December SciFi Suggestions

[dwndrgn]

Please make your suggestions for the December discussion. Remember one suggestion per member and give us a synopsis and a reason for your suggestion.

 

[dwndrgn]

What, no nominations for December yet??

 

[mikeo]

I'll nominate Charles Stross' Accelerando (again). Here's the blurb from Amazon...

"Synopsis
His most ambitious novel to date, ACCELERANDO is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head."

 

[Rane Longfox]

I suggest Al Reynolds' standalone, Chasm City

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0575073659/qid=1128982712/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-3393200-3678240

Amazon Review:

In Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds revisits the noir universe of his debut SF blockbuster Revelation Space with a suspenseful, convoluted pursuit story. Its dizzying reversals and games of disguise are reminiscent of Iain M Banks at his trickiest.


The main narrative stars trained killer Tanner Mirabel, a man hell-bent on revenge, who stalks his enemy Reivich from the world Sky's Edge across a 15-year interstellar gap to the gaudy, poisoned melting pot of Chasm City. Flashbacks reveal the violent events and worse repercussions that so badly twisted Mirabel and others. Virus-induced dreams provide a third story line from inside the head of legendary traitor-messiah Sky Haussmann, who long ago shaped the original colonisation of Sky's Edge and whose real story never got into the history books.

Chasm City's complications include spectacular space-elevator sabotage, faulty antimatter drives, hidden aliens, mystery drugs, exotic bio-modification, tailored disease, high-tech weaponry, a new and deadlier form of bungee-jumping, and that traditional SF symptom of decadence: organised hunts with human prey. Violent death is never far off, but our protagonist has deeper worries in that his own motives and memories, even his identity, don't seem to add up quite as they should ... After many chases, captures and escapes, these tangled plot strands are satisfyingly resolved. Masks are stripped away, and webs of lies exposed. Revelations range from the origin of the dread Melding Plague (which once nightmarishly merged Chasm City's people, machines and buildings) to the reason for an irrational fear of alcoves. An enjoyably tense, tortuous SF thriller.

 

[dwndrgn]

I suggest Ring of Fire an anthology put together by Eric Flint where the authors take his ideas from the popular novles of 1632 and 1633 and run with them...
here's the synopsis from Amazon:

From Publishers Weekly
Readers who enjoyed editor Flint's novels (1632; 1633) of a West Virginia town transported by a black hole back in time to Germany during the Thirty Years War will appreciate how neatly the other authors' tales in this strong anthology dovetail with Flint's series. For instance, the aging hippie of Mercedes Lackey's "To Dye For" has already played an important role in 1633. Other stories lead into Flint's forthcoming novel, The Galileo Affair, while still others provide major plot threads for this volume's concluding novella, Flint's "The Wallenstein Gambit." Following their editor's lead, individual contributors concentrate less on the impact that the displaced Americans' technology makes than on how their ideas-and ideals-inspire those newly exposed to them. Thus we see a young priest embracing the ideas of a Vatican Council over 300 years in his future as a solution to the sectarian violence of his era (Andrew Dennis's "Between the Armies"), while young Germans take to baseball as a means of pushing themselves beyond themselves (Deann Allen and Mike Turner's "American Past Time"). Flint and his followers never forget that history is more than just kings and heroes.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

I can see many interesting discussions coming from this one...

 

[dwndrgn]

Only three nominations? Come on people, nominate something!!

 

[Brys]

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester:
"EDUCATION: none
SKILLS: none MERITS: none
RECOMMENDATIONS: none

This is the official verdict on Gully Foyle, unskilled space crewman. But Gully has managed to survive 170 days in the airless purgatory of deep space after the wreck of his ship and has escaped to Earth carrying a murderous grudge and a secret that could change the course of history"

It's considered one of the classics of the SF genre.

 

[Blue Mythril]

Does George Orwell's [font=verdana, helvetica, arial]Nineteen Eighty-four [/font][font=verdana, helvetica, arial]count as Sci-fi?
If so I would like to nominate that. I was reading through the paper recently and was thinking on how relevent this book is to today's politics (well, Australian politics at least sorry). I think it'd be really interesting to read with today's political climate in mind. I actually havn't read the book yet, just tantalising excerpts here and there. I think it has the potential to generate some good discussion, both literary and sociological/ topical.

[/font]Synopsis (from Amazon.com)
An apocalyptic tale set in a nation ruled by Big Brother, where speech is doctored and thoughts are controlled by totalitarian agents. From the author of Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London.


(p.s. I haven't been around for a while so I'm not up to date with what's been read etc my apologies)
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[dwndrgn]

Though 1984 might be an interesting discussion topic, the book club has new rules designed to help us discover new and interesting authors that we might not encounter otherwise. Thus the rule that a nominated book must have been published (in some form) within the past 12 months.