Customer Comments

connie willis' blackout, along with all clear (it's really one big novel) was the best book i read in 2011. my hands were shaking; i was reading late late into the night; the suspense was off the scale - there should be a warning on the cover cautioning people taking heart medication. and the resolution was so satisfying, an essential element after the investment of reading such a huge tome; really a wonderful payoff. thank you, ms. willis.

this was the best book i read in 2010. who could even conceive of such an outrageous premise, let alone execute it, with such panache as china mieville? his originality is astounding. the concept in this novel, it seems to me, is unfilmable. even christopher nolan would be hard-pressed to convey the idea visually. it lives in the prose; and that is rare indeed.

i can't think of a book i've liked more; or that i've recommended to more people in the last ten years. i'd love to see the golden galoshes go to this novel.

normally books written in an artificial gibberish invented by the author are tiresome and strain my interest. not so with this novel. anthony burgess is a superior stylist and his narrator's voice is compelling.

so much has already been said about this book that i won't attempt to review it. on a personal note, however, i will say that very few non-fiction books make me hopeful about the future. can you imagine if people the world over were to read this book in droves - and listen to dawkins' lucid arguments? it's awe-inspiring to think the change that might be wrought. the world needs a revolution in thinking on this subject. i hope history will show this book helped start that change. somebody pin a medal on richard dawkins' chest.

certainly the most impressive book i've read which tackles the concept of the singularity. in a world characterized by progress accelerated to the nth degree, how do you describe a culture that's evolved beyond human comprehension? with incandescent prose - that's how. even if you don't buy stross's premise of hyper-intelligent machines deconstructing the mass of the solar system into computronium, it sure is fun to watch him describe it. his use of language is jaw-dropping. and while the far future he depicts is terrifying in its weirdness, he also manages to make it seem like a fun place to live. bring on the utility fog!

since first discovering haruki murakami almost 10 years ago with his fabulous wind-up bird chronicle, i've been waiting for this book to come along. his shorter, quieter novels in the interim like sputnik sweetheart and south of the border, west of the sun have been great too, but kafka on the shore is the kind of titanic, philosophy-infused epic that made me fall in love with murakami in the first place.

Geoff Ryman's Air won the Arthur C Clarke Award last year and so my sf book club recently chose it. The story centres around the impending arrival of Air, a system about to go live that will give everyone, everywhere access to the web directly through their thoughts. (Sound familiar? I know kung-fu). But what sets this book apart from that popular trope is that Ryman sets the scene in a remote Asian village that has never had access to the web before. That contrast, between the last place on earth to go online and the new global culture about to overwhelm their thoughts, gives the story a vitality and a great new slant on a popular sf notion.