Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
A run down of all the cool stuff I’m reading right now.
Sun of Suns takes place in an immense habitable Dyson sphere (or something like a Dyson sphere) inclosing the star Virga. A freefall civilization — complete with barrel-like towns spun to produce gravity — has spread throughout the enclosed habitat. The book tells the story of Hayden Griffin, a young man seeking revenge against the … Read more
The Laundry series is an amusing mash up of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The X-Files, Call of Cthulhu, and The Office. The second book in the series features its hero, Bob Howard, in a very James Bond-ish style adventure in which he has to re-enact all of the tropes of the spy genre in order to … Read more
Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel about the crew of a generational starship finally arriving at their destination … and dealing with what they find there. It’s the first Robinson book I read since I finished his Mars trilogy about a decade ago.
My summer reading list is progressing nicely. I finished up my first print novel on the list, Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon, and I’ve moved on to the second, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. The book opens with the destruction of the moon by an unknown “Agent”, and humanity’s desperate attempt to escape the impending lunar apocalypse. … Read more
The Courts of Chaos is the final book in Roger Zelazny’s first Chronicles of Amber series. The series involves the scheming of the royal family of Amber — the one true city in the one true world, of which the rest of the universe (including Earth) is but a shadow. It’s protagonist, Corwin, has finally seen … Read more
The second volume in Moon’s “Vatta’s War” series starts a hell of a lot faster than Book 1. It picks up about where Book 1 left off — young Kylara Vatta, kicked out of the Slotter Key Spaceforce Academy, is now captain of one of her merchant family’s spaceships. The book opens with a clandestine … Read more
Each summer I kick up my weekly reading time considerably. Aided by vacation and the occasional conference road trip I aim to read 12-15 books a summer. Below is an image galley highlighting the covers of the books I’m either reading or have read this summer. Check out my full Summer 2015 reading list on Goodreads.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice plays with the concepts of gender and identity with the framework of a conventional space opera. The main character is an “ancillary” — essentially a human being who’s consciousness has been overridden an artificial intelligence. That intelligence once controlled an entire starship and dozens of such ancillaries, and over the course … Read more
The last book on my 2014 summer reading list, and the one I didn’t get to finish. Consider Phlebas is the first novel in Banks’ Culture series of novels. It’s a morally ambiguous space opera in which its namesake civilization — the Culture — is a post-scarcity, trans-human, machine intelligence-led empire. Daniel Landau, a CLAMP colleague at Reed College, … Read more