KMC Forums - What book are you reading now?

For anyone who's looking for some solid sci-fi, the first two books in The Culture series (Ian Banks) are on sale right now for 3 dollars each (digitally through Amazon if you have a kindle). Each of the books are stand alone stories set in the same universe so it shows you The Culture from all kinds of viewpoints. One of the books, for example, centers on the Minds (super advanced AIs that are basically living starships, planets, and orbital habitat rings; they control a lot of the Culture) as protagonists and it's about how they react to the barbaric acts of humans and other biological species. I've been branching out more into space operas lately (I'm reading Hyperion at the moment and bought the first couple of Expanse books for my backlog), and I regularly see The Culture rated high (books two and three especially; I hear book one is a rough start though and some recommend skipping it entirely since these are all stand alone stores).

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The Culture is a fictional interstellar post-scarcity civilization or society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks and features in a number of his space opera novels and works of short fiction, collectively called the Culture series.

In the series, the Culture is composed primarily of sentient beings of the pan-human variety, artificially intelligent sentient machines, and a small number of other sentient "alien" life forms. Machine intelligences range from human-equivalent drones to hyper-intelligent Minds. The Culture's economy is maintained automatically by its non-sentient machines, with high-level work entrusted to the Minds' subroutines, which allows its humanoid and drone citizens to indulge their passions, romances, hobbies, or other activities, without servitude. Many of the series' protagonists are humanoids who choose to work for the Culture's elite diplomatic or espionage organisations, and interact with other civilisations whose citizens hold wildly different ideologies, morals, and technologies.

The Culture has a grasp of technology which is advanced relative to most of the other civilisations which share the galaxy. Most of the Culture's citizens do not live on planets but in or on artificial habitats, such as huge orbitals, or on ships, the largest of which are home to billions of individuals. Biologically, the Culture's citizens have been genetically enhanced to live for centuries, and have modified mental control over their physiology, including the ability to introduce a variety of psychoactive drugs into their systems, change biological sex, or switch off pain at will. Culture technology is able to transform individuals into vastly different body forms but, for unclear reasons, the Culture standard form remains fairly close to human.

A central theme of the series is the ethical struggles which face the Culture when interacting with other societies - some of which brutalise their own members, pose threats to other civilisations, or threaten the Culture itself, the reactions to which conflict with the Culture's philosophy of peace and individual freedom. The Culture tends to make major decisions based on the consensus formed by its Minds and, if appropriate, its citizens. In one instance, a direct democratic vote of trillions � the entire population � decided The Culture would go to war with a rival civilisation. Those who objected to the Culture's subsequent militarisation broke off from the meta-civilisation, forming their own separate civilisation; a hallmark of the Culture is its ambiguity. In contrast to the many interstellar societies and empires which share its fictional universe, the Culture is difficult to define, geographically or sociologically, and "fades out at the edges".

-Wiki

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Originally posted by BackFire
I've been reading quite a bit this year.

I'm about to finish The First Law trilogy - a "grimdark" fantasy trilogy with a lot of violence and very flawed, broken characters. Overall I really enjoyed it. Characters are well defined and developed, and the dilogue is extremely natural and believable. Also really like the author's prose, kind of direct but still slightly poetic and gives off this bleak vibe that fits in with the tone of the story. Really good stuff if you're into this kind of thing.

Also read the first two books in The Broken Earth trilogy, each book has won the Hugo award for best fantasy/sci fi book. The first one was outstanding, utilizing present tense 2nd person POV and present tense 3rd person POV. Bit strange at first but once you get used to it it works in the book's favor. There is a tragic swath to the story that I loved. Second book I liked much less, unfortunately. Still will give the third a try.

Read The Shining, which greatly disappointed me. Like many, I consider the film one of the greatest horror pictures of all time, so I had high hopes for the book, but it just paled in comparison, most of the good parts of the movie were made up by Kubrick and I think uniformly that all the changes he made were for the better. I also really disliked King's writing style. It's the only King book I've read so I don't know if his style just isn't for me or if it was unique to this book, but his 'voice' just didn't work for this story in the book. It was too smart-alecky and silly, breaking the tension seemingly every chance he got with bad jokes. Also I didn't find it very creepy or scary, just all around disappointing.

Read quite a few others, last one I'll mention is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It's widely considered one of the best novels ever written and I can't disagree. It' was bleak and harrowing and his vocabulary is second to none and his writing style, while not for everyone, is so unique and gives his books a mood like none other. Also it has one of the greatest villains of all time in Judge Holden, one of the most unsettling characters I've encountered in any piece of fiction, with an ending that lingers long after you've closed the book.

I recently bought Blood Meridian so I'm super excited to read some McCarthy. I always see a lot of his works recommended so I've kind of built up an underlying hype in my mind about him over the years, though I've put off getting into him.

I've heard a lot about the Broken Earth books too, though I haven't really looked into them much since I'm already buried by my backlog. I'll give them a solid look anyways though.

I read the first book for First Law and wasn't a huge fan. It felt like it dragged and the story was kind of bare IMO (though the author definitely knows how to write action scenes). I loved Glotka and Jezal (my favorite character), though wasn't a huge fan of Logan and found him kind of boring/typical. Maybe I'll read the rest of the trilogy eventually but the first didn't really hook me and I found myself forcing through to the end just because I don't like leaving books unfinished. Did the plot pick up at all in the last two?