Some Books I Loved

 **Is it a near-future tech scifi novel?  Is it a dark academia magic school novel?  Yes** The premise is simple.  Elegant, really.  We have two childhood best friends, Patricia and Laurence.  Patricia realizes that she has magical powers, she can speak to birds and has other abilities.  Laurence is a supergenius in the classic scifi sense, building advanced gadgets as a young kid.  They get split up, and at this point the novel diverges into basically two completely different books told in alternating chapters:  Patricia ends up in a dark academia story, sent to a magical school where she learns magic and the secrets of the world; meanwhile, Laurence ends up in a day-after-tomorrow scifi story, where he invents increasing fantastic technological marvels Patricia ends up part of a cabal dedicated to protecting the Earth:  “When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,” (man I love that line).  Laurence end...

**A postapocalyptic Katmandu, ruled over by a benevolent AI named 'Karma'.  Is it a utopia?  A dystopia?  Well, an all-powerful djinn just woke up after millennia of slumber, and the big problem is he thinks it's boring **   The setup is a classic one:  Following climate disaster, humanity's survivors are forced to huddle up in purpose-built cities, nanotechnology protecting them from a Planet Earth that can no longer support them.  One such city, one of the greatest, is Katmandu, jewel of the Himalayas shining brighter than ever before Nanotechnology has created a post-scarcity society, in which everything you could possibly want is available at the push of a button.  With food and shelter and comfort and safety taken care of, currency has been abolished.  For luxuries, the only thing that matters is Points doled out by the city's aptly-named benevolent AI ruler, Karma: Karma took everything; money, land, companies, stocks, bonds, vehicles, ...

 **A legendary group of badass female space bandits, scattered across the galaxy after a job gone wrong, is reunited for one last ride.  And gore.  And cyberpunk.  And so much gore.  God, I love Cassandra Khaw** Ok but for real, I love Cassandra Khaw.  I will read anything they write.  But I will also readily admit that they are . . . not for everyone.  Because what Cassandra Khaw loves more than anything else (and for which they have a true and delightful talent) is a mix of fantastically beautiful prose and visceral gore and horror.  It's kind of amazing.  Here, from "The Salt Grows Heavy": The girl inhales to screech, one hitching breath. I bury its denouement in the cellar of my throat, mouth locking over her windpipe, her spine. Her vertebrae break with the crisp, dewed noise of an apple’s skin when it is first pierced. She crumples, I follow her down, palm molded to her skull, taking only as much as I need, just a thimble of cider-...

 **Late-90s Cyberpunk Space Opera . . . yeah, I know, that's a hell of a combination of words . . . but with a surprisingly thoughtful central message about diversity and xenophobia** In many ways, this novel is a pastiche of some of the classics of Science Fiction.  It is unashamed at its debt to William Gibson, and the influence of Frank Herbert is obvious as well.  Cordwainer Smith literally gets a shoutout in the Forward, but I won't say for which story since that's a bit of a spoiler (but yes, if you know Cordwainer Smith, it's almost certainly the one you're thinking of).  However, Friedman takes these elements and combines them into something that feels less like a ripoff and more like a respectful homage--achieving this mostly because this novel takes that foundation and adds to it in some surprisingly beautiful and original ways The first unique point is the history of her setting, which is fantastically realized and darkly plausible, a backdrop for the adv...

**Calling it the greatest cyberpunk writing ever is an understatement to the point of insult.  Calling it one of the best science fiction short story collections is still an understatement.  Simply put, a masterclass in short fiction writing for any  genre**  In the Introduction to the 2003 re-release of this collection, William Gibson wrote about the scifi he read when he was a child: Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back.  But you can't draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own. The less you think your map of the past imaginary (or contingent), the more conventionally you tend to stride forward into your imaginary future.  Many of the authors I read as a boy possessed remarkably solid maps of the past.  Carved, it seemed, from doughty oak.  Confident men, they knew exactly where we were coming from, ...