Summer Books, Sweat In Your Eyes
Forty Signs Of Rain review … and another one…
Kim Stanley Robinson remains my favorite author. His newest novel isn’t quite science fiction so much as fiction about science and its relation to society. Sure, it takes place a few years in the future, and as it picks up the pace at the end, the weather is getting very extreme due to global warming having progressed. But there is little to no attention paid to technology – the book could be happening now, as far as the tech goes. And The Day After Tomorrow it definitely isn’t.
One of the main characters is an aide to a Senator, and a stay-at-home “Mr. Mom.” His partner works for the NSF, and one of her coworkers has ties to a California university and a California biotech startup. So we get to see, as two of the section headings in the book point out, both “Science in the Capital” as the NSF and the senator’s aide separately deal with the intersection of politics and science, and “The Capital in Science” as the NSF and the biotech startup deal with funding issues and venture capital games, respectively. The book also touches on the purpose of science, and suggests that the goal of science has always been to help “others”, going back to the first people to practice primitive medicine.
These are vital concerns, and as usual, Stan adroitly gets to the root of them, while weaving in other relevant ruminations as the book progresses. I highly recommend this book, though it be the first in an as yet unfinished trilogy. I also recommend Stan’s other books, especially Red Mars if you’re into hard sci-fi, Escape From Kathmandu if you like humor and adventure, The Memory of Whiteness if you like music and philosophy, and The Years of Rice and Salt if you might like an extremely well-written exploration of a possible alternate history. And his other books are ace, too.
As for the rest of the summer, some of my other favorite authors all have new material coming out. Stephen King is finally finishing his Dark Tower series, with Song of Susannah out now and the final book, The Dark Tower due in September – I can’t wait! Ken MacLeod has a new stand-alone novel, Newton’s Wake, which looks great! BTW, for a preview of what the rest of the 21st century will be like, read MacLeod’s The Star Fraction. Alastair Reynolds is also finishing a series with his new Absolution Gap novel, and claims to have a stand-alone novel, Century Rain, due out by the end of 2004. Again, I can’t wait!
But of course there are older books to catch up on from my reading list, and non-fiction aplenty… More to come as I read them.
