Rainbows End75 reviews Vernor Vinge, 2006 Tomorrow's Science, Youthful Energy, and Family Fun + A disappointment, but only by comparison Another terrific sci-fi adventure from Vernor Vinge, who once again makes the virtual world of tomorrow come stunningly alive. Aging poet Robert Gu, his granddaughter Miri, and the rest of their family become embroiled in a plot to deploy mind-controlling YGBM (You Gotta Believe Me) technology. ...             Altered Carbon207 reviews Richard K. Morgan Subterranean, 2008 Spectacularly good SF + futuristic Chandler + Altered Carbon + An exciting debut novel from Morgan!             Spook Country146 reviews William Gibson Putnam Adult, 2007 Brilliant, but not perfect + The Future is Now and Gibson is still there! + The pleasure of finding things out The good: This book has some brilliant characters which ultimately intertwine around a caper based climax at the end. The writing is clever and a joy to read, and paints a very realistic and plausible world, once you get past the first chapter, which was like another reviewer mentioned like wading ...             Schild's Ladder31 reviews Greg Egan, 2002 The future of post humans! + Schild's ladder + A grand story at Egan's usual pace + One of the best hard sci-fi I have read + Australian SF Reader             The Algebraist55 reviews Iain M. Banks Night Shade Books, 2006 Fascinating and rich SciFi story + Progressive In Both Ways + Algebra doesn't really come into it... Iain Banks has stories coming out of every pore of his body. I am a phsysicist. His Universe is fictional, but mostly self-consistent and plausible, if very, very, strange. Great human interest story lines as well. Read it !             Time's Eye (A Time Odyssey)54 reviews Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter Del Rey, 2005 Perfect and fast, as promised! + Times Eye + In Times Eye Amazon pulls through again with fine service and good products. The added bonus: all are delivered in a timely fashion for a reasonable price! Long Live Amazon!             Beyond Infinity21 reviews Gregory Benford Grand Central Publishing, 2006 An Ur-human In Time + Good outer-limits SF + gregory benford + A wonderfully written book             Terraforming Earth18 reviews Jack Williamson Tor Science Fiction, 2003 Grade B Work This was an interesting idea with a hopeful but down beat ending. The story of a failsafe base on the moon started by some well meaning scientists and the clone children who are reborn with each catastrophe that strikes the earth over literally millions of years was interesting but grew ...             Mindscan31 reviews Robert J. Sawyer Tor Books, 2005 A Meeting of Minds + Couldn't put it down Mindscan (2005) is a stand-alone SF novel. Yet it represents an ongoing theme in the author's works (see The Terminal Experiment (1995) and Factoring Humanity (1998)). In this novel, Jacob Sullivan was born into a very rich family. But he also has a genetic disorder, arteriovenous ...             Olympos106 reviews Dan Simmons, 2005 The gods must be angry Even now, decades after you'd think that such ideas have passed, some people still have a prejudice against science fiction as some sort of unsophisticated kiddie fare. If there was ever an author to show just how wrong that belief is, it would be Dan Simmons, who is able to write novels that are ...             Infoquake (The Jump 225 Trilogy)21 reviews David Louis Edelman Pyr, 2006 John Grisham of Science Fiction + Fast-paced and character driven + mind-blowing fiction for lovers of sci-fi and everybody else David Louis Edelman has recreated the excitement of the world of business in his science fiction novel, Infoquake the first in the Jump 225 trilogy. Set in a far future, where the old nation states no longer exist and all technology is more related to biology than mechanics, Infoquake tells the ...             Hybrids (Neanderthal Parallax)41 reviews Robert J. Sawyer Tor Science Fiction, 2004 The Camel is in the tent + All right, having read the previous ones... Hybrids Hybrids is the book Sawyer has been leading up to all along. You should definitely read all three books in this trilogy. Hominids (Neanderthal Parallax)], ][[ASIN:0765346753 Humans (Volume Two of The Neanderthal Parallax), and now Hybrids (Neanderthal Parallax). I mentioned in ...             The Plot to Save Socrates17 reviews Paul Levinson Tor Books, 2006 More like 4 1/2 stars.... + An excellent read! What if Socrates didn't really die and was offered an escape from his infamous death by hemlock poisoning? Paul Levinson asks just such a question in this fascinating time travel.... Doctoral student Sierra Waters isn't sure what to make of the dialogue between Socrates and Andros on the ...             Red Lightning22 reviews John Varley, 2006 Good old-fashioned sci-fi With a career that spans over thirty years, John Varley is only moderately prolific, with just over a dozen novels to his name. Fortunately, he is an author who is well worth the wait between books. Red Lightning once again shows why he continues to be one of the greats in science fiction. Red ...             Brasyl20 reviews Ian McDonald Pyr, 2007 Brilliant stuff + Riveting stories perfect for science fiction collections Brasyl is a work of true brilliance! If William Gibson will still penning mainstream science fiction works than this is what he would have evolved into. Never has South America seemed so real as in this fictional cyberpunkish take on what it might end up as. I love it. If you have any taste, ...             The Stonehenge Gate14 reviews Jack Williamson Tor Science Fiction, 2006 wild journey + Golden Age-like adventure of wonder and mystery I found myself right there watching every scene unfold, just when you think you're out of a spot something else pops up. This has been a wild journey across the realms of space.             The Zenith Angle39 reviews Bruce Sterling Del Rey, 2004 I really enjoyed this book + Entertaining to near the end, where it flys off the rails Being a programmer and a geek, I really enjoyed reading this book. Yes, some of it is implausable, and there a few rants in there, but I didn't like the book less because of that. I liked the characters - Van, his wife Dottie, Michael Hickock, etc. There's also some dry humor in there. It's not a ...             The Big God Network7 reviews J.C. McGowan Xlibris Corporation, 2007 The Ghost in the Machine + COMPELLING ORWELLIAN SCI-FI WITH MORALITY TWIST + Wickedly Funny post-American Science Fiction + J.C. McGowan's "The Big God Network" + A New Classic for a New Genre: the Near-Future Political Satire             Feersum Endjinn41 reviews Iain M Banks Spectra, 1995 A mind game of a book + Banks and the Culture + Potentially great book (ride, ideas, characters) reduced to very good by plot This is a superb book. Much of the book is taken up with the thoughts of the main character and his thoughts are presented in phonetic fashion, which means it might be difficult for some readers if they can't latch onto the accent. The structure of the story plays games with the reader's mind ...             The Accidental Time Machine53 reviews Joe Haldeman Ace Hardcover, 2007 Great + Great time travel story + An Entertaining Trip If you're looking for the best science fiction has to offer, then look no further than Joe Haldeman. In The Accidental Time Machine we meetthe college drop-out now MIT assitant named Matt Fuller. Discovering a simple machine he built was the final part of Prof. Marsh's larger experiment. He later ...