{"id":1189,"date":"1999-01-05T08:40:26","date_gmt":"1999-01-05T08:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2012-04-25T08:41:12","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T08:41:12","slug":"murder-in-the-solid-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1189","title":{"rendered":"Murder in the Solid State"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>Murder in the Solid State<\/em> by Wil             McCarthy<\/h3>\n<p>Eleven people attended this meeting. This meeting&#8217;s             book, <em>Murder in the Solid State,<\/em> is a             near-future thriller about a young physicist who has             been implicated in the murder of a prominent scientist.             Suspecting that the local police intend to do him harm,             he evades incarceration as he looks to prove himself             innocent and find the real killer.<\/p>\n<p>We felt that McCarthy&#8217;s prose style was engaging, and             the plot kept us all turning the pages. Some of the             characters were memorable and original, particular the             protagonist&#8217;s best friend. We felt that this was             overall a good story<!--more--> and would recommend it as a decent             reading experience, but no one considered the book             anything special.<\/p>\n<p>Our main problem with this book is that it was not what             we expected to read. While the cover material markets             this book as &#8220;hard SF&#8221;, we didn&#8217;t feel that the             scientific component of the plot was large enough to             justify this label. We felt that the book was more             appropriately considered a thriller in the tradition of             Michael Crichton&#8217;s work. While it was a successful             thriller, those of us hoping for a novel full of bold             scientific extrapolation and big ideas were             disappointed.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of the discussion, we picked new books for             the reading schedule: <em>To Say Nothing of the Dog<\/em> by Connie Willis, <em>The Border<\/em> by Marina Fitch,             <em>A King of Infinite Space<\/em> by Allen Steele,             <em>Jack Faust<\/em> by Michael Swanwick, <em>Mars             Underground<\/em> by William K. Hartmann, <em>Greenwar<\/em> by Steven Gould &amp; Laura Mixon, and <em>Forever             Peace<\/em> by Joe Haldeman.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Murder in the Solid State by Wil McCarthy Eleven people attended this meeting. This meeting&#8217;s book, Murder in the Solid State, is a near-future thriller about a young physicist who has been implicated in the murder of a prominent scientist. Suspecting that the local police intend to do him harm, he evades incarceration as he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1191,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions\/1191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}