A book of many very short chapters with positive messages. Willie gives lots of uncontroversial advice, mostly along the lines of be kind, let others be, enjoy life, etc. A chapter about biodiesel was a bit out of touch when it comes to practicality.
While this is not a full biography or anything, it does discuss a lot of his past. So now I know at least a little history about Willie.
A pretty interesting history of the early days of science fiction, centered around the magazine Astounding. I would have rated it fairly boring but as I became more familiar with the characters it became more engaging. Admittedly, some of the most interesting was when it got into the forming days of dianetics and Scientology. I say "admittedly" because I regard these as trash topics and don't really think that it is worthwhile to spend time learning about them, but it seems that I the same inner urges as most do to rubber-neck that wreck.
Reading this did make me want to go back and read some of the discussed works. I have already read the main three parts of Asimov's Foundation stuff, and Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I should probably go for a couple of the latter's other Hugo winners. Also it made me want to see what the old pulp magazines were like. The Internet Archive does have some that I might read through, but I think I am almost as interested in the physical details as in the contents. So I may pick up a year of them sometime for $50 or so on eBay. It would also just be interesting to have some old stuff like that.
Â
Pretty short as it only took me 20 minutes to read, but I guess worth signing up to the mailing list to get for free. It is just a prologue to the Quantum series.
A well written time travel story, and again a good balance of cutting edge science topped of with some made-up things.
Great for the price I paid, which is free since I signed up for the Kindle Unlimited free trial (and set a calendar reminder to cancel it). Hey, there are a lot of books that I won't even read for free so this is still a compliment.
Good pacing and very nice mix of real quantum theory with some made up stuff, and an accompanying final "chapter" that tells you exactly what was real and not. There were some hints at time things in the story which the third book Quantum Time will surely get deeper into.
Excellent read, nice mix of psychology with sci-fi. A lot of technical details of how they are able to survive in various ways underwater are ignored but I think that is the right choice as it lets the story stay focused.
I will be grabbing Michael Crichton books when I see them in the future. I knew he was a very popular author but I don't think I had read any of his works prior to this one.
An easy read for the easy price of free via Prime Reading. Good enough that I will probably spend the $4 for each of the sequels in the next week or two.
The balance of real quantum theory and made up stuff was OK, and the puzzles of the communication devices were nice. The analogy to explain how 3D space appears from a fourth dimension was very reminiscent of how it was described in The Three Body Problem. In the afterword the author does cite The 4th Dimension by Rudy Rucker as "a fun book about dimensions" so maybe that is a prior work that both of them built on.
This was a great end to the trilogy, featuring some of the grandest sci-fi themes I have encountered.
Very good read! Plenty of great spaceship-type action, and grand plot strategies that reminded me of the style of the Foundation trilogy. But also I really enjoyed the sequence where the main character dreams comprehensively about spending time with the perfect woman.
I think I am getting better at processing Chinese names as they were a little easier to remember in this second book of the trilogy.
Overall good. I read reviews for the sequel and some of them said that reading this is a necessary slog and the sequel is the big payoff. One of the best sci-fi books of all time I guess. I do plan to read it.
This itself is still a good book though. I found it hard to keep track of the characters, I think because they all have Chinese names. Maybe I don't have anything to visualize for names that I am unfamiliar with, or maybe my brain just isn't wired to track those "words" as characters. Otherwise the Chinese setting and cultural influences are interesting.
I actually should reread the book as I read a lot of it while falling asleep. Might help rewire my brain for the names too!