Blindsight by Peter Watts This book is about ten years old and despite getting quite positive reviews at the time and being nominated for the Hugo award is not very well known. It's a book about alien first contact, which is a pretty familiar idea in science fiction but the book itself is anything but familiar. In Blindsight, biologist turned science fiction writer Peter Watts takes a group of assumptions so fundamental to our understanding of ourselves that we don't…

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor I've been thinking about putting this one up for the book club for a while, but the lack of a local release meant that availability would have been a bit of an issue. There still isn't a local edition, but the announcement that the book is being adapted by HBO means that there are other stores getting copies in as well so now is probably the time to do it.  Who Fears Death is…

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem I had other plans for the book we would be discussing for our first meet of 2018, but for a bunch reasons that one will have to be next year sometime. Instead I brought this one forward. I was intending to have a few more books between the October book Blindsight and this one, because they're both about alien first contact and the difficulties of communication. I don't think we'll have too much time for comparisons…

Quarantine by Greg Egan Since the March meet is the fifth anniversary of our book club I decided I wanted to do something local. The first book that came to mind was WA author Greg Egan's 1992 book Quarantine. The short description is that it's a cyberpunk book about quantum physics. How that actually works is a much more complex idea, and even after reading it multiple times I'm not sure I get it. There's plenty to unpack in it…

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer A while ago we read Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin because I wanted to do a book that was like Nineteen Eighty-four without actually being Nineteen Eighty-four. This month I had a similar thought. I kind of wanted do something like Dan Simmons' Hyperion, but new. I think that this one will fit the bill. It's got the care and attention to language with a slightly archaic style and some interesting philosophical ideas.…

Autonomous  by Annalee Newitz One of the things I really like about the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction is how the ideas of what a near-future dystopia might look like change over time. Many of the fears of early cybepunk books are now reality, and other anxieties have replaced them. Autonomous deals with a few of these but one in particular, the growing power of the pharmaceutical / biotech industry. The protagonist is a pirate, in classic and modern terms. Jack…

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence by Michael Marshall Smith This month I wanted to do something a bit lighter and stranger and I think the new book from Michael Marshall Smith might do the trick. Folks who've been with the group for a while might remember that one of his earlier books, Only Forward, was read by the Odd Book Club back when we were running two book clubs. He tends to do a mix of the peculiar…