Science Fiction Book Reviews

I like hard SF and hate fantasy.
updated May 2, 2005

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# = I will read anything they ever publish

Bruce Sterling #
One of my favorite authors.  Hard near-future SF.  More of an all-around futurist than a scientist.  He's really into global warming and design, also.  He also writes the Viridian newsletter which has (commented) articles about climate change, and his awesome speeches at various tech/design/sf conferences.   Distraction, Heavy Weather, A Good Old-Fashioned Future (short stories) were all great.  They're set in the near future (less than 30 years probably) and focus on how media, tech gadgets, climate change, networking etc will change us.  In one shocking moment the main character is walking through a European city and stops by the central river, and drinks from it.  We can make the natural world will be viewed as clean again, even in cities.  Schismatrix, Crystal Express - cyberpunk, awesome, 80s. 
The Difference Engine - written with William Gibson.  Alternate history where Babbage's experiments with mechanical computers in the 1880s really take off.  Steam-punk.  It was pretty good.

Vernor Vinge #
If you ever want to enjoy "normal" SF again, don't read Vinge.  I compare all the SF I read to him now, and almost nothing stands up.  It's thoughtful, exciting galaxy spanning human-alien interaction/deserted island/introducing-modern-tech-to-ancient-cultures stuff. Deepness in the Sky is probably my favorite SF novel, I read that and Fire upon the Deep twice they were so good.  I'm gettind ready to read deepness again.  I haven't reread things like this since I was a kid.  I've been waiting for the next one to come out for a couple years now, but no luck.  Vinge also thought of the idea of the technological singularity, a massive compounding increase in machine intelligence beyond which prediction is impossible.  Once we make AIs, we teach them to make themselves smarter, and they will rapidly become godlike.  I'm reading his earlier stuff now.  The Peace War was interesting but not major.  Some good ideas but the technology he introduced was really amazing.  I can't imagine how you would live in a world with bobbling technology, even once people got their freedom.  Still, it's a good post apocalyptic rebuilding society book.  The Witling was pretty interesting.  Very physicsy, but definitely Vinge.  Really short, lots of action.  Like a good pulp.  Annoyingly complex character names, though.

Dan Simmons #
Famous for the Hyperion series, which is great.  The first two are awesome, the 2nd two good.  Carrion Comfort is also great horror.  If the horror genre, which I've read nothing of, has more authors as good as this then I've got a lot of reading to do.  The one about Hemingway in Cuba in the 50s The Crook Factory was good and held together all the way to the end..  The "Case" series reads like a screenplay, super violent and ugly.  Is he trying to become Michael Crighton?  I'll read Illyrium when it comes out in paperback.  Children of the Night was pretty good.  This guy knows how to end a book, which is nice.  The first couple stories of Lovedeath were pretty good.

James Tiptree, Jr  #
Brightness falls from the Air was sooooo good.  Houston, Houston do you read? was also great.  Incredibly good writing about sex, psychedelia, and addiction.  I still have to find her other books.  I think there are some short story collections I don't have.  So, so wonderful.  If I had Brightness with me I'd read it again right now.

William Gibson #
Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero are all famous and good cyberpunk.  It's interesting that this vision of the future is basically wrong.  Things are still holding together.  We've got some years yet.  He's at least half a crime/detective/noir author whose books happen to take place in a bad future.  The later books are also good, Virtual Light, Pattern Recognition etc.

Neal Stephenson #
Snow Crash is great, if incredibly unrealistic.  The Diamond Age was good.  I can't imagine we'll get that far in nanotech without first totally changing ourselves genetically, or at least reaching a singularity though.  Cryptonomicon was really good.  All the cool stuff about WW2 - secret codes, secret missions, special forces, etc.  He also throws in Tempest and EM bombs.  I mean to read his later huge books like Quicksilver, etc.  Also he's got one about the surveillance society that recommends putting total surveillance in the hands of the public as our best option.

Cory Doctorow #
Publishes boingboing, is also a good writer.  Kind of like Bruce Sterling, lots of thoughts on how technology will change society.  Has a few short novels available online.  Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is great.  The idea of "whuffie", a social currency that would replace money, is brilliant and is the first revolutionary political/evolutionary idea I've read since the communist manifesto.  Basically it's just about extending and automating the ratings systems ("was this review helpful to you?" from amazon) to everything in life.  So everytime you think something good about someone, they get points.  And you can spend points to get people to do stuff for you.  It automatically rewards people who create good public art.  It's awesome.  The novella also introduces extreme human-computer interfaces, brain backups, immortality.  Still, it feels human.

Dean Koontz
Cold Fire was just surprisingly good.  Mostly horror, I suppose.  Light, fast, he's a better writer than 90% of SF authors.

Isaac Asimov
Ugh.  Some of them are ok but really dated.  His later work absolutely sucks.  Don't waste your time.  I'd recommend reading just the first three Foundation books and a few of the robot stories.

Robert Heinlein
Starship Troopers is awesome.  I go back to it every few years and come out a republican for a few days.  Some of the juveniles are great, especially Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Farmer of Ganymede.  The Puppet Masters and By his Bootstraps were good.  Stranger in a Strange Land - eh.  Sixth Column I remember as being nicely anti-christian.  The others mostly sucked.  Farnham's Freehold was really anti-asian.  Read most of them as a teenager...  but my lasting impression is of a libertarian asshole.  Starship Troopers is awesome though.  Must Read.

Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama was really good.  The 3 sequels were absolute garbage.  2001 and 2010 were ok, 2061 was bad, 3010 was absolutely awful.  After a few pages I realized it, and started a list "things clarke hates about the 1980s."  Typically for SF authors, the early stuff is good, later stuff sucks.  Childhood's End was good.

Maureen McHugh #
Her books are about sex and gender and living in foreign countries, especially China.  It is what SF should be - it's mainly about non-tech things, but it lets it influence how basic human things are considered.
China Mountain Zhang - I really liked this one.  It has a gay american chinese construction worker who dreams of getting his visa to go back to China.  It has hang glider racers. It has living in an isolated arctic research station.
Mission Child - I liked this one too.  An isolated planet is recolonized by more modern humans.  The part about the tribesperson refugee becoming a druggie in the city is memorable.  So damn good.

Douglass Adams
So funny.  Brilliant.

Alfred Bester
The Stars My Destination - I read this a couple times as a teenager and loved it.  The idea is that someone discovers a way to mentally instantaneously transport yourself to anyplace you've memorized the location of.  In that future a fugitive is searching for a man he witnessed commit an atrocity.  The prison scenes are really memorable.  It's hard SF in spite of the semi-magical premise, because it does a good job of imagining how transportation changes society.  I recently reread this and it was quite different.  It's really fast and light, still good though.  A fast 60s SF novel.  I've got his others and am waiting to read them.  ...I started Golem Hundred but quit after 100 pages or so.  It was a failed return to SF apparently.  Awful.  The Demolished Man has amazing praise from asimov etc...  it was ok.  But not as good as Stars...

Walter John Williams
I read City on Fire, it was all right.  I don't see what's the big deal though.  A little too magical for my taste.  Probably better classified as fantasy.  I read The Praxis, wanting to give him another chance.  But it was just utter crap.  Not awful and the first page or two is good, but just not SF, not deep or thoughtful.  Apparently you can have galaxy spanning empires withough changing human nature at all.  The aliens who conveniently forbid all post 1990s technology helps too.  Soap operas in space.  Post Vinge this doesn't cut it anymore.

Larry Niven
Prolific.  Early stuff good, some hack work later.  Likes meta-engineering projects.
Ringworld was good, the sequels were ok.  The most interesting idea is the "droud", a mechanical device that stimulates parts of the brain for a herion like-effect.  The main character becomes an addict after being zapped by one randomly on the street.  Also, the super-cautious puppeteers are interesting.
The Integral Trees was a great idea, a gas ring around a sun with huge trees growing in it and the descendants of stranded human colonists.  Life directly in a zero-0 ring of air with floating blobs of water.  I don't remember the plot at all though.
I read a bunch of the Man Kizin Wars series but I can't imagine they'd be any good now.

C.J. Cheryyh
Really prolific, I've only read Cyteen.  I read the first of the three books and thought it was amazingly great.  But nothing happened in the next two books and I was a bit disappointed.  It takes place in a scientific authoritarian society where citizens run genetic labs that breed, clone and raise people who are in effect slaves.  However, they have a good understanding of psychology so they treat them really well, and sometimes allow them to become citizens.  The description of the upbringing of two kids destined to be bodyguards is awesome.  From age 3 they are trained, subjected to hypnosis and all kinds of mental analysis.  Not in a brutish way at all though - it's more like japan-style conditioning, which takes into account human needs and desires.  The book is about people trying to control the nurture aspect of upbringing, not just nature.  There is also a secret project to clone a genius and replicate her entire upbringing (i.e. giving her the same type of mother, the same type of friends etc).  Foreigner - um, this book was awful.  Page 50 to page 250 could and should have been condensed to 5 pages.  Unbelievably annoying dialog style.  Way too much of the whiney narrator's thoughts.  I read Downbelow Station, her other Hugo award winner.  Um.  She is shit.  I'm sick of it.  There were a few good ideas in there but they were overwhelmed by 200 pages of moaning.  Why do I keep reading her?  I'm done now.  Done.  Enough.  I read her wikipedia entry and it's as i suspected - she's a she, and not only that but a lesbian.  It mentioned something about her male characters being indecisive.  And all haunted by some kind of sexual abuse that they always refuse to talk about or deal with.  They just beat themselves up mentally all the time and you have to read ALL of it.  Cheryyh's got like 30 books, I will read more.  I'll look at her timeline and see if i can locate the good period...  After reading Cyteen I realized that I have actually read another of hers, but I was too young for it.  40,000 in Gehenna was mentioned at the end of Cyteen.  Two competing spacefaring civs have a disputed zone.  One sneaks 40,000 lab-raised clones onto a planet in the zone, mindwipes them, and lets them start a society secretly.  Later when the other side figures out the space has been mined they're pissed.  I was too young when I read this, it sounds interesting when I think back on it.  But now that I know Cherryh's annoying, pretentious style, every time she does it (about 5 times a page) it breaks me out of the book.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars was pretty good.  I don't know what to think about it really.  It got incredible amounts of praise from the new york times etc.  It was good all right...  The characters feel way more real than something in say Vinge. There was an awful lot of mars geography in there though.  I didn't really bother to figure it all out.  I liked it enough to plan to read the next two.  Robinson knows something about arabic culture evidently.  Green Mars was pretty good.  Yet more tons of martian geography.  I wish I'd gone to nasa's mars site before I read all these.  I guess I'll read the next one, if only because 2 ends right in the middle of something important.

Ian McDonald
Terminal Cafe started off annoying wanna-be gibson, all in love with death etc.  It got much better once it switched to the other characters.  It's good SF, but the plot lacks something.  It was all familiar to me, yet I'd never read it before.  Turned out it was a prequel to The Days of Solomon Gursky, a novella which I'd read somewhere and loved.  It's a posthumanist immortality romp.  So great.

Lois McMaster Bujold
S/he's won a million Nebulas, so I got one of the Miles Muscovian series.  I wasn't impressed, stopped halfway through.  Seemed like simplistic moralistic tales set in a future where nobody knows what to do with their technology.  It's pitiful when you read a book set in the future yet today we can do more advanced things with tech.  Not SF.

Joe Haldeman
The Forever War was good.  We get involved in a war with some aliens and there's lots of relativistic travel changing sexual morals hijinx.  Turns out the whole thing was dumb, just like vietnam.  The Forever Peace was ok.

David Brin
I read a bunch of it when I was a teenager.  Seemed all right.  One interesting bit was the idea that man evolved to chase down antelope on the plains.  They can sprint way faster than us but over a few days of running we can wear them out.  I don't know how true that is, but it'd be cool.

Orson Scott Card
I read the first one, Ender's Game.  it was pretty good.  He's an asshole mormon though now, and he's disavowed his earlier books.

Frederik Pohl
Gold at the Starbow's End was really interesting, even if totally wrongheaded.  Send out 7 super smart but varied people on a mission to a star many years away.  Give them math problems to work on to pass the time.  In actuality, there is no destination - they're being sent to their deaths, on the hope that in the isolation they will discover amazing things.  It turns out to work and they become godlike before they get to their nonexistent destination.  After reading Guns, Germs, and Steel this idea seems absurd - whole countries of millions of people (china) foundered and didn't advance because they were too controlled and didn't have outside perturbing influences - Europe did so well because it was hard to control all of it, so there were always competing countries and evolution of political and military systems continued.  Japan had better guns than Europe in the 17th century but since they had no competing countries, they eventually abandoned them and went back to swords (until the west came in again).  So the idea that 7 people on a spaceship would be able to remain innovative and not settle down into some stable pattern seems doubtful.

Philip K. Dick
Speed addict and crazy, but wrote some good stories.  A Scanner Darkly is great.  Some of his short stories are good.  Not hard SF.  I haven't read Ubik or or his other later speed head books.  The short story Second Variety was memorable.

Philip Jose Farmer
Famous for Riverworld, which I haven't read yet.  A bit of a hack from what I can tell - I've read his one about an attempt to create a modern tarzan, and the one that's to Frankenstein as back to the future 3 is to back to the future 1.  Both were amusing.  Hangover reading.

Roger Zelazny
Amber I've read the first 7 or 8 of the amber series.  They're pretty good, not SF though.  There are some promising SF ideas in the first one but they never reappear.  The main character has the ability to move between an infinite number of worlds, all more or less similar to the true center of the universe, a sort of medieval city called Amber.  Earth is just one of the fairly distant alternative worlds.  The main character never thinks of doing what I would do if I had the power to easily switch like that - go find some really great music, food, girls, books.  And find some really really great go players.  Everyone is just obsessed with controlling the city of amber.  The second 5 bring in straight up magic; I lost interest.

Michael Swanwick
Bones of the Earth was pretty good.  Deterministic time travel and dinosaurs and a really crazy end, plus anti-funamentalist Christian stuff.  Jack Faust was... um...  I'm glad I read it, and it was really fast, didn't drag.  Swanwick is pretty good, but I don't know... maybe he's secretly a fantasy author or something.

Frank Herbert
Dune is great.  I've read the next 3, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune.  They were all right.  I kind of liked God Emperor though.  It'd be interesting to reread these in light of The Blank Slate - Herbert's definitely got genetics playing an important role, but in God Emperor the emperor tries to change society by destroy all history books and making an invincible woman army.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle For Leibowitz - The first two parts are really good, the third is ok.  Postapocalyptic, religious.

Octavia Butler
I read Dawn for a SF class.  I thought it was really interesting, definitely had some good ideas.  Aliens find the remains of post-nuclear war humans and try to reconstruct is, but they want to make modifications.  Similar to Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars in having a bunch of humans with no culture being raised by aliens who don't understand them.  And in some ways it's similarly annoying - therre's this major thing where the aliens refuse to give the woman paper and pencil, because they've just assumed she has eiditic memory.  Takes a while and a lot of annoyance to clear that up.  Of course Dawn is still way better than Anvil of Stars though.  I should read her other stuff.

Robert Silverberg
Prolific.  Probably his short stories are better than his books.  I read one of the Valentine books, didn't get into it.  Too much juggling, and really predictable.  Tom O'Bedlam was better, but still predictable.  Better than Philip Jose Farmer but similarly seems to be lacking something to really grab me.

John Varley
Meta-engineering and gratuitous sex, like Niven.  The most memorable part of Titan was two girls' months long climb up a tree-covered 50 mile tall ventilation shaft inside a huge living moon.  Not really hard SF.  Kind of 70s.  I should give him another try really.

Carl Sagan
Contact was good.  The movie sucked.

Gene Wolfe
Everybody constantly talks about the Old Sun and New Sun series.  I started reading one but couldn't get into it.

Aldous Huxley
Brave New World is pretty good.  God, where are the modern versions of this guy?  All destroyed by drugs, probably.

Stanislaw Lem
Polish "I'm not SF dammit!" SF author.  Novels mostly revolve around describing some weird but inert/alive alien environment.  His short stories are great and funny.  Also has some incredible mathematical poetry which translates well from Polish.

Kurt Vonnegut
Depressed good "I'm not SF dammit" author.  Super depressing, but great books.

Neil Gaiman
A really good writer, but basically fantasy.  American Gods was really well written.  But it was still just a bunch of myths, it's all outdated and unreal.  I'm just not interested.

Samuel R. Delany
Tales Of Neveryon kind of PoMo Le Guin style.  Some was ok.
The Fall of the Towers was awful.

Clifford D. Simak

Greg Bear
His books have gotten better and better.  At first he wrote hard space SF, lately he's written bioscience thrillers.  Eon was absolutely awful.  The Forge of God was all right, but the sequel Anvil of Stars was awful.  Darwin's Radio and Vitals were both really enjoyable.  I plan to read all of his new work, and the sequel to Darwin's Radio.  Dead Lines was a horror crossover.  It was just ok.  Compared to Dan Simmons' horror it was a letdown.

Piers Anthony
Arrogant hack.  The Xanth books are ok for 12 year olds.  Bio of a Space Tyrant is a fucked up thing for a kid to read.  However, he did write one extremely memorable short story collection, Anthonology.  I'll never forget the torture story in that one.

Greg Egan
Permutation City was really good, if heavy.  I plan to read the rest.

Robert Charles Wilson
Darwinia was pretty good.

Robert A. Metzger
Picoverse was pretty good.  It's one of those books that despite having lots of hard pysics, includes the magical idea that physics knows something about the human body.  The human body is not well-defined, so there can't be machines that operate on the human body as a unit.  "A is touching B" for physical objects is not well-defined.  I was also surprised at how despite messing with incredibly powerful pysics and jumping through wormholes, the physical environment remains conducive for human life.  I'd think that having half your body exist in one universe and half in another would really really mess you up, even for the half a second that it takes you to jump through a portal.

Terry Pratchett
He has about 20 Discworld books.  I've read the first one and it was pretty good.  It's fantasy.  I'll probably eventually read a few more of them.