On Books

I approached Anathem with some caution. By the end, I was taking a document about its philosophy to a festival so I could spend a little longer in its world.

Snow Crash is absurd, loud, deeply weird, and somehow still full of ideas that escaped into the real world.

I've just finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I devoured it in just a few days. It’s one of those books that grabs your imagination from the start and doesn’t let go until the last page.

I finally finished Echopraxia by Peter Watts this June—a sequel (or rather companion) to my beloved Blindsight, long awaited and wildly anticipated. This is hardcore hard‑SF: dense with ideas, heavy with references, and often more rewarding to read the annotations than the book itself. And yet, that very richness is both its virtue and its vice.

Books were hard to get when I was a kid. They were expensive and, on top of that, in short supply. Many people owned no books at all; some copied them by hand. But there were always plenty of books in our family, and it was shocking to me to see a room with no books in it.

I became acquainted with Glen Cook quite a long time ago, but, as it turned out, through the back gate: I swallowed his entire series about detective Garrett and was very pleased with it.

I already knew the conclusion. Reading Darwin meant working through the observations and objections behind it, with more fatigue and more respect than a summary could convey.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel with 'what if?' in mind. Diamond offers an absorbing answer to why history unfolded this way, even when I don't take it as the final answer.

A beaver's dam belongs in the picture of what its genes do. The Extended Phenotype follows that idea beyond the body; I found it harder than The Selfish Gene, but just as fascinating.

A rare specimen of damn strong science fiction, without the slightest bows toward adventure literature.