I finally finished Stranger In A Strange Land!

Gentle reader, this book Fucking Sucks!

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/8da7c6e3-ece5-4410-a3c7-885d14b729f1

Philip K Dick fans read the following with caution

I thought The Man in the High Castle was really really bad

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/80ee3d00-3b8e-4a56-b8e9-12fe20ff7016

Got through Way Station in "one" day!

Subjectively it was two days because I went to sleep but by the calendar it was only one!

We're firmly in the era of Cold War Sci-Fi now

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/fdd6c32f-63de-4297-bd23-19f04785eb84

New review coming up!

The Wanderer was the worst garbage I've read so far, EVEN WORSE than The Forever Machine, which at least had the grace to be short and stupid enough to make fun of.

I have no idea how this one ever won a Hugo unless it was just because Leiber kept dropping references to Burroughs and Heinlein.

Not even sexy catgirl aliens could save this mess.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/117721f2-3b1b-412f-93a5-b926d91faec9

Dune is finished! Are you expecting me to play the contrarian, say it's overhyped, not worth the reputation it's garnered over the decades?

TOO BAD IT'S THE FIRST 5-STAR OF THE HUGOS

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/95c7dfa4-c812-4fa4-8b3f-fbaf24d2ac2f

Next after Dune is Roger Zelazny's This Immortal and it was

Fine

:|

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/319e03ea-91ab-4af5-9bd1-6d454b678ce4

A friend of mine told me that This Immortal was functionally a warm-up for Zelazny before Lord of Light and, yeah, he was correct. This book was incredible.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/53087c0b-f8c3-4f30-81cd-500d7221b9ae

Me: Iunno, I'm just really worried about the state of publishing right now, it seems like the market for truly interesting books is shrinking as publishers continue to encourage writers to churn out worse and worse slop in order to chase tiktok trends

Roger Zelazny: I know what you mean, buddy, do you want to read a genre-defying mythological epic with extremely stylized and ornamented prose about a war in heaven about it?

Me: You know, Roger, I really think I do

At long last

I am free of Heinlein

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/bcf374a3-c70c-4579-897d-b950d7986625

Stand of Zanzibar is behind me! I read 550 pages and they were very full, very interesting pages that were definitely trying to say SOMETHING

But god knows if I know what

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/39e3db32-e21d-4def-bb84-9228134ea66a

This was a tough one. I feel like I'm committing sacrilege by rating The Left Hand of Darkness less than a 4 but it just didn't quite come together for me the way it clearly has for a lot of others.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/ed670474-e4e2-4a26-bad8-9d73fe7a7bb4

There are so many reviews on Storygraph giving it 5 stars and talking about how much it moved them and honestly I'm super happy those people had those experiences

If anything, I'm upset that I didn't

I finished Larry Nivens' Ringworld.

I want to go back to Ursula Le Guin

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e2329ed5-d68c-4f9d-8672-2e549ab7f25b

I will say this about To Your Scattered Bodies Go: it was a DAMN sight better than Ringworld

Sadly, that bar is in Hell

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/29e8778c-b2b4-4c4a-a6b9-89543bc9cd08

The Gods Themselves is a book that starts really strongly and has a lot to say about the processes of Doing Science but then takes a long detour to explore alien gender politics in a way that completely destroys the pacing and momentum of the story and then fails to recover

As cool as it is to see nonbinary genders and nonmonogamous systems being explored in a 70s sci-fi novel, this was not the book to be doing that exploration

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/5bc04b42-539b-4864-b12d-f63256f8fe90

Finally Rendezvoused with Rama

It was okay

Cool ideas, a fun exploration of a Strange Thing, but I would've liked to see an actual plot in this novel

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/dde57d46-a5fb-4b66-8ecd-98846ac3de85

The Dispossessed had everything I had hoped to find in Left Hand of Darkness and so much more

Fantastic novel

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/b08055fd-dd7a-4862-8cfb-86f958f617d1

Short review for The Forever War. Maybe because I just finished a bike ride and I'm still recovering from that, but I just couldn't find a lot to say about it

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/8c891f1e-d099-4241-aec9-4f8d25cf0c6c

Where Late The Sweet Birds sang was not good!

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/2893dd49-df13-4684-a225-7ad6fdf615ae

I'm not even sure the book deserved a 2 tbh

Gateway had way too much Freud for me to fully enjoy it, but given the time it came out, I can see how that would've been seen as a strength when it was new

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/f0eb9b94-780e-4352-ba34-6279304ec746

Dreamsnake was one of those books that comes along and provides a breath of fresh air. Finally, after like three books straight about things that suck or people that suck, I got a book with a heart. Loved this one.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/9872697a-c4ca-4f50-bd44-5681f957640f

The Fountains of Paradise was an extremely boring slog through all of the worst sci-fi has to offer

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/e6b2f48e-f74c-4912-9555-a1afe8be7a22

I'm firmly into the 80s now with Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen! I thought it was fine, but weirdly pro-cop for a book so interested in the lasting damage that is caused by colonialism

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/046cb1a9-f140-42d6-b46c-190054af91d0

My daily reading streak has broken half a year!

I have reached my limit. I am not going to finish reading Downbelow Station.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/b2cf410d-0927-41c8-abad-93ecfe2297a0

I read like a thousand pages of Heinlein but THIS was the book that beat me

I had to read 3 entire novels before I got to the next winner because I was not about to jump into book 4 of Foundation. There was some good stuff in that series but most of it was in the first book.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/778e8982-f786-45c2-a931-86802c7a48a9

Startide Rising was a great book about dolphins in space

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/0cb5d52e-00ec-4002-9a8c-c44994f25060

The Uplift War was also a very good book about chimpanzees on an alien planet

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/cd2ef051-be3a-46e3-b617-54630f91da36

It might be heresy, but I gave Neuromancer less than 5 stars

But not a lot less

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/3b78afeb-8fd6-4115-a6f4-f548489c750a

@coriander I don't know what that is, but still, reported.

@wallhackio Hasn't read Dune, doesn't know Neuromancer, clodboy can you even read

@coriander I am reading A Wizard of Earthsea ​​

@wallhackio I should read that at some point

@wallhackio Anyway Neuromancer, together with Blade Runner, basically codified what cyberpunk Is

@coriander I have never watched blade runner

@wallhackio Reported as FUCK