SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

The theme is: Science Fiction published since 2000

Please place book suggestions ONLY below!

How about "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow? I have no idea if it's any good. However, living in Orange County, California, I can't help but love the title. Here's the synopsis from Amazon (the review is from the American Library Association):

Welcome to Bitchun society, where all today's commonplace problems have been solved: even death is a minor inconvenience, since one can make regular backups. Our hero has gone to Disneyland--his habit at times of major personal crisis--where he works for the ad-hocracy that runs the Haunted Mansion and the Hall of Presidents. It is a great honor to be working on the pinnacle of late-twentieth-century cultural and artistic achievement--Disneyland, that would be--and it inspires great loyalty. Our man begins feeling the pressure of change, however, after a cookie-cutter teenybopper shoots him dead for apparently no reason at all. Convinced that a new ad-hocracy on the block used his death to take over the Hall of Presidents, he vows to sabotage their plans and protect the sanctity of the Haunted Mansion. Thus begins a cycle of destruction and conflict with unexpected ramifications for the park--and his personal life. An excellent ride, entertaining and unpredictable.

Needle in the Groove by Jeff Noon

Went searching for science fiction published since 2000 at Amazon (because I'm not completely up-to-speed on anything but fantasy) and found this:

The Planet of Mortal Worship by Donald Templeman

Sounded very interesting and the reviews were helpful as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Mortal-W...

That is one creepy cover, Jon. It sounds like an interesting book.

Never even heard of it! I'd go for it - as a matter of fact, even if it's not chosen I'm going to read. Great choice, Jon.

Here's a couple of books that are supposed to be excellent and the subject matter would likely lead to some interesting discussions.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
Synopsis:
Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received and Sarah, now eighty-seven, may hold the key to deciphering this one, tooif she lives long enough. A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties as the second message arrives. While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what shed done once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains. Exploring morals and ethics on both human and cosmic scales, Rollback is the big new SF novel by Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer.

Air: Or, Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman

Synopsis:
Chung Mae is the fashion expert of the farming village of Kizuldah, Karzistan. As such, she represents the villagers' connection to the culture of the wider world beyond their fields. But Mae's role is about to change drastically. The Net, and unlimited information, has finally come to Kizuldah, and it's soon to be followed by Air, a new communication technology that will connect everyone, everywhere, without wires or computers. But the initial test of Air is a disaster; people are killed by the shock, and Mae ends up imprinted with the memories of a dying old woman. Realizing the changes the future will bring to Kizuldah, Mae struggles to lead her people to prepare themselves, while preserving the values that have always held the village together.

I managed to narrow my Amazon wishlist down to 3 suggestions (although it could easily have been many more):

Revelation Space

This distant-past/far-future, hard sci-fi tour de force probes a galaxy-wide enigma: why does spacefaring humanity encounter so few remnants of intelligent life? Excavating the 900,000-year-old Amarantin civilization on its home world, Resurgam, archaeologist Dan Sylveste discovers evidence of a splinter cult that abandoned Resurgam for the stars but returned, only to be swallowed up by a mysterious cataclysm that destroyed all the Amarantins.

Old Man's War

Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi's astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master. Seventy-five-year-old John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Force because he has nothing to keep him on Earth. Suddenly installed in a better-than-new young body, he begins developing loyalty toward his comrades in arms as they battle aliens for habitable planets in a crowded galaxy.

Newton's Wake

In the 24th century, brash young Lucinda Carlyle takes her first big chance to prove herself to her wheeling-dealing clan who control the skein, a network of "gates" transporting people and equipment instantaneously between planets. In the Hard Rapture war centuries earlier between the United States and united Europe, run-amok American AI took over the brains of humans. Survivors flung into space include the gawkish farmers of America Offline (AO), the straitlaced Oriental Knights of Enlightenment (KE) and the third-world "commies" who strip-mine planets (DK). Lucinda opens a Pandora's box of shifting alliances that turns 20th-century American sensibilities upside down.

Both of Ben's suggestions, Rollback and Air, caught my interest. I think they'll both have to go on my reading list, regardless.

Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Two months since the stars fell....Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesistan informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....

I second the recommendations of Rollback and Old Man's War. Both are fantastic.

More info on Blindsight. It has been released under the Creative Commons license and is available here. It is supposed to explore the philosophical question of "What is consciousness?". And it has alien vampires.

A friend recommended Robert Sawyer not long ago but I couldn't remember what book of his they said was good - so this'd be a great chance to read one of his. I'd vote for him, regardless of what book it was, and for Blindsight.

I haven't read much sci-fi, but I'll nominate Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon, which a friend recommended not long ago - it was published last year I think; and On by Adam Roberts, which has a really interesting premise in that gravity has changed, and the planet's surface has become a cliff-face. It was published in 2002.

I've never heard of either of those, but they sound pretty interesting. On may be hard to get a hold of though, since it is "3 to 5 weeks" from Amazon, and will likely be hard to find locally.

Worldcat.org shows several copies available in libraries around the country:

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46332470...

Interlibrary Loan maybe a quicker option than Amazon in this case.

Bookmooch.com does not currently have any copies available either.

Seattle doesn't have a copy, and we're no longer allowed to borrow from King Country library system. Maybe we should wait on that until later when more copies are floating around?

Ben said: More info on Blindsight. It has been released under the Creative Commons license and is available here. It is supposed to explore the philosophical question of "What is consciousness?". And it has alien vampires.

Okay ... I am going to second this recommendation. I just started reading it and the first chapter really sucked me in; I like the style a lot, so unless the author falls apart later, this will be one of my favorites :)

Blindsight by Peter Watts

It would certainly be better if we could choose a book that was more readily available. I thought that might be the case with On but felt it worth nominating anyway, just in case.

Old Man's War is interesting -- I think its out in paperback. I read 1/2 but had to return it.

I read the Kay Kenyon book and its good.

Here are my favorite sf books to look at since 2000. I tend to seek out the new and original and many of these are unknown.

1. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

2. Crystal Rain by Tobias Bucknell

3. Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder (really a superlative adventure novel sf cant put down great fun read) here is a review:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/04/...

4. Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder (the sequel to Sun of Suns)

5. Spin State by Chris Moriarty (another terrific sf novel)

6. Death's Head by David Gunn (military sf at its best)

7. Hammered by Elizabeth Bear

8. Code of Conduct by Kristine Smith

9. Off Armeggeddon Reef by David Weber (a tour de force)

10 Crossover by Joel Shepherd (australian) an android soldier leaves her people to try to start a new life as a non soldier - really good first novel

11. Horizons by Mary Rosenblum

12. Survival: Species Imperative #1 by Julie Czerneda

Blindsight +1 Sounds full of posthuman goodness. Love it.

Altered Carbon +1 There's a lot of good material for discussion in this one: the nature of the soul, of life, freewill, identity, and morality. Plus, it's just good.

Also +1 for Sun of Suns. I'm currently reading Ventus, also by Karl Schroeder, and enjoying it.

Hey, I am new to the group and haven't participated in any discussions yet, but I would like to place my vote for Old Man's War. I've heard it is wonderful.