Happy New Year to everyone, I wish you all the best for 2009!
I'm hoping 2009 will be another great year and I'm going to try and dedicate some more time to the blog with, hopefully, more reviews, interviews and perhaps a contest or two thrown in for good measure! If you're a regular visitor you may have noticed that I've not yet put up the post letting you all know what sci-fi books are out this month. Well, there's a good reason for that - I've not yet got it written up. With Christmas and time off work my mind has gone into complete meltdown and I've done nothing that I wanted to do during the holidays. My reading has been dire (although I did re-read The Temporal Void) and as you have seen, the blog hasn't been updated half as much as I was hoping. Still, new year and a fresh start - I don't plan on letting things slip like this again.
So, onto what I've got lined up for the next month or so. I'm going to get Splinter finished soon enough and then I've got quite a few books that I want to read: Shadow of the Scorpion, Infoquake, Black Magic Woman, Earth Ascendant and The Birthing House to name but a few. Anything there you're interested in? Let me know and I'll see about moving it up the review pile.
I'm not one for resolutions, but this year I'd like to read more of what I love, get some of the classics and read more new things. So, this is where you come in: What classic science fiction books should I read? Is there something that is inexcusable not to have read? Let me know, I want to try and broaden my knowledge to some of these older books that I won't have read! I'm also looking for new authors breaking into the science fiction genre and would love to hear from anyone that either falls into this category or knows of upcoming debuts that I need to read :) Contact me on the usual: mdchitty@[nospam]yahoo.co.uk (remove the [nospam]!).
I've go one review that I still need to write up (The Eyeless), but apart from that I'm looking forward to what I'm hoping will be an exciting year!
Mini-Review: Tricked by Kevin Hearne
6 hours ago
2 comments:
One classic I never got round to reading but just bought is 'Dying Inside' by Robert Silverberg, about a telepath living in the modern day and slowly using his powers. It's from about the same time he wrote 'Book of Skulls', one of my favourite books. One of those would be very good to go for in terms of classics.
Otherwise - there's 'Schismatrix' by Bruce Sterling; Demon, Wizard and Titan by John Varley, or the Ophiuchi Hotline by the same (the first three are hard sf, despite the names); Hyperion, by Dan Simmons; Chaga, by Ian McDonald (or the more recent River of Gods); Philip Jose Farmer, All Your Scattered Bodies Go, first of the Riverworld books; Scanner Darkly, by Dick; Stars My Rendezvous/Tiger Tiger by Alfred Bester; Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny; and Gateway by Fred Pohl. That would be my pick of some of the best of the classics.
In terms of newer writers who aren't much heard of, I can recommend Holy Machine by Chris Beckett, published a couple of years ago by, I think, Wildside Press. He had a short story collection out recently.
Thanks for the tips Gary, I'll add them to the list of books to get around to. I'm hoping that these sorts of books will be easier to get hold of locally than newer ones. If not, there's always amazon!
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