What are you reading in 2025?

[prabe]

I've just read the first two books of Gibson's new Jackpot trilogy and love them! It's the most out there sci-fi Gibson has ever gone in the sense of revolving the plots around a pretty fantastical premise: communications time travel so that a future earth is able to communicate backwards with it's own history, within the past century or so. But each time they do so, it automatically splinters that past off into a new direction.

Gibson doesn't explain things until well into the first book, so it takes awhile to fully understand what is going on. I love the space he leaves for the reader to figure things out. And his prose, as always, is absolutely gorgeous. These are his most action-packed books since the original Sprawl trilogy, and this feels almost like a franchise setting; I could see him adding on to it past the current trilogy. I highly recommend, if you are a fan of more literary sci-fi.

I very much enjoyed Agency, but it didn't feel like part of a larger thing to me. I'll probably end up needing to read the rest.

 

[Clint_L]

Did I previously mention This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone? This is a kind of mutliversal romance that is totally unique. It's short, but does an amazing job of building out an extraordinarily rich setting and relationship entirely through epistolary. Romance is not normally my genre, even cutting edge sci-fi romance, but this is worth a read. Fantastic writing.

 

[Clint_L]

I very much enjoyed Agency, but it didn't feel like part of a larger thing to me. I'll probably end up needing to read the rest.

Agency is the sequel to The Peripheral, which introduces most of the key characters. Agency must have read a bit oddly without that?

 

[Voadam]

I quite enjoyed Amazon's Peripheral, how similar is the original book? My wife generally raved about the books but didn't want to spoiler anything for me when she saw it was a Prime series so we did not discuss book specifics at the time.

 

[The Soloist]

Suldrun's Garden (Lyonesse trilogy), Jack Vance (1982). First read. I'm enjoying it immensely so far.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Suldrun's Garden (Lyonesse trilogy), Jack Vance (1982). First read. I'm enjoying it immensely so far.

What a treat! This whole trilogy was an absolute joy to read for me. I'll be interested to know what you think as it proceeds.

 

[prabe]

Agency is the sequel to The Peripheral, which introduces most of the key characters. Agency must have read a bit oddly without that?

It made perfect sense as a standalone to me. Well, I thought it did, anyway. Then again, even his classic early trilogy seemed really loose to me, more like three books with some overlapping characters.

 

[Clint_L]

I quite enjoyed Amazon's Peripheral, how similar is the original book? My wife generally raved about the books but didn't want to spoiler anything for me when she saw it was a Prime series so we did not discuss book specifics at the time.

Cool - I didn't know that was a thing!

 

[Autumnal]

In the Sprawl trilogy, the real through line is

Spoiler

Wintermute and its offspring/descendants.

But this isn’t at all obvious reading the books, particularly if you were reading them as they came out or spread apart reading them later.

 

[prabe]

In the Sprawl trilogy, the real through line is [REDACTED] But this isn’t at all obvious reading the books, particularly if you were reading them as they came out or spread apart reading them later.

I've been meaning to reread them, haven't gotten to that yet. I'll try to keep that in mind. I'm not sure I read them in order, and I'm pretty sure there were probably at least a dozen novels, between them.