The Sprawl Trilogy

I caught up with some science fiction this year. The Murderbot diaries books by Martha Wells - 6/10. Mixed on these. They're fun to read. The setting is cool and the worldbuilding is shallow but effective (i.e., don't read it if you want game of thrones in space). Each novella takes an afternoon to read. I think "snarky violent droid" is overcooked these days and lost interest after book 5. Light by M. John Harrison - 7/10 excellent prose; great multiple-storyline plot; the journey was better than the destination, but it kept me thinking Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson - 7/10 Fun. If "near future Nigerian/British post-colonial frontier action with guns, robots, and psychic aliens" sounds cool to you, check it out. I liked his Rosewater Trilogy just as much. Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts - tough to rate these. brilliant ideas, VERY challenging plots. I wish I didn't get so confused by the end of each book.…

Multiple re-reads: - Saga of the Exiles by Julian May, which merges science fiction with folklore/fantasy in Pliocene Earth - Hyperion by Dan Simmons, excellent SF with a feel of the Canterbury Tales about it - Neuromancer by William Gibson, plus the follow-ups (all the Sprawl) are very good too - The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, about the eco collapse of the US in the 1980s (10 years after it was written) and which William Gibson called a "brilliant novel" And a couple of guilty pleasures: - Venus Equilateral by George O Smith, 1940s stories based around a three mile long space station at the L4 point in space, a bit like Babylon 5 meets DS9 in the era of vacuum tubes - Necrotech by KC Alexander, a brutal and obscene body-mod cyberpunk dystopia (the sequel of which, Nanoshock, has a superbly offensive opening sentence) - Halcyon Drift by Brian Stableford, about a corporate dystopia and a pilot who hooks up his body to merge with his ship (a bit blase now but less so then, especially as I had read far less at the time) - Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony, a 6 book series following the rise of a refugee to becoming the Tyrant of Jupiter

The sprawl (neuromancer etc) and the Jean le Flambeur (quantum thief) trilogies. Both are packed with very interesting concepts and characters.

William Gibson. The Bridge trilogy and the Sprawl trilogy, at a minimum. They still feel like maps to the future even now. You have to work at it, the map is not the territory after all, but the realisations about the impact of technology, progress, and the choices we make when we let society work a certain way have been profound, for me at least. Also The Peripheral, and Gibson’s essay in Wired about undersea cables, and... yeah. Having read Gibson feels like a superpower. As others have said: - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide - Stepehnson’s Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Seveneves, Anathem (aside: totally surprised how much love there is for Anathem, I remember it not being received very kindly at the time by people around me, though I liked it.) - The Culture series (special shout out to The Player of Games.)