Iain M. Banks

It's Wednesday again...

... and 3 days ago, one of my favourite SF authors, Iain M. Banks, died, age 59.

In this entry, I'll mostly talk about five of his science fiction novels, "Consider Phlebas", "Player of Games", "Use of Weapons", "Against a Dark Background" and "The Algebraist. The first three, as well as most of his later SF novels, take place in Banks' "Culture" universe, named after a humanoid post-scarcity communist utopia (although personally I'm more and more inclined to try to coin/promote the phrase post-maslowian, because "post-scarcity" gets very strong reactions from some people, and is also somewhat misleading).

If you just want to know where to start with his works, and want to read the rest of this blog at a later time, the standard recommendation, which I support, is to begin with either "Consider Phlebas" or "Player of Games" (the later available in a tolerable Danish translation).

2011/04 Best reads 2/2 The Dawn Palace by Helen M. Hoover

It's Wednesday again...

In this blog entry, I'm going to talk about the other best read of April 2011, "The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea" by YA science fiction author Helen M. Hoover. The first novel was le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea".

2011/04 Best reads 1/2 A Wizard of Earthsea by le Guin

It's Wednesday again...

In this kind of blog entry I'll write about the best novel or novels I've read or re-read in a past month, usually the month immediately previous, although sometimes I'll go back some months or a year or two, to highlight something really good that for whatever reason I haven't wanted to re-read. Or if it is a really long work, like the May's Pliocene Exile or Turtledove's Tosev timeline series.

In any month I might write one, two, three or zero such entries (often zero, I'd expect). If it's a series novel, just one long story told in multiple volumes, it'll get one entry although it may be longer.

This first is about the 1968 YA fantasy, "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. le Guin. The second April 2011 entry, to be posted later, is about "The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea" by Helen M. Hoover.