Michael

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.

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.

Hard to rate this one. I'd say it's probably only three-star Pratchett, but maybe 3.5 overall. It's not bad, it just feels like Pterry's repeating himself on several levels: some jokes have appeared in previous books, and one of the central themes is right out of Feet of Clay. In some ways, the book breaks new ground for a Pratchett novel, though. The pacing is very different – not bad, but unexpected – and [minor spoiler] it's neat to see Vimes, after so many stories, so clearly able to out-think the main antagonist.

Ferling might have a genuine argument to be made here, but he seriously undermines it with his habit of telling us how he interprets his sources without showing us what those sources say. When he does bother to actually quote them, he typically uses just fragments of sentences, often without attributing them to a specific person and rarely with an explanation of the context. Without that grounding, his assumptions and interpretations seem self-reinforcing and circular. Judging by the internet he's apparently a leading scholar in Revolutionary history, so I don't doubt these are genuine conclusions based on the evidence he's seen, but unfortunately the book does not read that way.

Certainly interesting, especially in the first third or so, but I had hoped for more about what O'Brian did during the War, and more about how he wrote and researched the Aubrey/Maturin books. Given that he was obsessively private, however, I don't know that anyone could really learn much about those.

Not as polished and focused as the later Discworld books, but still wonderfully funny. This and The Light Fantastic are much closer Douglas Adams in tone, and draw more heavily on Howard/Moorcock pulp. Very worth reading if you like any of that. Considering Pratchett's written about a hundred in the series, even if you dislike these early ones, you may still like the later ones.

I read the first chapter or so of Bellwether in some sci-fi compilation back when it first came out, and finally got around to the actual book. I wish I'd thought to read it back then; not for its own sake, per se, but because it's a good example of her strengths and weaknesses, and would probably have gotten me to read To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book earlier. I'd really rate this 3.5, but I'm rounding up because I do like Connie Willis quite a bit.

It's a fun book: Willis is expert at creating a manic comedy of errors, and there are points where Bellwether comes close to the heights of lunacy she reaches in To Say Nothing of the Dog. It's also a relentless attack on the human tendency to herd, and draws constant parallels between that behavior in fashion, hobbies, music, management styles, etc. etc. And (this would be slightly spoilery if it weren't so clearly suggested from early on) tying that to the mathematical complexity of human social systems is a very interesting idea.

Unfortunately that laser focus is one of the book's weak points, and one that I've seen in other Willis books: it deals so heavily with the main concept of the book (fad behavior in this case) in all its forms that it gets repetitive. After a few chapters, there's a sense that you're re-reading nearly any scene that takes place outside the lab. I'll also say, spoiler-free, that the actual arc of the story was not terribly surprising whatsoever.

It's not so bad that I regret reading it, even slightly – I don't bother writing reviews about books unless I think they're worth reading. Willis is an interesting, engaging writer; she's just written better and more epic books than Bellwether.

Not as consistently great as his later novels, but still extremely interesting. Some of the side plotting is distracting, and the characters are not exactly believable, but the Big Picture ideas offer a fascinating perspective on post-Singularity culture shock. He tackles some of these ideas more skillfully in Accelerando and Glasshouse, but this is still fun if you're already a Stross fan.

Very neat book. I have a minor technical quibble: Walton switches between first- and third-person perspective when there's no compelling reason to do so, but it's not like there's a half-dozen perspectives that she's switching between (only two), and she's consistent about it at least.

What's great about this book is that it starts out as a minor murder mystery, set in an England that made peace with Nazi Germany before America got involved in World War II, and it gradually begins revealing a much larger and more malevolent story. It could work as the first part to several types of interesting stories about fascism and war, so I'm very interested in reading the two sequels to see where she's going.

Even though I got an off-taste from the little bit of Dunnett I've read (which is only a matter of pages), Macbeth is my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, so I thought I'd give this one a chance. The story is really built around the idea that the actual Scottish king Macbeth and a half-Viking Earl of Orkney named Thorfinn were the same person; there's no real connection to the play, except for depictions of a few events that become part of the myth around Macbeth which inspired Shakespeare, like the Birnam Woods coming to Dunsinane Hill.

There's an attitude of “my characters are so cool” particularly in the beginning, which is what I didn't like about the tiny bits of the Lymond books I've read, and there are too many moments where the outcome of a situation feels like the result of Thorfinn's awesomeness instead of his effort. Her choice to mirror Shakespeare's use of prophecy, albeit with a completely different context and effect, makes the problem worse: Thorfinn knows and is resigned to his destiny, but when your main character doesn't feel like an active participant in his fate, why should you expect your readers to?

Dunnett's portrayal of the culture and the events of the time more than make up for all this, but I never got past the feeling that I was reading about imaginary people in a real setting. I realize that's basically the point of a work of historical fiction, but I mean that I was reading with two different and incompatible degrees of suspended disbelief. I did like King Hereafter and I'm more likely to read her other historical fiction now, but it wasn't until the last quarter of the book that I was even remotely emotionally invested in any of the characters.

I'm being more critical of Dunnett than I would be of many authors, because she's held up as one of the greatest writers of historical fiction. She's recreated her historical setting here very thoroughly and believably, and on the strength of that alone I can understand the merits of her reputation. She does not seem as strong at integrating her characters so that they're a believable product of that setting, however. I don't have any sense of her ability to create a story, given that she's working to support her idea of Macbeth==Thorfinn and reconcile the events attached to those names, but she definitely does a very solid job of that.

Generally I find books that rely so heavily on an unusual narrative structure gimmicky, if not outright obnoxious, but the nested plots of Cloud Atlas don't get in the way of the book's sense of purpose. I wish the nature of that purpose had been a little clearer before the last two or three stories, but only because I was worried while I was reading it that the veiled connections Mitchell makes between each storyline would end up too weak to support the book as a whole. Fortunately that's not the case — the final few pages act as mortar and hold the larger structure together solidly.