November 2021 Reading Thread

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Finished "The Galaxy and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers. (Who, as I've said before, is one of those Marmite authors- most people seem to either love or loathe her work.) It's a quiet, character-led story. Five people, three of them interstellar travellers, are stuck waiting in a small habitat dome during a disaster. What fills me with delight is the fact that this is a novel where none of the main characters are human. They're also not what you might call stereotypical members of their various species, which makes their interactions less predictable than they could have been.
 
AE35Unit said:
I'll be so glad to finish Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham. Its so dull. Just like his dreadful Kraken Wakes. Its a thin book but boy is it dragging!
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return it to the sea
 
Robert Sheckley "Shards of Space" (1962)

Eleven stories first published between 1953 and 1960, all except one in Astounding/ Galaxy/ Magazine of F&SF. A pleasant enough read, nothing exceptional, no attempt at being science-based, just quirky.

Digging a little bit deeper, it's interesting to see the place of women in these stories (perhaps not so much a reflection on Sheckley, but more on his editors and their readers). Of course this was par for the times.
Of these eleven stories, six feature no women at all
and of the remaining five we have
A longed for fiance on Earth (unseen)
A mid-50s schoolteacher protective of four beautiful young women
A conventional housewife
A nightmare (female)
A housewife who her husband plans (successfully) to kill.
 
I completed Ishiguro's Klara And The Sun this morning. It's a delightful book, the very softest of soft SF, and a meditation on the uniqueness of the human heart and the apparent inability of science to recreate it. I say apparent, as it's not recreated in the way that they might have expected. Ishiguro is the master of gossamer-light prose, as clean as bright spring air, relating the whole story from perspective of the robot AF (Artificial Friend), using no direct metaphor (though plenty of indirect ones) or prose flourishes. The drama is initially subtle and then, quite unexpectedly, terribly, urgent. Highly recommended.

Next I'll be reading Rob Holdstock's Mythago Wood, which @The Big Peat and @HareBrain told me off for not reading before.
 
Fiberglass Cyborg said:
Finished "The Galaxy and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers. (Who, as I've said before, is one of those Marmite authors- most people seem to either love or loathe her work.) It's a quiet, character-led story. Five people, three of them interstellar travellers, are stuck waiting in a small habitat dome during a disaster. What fills me with delight is the fact that this is a novel where none of the main characters are human. They're also not what you might call stereotypical members of their various species, which makes their interactions less predictable than they could have been.
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Is this an updating of "The Canterbury Tales?"
Dan Jones said:
I completed Ishiguro's Klara And The Sun this morning. It's a delightful book, the very softest of soft SF, and a meditation on the uniqueness of the human heart and the apparent inability of science to recreate it. I say apparent, as it's not recreated in the way that they might have expected. Ishiguro is the master of gossamer-light prose, as clean as bright spring air, relating the whole story from perspective of the robot AF (Artificial Friend), using no direct metaphor (though plenty of indirect ones) or prose flourishes. The drama is initially subtle and then, quite unexpectedly, terribly, urgent. Highly recommended.
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I also loved this and your review does it a real service.
 
Re Mythago Wood

I've been looking at reviews before adding this to my reading list (realistic list, kept short) and one person referred it to as having created a new genre of 'fairy porn'. Is that right?
 
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