First book of China's that I've read, and I love his writing style. It's smooth and largely cliche free, sometimes bordering on poetry instead of prose.

The characters themselves are pretty interesting, there wasn't really a good guy but rather a bunch of anti-heroes with differing desires. They range from the mundane (Shekel) to the downright creepy and bizarre (The Lovers) with most everything in between (Kruach Aum or whatever his name was.)

The plot was alright, but I kind of wish it ended a little more ... resolutely than it did.

SPOILER - they ended up putting in all that effort (and thus most of the story) really for nothing, forfeiting their prize and the sacrifices they made when their goal was finally within reach. /SPOILER

I'm totally intrigued by all the places/people of Bas-Lag, and I'm pretty into China's writing style, so I think I will probably check out his other stuff as well. 

Ass Goblins. 

shouldn't this maybe go in the drunk thread?
btw I thought it was ass pirates. shows how much I know about internet terminology. 

YOU EEDIOT! 

I read Accelerando by Charles Stross this past summer and found it quite enjoyable. It starts out something like a near future cyberpunk Neal Stephenson novel, but then, well, accelerates into something else entirely. Lots of speculation about where AIs, nanotech, transhumanism, etc might take us as a species. The writing is technical at times, which can be fun if you understand what Stross is talking about. (for instance, speculative discussion of futuristic routers, firewalls, and network protocols)

There is a sequel as well, called Glass House, that I have not read and I've heard that it doesn't really directly follow from the first book's story or tie up its loose ends. 

I can't remember which else of his I've read, I read several in rapid succession and now they're all blurred in my memory :-)

Something I found strangely satisfying about the ministry stories is that the lead character's love life is important to the plot, but there's no contrived rom-com style stress between the two of them, 

 

finished reading ringworld a few days ago.

i love scifi that makes humans caught in the machinations of another more ridiculously advanced species. 

Welcome to having good taste in books.

Get Perdido Street Station obviously. Iron Council is skippable.

The City And The City is completely unrelated but is great. 

Thanks, I've been here for a quite a while now. 

Currently reading" Our Enemy, The State" by Albert Jay Nock. 

THIS

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Equal-Rights-International-Materialism/dp/1931859337/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1288744758&sr=8-12

The Anti anti-state book written by China Mieville! 

Those silly statists. 

Iain M. Banks' latest. It's not exactly bad, but it's certainly not very good either. I read it on a 13 hour flight and it was fine for that purpose -- but I said the same thing about the A Team movie :-)

This review gets it about right: http://totalscifionline.com/reviews/5588-surface-detail 

Stupid. Just awful. Avoid. 1/2 out of 10, would have gotten a 1/10 if Sharrow died at the end too. 

Do you like books, Zwiffle?

If I was reading anything less than 3/10, I wouldn't even GET to the end... 

 

Read half way through, and I made a call. I could quit reading like I tend to do or force myself to finish it. I forced myself to finish it just to see if it would pick up pace or change or something. I can safely say Iain M Banks is a poop author. 

Player Of Games, Feersum Endjinn, Consider Phlebas, The Algebraist, State Of The Art etc etc 

Against a Dark Background is probably one of his weakest books in my opinion... 

Found it incredibly shallow and irritating, with characters that really had no reason to be in the god damned book in the first place (you've been pregnant for 20 years because a man-slut CHEATED ON YOU??? Did you not see that coming you stupid bitch?), and unbearably annoying and unnecessary ship-format text. I also give it a 1/2 of 10. 

You fail at books! 

 

 

She is the Darkness by Glen Cook - still slowly working away at this 80s-90s fantasy series, The Black Company (which inspired bungie's 1997 game Myth: The Fallen Lords). It is awesome how obvious it is that Cook is writing _AMERICAN_ fantasy - based on Vietnam - confusion, cynicism, greed - rather than WW1 (Tolkien) or WW2 (most fantasy) with the good/evil/despair etc. Cook writes in a low register, it's all slang, people are sick, cynical, greedy, pock-marked, liars - most of the soliders are black - and there are lying priests EVERYWHERE. All of this anti-fantasy praised since that's what Cook, does, he could have done a lot better if he thought things out more carefully, but then that's the curse of genre fiction, quantity over quality.

The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins - a crazily intense view of evolution, starting with modern humans and going back to the dawn of time. Slow reading for a layman but incredibly enlightening and interesting, and well-written and engaging. Some of the life-forms described in this book have never made it into popular consciousness (2-foot long sea scorpions, carnivorous kangaroos, jesus) and I wonder why.

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris - just started reading this, and it seems like his best book yet. I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this guy he has the clearest thinking and the most eloquent prose style I can think of.