Michael

Five stars at least for the world-building, literary and literally in this case. Knock a few off because literally every female character is only participating in the plot to give the male character something to have sex with. That's not, like, subtext, they say so. Repeatedly. I sort of get the sense that Niven is trying to have a Science Fiction Idea here: like “since only men do Space Things, how could women have a place in Space Future? Aha! I have the answer!” without ever realizing how he's not getting nearly far enough out of his own pants on the topic. I grant that it was the 70s and these kind of assumptions were pretty universal among men, but it's still a real problem when you're reading a book about two-headed aliens and a constructed world that spans a planet's entire orbit and it's the people that make you say “oh, that's just not plausible”.

But there's a lot of great stuff in this book. The mega-engineering, the many very alien aliens, and Speaker-to-Animals as a character, are amazing. There's a weird and unexpected sense that by the last quarter of the book the characters have somehow, but rightfully, wandered into a Boris Vallejo painting. Obviously, to the extent that things like ring worlds have a place in pop culture, this book defined them, and this book is still worth reading nearly 50 years later – you just have to be mindful of the fact that there's a good chunk of it that you won't be able to take seriously, and it's not the science fiction part of the book.

Not quite as cohesively awesome as The King Must Die, but still quite interesting. Renault's invocation of ancient Greece is just as engrossing; the book's main flaw is that it seems to boil down to “then the rest of Theseus's life happened”. If these had been written today, we'd probably see this stretched out into several Theseus-post-Crete sequels with their own themes and ideas, and I think that actually would have been appropriate here.

Howey's an excellent world-builder: this is probably an odd thing to point out for a post-apocalyptic series, but he has a strong sense of the history of his story and the effects it has on his characters. It's not the first time anyone's written this kind of story, but Shift is engrossing, both on its own terms and as a rephrasing of the events of Wool. And Shift gets huge bonus points for completely avoiding the trap of mimicking Wool's highly mimickable (serial) narrative structure.

Unfortunately I don't think Howey's prose does his story perfect justice. It's not bad, just a bit average, and I can't think of any particular moment where it distracted me from his storytelling – but I can't think of any particular moment where it helped the story transcend itself, either. This is a case where I'd suggest reserving judgment on the author's style until you have a strong sense of their actual voice.

An interesting look at Steve Martin the performer rather than Steve Martin the persona. Don't read it looking for something as maniacally weird as his comedies: this is a discussion of what shaped his comedic style, and his perspective on the craft of stand-up.

There's a lot going on in this book and I can see how a lot of people bounce off it. It's a long read and although there is a main narrative thrust connecting everything, it evolves through several different kinds of story to show a slow-burn, accidental Singularity: sci-fi examinations of social media and technology, mythological creation stories of gods and monsters, fantasy adventure quests, etc. And it frequently shifts from one style to another to view particular characters or events through different contexts to highlight one of its main themes, that the nature of the something's reality depends quite a bit on the world you're viewing it in.

If you like reading about the kinds of topics Stephenson likes to write about, you'll find pretty much all of them somewhere in this book. There's so much of it that it does demand some stamina and attention to detail. Stephenson's best works are the ones where he's most ambitious, and although he very nearly bites off more than he can chew with Fall, I found it fascinating and rewarding overall.