SCIFI January Suggestions

[dwndrgn]

*your suggestion here*

[dwndrgn]

Hello?? Anyone out there???

[Rane Longfox]

(I think this is recent enough)

Recursion, by Tony Ballantyne (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...004062-9827007)

Originally Posted by http://www.lovereading.co.uk/book/500

A highly imaginative and enjoyable venture into a future era of conflict between mankind and the artificial intelligences and cities and planets it has carelessly fabricated. Herb returns to the remote planet he has been furtively trying to build a city on, to find it a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Eva has taken desperate steps to escape the tedium of her pointless life...only to end up in the super-intelligent clutches of a yellow mechanical digger. Constantine arrives at the remote part-idyllic, part-nightmare settlement of Stonebreak and - unsettlingly - begins to confront the truth of his own unreality. Meanwhile in the farthest reaches of outer space, the Enemy is plotting the final overthrow of the human race which created it.

Its a great vision of a high-tech Big Brother future.

[dwndrgn]

Sounds a bit chilling! Thanks for the suggestion!

[knivesout]

River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

Here's the back-cover copy:

August 15, 2047 - HAPPY HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY, INDIA

One and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Mother India is all the things she has always been - beautiful and terrible, staggeringly poor and fantasically rich, unimaginably ancient and a leader of the technological revolution. Always changing, always the same.

On the eve of her hundredth birthday, ten people are doing ten very different things. In the next few weeks, they will be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.

As the gangster Shiv lets the holy river Ganges sweep away a bad night's work, Mr Nandha prepares for another day as a Krishna Cop and his wife wonders how to pass the time. Shaheen Badoor Khan has no trouble occupying himself: the Prime Minister's advisor has to deal with the failure of the monsoon, a potential war with Awadh, and the rabble-rouser N.K. Jivanjee.

Tomorrow, a stand-up comic will run a power company, a set designer will become a star, a young journalist will get the story of her life, and a scientist will land on an asteroid.

No one knows what will happen to Thomas Lull. Excapt Aj, the waif, the mind-reader, the prophet - the one who may hold the key to it all.

Ian McDonald has written a Great Indian Novel for the new millenium. River of Gods teems with the life of a nation choked with peoples and cultures - a war fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded - as the great river Ganges flows on.

[gill]

judas unchained by peter hamilton

[Brys]

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick

I haven't seen much PKD nominated here, and as he's one of the most prolific and important authors in science fiction, it's about time we had a discussion on one of his novels.

Synopsis (from amazon):

Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. Nevertheless it's blackly farcical, full of comic- surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred", face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of Trainspotting.

[knivesout]

I'd be cool with some PKD, too. My personality has just finished re-integrating after a 4-novel PKD marathon few months more, and my sense of reality and identity is up for another round of punishment!

[polymorphikos]

I thought we weren't allowed to read books written more than a year previous.

I am out of the loop. I never have any suggestions.

[knivesout]

Oh yea, if that's the case River of Gods would still be eligible, I think. Or maybe the new Adam Roberts novel, The Snow?