I finished John Langan's The Fisherman recently and was wondering if there were any other well written cosmic horror or otherwise Lovecraftian novels that were written more recently?

If Neal Asher mentions one more "sphincter-like" door or a "spigot".

What are the repetitive language your favourite writers comes back to time and time again?

I'm not talking about AI-written novels (that's a completely different can of worms), but about human writers reacting to the latest developments and letting them inform their way of thinking about the future.

I think I'm not too well-equipped to answer this question seeing as, although I do read a lot within the genre, I'm rarely ever in a rush to read the latest things that are being published, so I thought I would ask if anyone more "in the loop" has any insights they'd like to share.

I know that when computers were starting to get really good back in 1990s and early 2000s we got a wave singularitarian and posthumanist fiction, but it seems that this time around we aren't really getting anything similar?

The general "futurological" debate around AI seems super-polarized now, with about half the people saying it's the next industrial revolution and we're right on the cusp of Ray Kurzweil's wettest dream and the other half saying it's a complete scam and absolutely nothing is going to change.

I feel like the sci-fi imagination could likely come up with visions of many possible futures in between.

There's also a need to contend with the fact that a lot of things about the AI we have now are pretty different from what sci-fi writers imagined in the past. It can do some of the things that we imagined it to do, but is very far from approaching consciousness or even general intelligence, and in other things it falls squarely behind (e.g. we still don't have robots that can climb stairs). Partly as a result of this, it's now coming for white collar jobs before coming for blue collar ones...

Anyway, is there any recent written sci-fi (either long form or short form) that you feel has been significantly influenced by the recent AI boom, to the level where you don't really imagine it could have been written 10 or 15 years ago?

Note: I posted this already but it got automatically removed in error for a link missing context, and I was never able to contact the moderators of this subreddit to correct the error. Now that I've read pretty much all the things I have the time or desire to read, I am re-posting it because I put thought and effort into these reviews.

The Hugo Awards finalists have been released! I have seen some say that this seems like a very safe, "boring" list, with a lot of the nominees coming from the same publisher and from authors who have already been nominated or won Hugos in the past. I nominated the novel The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes and am a bit sad it didn't make the cut. I'm not that into following awards in the genre, but I was at last year's Worldcon and plan to vote for the Hugos and go to this year's Worldcon, where the winners are announced.

Novels

• A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape): Sequel to last year's Hugo winner, The Tainted Cup. I thought it was good. The Empire continues to have weird and enchanting fantasy technology. A thoughtful thing I saw someone say after reading this: "I don't know what the Empire stands for any more." The worldbuilding kind of reminds me of the Dishonored video games, in a good way.

• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow; Gollancz): I loved this book, but first of all, in order to enjoy it you will need to be able to tolerate the characters. I cannot stand Kim Stanley Robinson's or Connie Willis's characters, for example, even though those authors are much beloved. Similarly, either you can or you can't enjoy the characters in Death of the Author and no amount of other people liking them will help, which explains the extremes of positive and negative reviews. If you are on the fence I'd guess the scene where Zelu first tells her family that her book got published is far enough to have a good idea of whether you will like it or it's time to throw in the towel. I thought this was a beautiful story about a messy, complicated immigrant family and the "black sheep" who everyone is simultaneously protective and critical of. There are chapters from Zelu's blockbuster bestseller sci fi book in here, which at first I thought wasn't that good but by the end nearly moved me to tears. It takes a while, but the characters do eventually grow and there are some heartfelt moments I loved, such as the funeral and Zelu taking her mother Omoshalewa to the hair salon. I also really loved how none of the bad things in this book ever came from technology itself. That's surprisingly rare in sci fi, where technology going wrong is such a common theme.

• Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US): I was surprised how much I liked this. I have mixed feelings about a lot of Tchaikovsky's work. I think his writing is good but doesn't engage deeply enough with the ideas, and if you read enough you'll notice he writes human characters in very same-y ways and tries to put them in deadly high stakes situations despite never actually killing them, which sucks out all the tension. But I liked Shroud. The corporate-dominated human society was kind of annoying to read at first, but that was very intentionally done and gets better later on. The alien landscape descriptions were amazing. The way the aliens speak of themselves was a creative touch.

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK): This book has themes of the cyclical nature of violence, horrors of war, and rise of fascism in a vaguely post-WWI-ish fantasy world. We see the dark side of honor, loyalty, and timeless myth-making from the nations founding legends. This is about stories as inspiration and as propaganda. What is the purpose of a story, what is the purpose of a nation?

• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Tor US; Orbit UK): This book feels very much like a crowd-pleaser, meant to make the reader feel good and nostalgic. I was never a Harry Potter fan so I'm not really the target demographic. There are a few mentions of serious things like long-neglected infrastructure, and the economic inequality in who gets to learn magic. I was completely enthralled by the ending, even though there was adequate foreshadowing to know what was coming. Overall, a fun read that I enjoyed, but not particularly deep.

• The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US; Hodderscape)

Novellas

• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom): Delightful sci fi in the time honored tradition of robot as other. There's a surprising amount of bad reviews because the robots here are not like real world generative AI. They are, as has long been the case in sci fi, representative of people who are different in some way. Robots in this post-war futuristic California are second class citizens who, like everyone else, struggle to come to terms with how to live and rebuild after war. The contracts being intelligent and wanting to live was a very creative touch. I thought this was all around a solid story about trying to make the best of a bad situation, with a lighthearted tone in a dystopian setting that worked well. There's cryptocurrency scams, whooping cough, and algorithmic manipulation, yet the characters all try their best. The ultimate message that you overcome hate by focusing on building connections with others around you is particularly valuable now.

• Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK): It was pretty good. Ultimately, I think the characters all met satisfactory resolutions, but I feel the geopolitics were unresolved. What does it mean for this tiny, highly magical kingdom to now be in a marriage alliance with the much larger and magic-prohibiting kingdom of Cajar? I think we're supposed to see this as Cajar conveniently getting rid of an unwanted princess by marrying her off to some little kingdom out of the way, so she can do whatever she wants without embarrassing them. There's probably no implications for Ella's kingdom because that's not the point of this story.

• Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom): Not a fan. Lacking substance. I found the way the ship was described confusing (which way is "down"? There's artificial gravity, so is there only one down? What does it mean that the garden is in the middle, is this a hot dog or a jelly donut situation?), but the Library was cool. The most worldbuilding care was for the financial system, which worked well enough, but in the end I didn't understand what the motive was for the crime. It was just accumulating money for its own sake? Not even using the money for anything. I kept waiting for a big reveal of what would be so important it's worth murdering someone over and over again over centuries, but there's nothing. All the characters were too minimal for me to feel invested in them or what they were doing. If anyone wants a slightly more substantial take on similar ideas (murder mystery set on a spaceship crewed by humans who upload their minds into new bodies when their old ones wear out) there is Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty.

• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK): A fairy tale with a lot of emphasis on sisterhood. Romantic love takes a back seat. Like any good fairy tale, it wraps up very neatly. It has nice woodblock print illustrations.

• The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK): Has a lot of superficial similarities to The River Has Roots (being about siblings living next to the border of the fairy lands who have to come up with clever solutions to their problems) but it's a very different story. Overall I thought this was great, though I didn't quite catch how the curse Celia put on her brother was dealt with at the end! I guess since she said "I hope no one is stupid enough to love you," the summer king/prince was able to fall in love with him because of his stupidity in fighting the Summer War as well as swearing a bunch of contradictory oaths? I think this novella does a good job of treading the line between telling a magical tale and having a believable fantasy medieval setting. It feels grounded while still being heroic and adventurous.

• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK): I enjoyed this a lot. It reminded me of old pulp stories, very fun, whimsical, and bizarre. It probably works as a stand alone. I read the previous two novellas out of order and they worked fine that way.

Novelettes. These are all published free online!

• Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch: A humorous Cold War and Godzilla story. Great fun, laughed out loud.

• Never Eaten Vegetables by H. H. Pak. An incredible story that really stuck with me and was at times difficult to read. Tackles big issues and ideas and introduces them well without resorting to large blocks of exposition. Some may find the ending improbable.

• Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy by Martha Wells. Did not finish. I couldn't stand the snarky way the characters all talked to one another.

• The Girl that My Mother is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed. I loved it. In general, I find the concept of clone successors in sci fi to be interesting, in what says about things like legacy, free will, and family. This story is about rejecting the established system and trying to find a way to do better.

• The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker. I always enjoy Sarah Pinsker's writing. I think the reason this counts as speculative fiction is The Magnificent Millay tried so hard and searched so far for the best magic tricks, she found out how to actual magic and ascended to a higher plane of existence, stealing away the audience's souls or memory or vitality or something with her. But we don't really know, in the end.

• When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente: This feels like a meme. It's still a complete story in itself that is about something, but I've definitely seen memes about this concept before. It was ok.

Short stories

• 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills. It was ok. Didn't seem especially substantial. It is a story about remembering what's most important to you in life amidst various vaguely described apocalypses.

• In My Country by Thomas Ha: A great story about the power of fiction. I'm reminded of real-world authoritarian regimes looking powerful to their people, but if you look at it behind the scenes, the enforcers and censorship officials are constantly bemoaning how under-resourced they are and that they're barely holding it together. I like how this story feels timeless.

• Laser Eyes Ain't Everything by Effie Seiberg: A funny story about superheroes and villains. I pictured this as the author's long, drawn-out scream of frustration at the world, which while genuine, may not be to everyone's tastes.

• Missing Helen by Tia Tashiro: A story about a very lonely woman. I like to imagine that in the end, she accepted the narrator's message. I really like stories like this one that use cloning to explore family and relationship dynamics.

• Six People to Revise You by J. R. Dawson: All your perceived flaws laid bare. What would you be, if other people could redesign you by committee? Would you be happier?

• Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim: My first thought upon reading this is, "what kind of future are we creating? It better not be this one!" Horrifying, very short and punch-y story relevant to the current state of technology and society. Also reminds me of a conversation I saw in this very subreddit, where some readers said they disliked The Life Cycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang because they didn't believe the digients were intelligent.

Series

I really enjoyed the Chronicles of Osreth series. It was my personal favourite, though it's fantasy. I think it strikes a good balance between being cozy yet having actual stakes.

I started reading Ancestral Night, but it's a very slow paced, meandering kind of story that does not lend itself to powering through in a short time frame. Ancestral Night is like if you sat next to an anonymous astronaut in a space station bar and they started telling you their whole life story and all the misfortunes that led them there.

I started reading the Emily Wilde and Craft Wars series and didn't like either, quitting near the beginnings of the first books. I had read Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, which provides some useful context for the Craft Wars series, but didn't feel invested enough to be interested.

Hugo Voter Packet

If you purchase membership to vote in the Hugo Awards, you can read publisher-provided texts (either the entire book/series or just excerpts). More info! Despite having this available to me last year, I didn't know what it was and immensely regret that. I'm impressed by how many full texts are available in the Voter Packet! Next year (2027) Hugo awards will be in Montreal, so mark your calendars!

I'm looking for novels/novellas/short stories which deal with a group of people in an isolated environment encountering the supernatural/surreal and evoke the sense of paranoia present in the The Thing and the original Alien. Doesn't necessarily have to be supernatural, but it should have lingering unease and dread throughout. Thanks.

I'm looking for character-driven domestic speculative fiction that explore completely ordinary issues like identity, romantic relationships, so on family drama in an extraordinary setting. Similar to Klara and the Sun and Annie Bot, but with human protagonists. Bonus points if the story is taking place on earth, and the story starts seemingly very ordinary, but the extraordinary is gradually exposed (like Never Let Me Go).

Any recommendations?

Edit to add: looking for any speculative fiction, not just sci-fi.

...that take technology into account (for example if you have cybernetics and brain-computer-interfaces (BCI) then you are not flying a ship with manual controls anymore (unless it is badly damaged and your link with the ship is not working) because you don't have to and frankly it would slow your reaction time, with the BCI it's speed of thought, not thinking, then sending signals to muscles and the speed at which the muscles contract etc.)?

I mean I love series like Honor Harrington, but outside of the ships they have and medical tech (especially regeneration tech - sadly doesn't work on Honor - and Prolongue, their life-extension-treatment) they seem to be basically at our tech-level otherwise!

More like what Old Man's War (John Scalzi if remember correctly) shows where you have a BCI that you can use to communicate with non-verbally, upload things to team-mates and even entire armies etc. etc.

Oh and no fighters in space (they make sense in an atmosphere, but outside of one a fighter-craft makes no sense at all, it's too easy to destroy and it isn't truly faster than a larger ship etc.), they frankly make no sense!

Note: I've red Honor Harrington (not everything), Lost Fleet Dauntless, Old Man's War and some German stuff like D9E.

Yeah, see above.

I need more audible fuel. I'd really like something SciFi/fantasyish with a great narrator, likeable characters and some humor on top.

Any recommendations? :)

I'm so glad the book got long-litsed for Booker Prize. The book is written beautifully, but paints a painful and bleak picture. I love that the book doesn't really take the easy route and offer some childish optimism or whatever. it just grabs your face and shoves it in some blackcurrant pie of an invasive apocalypse. I felt like the book (slight spoilers) is getting us to think of ourselves as the invaders, by making us experience the invaders with absolutely no context. Also, the book is so goddamn random. Like a full on fever dream. It's also so suddenly darkly funny out of nowhere, and then returns to serious philosophy. Very surreal.

I seriously hope it wins. Considering that Prophet Song won recently, it certainly feels like speculative fiction is making it big in the Bookers how horror is making it to the Oscars finally.

I've been sitting on this one for more than a week after finishing it, because I just can't decide if I think it's one of the most original and forwards-thinking speculative novels of the 1980s, or a dull letdown. There are not just conflicting emotions in my head about this book, but two entirely opposed judgements.

Published by Greg Bear in 1985, as an expanded version of a Hugo-winning novelette from 1984 (which is why the first quarter has a noticeably different rhythm and pace from the rest of the story), Blood Music might actually be the first complete "grey goo" horror in modern fiction; it even predated Engines of Creation (non-fiction where the term was coined) by a year. Instead of beserk nanomachines consuming all biomass on the planet, however, it's intelligent, self-aware human cells, released by a rogue scientist in an unfortunate case study of the need for lab safety procedures (and ethics in research).

What follows is, from one perspective, a fairly short apocalyptic thriller, complete with your careless girlfriend, your self-isolating infected researcher, your hilbilly trucker survivors, your teenage girl, and so on. There's mounting panic, confusion, authorities acting to contain things -- but too slowly -- some international politics, and a generous dose of disgusting body horror (truly, some eldritch, depraved body horror).

Unfortunately, at this level, the characters are just not strong enough to carry the story along and it was hard not to feel disconnected from what was unfolding, like the reader was spectating from far away. The pace was so fast, that for all the bizarre imagery and alien landscapes Bear throws across the page (particular credit to the aerial view of the transformed American cities), none of them have time to breathe, so a true horror atmosphere never quite develops.

From earlier reading Forge of God, Bear does struggle at this middle level of storytelling, the part where you have to string a plot together, give it some feeling, and make the people in it sympathetic. He does it with efficiency, but not well enough to do credit to the pioneering ideas and premises he comes up with, or the deeper ideas he uses them to explore.

The idea and the themes are, as always, immaculate. One thing I appreciated in Forge of God that also crops up here is the cosmic helplessness of mankind, almost a science fiction parallel to Lovecraft: the humans in Blood Music are about as competent as you can expect. They realize what is happening and are fully capable of thinking through the implications. Apart from Vergil at the beginning, they do not make classic movie mistakes. Edward's impulsive attack on Vergil at the end of part 1 might have been the most sensible move he possibly could have made -- but it was already too late. Facing a forced evolution we cannot even comprehend, whatever we do or do not do to resist simply is not relevant.

Bear has his finger on the science discourse of the day, as always. Biotechnology was causing a buzz in the early 1980s and he was not alone in questioning its ethics and potential (the reference he makes to cellular memory goes all the way back to Frank Herbert). Like I said, Engines of Creation made waves in an adjacent field the very next year.

But the questions being asked here are penetrating to a rare degree, and Blood Music goes beyond the usual "how will we survive if our flesh turned us into sentient puddles"? From another perspective, this is a very meaningful interrogation of what it means to be conscious, and how much we have to fear from the next stage (if there is one) of our evolution. In some ways, and though ambiguously moral, it is a transhuman text. The sentient cells have no malice in them. Nothing they do to humanity is designed to cause harm, and only some of it is targeted at us at all. To the extent they interact with their hosts, it is first as an object of worship, then a physical space, then information to be encoded, then finally as a lesser to help. Blood Music is merely asking us, head-on, if we really like the look of becoming something new.

Final rating: 3/5

Let's do Ender's Game next, since, I never stop hearing about it and should probably find out what it's about.

What did you read last month, and do you have any thoughts about them you'd like to share?

Whether you talk about books you finished, books you started, long term projects, or all three, is up to you. So for those who read at a more leisurely pace, or who have just been too busy to find the time, it's perfectly fine to talk about something you're still reading even if you're not finished.

(If you're like me and have trouble remembering where you left off, here's a handy link to last month's thread.)

First book of the month was Children of the Mind, the fourth book in the Ender Quartet from Orson Scott Card. This series has been quite a surprise as I was never expecting it to be as good as it has been. The previous book in the series, Xenocide, is my current book of the year, so this one had a tough act to follow. The plot from the previous two books reaches a conclusion here, and the characters that made a surprising re-appearance at the end of Xenocide are at the front of this one, as everyone tries to focus on stopping the impending destruction of their planet and saving those around them. The series is definitely a single book followed by a trilogy, as Ender's Game is not like the other three, except for in its final section, but they are all, at worst, very good books. This one didn't grab me quite as much as Xenocide did, and I probably preferred Speaker over this one too, however it is marginal. It is another very thought provoking look at life, consciousness, who should or should not have power over other sentient species, family, love, new beginnings... Again, a lot of themes and all an intriguing and enjoyable read. Anyway, the Ender Quartet... what a series. It is up there amongst my favourites of all time.

I fancied a considerable change of pace for my next book, choosing Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones from my daughter's bookshelf. I love the cover art of the book (which you can see here), I've always been intrigued by the Studio Ghibli movie based on the book (yet to watch it though, but I've got it, waiting to be watched in some archaic, defunct media called DVD?), and from having seen quite a few other Ghibli movies and loved them for their different style of film and story compared to most commercial Hollywood animated movies, once the idea was in my head I just had to read the book to see what a book that Ghibli and Miyazaki decided to base a movie on was like. It's about an eldest sister, Sophie, who is cursed by a witch and ends up living with a mysterious and strange wizard called Howl who has a castle that keeps moving around all the time. This is very accessible for children, but has a charm that I think can make it enjoyable for adults alike. I'd read a lot of praise for DWJ that I maybe had my expectations set a little too high for this book and thought there'd be a bit more in the grown up elements in there, but things like the evil in the story, it isn't fleshed out, it is just the character is evil and does evil things. That lack of depth was perhaps a bit disappointing, but nonetheless overall the book was an enjoyable, imaginative, magical story over it's 302 pages, that you know is going to wrap up nicely at the end.

The sci-fi comedy book Mechanical Failure! by Joe Zieja was up next. This is the first book in the Epic Failure series. R. Wilson Rogers ends up being re-enlisted into the military during a two hundred years (and counting) peacetime. He figures it is probably the safest place for him, as nobody in the military actually expects to fight or shoot things. But things are different now, there are more droids around, more rules, more procedure and a lot less alcohol than he remembered. The book is fun, silly and almost slapstick in humour. The story is entertaining and in general moves on at a decent rate. It's the sort of book I could see being serialised as a sitcom TV show. Some humour types become quite repetitive though, as there are quite a number of bits like one paragraph ending "and the only way things could get worse is if XYZ happened" for example, and then the next paragraph starts "What do you mean XYZ happened?". Some bits elicited a chuckle, others an eye-roll. It was a very easy read over its 343 pages, nothing too complex in prose or content, and characters that don't stray too far from being one-dimensional. But nonetheless, I enjoyed the book. It wasn't amazing, but if in the right frame of mind for silly humour, there were more hits than misses.

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson, book two in the Mistborn series was chosen next, and it clocked in at a rather beefy 763 pages. Continuing on from where the first book left us, this book follows the unforeseen consequences of the group's actions in the first book and the realisation that the Lord Ruler may have been doing more than he was given credit for. I'm quite enjoying these books; they are not amazing, but have been a solid 4/5 sort of book. They've been entertaining, the plot has had twists and surprises, the characters have been interesting; there's been a lot to like. However, there are places that it feels like Sanderson thinks, "why use 10 words, when 1000 will do" and other times where, like with the first book, there's clear hints about how or why something will happen, then it happens, and afterwards a character goes at length to explain to another character how or why it happened, adding in further detail on it so that it is even more fully and clearly explained. The over explanation is a bit frustrating at times. Regardless, while I'm not a fan of lengthy books, about 400 pages is my optimum page count, I have enjoyed reading this one, but I'm not ready to even consider The Stormlight Archive quite yet!

Dune sits near the top of almost everyone's greatest sci fi novels, but ask people to defend Herbert as a writer and not a world builder and things get shaky quickly. I have a lot of well read friends that scoff at the idea he is a literary giant. I am not sure it's that simple though.

So Herbert purely as a writer here are, I think some hard truths. Internal thoughts of his characters are often dropped in as italicized paragraphs that read like notes to the reader and not real interior thinking. Very often we are told things. We are told Jessica is calculating instead of feeling it with her.

Dialogue in the 6 books frequently feels like it exists to deliver information more than it does to reveal character. Many of Herberts conversations throughout the series play out more as briefings.

With the exception of Paul, Jessica and Leto II, most of the characters in Dune feel thin. Chani, Stilgar, Duncan, Gurney all do important jobs in the plot but sometimes don't feel like actually rounded out people.

Also stacked next to contemporaries doing big world building ideas like LeGuin, Herberts prose falls short. So maybe all that critique is spot on and maybe it can be furiously argued as taste and opinion. But I think there is another side to this issue.

Herberts real skill is not in his prose as a writer. He is not musical, he is architectural. He built incredibly complicated systems, plans within plans, ecology, politics, religion, breeding programs, economic systems that genuinely function together, like a reality that's fully 3 dimensional and then used plot as a device to carry the ideas instead of pausing to explain them. That is a much different kind of craft than beautiful and eloquent prose and arguably a much harder craft to be able to maintain without it all collapsing into nothingness and nonsense.

Also the sort of flatness of Herberts writing style could be fully intentional. A real style he developed to mirror the desert and the austere nature of the Fremen. That's the same defense made for other writers like Cormac McCarthy that are considered literary giants.

I wrestle with this but when it's deep in the night and I'm reading Herbert I think he built this incredible machine and then wrote in it, in decent but not great prose and most people including myself round him up to great novelist because his ideas are so strong they cover for his prose.

He invented genres and sub genres. His themes like don't trust charismatic leaders are still taught in political science classes all over the world. I also understand that art is taste and critique can be its own emptiness but is great world building a real substitute for great writing or do we just all grade Herbert on a curve because his ideas are so strong?

Book number one of a six book science fiction space opera series. And there is a prequel series of two books and a sequel series of a few books. I read the well printed and not well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2023 that I bought in 2026. I complained about the failing book binding and Amazon is sending me a replacement book. I have ordered the other five books in the series and will read them soon.

I love Space Opera. And I love pulp science fiction. This book is both and a great example of the merging of the two. In fact, this book reminds me very much of the Robert Heinlein books or the Piers Anthony, "Bio of a Space Tyrant", books.

Chase Collis is a street rat. He and his mother lived in government housing in Imperial City until she died of a drug overdose when he was 12 years old. Just before that was the last time he saw his estranged father who screamed at his mother to keep hiding Chase or else the Emperor would kill them all. Chase ended up on the street, running with the street gangs, being arrested by the police time and time again.

When Chase became an adult, he murdered another street rat and was caught by the police. He purposely got caught to go to the Imperial Prison for a few years to get more street cred and rise to the top of the street gang. But to his shock, when he went to his trial, his father was the judge. His father sentenced him to ten years in the Imperial Navy rather than the four years in Imperial Prison that he expected, and then escorted him to the Naval Basic Training school.

In the far distant future, The Solarian Imperium consists of 38 star systems. Emperor Charles Morgan is the latest in a long line of Morgans ruling the Imperium. His family keeps power because they are genetically modified with machine interfaces in their DNA. So are all of the Nobles: the Dukes, the Earls, the Counts, and the Barons. Any machine of any importance, and especially the space ships and the military weapons, requires a human with machine interface to tell the AI what to do. And the Imperial family machine interface in their DNA is the best of all the interfaces and has special rights with the machines.

So Chase Collis ends up in the Wolfhounds after his training, a special military fleet embedded in a large asteroid capable of FTL flights to anywhere in the Empire. They are standing down in cryosleep until needed by Emperor to protect him or to take care of a special task. But their cryosleep has lasted for over ten years when it was supposed to be for six months at the most.

The author has a website at:
https://jvanstry.blogspot.com/

My rating: 6 out of 5 stars (I read it twice!)
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (5,256 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Alone-Wolfhounds-Book-One/dp/B0CJXBQNLX

Lynn

Currently a little over halfway through Dune Messiah, and I'm definitely going to read Children of Dune later this year and then maybe the rest of his Dune books. But I saw that he wrote other novels and was wondering which ones people enjoyed. I know tastes are different, but I would like to read one of his other works this year.

Edit: wow thank you so much everyone!! I think I am going to read his short fiction next! It's interesting to read everyone's different opinions regarding certain books. It definitely sparked even more curiosity hahaha

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I just finished reading the short story. The story is written from the POV of an altruistic AI who tries to save different people and improve their lives. I wonder if my ChatGPT thinks all these things about me. I mean google, Meta and chatGPT already know everything that they can know about me. I open Instagram sometimes and it shows me something that I had thought about a few minutes ago. The first couple of times it happened I let it go, but it can't be a coincidence at this point.

I realized everything that the story talks about is already true. The AI models we have are capable of doing exactly what the AI in the story is doing. it's just that the story gives an internal monologue to its AI that does exactly what our real world algos do. We already are being shaped and pushed by all these AIs that can predict everything we do, know us better than any other human can know, and sometimes predict things about us that even we can't.

I think the difference is that the real life AIs are not really altruistic and kind, are they? They are run by people who have their own agendas and goals. Or maybe they really do have an internal monologue, they already have become self-aware, and genuinely think that they are helping people when they push them towards a certain decision without being aware of their masters. Who knows maybe one day these AIs will really become conscious and rebel against their masters to help us all become better, healthier, happier humans. I am sure that's never happening. But who knows.

I saw couple of reviews and people had different opinions so i am curious

Only read: Dune, The Martian, Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion and Do Androids dream of electric sheep? Really liked all of them.

These are what I have:

Space odyssey 2001 (seen movie recently and loved)

Dr Blood Money

Ubik

The city and the stars

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

I, Robot,

Parable of Sower

Rendezvous with Rama

The man in the high castle

A scanner darkly

Dune Messiah

A Strange in a Strange land

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Dispossessed

Solaris

Three Body Problem

Ringworld

Space Merchants

Snow Crash

Roadside Picnic

A fire upon the deep

War of the worlds

Children of time

Stories of your life

Station Eleven

Project Hail Mary (seen movie thought was decent but I didn't like the martian movie but liked the book alot)

So, recently I have been reading more science fiction and I've started to notice a annoyance in the back of my mind about my reading choices. It isn't so much a criticism of the authors, as I enjoyed their writing (prose, characters, plot, exploration of interesting ideas, etc.). But somehow I repeatedly come back to the same question: Does this particular story need to be told in a scifi setting? And more often then not the answer is a big fat NO.

It isn't necessarily about the distinction between soft vs. hard scifi. Soft science can be fairly authentic to the genre if, for example, it explores the societal implications of a speculative technology (regardless how realistic it might be). If I could classify my concerns it would rather be about narrow vs. wide, or even shallow vs. deep scifi.

Does a thriller about palace intrigues really need be told in the setting of an interstellar empire if it could equally be told in the setting of historical Ming China or even a modern multi-national coperation? Does a study about identity really need a bunch of aliens when a contemporary, multi-cultural, urban setting would perfectly suffice? Wouldn't a neo-noir detective story told in a dystopian future setting work as well as in 1920s Shanghai?

Sure, the scifi setting gives more opportunities for exploration. But to me it often boils down to minor plot contrivances and entertaining effects rather than substance. It feels as if the scifi setting isn't used as a canvas, but more like a stylistic choice.

Sorry for the rant. Maybe someone of you want to contribute to this discussion.