49. The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Ken MacleodIn the far future, a bunch of robots who are supposed to be mining/terraforming a planet achieve sentience and refuse to work. So the company brings back to "life" backups taken of the worst war criminals in the last world war to fight them. Except that none of them are quite what they seem ( Read more... )

40 The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod
On the front cover: "The War on Terror is Over. Terror won ( Read more... )

57. Newton's Wake by Ken MacleodIt's Ken Macleod, so, you know, big space opera, post-Singularity, where societies have evolved around scavenging machines made by post-human AIs, and accidentally wake some, for want of a better description, Big Honking Space Guns (thank you Stargate ( Read more... )

25. Intrusion by Ken Macleod

A near-future UK where everything is supposedly wonderful, but actually a complete nightmare.  The nanny state has completely taken over and women can't drink unless they can prove they're not pregnant, and they're barred from most workplaces because these premises might not be safe if they were pregnant.

It centers on a ( Read more... )

11. Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact by Ken Macleod

A spaceship whose purpose is to travel the galaxy and plant new colonies finds a sign of life, for the first time in thousands of years of colonisation.  The "aliens" are a sort of bat people at a level of development that roughly parallels the eve of World War I.

The story is told ( Read more... )

When I say mixed, I mean a mixture of stuff the doesn't require much brain power. Concentration is still an issue.

35. Ghost Song by Sarah RayneI've reviewed Rayne's work on here before. They're all the same idea - gothic-type potboiler, spanning multiple historical periods. A poor woman's Kate Moreton, if you will. This one revolves around ( Read more... )

I had a lot to say about some of these, but it's been so long I just can't remember or be bothered.

28. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Not as good as I remembered, but still worth while.

29. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon SchamaA pretty scholarly work for something that accompanies a TV series. As I ( Read more... )

8. The Stone Canal by Ken Macleod

Second of four books in the Fall Revolution series - I read the first, The Star Fraction recently, and found it good but hard going ( Read more... )

2. The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod

Ken's first book and the first of a four-part series. Typical Ken - left-wing space opera, lots of weird political ideas taken to their (possibly il-)logical conclusions. I really enjoyed it but a lot of it went over my snot-filled head. I'm enjoying volume 2, The Stone Canal, a lot more.

3. Primordial Soup ( Read more... )

55. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

This month's bibliogoths selection.  The mother of all dystopian novels.

Even grimmer than I recalled.  Though, I have to say, New Labour (and to be fair, every government now that we have the surveillance tech)'s wet dream.

Nobody actually liked it, but it did generate a lot of discussion.

56. The Little Stranger by Sarah ( Read more... )