Category Archives: Books

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    “Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds

    Absolution Gap, by Alastair Reynolds

    Awesome. This book had me rivited until like 3am the night I finished it. Fantastically imagined. Crazy characters. Space ships. Unfathamable aliens. Ancient self aware weapons. The works. It’s very cool how the different plot lines came together in the end. Like hard SF? Read this series: Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, and of course Absolution Gap.

    I see that there’s another book set in the same universe as the above series that I didn’t know about that I’m going to have to run out and lay my grubby little paws on: Diamond Dogs Turquoise Days. Saweet, B&N here I come! It looks like it’s a collection of short stories.

    Here’s Reynold’s bibliography. He’s an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency and a best selling author. Impressive. He’s young too – a year younger than me, the bastard!! (just kidding ;-) )

    Finished Song of Susannah, By Stephen King

    Too short! It’s a thick book with big type. It took me all of three days to read it. I enjoyed it though it wasn’t as good as some of the earlier Dark Tower books. This one seemed simpler or something. Perhaps it’s just the warm up for the final book, the The Dark Tower, which should be out later this year. Can’t wait for that one. I hope the finale is as good as the rest of the series.

    This is some of the art from the forthcoming book.

    What I’m reading now…

    I’m excited because I went to Barnes and Noble to buy the new Stephen King book Song of Susannah which is book six in the Dark Tower series, which I can’t wait to read. This is a really great series by King.

    I also happened to find a new book by Allistair Reynolds called Absolution Gap. This is the third book in the Revelation Space trilogy. Reynolds is one of my favorite sci-fi authors and I didn’t even know this book was out yet. Hence my excitement. It’s rare that I find two new books like this to read. I’m a geek, I admit it.

    Red Mars Trilogy

    It’s been a while since I wrote anything about what I was reading. Mainly this is because I’ve been wading through the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m about half way through Blue Mars (3rd book). Each book is about 800 pages long so it’s a pretty hefty undertaking. I don’t mind that at all except that I’ve ground to a halt out of sheer boredom in Blue Mars. Flame out. I might come back to it a bit later because I don’t like not finishing books, especially the last book in a multi-book series.

    The reason I’m finding it to be boring is because it’s less about the characters and more about the planet and the characters trying to put together a government and infrastructure for Mars. While this is unbelievably detailed and totally believable, I don’t really give a rats ass. I care about the characters. So I’ve been stubbornly plowing along trying to finish it. It’s going to have to wait though.

    Looking for a good book to read?

    Check out this site: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/index.htm. It’s only scifi, fantasy, and horror books (I don’t read fantasy or horror). I haven’t gone too deep into this site, but it’s tough to find a good scifi book if you don’t know before hand what to get. There’s a lot of crap out there. Hopefully, these reviews might help mitigate that somewhat.

    -Mike

    Excellent interview with Richard Morgan…

    Richard Morgan is an author I discovered recently. I have a lot of respect and admiration for his writing. Here’s an interesting interview with him: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intrm.htm