Yes, it's rather late for this sort of thing: it's the last day of March
and therefore the final day of the first quarter of 2012. Somehow
drawing attention to the fact that it's still the first quarter of the
new year makes it seem like this isn't really as late as it is.
I didn't pay that much attention last year to the books I read, so it's
all going to be a bit vague, but here, briefly, are the three best books
I read last year:
In order of reading.
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi (2010)
This one stands out a little for me, selection wise, in that it was a
very recent publication. Though I have a bit of a bent these days for
modern SF, that normally means reading something from the last couple of
decades.
There was a fair bit of hype on this debut and it doesn't fail to
deliver. Hannu writes a very dense, very hard post singularity sci-fi
novel that throws some brilliant concepts around some pretty cool
characters. Post-humans abound, working with even more powerful
entities, in and around the solar system perhaps a few centuries hence.
Contains detectives, thieves, gaming culture and a whole lot of musings
on the implications of future tech.
Looking forward to the sequel coming out later this year, but will need a reread of the Quantum Thief beforehand, methinks.
Trivia: contains a recommendation on the cover by Charles Stross, who
wrote the very next book I read and is next up on this list.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross (2005)
Selected by me for a bookclub, since I'd been meaning to get around to
Stross at some point and this one received some notoriety. The book is a
collection of 9 continuing tales, though it didn't suffer for that.
Taken together, they form a novel focusing on a man at the cutting edge
of technology, and his descendents, as they head into and then through
the technological Singularity, beginning in roughly the present day.
Slashdot makes good background reading for this (and even gets a
mention), especially for the first third that deals with the ramp up to
the Singularity.
Probably has the highest density of ideas to pages of any book I can
recall reading. Stross throws down concepts and references without even
bothering to stop and see if the reader is still with him because he's
already bringing something else up.
Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds (2005)
I'd picked up a slew of books by Reynolds at a garage sale recently and
had rather expected that the first Reynolds books that I'd read would be
the Revelation Space series. The first book in that series was in fact
sitting in my short-short list of books awaiting to be read, whereas
this book had languished in a more general pool of books: the second
tier, as it were. Still, for whatever reason this book was picked up in
the dying weeks of the year and wham! it delivers emphatically with a
strong plot and characters, along with a high degree of page-turning
readability. It has an adventure feel to it, and is quite reminiscent
of Clarke's Rama series. A crew of comet-miners are in the vicinity of
an unknown alien object that's discovered and they are dispatched to
investigate. Cue humans interacting with cool alien tech.
General Notes
All three books are the only novels I've read by those authors, which
also helps me tick off on another list a couple of the authors that I
wanted to read something - anything - by.
All of the books are sci-fi, and in fact all are hard sci-fi.
All of the books are quite recent, being published within the previous 6 years.
Only one book (The Quantum Thief) is set in a specific time - the other two span non-trivial ranges.
All of the authors are European, and two of the three are from the UK.
Comments on the above novels are welcome, as well as your own favourite reads from last year, whatever the genres.
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