Tag: books

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge

After the heavy non-fiction of A Man on the Moon and Truth, Lies, and O-rings I opted for some lighter fare.

I've read this before. I find it particularly amusing because the antagonists of the story is the Livermore Energy Lab (a.k.a. LLNL). They've imposed a tyrannical peace on the world by sealing away the implements of war.

However, the protagonists disagree on these being a preferable world to live in.

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

Although I had read The Peace War previously, I was not aware there was a sequel until I stumbled on it looking for new reading ideas.

So I grabbed this to read. It certainly takes place in the same fundamental universe, but it's a completely different kind of story.

While The Peace War is mainly an action/adventure story this is a murder mystery: The death of a woman from natural causes tens of thousands of years ago. How is that murder and why would anyone even care? Guess you'll have to read it to find out.

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

This is a focused chronicle of the Apollo program and the astronauts that flew during it.

Still quite incredible that such feats were accomplished in the mid-twentieth century with such rudimentary technologies--almost through sheer will of the thousands and thousands of people that made it happen.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson is known for his fairly-hard sci-fi. He does a great job of including solid math and physics and then going beyond in a fun way. His work is definitely more challenging to read than much other sci-fi stuff, but that often is because of the richness of his worlds and the accuracy of the science.

I had little information about Anathem before diving in, which I think made it more enjoyable. It's 1000+ pages though, and without the reputation of the author behind it I may have given up after the first couple hundred pages. For a novice author it could easily have been an rambling mess with no coherent story thread, but for Stephenson it tells an interesting story--he just takes his time doing so. He could easily have published it as a trilogy instead but I think that may have made the story inflection points feel more arbitrary.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I was slogging through 1000+ pages, it felt like I was walking the path of the story and enjoying the journey.

Silo 49: Going Dark by Ann Christy

Fan fiction of Hugh Howey's Wool/Silo world. This has also been sitting on my ereader for years.

Well written and edited, decent story. I enjoyed it. Explores what happens to a silo besieged by illness with a failing population.

Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay

I saw a description of this in a internet discussion and it sounded interesting. However, it was disappointingly shallow and short.

The concept is someone in the year 4000-something falls into an old late-20th-century motel and draws erroneous conclusions about the purpose of the contents found therein.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

A "first contact" story. But it's not about space-faring species exploring the final frontier. Nor a nascent space-exploring species being welcomed into the intergalactic fold.

More of an exploration of what happens when fate puts a pre-industrial civilization at the center of an intergalactic incident.