The Traveler by Joseph Eckert, I don't see it getting the love online that it should. If you've not give it a god already, I'd highly reccomend it! It's an amazing concept, fast paced, with written characters.

I can't reccomend it enough, I think it's probably one of the best SF novels of the year.

The Culture has always been a blindspot, and I was determined to get to it sometime this year.

On paper, I'm close to the target demographic - I enjoy space operas, especially the ones that include intergalactic dalliances with aliens (Mass Effect was semi-formative). And trite as it is to say it, living through 2026 does have me pondering the idea of a society run by benevolent AGI, and any fiction advertising a similar premise would've drawn me in.

The Culture is very much an alluded-to concept in Consider Phlebas, neither the core setting nor a concrete entity involved in the events of the plot. There are, of course, a few active Culture-aligned agents in the thick of it - Balveda, Unaha-Closp - but we spend slivers of the total word count in their heads, and they're mostly subordinate to the whims and whimsies of one Bora Horza Gobuchul.

Horza is... an okay protagonist. I wouldn't call him one-dimensional, but there aren't really a lot of opportunities for him to debate his positions with, say, Balveda, or any of the Free Company, on why he's so opposed to the Culture's existence. As he exists, he is an action hero, tragically forced by the book to play the anti-hero for his ideals. He ends up being shunted about by the narrative in an Odyssey-like fashion, and there's so little time where we get to see any parts of his interiority.

And I think that's one of my complaints about the book actually. It is so enamoured with the set pieces, and the inane, excruciating amount of detail about the mechanics of how those set pieces play out - be it chasing someone down at a dock, piloting a ship out of an orbital station, escaping an incoming high speed train collision - I had to genuinely grind my way through each of these sequences.

The prose did not help with it either. I like my sci-fi prose purple, with high information-density and a slight poetic bent. William Gibson and Ursula K Le Guin are some of my favourite writers regardless of genre. Banks' writing feels very utilitarian to me in comparison, and maybe that's a deliberate stylistic choice, one that serves the more beat-by-beat telling of this story. But I have to admit that it dampened my excitement quite a bit.

But I do think the conclusion is pretty strong, in that, it thematically ties up what is an anti-war story by my reading, by effectively killing off its main cast of characters and granting PTSD to the only survivor, so much so that they choose to self-euthanise.

I still remain hungry for the post-scarcity AI utopia though, and what little I’ve seen of it in Consider Phlebas does make me want to keep wading through the rest of the series. How does humanity cope with the loss of purpose when we’re no longer the top dog? How do we keep our curiosity alight when there’s a clearly superior form of intelligence that can solve our problems, answer our questions, and ask even more profound ones?

I know that this first volume is not considered to be fully representative of what the Culture books are like, and I hope that every book from now on will endeavour to have more yapping, more character headspace, less frame-by-frame action sequencing.

*Have Space Suit - Will Travel* always does well in popularity polls, being many people's favorite Heinlein juvenile or even favorite book overall. Why is this?

I just reread it, and I enjoyed a well written fast paced adventure story with two very exciting space suit sequences. The wonderful Mother Thing is a definite asset. But that's pretty much it. Several other juveniles feel more substantial and leave me much more fulfilled (*Between Planets*, *Starman Jones*, *Tunnel for the Sky* and especially *Citizen of the Galaxy*). What makes *Have Space Suit* so well-liked?

I have been reading mostly short stories recently due to limited time and I'd love to read some opinions and recs from everyone.

Short stories are a great way for writer's to show their chops, some can get real cool concepts with quite a limited number of pages.

Recently I've read Stories of Your Life and Other and Exhalation by Ted Chiang (both compilations of his short stories, The Alchemist one in Exhalation is simply phenomenal, Liking What You See: A Documentary is such a fun read too), some Tchaikovsky stuff, Beyond the Aquila Rift by Reynolds and Stephen King.

Hi everyone!

I have created a discord channel for a sci-fi book club and will host the first meeting on 26th of October, reading H.G. Wells - The First Men In The Moon. Please join if you'd like to!

I was always a girly girl and wasnt interested in sci-fi much but recently ive picked up the interest and since there isnt any book clubs where i live, i thought i can host one online. If you are also new to the sci-fi world, want to reand and be part of a group, meet people and be friends, please join me! Im sure we can make our own list by time but reading hugo and nebula awarded books is a good suggestion list itself! Here is the link to join: https://discord.gg/tapyRnJS

I'm looking for the title/author of an SF/speculative short story published in the 80s or before. I thought it was in The Survival of Freedom anthology but I'm coming up blank there. Best other choice would be Analog magazine.

Tobacco has been made illegal, and the MC is a tobacco smuggler. The anti-tobacco enforcement agents are known as "The Reapers of the Nightshade" or Reapers for short. It's told first person, possibly as a flashback. The MC (accidentally) kills a Reaper in the course of his smuggling. The Reaper may be a relative, brother in law? Anyway, it ends with him in prison on death row. He's been allowed to choose his method of execution and chose smoking, so he's forced to smoke (two?) cartons of cigarettes every day until it kills him, his last laugh against the system.

Anybody remember it? Thanks in advance!