Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

Eleven members attended the discussion of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. One reader emailed their comments. All but one member had read Vernor Vinge before. Everybody started the book. All but 2 people finished it, and the rest were planning to finish.

Overall people thought it was a multilayered book, even though (to quote one reader) when you read it it does not feel like a book with layers. The majority of the group felt the story was entertaining. However, everyone seems to have taken something different away from it.

Some people did not think that the technology portrayed in the book brought up any unique concepts, but others were impressed how convincingly Vernor Vinge extrapolated from existing technological trends. One reader said he had just read in the news that Google and Linden Labs are collaborating on “something like that”

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The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

Eight of us of us gathered at the North Village library for this meeting, and another submitted comments by email. Our topic was The Last Mimzy, a collection of classic short science fiction and fantasy by Henry Kuttner. This is a reissue of the earlier book The Best of Henry Kuttner, retitled to tie in with the recent film The Last Mimzy, adapted from one of its stories. About half of us had read Kuttner previously. Everyone started the book, and four finished.

The book starts with “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” the basis for the recent film. It involves bright children finding toys from the future. The Lewis Carroll thread that imparts the title to the story is well-done. One person was impressed that such a good story could be inspired by a few silly sentences from Jabberwocky. Those of

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I Hope the World Can Take It by Artemus Shelton

Nine people showed up at A. T.’s house to discuss the new novel by Reading Group member Art Shelton. The book tells a near-feature cyberpunk science fiction tale full of action.  The story follows a data courier who gets into trouble when carrying some especially secret information. One member had read Shelton’s work before, in a writing group. Eight of us started the book, and five finished it.

The story starts with a bang and never lets up. Most of us got involved with the main character and action quickly, and the story kept us going until the end. The surprise twist near the end is well-executed. Some of us felt that the story reads like a screenplay.

This book works well as an action novel. We really did not see as many new concepts and technologies as we would prefer in a science fiction novel. Most of

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Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Ten people gathered at the North Village library for this discussion of Octavia E. Butler’s final novel. We had one first-time attendee. The story deals with a young woman who wakes up with no memory and tries to determine who and what she is. She quickly learns that she is not human, but instead is a member of a humanoid species with many characteristics of vampires. She eventually comes to learn a great deal about her heritage and the social structure of her race. Eight of us had read Butler before, and eight started and completed this book.

Some of us trouble finding copies of Fledgling to read, despite the trade paperback being out for only a few weeks. We suspect that bookstores and libraries had trouble figuring out where to shelve this book, since it deals with vampires but has no horror elements.

The protagonist’s story is told in first-person, and the author does a beautiful job of developing the story’s world, the plot, and the narrator’s emerging personality.

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A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park

11 people attended the discussion. Everybody had started the book. Only 5 or so finished the book, but the rest were going to finish it. Only 2 people read Paul Park before. One of them had also read two sequels of A Princess of Roumania, and his comments gave an impression that A Princess of Roumania is a lot more enjoyable in retrospective, once you know what happened next, as the events in the sequels explain a lot of things in the first book. Eventually others had to restrain him from revealing plot snippets from the sequels, although he was doing it only to be helpful. 🙂

The majority of the group liked this book. Some of the group members derive a lot of their enjoyment of a book from its literary and political references. One of those people found a treasure trove of such references in A Princess of Roumania. He thought the magic (which was based, he said, on Gypsy tradition), was

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Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

Seven people showed up at the North Village library to discuss this recent Hugo-nominated novel, and another submitted comments by email. The far-future story is about a group of humans who undertake a long space voyage to reach a planet they plan to settle, only to discover that it is already inhabited. The story weaves between the story of the settlers and of the bat-like inhabitants of the planet, who gradually realize something is going on. All of us had read MacLeod before, and all but one had started and finished Learning the World.

The human society on the spaceship is well-developed. There is a complex culture involving three classes: founders, crews, and the ship generation, and there are viewpoint characters from each class to showcase the classes’ differences and interactions. The human settlers had great names: Atomic Discourse, Horrocks

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Recursion by Tony Ballantyne

Eleven people attended the discussion of Tony Ballantyne’s Recursion. Nobody has read anything by Ballantyne before, because this is his first novel. Everybody in the group has started the book. About half the people finished it. Some of the rest were planning to finish, but a couple of people were so disappointed by the beginning that they put the book aside.

Recursion consists of three storylines, set at different times in the future. In the storyline set in the most distant future, a human and a robot fight Van Neumann

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Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder

On March 5, 2007 the FACT reading group discussed Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder. Everybody who was present at the discussion has read Karl Schroeder before. All but one person had read at least some part of this book. Only 4 people (out of 8) finished it. Most of others were planning to finish. The person who did not even attempt to read this book justified her decision with one word: Ventus. 🙂 Despite agreement that Lady of Mazes was better than Ventus (Karl Schroeder’s first novel), the group’s opinions on Lady of Mazes ranged from lukewarm approval to outright disappointment.

While some people thought Schroeder’s world building seemed interesting at first while the story centered on Teven Coronal, later in the book both the world building and the plot faltered. A few people gave the author credit for developing something rarely seen in SF, countless overlapping virtual realities with no

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We the Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith

There were 9 people present at the discussion of We The Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith. Everybody read some portion of the book. A lot of people have read some of the stories that make up We The Underpeople, and other Cordwainer Smith’s stories before, sometimes decades ago. So the discussion revolved not so much around We The Underpeople, as around Cordwainer Smith’s writing in general.

Most people in the group loved it. What they liked about Smith’s stories was their political subtext and his manner of storytelling. The latter, everybody agreed, is unusual. It seems as if Smith wasn’t so much writing novels and stories in the traditional Western sense, as creating a set of myths. People familiar with Paul

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Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear

Our discussion of Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear, held at Charles and Willie’s home, had two attendees, the smallest attendance ever. (At one meeting in the mid-90s, every single attendee apologized for skipping the previous discussion of Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories by Terry Bisson. So it is possible that we had a meeting with zero attendees, but there is no way to prove it.) Only one of us at the meeting had read the book, with the other having been too busy with a crunch situation at work. Two others in the group had read the book, including the person who recommended it, but were prevented from attending due to illness. One of these absentees emailed in comments. Blood and Iron is a contemporary urban fantasy, and the author is a recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The following impressions of the book are distilled from emailed comments and the spoken words of the one person present at the meeting who had read the book …

“I like that it is set in the present. I like the grittiness. Best of all, NO FUZZY

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