What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

I really liked The Difference Engine, but it’s really different from anything else I’ve read by either author solo. It goes deeper but not faster. If you’d like to read some 19th century alternate history with super tech that turns out to have a solid physical rationale and radical politics, and that moves right along, let me recommend Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

After doing the Appendix N Jam, I'm really feeling that vibe right now, so it might just be the huge clash of tones putting me off the Difference Engine.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I read it so long ago soon after it came out, but I remember two things about it - 1) it was good but not great because 2) two great tastes that went ok together, but the parts were greater than the sum. Ie, it was not better than any of the books Gibson and Sterling wrote alone that I had read to date.

Corollary - it was an early steampunk iteration, and as such should get a bit of credit (or blame I guess, depending on your perspective).

 

[Clint_L]

I started re-reading the Harry Potter series - I was in Porto on vacation a few weeks ago, wanted an easy vacation read, and it was the obvious choice given that Rowling started work on it while she lived there, and there are all kinds of nods to the books throughout the city. Anyway, I just finished book 7 last night.

It's still a fun read - Rowling's formula of taking the old Tom Brown's Schooldays template and adding magic works a treat...for the first six books. But, man, Book 7 really goes downhill without the Hogwarts school year to give it structure. It's way over-stuffed, so much so that the climactic final battle of the entire series is constantly interrupted by pages upon pages of exposition to elaborate on all the plot contrivances (meanwhile, a key plot point such as Ron and Hermione figuring out how to destroy one of the horcruxes happens entirely off stage, though the film adaptation wisely decided to develop it). I'd forgotten that Harry's ultimate confrotnation with Voldemort is 90% the two of them playing twenty questions as Harry goes through the dubious technicalities of wand ownership. It's very strange that his final victory feels a bit like "Aha - you should have read the fine print, Dark Lord!"

Also...what is with mega-popular fantasy settings playing footsie with slavery? Harry, like Luke Skywalker before him, is a slave owner - Kreacher the house elf (who of course has come to love him by the end). Why on earth did Rowling introduce the whole "house elves are slaves" subplot...what point is she trying to make, since it really goes nowhere? Anyway, it feels weird to be rooting for a protagonist who owns another sentient being.

Edit: I suspect that her editors knew it was kind of a mess but also knew it didn't matter.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What, you didn't enjoy "and then they camped in the woods for six months. Let's drop in on them and show you how boring that was?" She was clearly impossible to edit by the time Book 7 rolled around.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Uh, I just started the Difference Engine and it's super-boring. Does it pick up or am I right in wanting to nope out? So far, it's mostly how it's terrible to be a prostitute in an alternate history London that has mechanical computing happening in the setting background.

Nah it's pretty boring mate.

Like, I say that with love. It's a book I enjoyed a lot as a teenager, and I do think it was important to developing and popularizing steampunk as a genre. If only anyone at all had understood that the industrial revolution, even with computers and robots was a horrific dystopia, not an idealized state lol, I thought that book made it pretty clear but I think some people's brains stop when they see a top hat or hear someone called "Lord [insert very British name]".

but the parts were greater than the sum. Ie, it was not better than any of the books Gibson and Sterling wrote alone that I had read to date

Exactly, both did wildly better by themselves.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I actually shelved John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Should have been up my alley, but after about 50 pages, the writing style and story structure got to me.

Instead I switched to Samit Basu's The City Inside. Really good read; it felt frightfully relevant and is likely only to get more so with time. The line "They don't want people to live like humans. They want them for data, and then for meat." stuck with me.

Now I'm reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I actually shelved John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Should have been up my alley, but after about 50 pages, the writing style and story structure got to me.

Instead I switched to Samit Basu's The City Inside. Really good read; it felt frightfully relevant and is likely only to get more so with time. The line "They don't want people to live like humans. They want them for data, and then for meat." stuck with me.

Now I'm reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix.

Love Schismatrix