Topic
Reading
A collection of 7 posts
Iain M Banks
Iain M Banks wrote engaging science fiction about people in a fascinating post scarcity utopia.
Jo Walton's "Thessaly" Trilogy
I recently finished reading Necessity, the third and final book in Jo Walton’s “Thessaly” trilogy. I had encountered Jo Walton’s writing previously in her novel Tooth and Claw, a fun and surprisingly thoughtful novel in the style of a Regency Romance with Dragons as the main characters. Her
Against the Singularity
Ray Kurzweil popularized the idea of a “Technological Singularity”, originally proposed by Vernor Vinge, based on ideas from I. J. Good, where the advances in technology and, particularly machine intelligence, will render the future unpredictable. The amusing thing to me is that they then go on to make predictions, usually
Current SF reading
I haven’t been reading as much sf, but I do like some of Charles Stross’s work, especially the first several books of the Merchant Princes series. It’s getting a bit soap opera-ish, and we’ll have to see what happens. I also liked Iron Sunrise quite a
Rachel Pollack
I first became aware of her through her writings on tarot, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in a psychological interpretation of tarot. Her Shining Woman Tarot is a deck of her own design, implementing her own insights into tarot. I’m not fond of
Ursula K. Le Guin
I’ve enjoyed Le Guin’s writing since I first encountered The Dispossessed back in the early 1970s. I can’t think of a bad book she’s written. Recently, I’ve noticed that I re-read Always Coming Home the most. It’s not really a novel—it’s more
Little, Big
My favorite novel for the past couple of years has been Little, Big, by John Crowley.
Little, Big is a big, quirky novel that took me three tries over about ten years to actually get into. Since then, I have re-read it several times, including once out loud to my