Rob

Not good, although I got through it quickly, and I've read worse; I'm vacillating on one star versus two. I'm pretty disappointed in it on basically all levels. It feels like the author wanted to convey a very specific destination and gracelessly composed a simplistic path to get there. The basic premise — the main character exploring alternate versions of her life — is okay, but the specifics are uninspired and poorly thought out.

Nora, the main character, is good at everything. Not always in the same life, but in whatever life she's in, whatever she decided to do, she's world-class. It's not enough for her to be a good swimmer, she has to medal at the Olympics. It's not enough that she has a career in academic philosophy, she has to be a lecturer at Cambridge. It's not enough for her to be in a band, she has to be selling out arenas.

The central conceit doesn't really work as executed. The author makes an attempt at explaining why it's the way it is, but it's very flimsy and doesn't stand up.

All this is rendered in mediocre prose, and I guess the author wants to show off his bona fides; there's a Sylvia Plath quote before it gets started, because of course there is, and philosophers are not just named, but quoted directly.

The editor was asleep at the wheel, too. I'm pretty sure I found a place where the dialogue, in a back-and-forth where speakers aren't explicitly identified, doesn't actually make sense and the speaking order can't be right.

It has a nice moment here and there, but this ain't it, chief. I'm donating this one to the library.

EDIT: Screw it, I'm downgrading to one star. I just made myself mad remembering how the author made a whole big deal in Nora's penultimate life about how the really important thing is love, and then never revisited that concept in the wrapping-up whirlwind tour of Nora finally making good in her root life. This thing is a mess.

Superb.

This is a short story collection by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk, most famous for his seminal novel Neuromancer. To read Gibson is to realize just how completely every other work in the genre has cribbed from him, right down to the slang he invented.

Not all of Gibson's work is up to the standard of Neuromancer. I'm happy to say that this one is. Burning Chrome collects ten short stories of varying lengths. I would prefer not to describe the stories; I believe a critical part of the experience is going in blind, allowing oneself to construct a mental image of the settings Gibson creates from the context he provides. Extrapolating his world from the little corner he renders is part of the journey. Instead, here's a list of the stories:

1. Johnny Mnemonic2. The Gernsback Continuum3. Fragments of a Hologram Rose4. The Belonging Kind5. Hinterlands6. Red Star, Winter Orbit7. New Rose Hotel
8. The Winter Market9. Dogfight10. Burning Chrome

I enjoyed all ten of them, but the starred stories were my favorites. As is Gibson's style, the stories are grimy and gritty as you'd expect a cyberpunk setting to be.

I love Gibson for his ideas and his settings, but several passages made me wish for a Kindle edition just so I could highlight. A lot of good turns of phrase in here.

This book is currently available only in physical format, and is not currently being printed, but copies are plentiful at the moment and are not hard to get hold of. My paperback edition features a preface by Bruce Sterling in defense of science fiction as a genre, which I enjoyed very much as well. I am sorry to say that the genre does seem to need sticking up for.

Very much worth reading.

Liked this quite a bit, and was surprised by how well it held up.

Rendezvous With Rama is a 1972 science fiction classic, about a future human society exploring an extraterrestrial... I guess I'd call it an artificially-made planetoid. It's light on what you or I might consider plot, preferring to cover the exploration and the challenges such explorers might encounter.

What strikes me about Rendezvous is how well thought out everything is. There are virtually no silly plot twists borne of a desire to artificially inject drama – no one acting irrationally, no decisions being made on the basis of barely-plausible emotion, no one incompetent. That is so rare it's striking when it happens.

This is one of the early sci-fi novels, so don't expect it to be different from what it is. It's a relatively self-contained work, content to explore within its boundaries. It does that beautifully.