A list of predominantly hard sci-fi books for your reading pleasure. I’ll loan you the ones I have, as soon as I can find them.

Click book covers to go to Amazon.

Lucifer’s Hammer ~ This is the one I told you about Tuesday. Oh YUM. A dinosaur-killer strikes the earth; hilarity ensues.

Darwin’s Radio ~ I have the second book, Darwin’s Children, in paperback. You’ll have to buy this first one.

Ilium ~ I have both this and the sequel Olympos in hardcover. Combines hard sci-fi and the classics you wish you were reading.

Code of the Lifemaker ~ I can’t remember why I liked this book so much, only that I did.

An Oblique Approach ~ This is not hard sci-fi, it’s military sci-fi/alternate history. IT’S FUCKING AMAZING; I’ve read the entire series twice. (I think I only have these in ebook format, though.)

The Boat of A Million Years ~ Solid hard sci-fi. I think I have it in hardcover.

Wheelers ~ This was a great read. Neat alien lifeforms. I used to have it in paperback; I’ll look around.

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For free sci-fi in ebook format: the Baen Free Library.
For sci-fi that’s not free, in ebook format: Fictionwise and Mobipocket.

In which I shamelessly read total trash.

Hi, it’s midnight. I’m awake because I spent most of the day dozing between bouts of Cramps From Hell™ and reading total crap.

I’m reading more My Little Pony porn.

And what’s My Little Pony porn, you ask? Good question! See, it’s like this. Last year we had an RAOK over at my knitting site, and my secret pal sent me a trashy paperback in one of her packages. It looked stupid and vapid so I let it sit around for months and months, but eventually I found myself with nothing else to read and, like the whore I am, I cracked the cover.

I read the entire thing in one sitting.

It was this weird combo of, like, elf fantasy and light erotica. With a touch of bondage. Oh, and blood sport. Nothing I would ever have purchased, ever, but I was hard up and just like a bag of cheesy poofs once I started I couldn’t stop. The heroine — magical, petite, drop-dead gorgeous and, of course, totally buxom — somehow ended up with this stable of sidhe men who were supposed to be getting her pregnant so she could inherit the unseelie kingdom or something, and they were all like 6’2″ and buff as hell and armed with swords and knives and totally hot with perfect physiques and outrageous costumes of laced-crotch leather pants and harnesses and capes and shit, and they all had tri-colored irises and hip-length hair ranging in color — and now you’ll begin to understand — from midnight black to sea green to lavender. (Don’t ask me how, but it worked. Maybe it was the near-gangbang scene in one of the first few chapters?) Anyway, our heroine gets laid in every single chapter, usually by two or three or more of her stable, and some of them even sprout wings (I shit you not) while gettin’ busy with her.

It was the weirdest thing I’d ever read, and since I read a few hundred books every year I read some weird shit.

So when I passed the book along to NLW a few weeks later, I dubbed it My Little Pony porn because I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. All that long, colored hair. Once she’d read it too, the phrase stuck – it totally is My Little Pony porn.

Turns out the author had written several books in the series, which NLW and I both read because, well, it’s My Little Pony porn and it’s stronger than we are! And apparently there’s another series by the same chick only with vampires instead of faeries and which NLW — purely to punish me for giving her the My Little Pony porn in the first place — loaned to me the last time I saw her.

Don’t click on the links. I’m serious. My Little Pony porn is evil. EEE. VIL.

In which thin-crust pizza is the best. And knitting.

Yesterday, Bread and I had lunch at Revelations. We had their house pizza – pesto, Greek olives, feta, and carmelized onions – and one of the pizzas on special, plus a salad. While we were waiting for the food, I scanned the fantasy/sci-fi section and found myself a trilogy to read. There was a buy-two-get-one-free sale on fiction, so I got $11 worth of books for $7. Yay!

This series is beautifully written. Behold: Overhead, a whirlpool of Skyhorses cantered in training circuits, and the sun was a goldfish in a blue bowl.

The sun was a goldfish in a blue bowl. Is that not gorgeous?

After we ate, I sat with Girija and Sarvani for a bit; they were knitting and I had to give them the URL to Iowa Chicks Knitting. Sarvani had picked up a stitch on the sock she was making and wanted help frogging a row but she didn’t have smaller needles with her to pick the stitches up with so she ended up tinking.

After lunch I sat in the jeep for an hour while Bread had a business meeting. Thank God I’d just bought a book, that’s all I have to say. Then we went grocery shopping and went home. There’s so much good food in the kitchen that I can’t eat for the inability to decide what to make.

In which I admit publicly that I no longer loathe RAH.

I received Off The Main Sequence as an automatic monthly selection from SFBC.

Last year I read an ebook of Heinlein’s non-fiction and decided I might be willing to forgive him for Stranger In A Strange Land and Friday and all that other incestuous crap.

I’d always found reading Heinlein to be like this: he’d set up a great premise with great characters and the first half of the book would be a joy to read. Then… well, then they’d all start fucking each other – sometimes they’d time travel and screw their own ancestors – and good sci-fi would degenerate into interstellar soft porn. Ugh.

I also pretty much hated the second half of Stranger, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I read some of his non-fiction quite by accident and realized that he really was the genius all the dust jackets said he was. And not too long ago I read a book of his shorts and loved it, and now I’m reading another book of his shorts with equal relish.

Okay, so, I’ll come out and say it: I was wrong. Heinlein doesn’t suck. I’ll even dig up some of the novels I hated and re-read them now that I’m older and of dirtier mind.

(But I never did like LOTR and I never will and I don’t care who knows it.)

In which I give this one four out of five stars.

I received Down these Dark Spaceways as a SFBC selection not too long ago, and read it this weekend.

Yum.

It’s a collection of novellas in the mystery sci-fi genre, but instead of being your standard fare there was a theme of modern or reversed sex roles in it. I love my sci-fi, but it’s not always on the bleeding edge of social change, being as myopically involved in science as it is.

The first story was good, but not memorable. (So not memorable, in fact, that I can’t even write about it.)

The second story was the first time travel mystery story I’ve ever read with a gay spin to it – the protagonist worked for an agency and was looking for a killer, all typical, except that the victims were young twinks in the late 50’s and he ended up getting involved with one, which is totally unexpected if you know anything at all about the genre.

The third story was your typical military-guy-is-hired-to-rescue-a-kidnapped-princess story, except the military guy was a woman and the princess was a totally gorgeous prince being held by bad guys – er, bad girls – who were torturing him and doing nasty things to his royal virtue. Super fun read with fantastically nasty weaponry featured.

The last two stories were tight, but not surprising in any fashion.

All in all, a highly recommended anthology – not just for the craft, but for the twists.

In which I bore you with my reading list.

I finished Ilium after returning from vacation; now I’m elbow deep in Olympos. These books are fantastically good readin’.

It’s sci-fi meets the classics meet a good story, with Zeus and robots and nanotech and LGM (little green men). It sounds impossible, but it works.

Makes me wish I hadn’t hocked my favorite translation of the Iliad in Albuquerque that one time.
——–

I recently finished reading Calculating God by Robert Sawyer, and I have to say I didn’t much like it.

I bought it because I was stoked at the idea of reading a “sci-fi” piece that was, at the very least, religion-friendly. I got instead a one-dimensional book (the entire story f0cused on one set of characters, the one “sub-plot,” if I’m not grossly misusing the word in this case, was told in fewer than five pages) in which the author thoroughly lamed out in the end with a finite, locatable intelligence turning out to be God!

While I enjoyed the author’s attempt to use science to explain the impossibility of our existence, I really felt like he lamed out at the end with that God-as-big-black-obelisk thing.

As you know, I read voraciously. I don’t restrict myself to ebooks, but an awful lot of my reading is in e-format.

I started reading ebooks way back in the day – ten years ago, now – when I got my first palm-top computer. At that time, it was mostly Project Gutenberg stuff; books that were old enough to be in the public domain and could therefore be distributed freely. I read classics, mostly, because that’s what there was, and loaded up on reference material like the constitution, the bill of rights, and other items that might come in handy during a discussion in a bar somewhere.
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