Hernando
Después de leer Señores del Olimpo, la cual no me pareció gran cosa, decidí continuar leyendo a Negrete por el simple hecho de que me pareció un excelente relator-escritor y que además, es bastante preciso en sus descripciones.
En esta ocasión, creo que el único punto negativo de la obra es que el último trazo del libro, luego de la batalla final , me pareció un poco plano y sin un climax a la altura de todo lo que venía siendo el libro hasta ese punto.
4,4/5 sería la nota.
Cixin Liu did something really impressive with this trilogy. Keeping the high quality throughout the 3 books is a great achievement, considering that a lot of series just go deep down after a second book .
The last 100 pages of this book were simply one of the most outstanding sections in all of three books. Such a dread and nostalgic sensation with all the memories of the old Earth.
Though the main character of the book is very naive and behave very odd for most of the situations , it did not compromise the whole experience of the story.
This is my first Culture book (well even my first Iain banks) and I surely enjoyed it. At the beginning before starting reading this I though the synopsis was a tiny bit silly , like a guy who plays games and is very good but wants to play a totally different game on another far place, what's that?. Well actually it was pretty neat and it wasn't just about that.
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.
Straight to favorites.
As much as it looks like a longer A Canticle For Leibowitz, it is not. They are quite different in basically everything.
There is no way to tell what this book is about without spoiling it. Understanding it slowly is one of its joys. So it is better to avoid reading most reviews because they possibly contain some spoilers.
This is one of those books I wanted to reread immediately after finishing it—almost a thousand pages of pure metaphysical speculation.
A bit of patience is needed to get through it, as by the 200-page mark is when everything just starts unwrapping. I mean this in the sense of understanding what the book is about and the meaning of the made-up words.
It will get some more complexity, but in the form of concepts. There will be ideas from Plato and Socrates on philosophy, Pythagoras and Einstein from mathematics and physics, and religion from St. Augustine and others, just to name a few. If you are familiar with that, it will be cool to make the connections, and if not, you can look up after finishing to match which current of thought belongs to the Earth counterpart.
By the last third of the book there will be more than that, just pages of dry academic discussion, materialism, metaphysics, interpretation of quantum mechanics, mathematics, and philosophy all thrown in the form of discussing-over-a-meal.
If you like reading and watching all those "old" debates and discussions about these themes, you will certainly enjoy this; if not, this might be another mountain to climb to finish the book, but by this point you might be enjoying the ride already.
PS: Iolet (The Music of Anathem) is an album that collects sequences and chants from the ones described in the book, which apparently come from mathematical formulae.
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.
A classic.
Reading a short stories book can be a roller coaster. The very nature of this kind of books is that more than 50% of the stories must be excellent to keep you reading, otherwise if 2 continuous stories are boring, then is easy to give up on the book.
The thing is, here we have a few weak stories for sure but they are still good, and the good ones, are just top quality SF and I’ll eventually read them again. There was not a single one that did not put my brain to work , I liked that.
This one and Timelike Infinity are my favorites from Baxter.
This book can be confusing at times, specially because there are like 5 characters you have to keep track of and they often hop into different planets and star systems without much continuity between them (the characters). So is recommended at least to write down the name of each character and where they are at the moment when reading the book.
It can be also engrossing and slow, mainly because of the above or because the big chunks of Hard SF in each chapter/page.
I would not recommend this book to people who don't have that much of patience for engrossing details or want some more of human drama or a light and easy to follow story because that would be difficult to find in here. It delivered what I was looking for, and I liked it overall.
The Man Who Folded Himself is a time travel story that is considered by many a master piece. A man inherits a time travel machine and starts playing with it. Sounds fun......until it doesn't.
To me, it is a pointless and silly book even within its own boundaries. One of the worst book I've ever read.
Fortunately is very short (less than 200 pages) but the whole story is supremely boring.
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 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.
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.
A slog of a book, very so, but is so unique in itself.
The following are probably one of the best lines I've ever read in a SF book:
“We are the centuries.
We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers, and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.
We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.
Hut two threep foa!
Left!
Left! He-had-a-good-wife-but-he
Left!
Left!
Left!
Right!
Left!
Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fällt.
We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.
We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do– Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eveand a traveling salesman called Lucifer.
We bury your dead and their reputations.We bury you. We are the centuries.
Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon's slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:
(Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)
Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens– and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH!–an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)
Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Kyrie eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Christe eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Kyrie eleison, eleison imas!”
Side note, the way Miller found death and looking at this book and see how he wrote the discussion about euthanasia is indeed staggering. Depression devours.
An interesting way to deal with consciousness.
There were a few things that were a bit annoying tho, like how the scenes of what was happening were described, as if something Watts was forgetting in the process of constructing the story. Confusing at times.
The other thing that will probably make this book not as enjojable a second time is the way one of the characters was basically clicking his tongue the whole time.
Apart from that, it's a solid book with a very intriguing and unique set of characters. The climax alone was worth the few hundred pages.
Can not say enough to this great-short story. One of my favorites ever.
I have read this story countless of time and it continues being fascinating.
A barely functional robot (Multivac) is being asked the fundamental question of how can we decrease the amount of entropy of the universe in order to "save" it.
This question span eons into the future (is asked every couple of decades) while versions of the robot are more and more intelligent. We would guess that as the robot gathers vast amount of data with the passing of the centuries, it will be able to give a proper answer to the question.
A flawless story with a superb ending.
Probably the most influential time travel novel ever. Not only in terms of going on a ride to a distant time but also in terms of its sociological aspect.
Imagining what human beings could look like hundred of thousands of years ahead, opened so many gates of human speculation.
It also made traveling through some sort of device a popular idea, which later became the de facto item for time traveling in pop culture.
I revisited this book after so many years (read it on my teenage years) and this time did not enjoy it quite much as I expected (or remembered) , but I will probably read it again some time in the future.
Like its predecessor, this is a very predictable book, but this time without the surprise element.
I am pretty sure this book was written to get some prospect contracts for screen formats or something.
The worst thing is reading it right after Dark Matter, because then its flaws are easier to spot. But that's what most people actually do.
PS: The author does not seem to know what recursion really is. I had to force myself to give it another definition in order to finish the book.
This book hooked me from the very first 20 pages. One of the best generation ship stories I have ever read.
There is such a sense of wonder when the book tries to explore an idea , which is basically impossible to achieve with current technology, while trying to keep the very idea grounded in modern understanding of physics and playing with the speculative tech of the future.
A few thousand people aboard a sentient or semi sentient ship wanting to go far and beyond our solar system to settle and make a new home is the main premise of the book. The plan for them is to terraform one of our neighbor planetary systems (home of the Tau Ceti star) or at least one of the main planet's moon.
All kinds of situation start happening when they find out that things are not going as expected with the biological system of the sentient ship.
I have seen many people disliking the end of the book, but to me it was just excellent. It gave the needed doses of adrenaline and makes you really think about what lies ahead of human exploration and all the risk that comes with it.
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).
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.
Humans fighting for centuries against an alien race in different theaters of war (mostly on far distant planets) are one of the main attractions of this book for me
Those soldiers on the front line travel at the speed of light to fight the enemy, they get older by a few days, while their relatives on earth do it by the years. And old but still cool idea.
The book reflects the very idea of going to war (in the real world) and coming home where everything is so unrecognizable (your family and friends are mostly gone) that you feel like an alien.
This is to me an interesting take on the scars of war. While I enjoyed Starship Troopers premise a bit more, this is a far more honest book.
3.8/5
The fact that it has the worst cliffhanger I've ever read and that I pretty much dislike books with that sense of ‘buy the next in the series to know what happen with this very important event', made it a bit difficult to enjoy it 100%.
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.