tomd22

Comment Threads

• pharmst commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  Chucking a few hats into the ring: No love for "Vellum" by Hal Duncan? Unlike Anathem, I actually enjoyed reading that although "Ink" didn't work as well for me. I'm afraid I bounced off Anathem rather hard, despite having slogged through the entirety of the Baroque Cycle (short verdict: moments of utter brilliance interspersed with acres of tedium. I'm not sure the brilliance was sufficiently luminous to make up for the rest sadly.) My partner suggests Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" for its outrageously amazing prose & being perhaps the definitive account of the gay experience of the emergence...
• nicholas.smale commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  While I'm no expert, I think we'll come to regard some of the novels by Arab writers which have inspired the Arab Spring as being the most important of the decade....
• Charlie Stross commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  Henrik: we know each other. (Hint: she guest blogs here from time to time.)...
• Charlie Stross commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  The last two important science fiction books in the sense that they had an effect in changing the way that significant numbers of people think and perhaps act were probably 1984 and Brave New World. Er, no. I believe "The Handmaid's Tale" is a slow-burning fuse, but if the dominionist entryists currently trying to take over the US Republican party succeed, it may abruptly become as relevant as 1984. There are probably a bunch of "near misses", SF novels that nearly coincided with the time that would resonate with them, or whose time hasn't come yet. Many of them are...
• Charlie Stross commented on Because I have too much spare time for reading ...
  Peter, while you're around here? Congratulations!...