The Windup Girl

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.…

The Overstory by Richard Powers - an intertwining of lives, as witnessed by the oldest beings on Earth, putting things into a rather different perspective. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - compassion and redemption, set in a terrifyingly plausible near future where the oil and tech companies have been replaced by gene and agro conglomerates. Calories or joules, it’s just energy. Weaveworld by Clive Barker - a dark, fantastical yarn of vivid (sometimes grotesque) imagery, spinning a new take on the oldest tale, that of good vs. evil.

The Windup Girl (also by Bacigalupi) is interesting too.

A bunch of books: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (as well as several of the sequels), American Gods by Neil Gaiman, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, and a bunch of others.

'Deep Six' (short story anthology) and 'Wind-up Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky It's easy to categorise these as wonderful and well written space opera, but that undersells them. Their author (Venor Vinge) invented the idea of the Singularity, and worked as a computer science professor. Both won both the Hugo Award. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game As good as people say it is. Most of Richard Morgan's works (esp the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kovacs series). Not his fantasy books though. For fantasy books, Patrick Rothfuss is doing good stuff. The Kingkiller Chronicles is excellent. Read his other books before "Slow Regard of Silent Things", though, because that is one weird story. From more recent SciFi books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl is excellent. I'm currently reading Ancillary Justice and I'm really enjoying it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Awesome!

Reposted from my site: (http://ben.kudria.net/post/2548785108/my-favorite-books-of-2... (http://ben.kudria.net/post/2548785108/my-favorite-books-of-2010)). Affiliate links there, for those inclined. === In 2010, every single book I read, I read on my Kindle. Buying a Kindle has been the best thing I have ever done for my reading addiction. I recently upgraded to a Kindle 3, and I wholeheartedly recommended you get one as well, even if you currently have a Kindle 2. Here are the top books I enjoyed in 2010, and you will enjoy also. - The His Dark Materials Trilogy. Start with The Golden Compass. - The City & The City by China Miéville. Quite the post-modern detective story. (Read also his novel Perdido Street Station) - Surface Detail, the new novel by Iain M. Banks, who has quickly catapulted to the very top of my “Favorite Sci-Fi Authors” list. Surface Detail may not be the best novel for a Banks-unfamiliar reader, however — you may wish to start with something like Consider Phlebas or Look To Windward.…