At the thrift store, the way the future was.. [View all]

Been picking up my reading material from thrift stores, flea markets and yard sales so these days I'm reading mostly older SF and it's really kind of interesting going back over some of the older stuff..

In the last six months or so I've read Hawksbill Station, Little Fuzzy, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant's War, Bova's Mars, Honor Among Enemies, Wyrd Sisters, Sight of Proteus, Heirs of Empire, Xenocide, Count Zero, Furious Gulf and a couple of anthologies, Godlike Machines and The Year's Best SF 1992 (Dozois).

I've learned that H Beam Piper was probably a socialist, in Little Fuzzy the baddies are corporatists and their patsies and the good guys are a crusty old prospector and mostly government agents of one sort or another, it's still a cute read.

David Weber is a right wing nut but his characters are often interesting enough to make you overlook it and he does have the miltech babble down very nicely and his books are well paced and plotted.

Card is preachy (and is now a right wing nut) but his world of Path subplot in Xenocide was compelling to me all over again.

Gibson of course is Gibson but some of the lingo is starting to date rather badly.

Pohl improved quite a bit from the time he wrote The Space Merchants to The Merchants' War, I liked the latter book substantially more and the first one wasn't bad to start with, biting satire that's still relevant today, maybe even more than when it was written.

Sheffield didn't seem as good as I found his stuff when I first read it, maybe it was just this particular book but it didn't do much for me.

The Silverberg book was really odd to read from thirty years in the future of some of the story and a billion years from most of the rest of it, Silverberg's future history is almost disconcertingly inaccurate but the story of the prison camp in the Cambrian age is still powerful.

I used to like Benford, now I had a hard time finishing Furious Gulf and I'm not sure why, his imagery is just not as compelling to me as it used to be, again maybe it's just this particular story.