Short Subjects: SF mini reviews
Tor has been continuing their free release of books in electronic form, and I have been totally enjoying these free glimpses into new works, formatted to display well on my Sony Reader. First, though, is a book still hammered into the beating heart of dead trees. Matter by Iain M. Banks – Banks’ returns to his much-anticipated stories of people at the fringes of his Utopian spacefaring civilization, The Culture. In the Culture, all boring work is down by non-sentient machines, the intelligent machines and human-kinda people basically do what they want and live in gigantic spaceships or massive orbital stations, and are really kind of boring. Since it’s no fun being part of the Culture if you can’t fiddle with other less advanced civilizations, the Culture stories almost entirely focus on the Special Circumstances crew; those who have a taste for harsh living and interference. ...