Peter F. Hamilton wraps up the Commonwealth and Void series (I think!)

I just finished a very enjoyable duology of Peter F. Hamilton's:

You'll need to have read at least three Hamilton's previous novels to really appreciate these two:

Pandora's Star
Judas Unchained

and at least one of the Void series:

The Dreaming Void
The Temporal Void
The Evolutionary Void

These books concern Bienvenido, another world in the Void that is not Querencia, the one described in the Void trilogy. It was also settled by captain and crew of a Commonwealth ship that was captured by the Void and devolved politically where the Captain and his successors hold most political power.

Abyss opens with a colony ship being captured by the Void when it was cruising well outside the Void on its way to another galaxy. Instead it finds itself near these structures that resemble trees and decide to investigate ...

That's when we encounter the Fallers, a monstrous species that entices humans (and others) close enough to its "eggs" to capture and "subsume" them ...

Nigel Sheldon's clone arrives in the second part of the book and "marries" Kyssandra, the young woman living on a farm near where Nigel's spaceship lands. She's just supposed to be sold into an arranged marriage with a local thug to pay her mother's debts but resists and wakes up from a drugged stupor at the altar not with the young thug ... but with Nigel! "Say yes," he says ...

Nigel runs rings around Bienvenido's powerful, engineering a political revolution and finally getting enough raw materials together to get his spaceship launched ... and to figure out what happened to the colony ship that was captured and to bring as much resolution as possible to that situation ...

Night continues the story ... if you finish Abyss and enjoy it, trust me and try this one. I found it one of the more satisfying stories I've experienced in years! Five stars!

Another favorite SF Author: John Scalzi

This guy:

... is prolific SF author John Scalzi, recently rewarded with a $3.4 million contract  and whose catalog of SF novels is one of the more inventive and enjoyable that I've experienced.

The first one I read (and just finished rereading 5 minutes ago) is one of my favorites of all time:

Any plot synopsis fails to capture it, but it consists of Washington power politics in an era of interstellar inter-species diplomacy and trade ... and sometimes war. One of the veterans of one of the wars is the protagonist Harry Creek ... the dialogue is sparkling, the characters vivid.

Don't hesitate!

Almost as good and set in the same sort of era where Earth is known by several different alien species:

... in this series the technology exists to make 75-year-olds into 22-year-olds with enhanced bodies (staying in top shape with no exercise) and blood (carrying more oxygen than normal blood) and even a BrainPal, an integrated computer in the brain that has all sorts of advantages ....

The series so far:

• Old Man's War (2005)
• The Ghost Brigades (2006)
• The Last Colony (2007)
• Zoe's Tale (2008)
• The Human Division (serial then collected into a novel 2013)

It's particularly important to read the first book in this series first, as I started with The Ghost Brigades and missed some things until I went back and restarted with Old Man's War.

Others of his:

• Agent to the Stars (1997 shareware, 2005 published "for real")
• Fuzzy Nation (2011 "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's 1962 Little Fuzzy)
• Lock In (2014)

I've "read" (mostly via audiobook) almost all of these and enjoyed all, some fervently.

Try any of these but be prepared: Scalzi got the $3.4 million contract because many readers went back to collect the entire list after reading one!

Scalzi also has a blog ...

A virtual war over virtual hells

I just finished my favorite work of SF since Charles Stross' Singularity Sky.

Iain M. Banks was also a Scot, like Stross; Banks died in 2013. He produced 9 books in a "Culture series" about an advanced civilization, the Culture where AI-run ships and drones have achieved full sentience and are granted equal citizenship and rights.

The first four chapters are just setting up the main characters, so do give it at least until chapter 5.

The protagonist is Lededje, an "Intagliate" who was tattooed at birth right down to her DNA. This marked her as the property of Joiler Veppers, the richest and most powerful man of the Enablement, a less technically and politically (and morallly!) advanced civilization than the Culture.

I won't spoil the story by giving details on how Lededje gets away from Veppers and into dealing with the Culture. But the basis of the story runs several complex threads around a war that several civilizations have agreed to fight only in a virtual environment (like a computer game) to decide the fates of several Hells. These Hells are also running as virtual environments, and the technology exists to transfer the consciousness at death from the body of an unfortunate into one of these Hells.

The complexity of the story threads and the way Banks brought them all together with their interplay with the Culture ships (notables of these named Sense Amid Madness, Wit Among Folly and Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) is just dazzling. There's also quite a bit of discussion of the sociology and political interplay between the Culture and several other intergalactic civilizations that exist at the same time and several of which are competing in the War Over Hell.

Five stars! You may want to read one previous Culture novel to get your bearings; I'd recommend The Player of Games if you want to read one before this one.

I experienced this as an Audible audiobook, which is the way I "read" almost all fiction these days.