Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2013
My reading this month was either student papers, university busy-work,
or else unsatisfying, with two exceptions.
- Catherine
Jinks, The
Reformed Vampire Support Group
- Mind candy. A lot has been written about vampires as somehow-metaphorical
expressions of fears about AIDS (and so a link between sex, blood, and death),
but I don't think I've ever seen them done, consistently, as hapless sufferers
from a debilitating chronic illness before. Funny, though it could probably
have been compressed a bit without loss.
- Alastair Reynolds, The Prefect
- Mind candy: a hybrid of space opera and police procedural, where the plot
turns on the not-really-parliamentary procedures of a solar-system-spanning
electronic participatory democracy, with each little worldlet free to follow
its own bizarre social path, so long as universal suffrage for the polls is
respected. (I can't tell if there's a direct debt
to Nozick, or only
indirectly
through MacLeod.) In
the same universe as Reynold's Revelation Space and sequels (more
specifically Chasm City), but stand-alone.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica
Posted at February 28, 2013 23:59 | permanent link