“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov.

I’ve just (on Sunday, that is) finished reading this book. It took me a mere seven months to do just that. Even though you might think so, the book is not made up of twenty five thousand densely written pages, it weighs in at about 500 pages of quite spacious text.

Some of author Isaac Asimov’s books are regarded as science fiction classics. His most commonly known work is probably “I, Robot”, not because it’s a great book (I’ve never read it myself, so I can’t tell), rather because it resulted in a movie with the same title starring Will Smith. His work has inspired a lot of people, like the Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese new religious movement that carried out the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways back in 1995. Continue reading "“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov."

“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds.

“Chasm City” is the second book I’ve read written by Alastair Reynolds, the first one being “Revelation Space“. I had a bit of a hard time with Revelation Space as Reynolds totally lost it during the last one hundred pages and started rambling like a madman.

So naturally I was a bit skeptical when I picked up Chasm City. The reason why I bought the book in the first place was that it was not part of the same series as Revelation Space, but the events of Chasm City still takes place in the same fictional universe as Revelation Space - and if it’s something Alastair Reynolds is very good at it’s creating thrilling, fictional universes.

Chasm City starts out well and Reynolds is keeping a good pace through most of the book, he is only side stepping once into what might resemble the ramblings of Revelation Space and for only a few pages. Unlike Revelation Space, most of Chasm City is written in first person with the occasional jumps back in time with stories told by a third-person narrator.

There is no requirement that you have to be familiar with Reynolds’ first book to enjoy Chasm City, but it’s without doubt a plus if you do as it enables you to enjoy all the more or less intricate references to Revelation Space.

“Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds.

Science fiction is perhaps my favorite genre, not only when it comes to books, but also other forms of entertainment, like movies and computer games. Every now and then a science fiction book comes along that every fan of the genre should read. Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” is not such a book.

Dan Sylveste is a scientist obsessed with the Amarantin, an alien race that was suddenly wiped out nine hundred thousand years ago. Sylveste lives in a universe where human kind has colonized worlds far from Earth and has evolved into several sub-species like the Ultras who are a mix of man an machine.

Enormous space ships called Lighthuggers move between the colonized worlds at a speed very close to the speed of light while their crew is stored in reefersleep chambers. Aboard one of the Lighthuggers is Triumvir Ilia Volyova, she and the crew on a desperate mission to find Dan Sylveste and his father, Calvin, so they can heal the vessel’s Captain, who is ill with a viral infection that has taken over parts of the ship and is slowly, but steadily spreading. Continue reading "“Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds."

Space Opera.

Over the last year I’ve been reading a lot, at least by my standards. I used to read much, mostly books in English, which was a nice way to keep my English skills at a reasonable level and to keep my brain working. TV and movies are nice, but they’re not very challenging for the brain. Then other things became more entertaining than reading. I’m not quite sure exactly what.

I started reading again when I spent a lot of my time waiting for planes on airports around the world and sitting on planes flying to other airports where I could wait again. For some reason I picked the first books from the non-fiction shelve. I came across some good books, some mediocre ones and one really bad book.

After the really bad one, I decided to ditch non-fiction and try a bit of fiction instead. Continue reading "Space Opera."

Dictionary.

Over the last couple of months I’ve read one great book, Hyperion, and one good book The Fall of Hyperion. Since I finished the last book yesterday, I decided to visit a book store after work today to find what I thought was the third book about Hyperion. Actually, I went to three book stores, but I was unable to find it anywhere.

Just as well, because I was looking for Hyperion Omnibus. Since I’m a moron, I didn’t actually know the meaning of the word “omnibus” and thought it was part of the title of the book.

Omnibus, noun, a book containing reprints of a number of works.

So now you know, too.