Hernando

I've been wanting to dig into the Revelation Space for a while so I finally did it with this first installment.
This is truly a great book with extremely awesome ideas and I really liked it but somehow I had the feeling that some of the characters were painfully annoying (Volyova specially) and were almost ruining the satisfying atmosphere set in the story.


Worldbuilding (25%): *** Ideas (25%): ***
Plot (20%): *** Characters (15%): ** Writting (15%) : **

My Rating : 4,4

A while ago (circa 6 years) I read a book called something like “Linux for dumb, naive and extremely clumsy people”. It got my attention as the tittle was really weird for a learning book, but I picked it up and read it.
It was interesting to read all the things the author said about those people who are not actually stupids but when you try to explain them something as hard as you can they just don't get it , they just simply don't understand that easily and that can happen to any people with any other topic.

This book reminds me that, in the way that many people don't really understand what's the deal with general relativity and then quantum mechanics and then with thermodynamics and then again with a world full of probabilities. But still, there are people out there with a profound gift to teach (like in this case ) who want to explain all those topics in simple words; The author here make things very simple, kind of like ELA5.

He gets quite emotional towards the end but I can understand why. He seems to be loving what he is doing as a theoretical physicist.

All the best for him and his team with that weird theory of loop quantum gravity.

I often find myself going back to the old classics, specially when I am busy and without enough time to read or when I am stressed and can not focus, just to find this. A fast paced, straight to the point and amazing ideas wisely packed in a short book.
The last 50p were absolutely great, everything was happening as if it were literally jaunting. Also all the crazy stuff with time-bending, elsewhere-elsewhen-NOW-etc were nicely done.
Indeed a very entertaining reading.

First time reading something like this. It is sort of a debate book but with footnotes and without the proponents interrupting each other, and I actually liked the format. It would be nice to find something similar but not only focusing on religious proponents.

About the book itself, Ken Ham's is the guy which most conservative Christians will relate the most as it is basically Christian religion as taught in schools (or were) . I find his essay the weakest of all four, also the guy is quite annoying sometimes as he believes whatever he says is the true because “That is the true”, I later saw him on YouTube and he is even worst. Even the editor of the book had some trouble dealing with him that it made me laugh. Citing the editor:
“The most obvious discrepancy that remains is in the initial essays, where Ham's is noticeable longer than the others. He was unwilling to cut anything further, believing it only fair that he should be given more space than the others since he was the only one defending the young age of the earth and the authority of Scripture vs the authority of the scientific majority”. Quite a guy eh?.

Hugh Ross is an interesting case, as an Astrophysics he believes in like 99% about all the scientific consensus related to cosmic stuff, but he differ in the evolution and origins of life. Researching through his footnotes I see he has an interesting views that few non-religious people also consider, specially that about Fine-tuning of the universe. His weakest point I would say that is that he is actually making the bible to concord with everything Astrophysics find and that is why many people say that he tends to much to Concordism.

Haarsma is a proponent of almost everything that non-religious scientist believe, so most of those people will find her point of view the most compelling of all, but she add God into the equation. So she believes in the Evolution, Origins of life, the LUCA, etc as the scientific consensus says but also that God guided everything in any way. Her weakest point is actually the obvious one, what God has anything to do in all this if all this looked as He was unnecessary. Though Her reply to this opposition is quite interesting. She works for that organization (BioLogos) that is actually run by geneticist Francis Collins which it happens that he is the guy in charge of the NIH in the US and who led the Human Genome Project.

The last guy, Meyer, only based his essay on Intelligent Design so nothing to add to this as even though he has his own position on the age of the universe and origins of life most of his essay is basically explaining everything about ID including why it is not Pseudo-science.

Finally, the editor finish the book saying: “It takes enormous effort, then, on our part to listen to others and consider their critiques of our own positions. But if we're serious about pursuing the truth in the matters, it is important.”

I almost gave up about 300p then again about 600p but I finished the book , from cover to cover.
I do not have any problem with expositions in any book (I actually like it ) but I honestly find that Kim Stanley Robinson does a better job on this than Neal Stephenson (taking Seveneves as a starting point) as I think that KSR when describing Space, ships, planets, etc is way more interesting, compelling and clear. I find the expositions on Seveneves almost boring and with too many ramifications that at the end were not even important to the plot.
On the other spectrum when the plot is actually happening and there is an argument Neal does an amazing job. I would say this book could be like 300p shorter.
For the last third that got so much criticism I do not think it is bad but I sympathize with those who say that it could be just another book.

I've been avoiding Stephen Baxter for a while and thought it was time to give him a try.

I read this one mostly because of the synopsis and the good reviews about his Xeelee series.

Timelike Infinity and Ring are considered the ‘main' story in the timeline between the all 4 books on this sequence. Raft and Flux being more like stand-alone stories.

I liked the book, lots of extravagant ideas with Wormholes, Singularities and Time travel which I truly enjoyed, even though it was not that easy to follow along the whole universe and time spans.
It was worth the time.

Update: Now After reading Ring which is another great one, I consider this one just a tiny bit superior than Ring.

This is a time travel story with a lot of imagination. I liked the explanations AR gave to the theories on it, and that he did not mess a lot with them. The seeds, the role of the AI, time-embedding, the noise in time and the interjection between minds are a few of the themes in the book and quite a different approach from other stories of this kind. I would have prefered the book to be a bit longer as the last 3rd of the book felt rushed. Also, I did not like the ending , it was not interesting at all. Or maybe it's just that I wasn't expecting to end too fast and took me by surprise (in a bad way).

A Classic SF book with many genres packed in a great fashion. We got Space Opera, Time travel, Thriller, Mystery, a bit of Horror, etc etc. I enjoyed each of the stories and did not feel bored with the characters, they all were interesting in some way. Don't know why I've waited for so long to read this book.

This is a Three-Body Problem Paraquel that adds some interesting ideas and reveals a few things to understand a bit more about Yun Tianming and everything that happened during-after Death's End. Here we also confirm how a useless character Cheng Xin is. If you disliked her in Death's End, this book in one page will increase that feeling.
In the other hand, the book leaves the usual SF and Physics approach and plays more with an Ultra Hyper Dimensional Universe of things (some people are considering it Fantasy), and I don't really know how to feel about it.
There is a pretty nice reference to Asimov's Foundation as well.
In a nutshell it's not in the same quality as the original trilogy but it is truly worth a read.

Pd: The English version of this book is coming out in a few months but I'm glad to found out that the Spanish version was already on the bookstores since last year.

Superb!. TMoD is a very unique/different book. It’s a neat SF with a lot of philosophy or the other way around. It’s also full of sort-of-poetic lines, i.e :

“As was my habit, I followed the afternoon to the ocean and ended up lounging on a shore of corroded boulders. The waters golden, the horizon blood. The squawking of mindless seagulls. Alone, leering at passersby, I grinned as Saturn brightened and watched feral waves swallow the fireball, savoring the taste.”

“Come midnight, a turquoise aurora hung over the land. Not as a fragile drape gliding down against the stars, but as a slow whip to bleed the firmament of its mysteries. A though out of those celestial wounds she would divine the whereabouts of the men she hunted.”

Some other lines are more straightforward:

“Even though we have more time, it’s the wrong kind of time. Everything moves so fast, and there’s barely a moment to stop and think and-“ “And people don’t understand each other at all, and we have wider but more superficial knowledge, and good ideas get lost in the noise”.

“We had lived in a present built on tomorrows. Wasted tomorrows.”

And some times like:

“-Do you think we have free will?. -I think about it. I don’t think about thinking about it.”

But the philosophical stuff is more dense and harder in one of the narratives, specially when the character is deep-thinking.

The thing is, you can still enjoy the book even if you don’t care about the philosophical and the different prose and just following the plot but it is certainty a better experience reading the “book-in-itself”. It was so good that I was tempted to reread it right away after finishing it.

MiR is a great thrilling book.

” For those who are marooned without hope of rescue” gives a more special meaning when reading the victim's diary . That was a truly sense of loneliness.

I did not read the first book but it was not necessary to enjoy this one.

Very promising premise but it was a bit boring and I can recall just a few interesting chapters. It supposed to be thrilling but I felt dissapointed, with little interest on the plot and annoyed with the neverending “have to keep my crew safe” from the main character. Also, the names, my goodness. Beside all that the science on the book was good.

It was lighter than I thought, action packed, western vibes and sometimes it felt like Mad Max but with robots. Good read indeed.

I was a bit worried when I started reading this book thinking about the spiders and bringing my memories back when I read A Fire Upon the Deep and all the stuff with the Thines because that was the only thing I was bored a bit in AFUtD. Well I was surprised by how interested I was on the spiders and their world. I did not like the end but It was a great read.