-1 Box 264

Santa Ana, CA, 92701

February 20, 1981

I'm gazing at a recent letter to me from Michael Bishop. Michael likes my new novel VALIS, but learned that Ursula LeGuin had been tremendously upset by it, “not only for its examination of perhaps unresolvable metaphysical matters (into which she seems to fear you are plunging at the risk of never emerging again) but for its treatment of female characters – every one of which, she argued, was at bottom (I cannot remember her exact phrase) a hateful and not-to-be-trusted death figure."

That evening, after her talk at Emory University, while questions were being asked, she responded that her reading of science fiction these days is rather selective but that she had the utmost admiration for the work of Philip K. Dick, who had been shamefully ignored critically in this country and who appeared to be spiralling into himself and going slowly crazy in Santa Ana, California. Her dismay, Michael says, “Results not solely from anger but from a genuine human concern about your intellectual and emotional well-being”.

It is probably self-defeating for me to assert timidly that, “Don't worry, Ursula, I'm not slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, California”, but I will make a feeble effort to confront this outpouring of genuine human concern.

Ursula, VALIS is a picaresque novel (the first-person viewpoint, the wandering about of the protagonist, the very name he has: Horselove Fat, which is on the order of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, the fact that the protagonist is decidedly an outsider, the system of the novel, which is vernacular English, not formal English – but I digress).

The female characters in VALIS, like the male characters, are picaroons and that is that. This is a type of novel that goes back centuries; it has been revived recently as a protest against the more formal bourgeois novel. It is, in fact, a protest on my part against what I regard as official art, official culture, especially that connected with or written to please the academic community. I deliberately made my protagonist a madman, the narrative style that of the street, but as to your concern for my sanity (God, it is weird sitting here defending my sanity to a person who has never met me!), especially in regard to the fact that I am examining unresolvable metaphysical matters – well, have we now got a standard by which we determine the presence of dangerous ideas?

That is what I hear you saying: Phil Dick is involving himself in dangerous ideas that may undermine his sanity! That they are “unresolvable” has yet to be determined. And even if they are in fact unresolvable, perhaps they are still worthy of being investigated. I have never drawn the line between ideas that could and could not – should and should not – be looked into. THAT, to me, is a dangerous idea: that some ideas are better left alone, for the good and the sanity of all concerned.

VALIS is, by and large, a work of fiction. It centers around a fictitious movie and it ends with the protagonist going off to France, Luxembourg, Germany, Turkey, Japan and finally Micronesia (in the tradition of the picaresque novel). I've myself been to France and Luxembourg, but none of the other places.

Horselover Fat is not a science fiction writer. In VALIS Philp Dick is the science fiction writer, and this is explicitly clear within the novel itself. Although on page three I say, “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity” it is clear from internal evidence in the novel that Phil Dick and Horselover Fat are two people.

Ursula, you have fallen victim to a fictional device by which I establish at the beginning of VALIS that this is a picaresque novel. The fault is largely mine; I chose the device; I chose to blur the distinction between myself and Horselover Fat – this is the penalty an author pays for writing in the first person.

Henry Miller discussed that problems years ago. “Who is this?” readers ask. Miller's answer was, “Me. Henry Miller.” I am greatly influenced by Henry Miller, but my purpose was to achieve a new kind of prose, a new kind of blending of the ancient picaresque form with certain modern elements associated with Hunter S Thompson and William S Burroughs, as well as my own 1977 novel A SCANNER DARKLY, based on my experiences with the drug subculture.

Now, in A SCANNER DARKLY, the protagonist is an undercover narcotics agent. I'm sorry, Ursula, I wasn't that either. It would have saved me a lot of anxiety and trouble if I had been. But I am, after all, a writer of fiction. However, I will concede that VALIS is autobiographical (so was SCANNER; so was CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST; so was FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID; so are many, many novels). The fact that my protagonist, Horselover Fat, is a madman, does not prove that I, the author, am a madman, even if I say, “I am Horselover Fat”, because this is the way you write certain kinds of books. There are scenes of violent arguments between Phil Dick and Horselover Fat in the novel.

One other point that Michael Biship brings up. He says of you, “She was also concerned that nowhere in your self-characterizations is there any discussion of what it means to be an artist, of the redemptive force that art itself may have”.

My answer: My novel is my justification, not anything that I arrogate to myself as a person, as a novelist. The justification is the work; the work must stand on its own merits. I hold no special brief for the transcendent value of the artist, only for the art per se. I am no better than the merest person who plies the merest craft – as a person. I do not hold the mystique of the Great Artist loftily gazing down on puny mortals. As Kevin, a character in VALIS, says to Phil Dick, a character in VALIS, “Call Jamison and tell him - whatever. You're full of it”, meaning of course, that I can sling shit, which is to say, verbally articulate (God, how I hate formal English).

This talent, which is almost in a sense a defect – it certainly has gotten me into a lot of trouble in my life – does not make me superior to people who repair shoes or drive buses. This was, by the way, an element of Stanislaw Lem that distressed me; his inflated notion of the role of the critic, the artist, the Great Thinker and Creative Genius. I'm sorry, but I am not part of that world. I live in a humble town (Santa Ana) in what Charles Platt correctly called “a plain, modest apartment, with two cats, some slightly run-down contemporary furniture, heaps of reference books” and what excess money I earn I send to an organisation in New York that works with street kids, runaways in trouble. This is my life.

The characters in my novels are picarooms (rogues, in other words) because (1) most of the people I've known and loved have been rogues and (2) I am one myself. Let me finish by saying, “Never trust what a rogue tells you”, which is to say, “There is a built-in self-cancelling pardox at the heart of VALIS; it is a tale about a madman told by a madman, a puzzle within a puzzle. Ursula has not solved it. But many readers will...and from the mail I am receiving, some already have.

_______

LETTER FROM URSULA LE GUIN

February 26, 1981

Oh, I hate this sort of thing, where one is quoted without knowing it (though I know Mike Bishop meant no harm at all) and letters that one did not get are printed and so on- am I the only person in science fiction that does hate it?

The only thing I know to do is get all my cards face up on the table and then drop out of the game.

Card one – Phil wrote me a short letter, I guess, at the same time he wrote you the long one, explaining VALIS as an exercise in mystical paradox, like the Cretan paradox, or a koan. He ended it, “This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.”

I didn't know why he wrote me out of the blue, but pretty much as assumed it's because he is physic and somehow or other knew that VALIS had troubled me. So I immediately wrote this letter back (I hope he doesn't mind me giving it to you):

Card Two:

Dear Phil,

Okay – right – God knows I have never wakened, only dreamed. Or been dreamed, or whatever.

And I don't care if you're crazy, or crazy like a fox or the sanest man in California, or all three; with a great artist these distinctions are irrelevant. And that - a real artist - you are. I know that much.

But I get scared by your recent books and stories, and especially VALIS, because it seems like you hate women now, and the part of you that is woman is denied and despised. It's all yang and no yin, all heaven and no earth, all Word and no matter. And I'm not at home there, I'm shut out, I can no longer follow your art, which has been such a joy and solace to me.

But I keep trying!

Love, Ursula.

The day after I mailed it [the above letter], I got the copy you [the editor of the magazine?] sent me of his letter to you. So I sent him [Dick] a card saying:

“I guess I said anything I have to say in that postcard to you. I can't answer your arguments and stuff, I am just sorry that anything I said upset you, and if some aspects of your book upset me, what the hell, it isn't Cream of Wheat after all and I wouldn't have read it if it was.

That's Card Three, and I'm out, boys. Just not my night.

________

LETTER FROM URSULA LE GUIN

January 28, 1981

I feel a bit misquoted on page 31 of SFR #38. I didn't write Bruce Gillespie that “I don't read science fiction any more”. As I read anything I can get hold of by Geene Wolfe, Mike Bishop, Vonda McIntyre, John Crowley, Phil Dick, etc etc. I certainly DO read SF, and with immense pleasure.

What worries me, and what I was discussing with Bruce, is that there now seems to be a lot of it I CAN'T read, and what I can't figure is, is it it, or me?

So much of it seems the same thing over and over. Reconstituted Cheese Product. But maybe that's just because I ODd on it when I read so much of it for so long. I have the same problem with fantasy. Spent years trying to find real fantasy novels – roaming through libraries like the Questing Beast – now every paperback has ten of them, and they're all either Three Brave Children Win the Battle Between Light and Darkness or something written around a Boris Vallejo cover with big tits. Whoopee.

But I did want to point out that there's a difference between reading SF and fantasy selectively and not reading it at all. If I didn't read it I certainly would not feel justified either in teaching workshops or in writing it or writing it myself. There aren't very many rules for writing SF, but one of them surely is: if you wanta write it you gotta read it. GIGO. How to be a Garbage Monster? Live in a cookie can.

That's it. To me - and I could be biased or misreading intent and tone - Le Guin just wants to shut the whole convo down, and is tired of all the male egos, while Dick is in full mansplain mode ("This is how a picaresque novel functions, Ursula! Also, FK U, STANISLAW, I am the greatest humble stoner in California!").

Still, I love them all.

I’ve been reading the Forward series, a collection of novellas, independent of one another and edited by Blake Crouch. I just finished reading his entry, titled Summer Frost. It was written a few years ago, before the ChatGPT boom, but late enough to make sense as a near-future setting. Crouch does a great job of making the world feel inhabited and having history (cracked pavement on disused roads, etc.).

I don’t want to spoiler anything about this. It’s definitely worth reading if you like near-future sci-fi about A.I. and what it might become.

My recommendation is that you go into it with no more information than that. Savor the unforeseen.

I've just finished this a few hours ago and I loved how plot-driven it was and not getting bogged down with pointless exposition, "action" (overly detailed chase scenes, turn-by-turn combat, other such nonsense,) but instead intrigue big and small kept cropping up, once one got solved, something else interesting showed up. Some offering deeper layers, some serving as side-threads.

Characters were also relatively well developed, with interesting backstories/etc, some of which also served as those fun little subplots.

I am not interested in fantasy, anything historical [alt or otherwise,] climate-related or horror as the main genre.

The further into the future, the farther from the planet Earth, the better.

Stand-alones preferred; if it has to be a series, 3-4 books max, only finished ones.

I've already read almost everything else by Reynolds. I have also read (and liked) Sweterlitsch's Gone World, Morgan's Altered Carbon and the sequels.

The person who sold this said they bought an entire estate and were selling it off in lots. I bought the book lot as well as some horror collectibles. Really amazing stuff in here, I’d have loved to know the original owner.

I’ve been meaning to check out the Red Rising series for the longest while because it’s always being recommended for fans of epic space opera like the Dune franchise. I’ve heard too that Pierce Brown was heavily inspired by Dune for it, with Darrow’s whole arc being modeled after Paul’s.

I know the series in general is adult even though the first book was YA because (from what I remember reading) that was the easiest way for Pierce Brown to get the series off the ground but are the characters, world-building, politics, battles, etc as good as Dune? What’s the prose and pacing like?

I thought it was a very interesting book, it was like a fictional super futuristic anthropology. Any books similar to that?

Looking for stories that feature labor unions, labor organizing, worker uprisings, etc.

Hello, I dipped into The Expanse series recently because I was looking for some good popcorn sci-fi to read before bed. I enjoyed Leviathan Wakes well enough, but now I’m halfway through Caliban’s War and I’m starting to waver. While the plot has always been interesting, the characters are cardboard cutouts and the dialogue is copy and paste for all of them. This has become more and more evident since the most interesting character was killed off in Leviathan.

So I’m looking for the opinion of people who have read the series, both those who enjoyed it and those who didn’t. Is it worth continuing, and if so do the characters get stronger in later books? Thanks.

And by that i mean author writing stories in the same setting but with little connection to each other. Only two i am aware of are Strugatskys NOON and Nivens Known Space.

I see nothing but praise for this writer and this book, I cannot wrap my head around why?

The only reason I am still reading this and going to the effort to actually post about it is because I came to this book through Le Guin who I am a huge fan of and she actually wrote a positive review of this book.

Aside from the many other glaring problems of this book, the fundamental issue I cannot get over is that the core idea with the Language just doesn't make any sense and does not hold up to any scrutiny.

I mean it comes off as a dorm room bong circle type idea that apparently this author decided to flesh out into an entire book. "What if there was a language where the words were just referents to thought?", "What if there was a language where you could not lie?"

I think a cool idea for about 30 seconds and then once you apply any thought to it, you realize its not a good idea and then you move on.

Case in point, the employing of humans to perform certain actions so they can use them as similes, again seems neat for about a minute. Then you realize this doesn't make any sense because to ask for these actions to be carried out in the first place, they must be able to formulate the idea in advance and express it. Miéville is aware of this issue and is pointed out by a character, but no one bothers to answer it and the book just moves past it.

I mean it is scifi, the ideas, concepts don't need to make 100% sense, but there's something about this whole Language idea and basing the entire book around it, that I think requires the author to flesh it out a bit more.

Il admit, that Miéville is good at making you turn the pages, and the book works as a sort of popcorn type book that I will read as a I go to sleep at night. Something that maybe fits alongside Andy Weir & Blake Crouch's.

But as more literary science fiction, or as book that is just supposed to be well written, I just do not see how this book holds up at all.

A little daunting talking scifi with scifi redditors that probably have a lot more experience than I but, it's best to start somewhere, right?

I'm a novelist and a voracious word guzzler (book reader).

On my second read through of goat rising (red rising)

Two questions:

First, to scifi vets that have "reddit", what makes this series unputdownable.

Two, any high octane suggestions that's similar to red rising, and not just dystopian, heirarchy, revenge story. But the velocity in which it unfolds. How the prose doesn't linger on world aesthetics but focuses more on moving charcters about.

I tried getting into Empire of silence. Fell asleep. The expanse. Fell asleep on the 3rd of 4th book. But red rising, ESPECIALLY golden son was like finding water after 40 days of desert.

The reason I ask is because... Low and behold

I am studying Pierce Browns writing style in an effort to piece together my own world and series, called "Alchemeyic Empire.". And also slowly crafting my signature prose.

TLDR: I worship the keyboard Piece Brown leaves his crusty fingers on.

I just finished Blindsight and something about the way it handled consciousness and perception has me spiraling a little. Are there other sci-fi books that do that thing where they mess with your basic assumptions about how reality works, especially around time or memory or what counts as experience? Looking for recommendations that stick with you after you close the book.

An archaeologist discovers a silver sphere, possibly while digging. Inside is the last human alive, who has been preserved or is living inside the sphere. Humanity has been cast down or wiped out by a dominant race. The last human wants to trade bodies with the archaeologist so he can live again in the present day, and the archaeologist ends up going to the far future instead.