Tad Williams: Otherland, River of Blue Fire

This second novel in the Otherland saga took me a long time to finish which is not a good sign. This large volume (700 pages +) fleshes out the story world somewhat but advances the plot by very little. I can't help feeling that this whole book is unnecessary and with tighter writing the important parts could have been squeezed into the other volumes. On the plus side William's characterisation remains head and shoulders above the wooden stereotypes we are more used to in Fantasy novels and the overall saga still retains my interest. I have already started on book 3 which happily seems to be progressing at a faster pace.

Aside: There is an Otherland MMO currently in development. I hadn't realised this until I spotted this article in Massively. Sounds very interesting, since the books are largely set in a virtual world they give lots of scope for mmo type stuff. One feature of the novels that I hope is replicated is the ability to move between completely different sim worlds. You could be flee from a battle in Ancient Egypt and tuumble into a HG Wellsian London. More information here.

Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by Tad Willliams

Tad Williams is a good writer and not just in a Science Fiction / Fantasy sense. He writes very readable prose with very well developed characters that stand up well alongside the best of contemporary non-genre fiction. Otherland is Tad's take on Cyberpunk and "City of Golden Shadow" is the opening volume in this saga. The book was written in the mid 1990's and William's cyberspace is more down to earth than Gibson's angular vector graphic inspired visions from the previous decade. In many ways Otherland seems like Second Life with added multimodal input. There is even an mmorpg described in the book that is not dissimilar to the games we play today (Hardcore afficionado's will be pleased to note that Williams' mmorpg has perm-death). A good adventure story set in an engrossing world with well drawn well written characters. All in all a very good read if a little over long.

The Mamoth Book of Extreme Sci Fi, edited by Mike Ashley

I find it hard to give an overview of an anthology, particularly one as diverse as this whose stories were chosen specifically because they are unusual. Their very diversity makes it hard to consider the book as a whole. Some of the stories were very good and I cannot remember any bad ones so I guess that makes it a good anthology overall. The list of authors is varied and includes many illustrious names My personal favourites from the collection included Geoffrey Landis's "The Long Chase", Ian McDonald's "The Days of Solomon Gursky" and Greg Bear's "Judgement engine." The last story in particular takes a very ambitious position, set as it is at the end of the universe and deals with big questions of philosophy.

Richard Morgan: Altered Carbon

This an interesting blend of noir detective story and Cyberpunk with a hard jawed cigarette smoking anti-hero righting wrongs in a futuristic setting. In this future world digital transportation of human personas has become commonplace and physical bodies have become trade-able commodities. An intriguing corollary of this is that spaceflight is generally unnecessary. Instead you just hire a body at your destination and transmit your persona to it. The story keeps up a cracking pace and it makes for an enjoyable read but I felt that the whole affect was let down somewhat by the way the flawed hero softens as the book progresses. By the end of the book I felt he was more Wuss than Tough guy - not what I expect from my anti-heros.

Peter Hamilton: The Fallen Dragon

A stand alone novel from the creator of Nights dawn. Space opera with a small dash of future philosophy thrown in. There were times when I struggled to keep reading this. For most of the middle section of the novel I wasn't sure who was good who was bad, which characters I liked which characters I didn't like. George R.R. Martin can do moral ambiguity and still keep your interest in his characters but in this book Peter Hamilton can't. Nevertheless there is a good story in there with plenty of clever stuff. Example of the clever stuff: A couple of hundred years after the invention of faster than light space flight the age of space exploration is fizzling out because it has turned out to be uneconomic. Recommended if you are prepared to put in a bit of effort to get to the end.

Mark Haddon: The curious incident of the dog in the nightime

Another book I started reading by accident and a very good one at that. This book is tricksy. For the first few chapters you think you are reading a light hearted whimsical view of the world from a the point of view of a teenager suffering from a form of autism. It is only when you are about half way in that it dawns on you that this is not a light hearted tale at all. It is deadly serious and very very good. Well recommended. Has lots of clever maths in it by the way as the narrator is a whizz at maths even though he is incapapble of empathy.

Garth Nix: The Fall

I must be regressing. I am reading yet another Young Adult fantasy. This book came free with a box of cereal as far as I recall, I read a few pages and hey ... it was pretty good. Lots of imagination in this first book of Nix's Seventh Tower Series. A young "Chosen" in a world that is veiled from light falls upon hard times when his father disappears with the families only proper sun stone. Without the stone our hero is likely to be booted out of the elite chosen ranks so he must set out on a desperate adventure to find one. Good stuff and with magical shadows it is somewhat in the vein of "His Dark Materials" but not nearly as dark.