Recent reading
Oct. 13th, 2016 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaChildren of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is one of those SF books with great worldbuilding and setting, but not very interesting characterization. Or maybe it's just that the aliens are so much more interesting than the humans--we get to follow the development of a spider species which has been infected with an uplift virus originally intended for monkeys. I really love the spiders, they are so great. There are so many interesting details of their civilization, for example, they use enhanced ant colonies as computers! I liked the book's ending, as well. But overall I think it was too long; a lot of the human sections of the book could've been cut, because they were not that interesting and also didn't advance the plot.
The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson
Short story + essay + interview. The short story is a fork-in-the-road AU of history where someone else ends up being the one who's supposed to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and we get to follow him as he's deciding what to do. I enjoyed it; it's very tense. The essay, meh. It's making the point that history is sensitive to initial conditions, which, yeah. But you do not need to invoke quantum mechanics for that! In fact you can't do that because people are not subatomic particles! I hope he meant it as a metaphor only; it's not entirely clear. I liked the interview a lot, though; I've never read an interview with him before and he comes across as interesting and sympathetic.
This is one of those SF books with great worldbuilding and setting, but not very interesting characterization. Or maybe it's just that the aliens are so much more interesting than the humans--we get to follow the development of a spider species which has been infected with an uplift virus originally intended for monkeys. I really love the spiders, they are so great. There are so many interesting details of their civilization, for example, they use enhanced ant colonies as computers! I liked the book's ending, as well. But overall I think it was too long; a lot of the human sections of the book could've been cut, because they were not that interesting and also didn't advance the plot.
The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson
Short story + essay + interview. The short story is a fork-in-the-road AU of history where someone else ends up being the one who's supposed to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and we get to follow him as he's deciding what to do. I enjoyed it; it's very tense. The essay, meh. It's making the point that history is sensitive to initial conditions, which, yeah. But you do not need to invoke quantum mechanics for that! In fact you can't do that because people are not subatomic particles! I hope he meant it as a metaphor only; it's not entirely clear. I liked the interview a lot, though; I've never read an interview with him before and he comes across as interesting and sympathetic.
