What are you reading in 2025?

[Ralif Redhammer]

After having it in my library for many years, I'm finally digging into Gibson's Neuromancer.

It's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. Like LOTR, it's a book I keep returning to as the decades pass.

Somewhere I have "Sticks" anthologized. Find that and read it. (I can poke around and find out where I have it, if you need.)

Sticks is good. KEW has a talent for building dread slowly but surely, infusing small things with fear at first.

Just finished reading Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Great old fantasy book that was direct inspiration for some of what ended up in AD&D 1e. Trolls, Nixies, Law vs Chaos, bunch of other stuff pulled directly from this book. A fun, older read similar to Vance.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is what I consider the most concentrated work of Appendix N, having so much that made its way into D&D.

 

[Mistwell]

Three Hearts and Three Lions is what I consider the most concentrated work of Appendix N, having so much that made its way into D&D.

On that note, what would you say are some others that have concentrated work that made its way into D&D, other than Vance?

 

[TheAlkaizer]

It's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. Like LOTR, it's a book I keep returning to as the decades pass.

I like it so far. It's very obvious that it's a foundational work for the genre of Cyberpunk.

It's not exactly what I thought it was thought. I was expecting something very straightforward. But it's actually a more challenging read than I was expecting.

 

[jian]

Finished Wearing the Lion now. As you might expect from John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) it’s a tour de force about family, found family, trauma, how family can and does hurt you, and overcoming your self-loathing through loving and being loved. Hera and Heracles are the two protagonists in this retelling of the Greek myths, and both are equally compelling. The presentation of Hera particularly as someone who is just angry and hurtful all the time because of the complete @$$hole who is her husband, but who is also the goddess of Family and finds a way to forgive herself and others through that, is really excellent.

 

[Autumnal]

@jian , sounds great. Onto the list it goes.

It's not exactly what I thought it was thought. I was expecting something very straightforward. But it's actually a more challenging read than I was expecting.

William Gibson wrote his early stories with two big influences that weren’t always commented on. One is noir: there is a lot of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the Sprawl stories, including some direct quotes. This bit of dialogue from Chandler’s The Big Sleep could obviously nestle right into Neuromancer:

“And I don’t like your manners.”

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

The other is William Burroughs, whom Gibson once described as “that old man who sent out so many of us with sealed orders”. Echoes of this description of Interzone from Naked Lunch are everywhere in the Sprawl stories:

At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence.

Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede -- sometimes attaining a length of six feet -- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.

Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.

The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.

Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, Effinger, Cadigsn, et al (like Brunner, Tiptree, and other forerunners) brought serious literary ambitions to their work that not a lot of later cyberpunk creators have.

 

[John Lloyd1]

William Gibson wrote his early stories with two big influences that weren’t always commented on. One is noir: there is a lot of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the Sprawl stories, including some direct quotes. This bit of dialogue from Chandler’s The Big Sleep could obviously nestle right into Neuromancer:

This is the bit that gets me when talking about Cyberpunk being dystopian. It has always struck me as being more noir. The whole world isn't necessarily terrible, just the bit where the story takes place. They are stories about the underbelly of society.

 

[Cadence]

Finished Wesley Chu's "The Art of Legend" (3rd of 3 in his War Art's Trilogy). He was aiming for a Wuxia style story and it feels like he got it to me - although my exposure to the genre is about three well known movies. Like with the other two, I really like the world building and martial arts styles and they make me wish there was a 5e product adapting it. The writing has some flashes of great moments and descriptions, and the story rolled along -- but like with the second book there are some spots where descriptions and/or introspection go on a bit long and/or could have been tightened. There are also two pages that make me wonder where the editor was (not for typos or anything, they just seemed not good).

Now going on to "The Hammersmith Murders" from 1930 by David Frome (pen-name of Leslie Ford) that Stout highly recommended. (Go-go interlibrary loan).

 

[Autumnal]

This is the bit that gets me when talking about Cyberpunk being dystopian. It has always struck me as being more noir. The whole world isn't necessarily terrible, just the bit where the story takes place. They are stories about the underbelly of society.

Gibson and Sterling both said explicitly that they saw cyberpunk as anti-dystopian, or at least vigorously non-dystopian. Life is bad for many people, but life goes on, and crucially, life keeps changing. No social, political, or economic power in their worlds can lock them down. Radical change can and will happen, the shape of the world will break open over and over again, on into the foreseeable future.

Other writers show the same thing: the post singularity post-humanity in Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers and the runup to the Singularity in his The Griffin’s Egg, the fringe science/magical changes in John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ (the origin of the Molly Millions mirrorshades look) and A Song Called Youth, his “Shaman” (one of Greg Stafford’s favorite stories), the techno-necromancy of Lucius Shepard’s Green Eyes…and so on. Lots of these worlds could become dystopias, and some did before the story started, but they’re not allowed to stay that way.

 

[Autumnal]

I finished the audiobook of The Stand, and loved it all over again. I also encountered a good insight into a common criticism of King, his tendency toward weak endings. Booktuber Lekden is a fan of horror and science fiction, with particular attention to queer genre fiction, and also a Buddhist monk. There’s a combo you don’t see every day. Anyway, in his review of the brand-new anthology The End Of The World As We Know It, where a bunch of great authors write stories in The Stand’s setting, he points out that while King’s plotting is sometimes not the greatest, he does very reliably deliver intensely satisfying character arcs. They rise and resolve and descend in a way that feels right and satisfying even when the plot kind of dangles. I was thinking about that all through the final quarter of The Stand, and feel he got right to the heart of it there.


That was 47 hours of listening. Time really well spent, but I was ready for some shorter listening. So I turned to A Spectre, Haunting, China Miéville’s book about the Communist Manifesto. It’s less than eight hours long, and it’s read by him. A few comments ensue.

1. Miéville has a great voice and is an excellent reader. If you like any of his fiction, hunt this up, maybe from the library or Spotify’s audiobook feature, and listen for a while just so that you can go on to hear his prose in his voice.

2. The first chapter lays out some comments about manifestos as a genre and about principles of criticism and analysis. I like these so much I’m going to quote a bunch.

All texts are, always, to various degrees, contradictory, multifarious, polysemic.

This is not licence for epistemological anarchy, according to which anything, any reading, always goes. But it is to acknowledge that no text, whatever its author’s (or reader’s) intent, can have a simple, singular meaning. Every text will generate something like a tangle of meanings and connotations, more or less concentrated around a core, and more or less protean or stable, according to political, social and linguistic context. As one playful formulation has it, rather than being straightforwardly ‘about’ something in particular, every text is inevitably surrounded by a ‘vibrating aboutness cluster’. The context, content and range of that cluster must be accounted for as part of an analysis. Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one ‘true’ meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.

This will be book 41/100 in my current read-what-you-own challenge, and I’m enjoying it a lot more this time around. Making sure to include a bunch of big books has helped a lot with that.

 

[prabe]

I finished the audiobook of The Stand, and loved it all over again. I also encountered a good insight into a common criticism of King, his tendency toward weak endings. Booktuber Lekden is a fan of horror and science fiction, with particular attention to queer genre fiction, and also a Buddhist monk. There’s a combo you don’t see every day. Anyway, in his review of the brand-new anthology The End Of The World As We Know It, where a bunch of great authors write stories in The Stand’s setting, he points out that while King’s plotting is sometimes not the greatest, he does very reliably deliver intensely satisfying character arcs. They rise and resolve and descend in a way that feels right and satisfying even when the plot kind of dangles. I was thinking about that all through the final quarter of The Stand, and feel he got right to the heart of it there.


That was 47 hours of listening.

I have a copy of that anthology sitting in my Library Book TPR pile. It's a chonker, but short stories are easier for me to take as smaller pieces than novel chapters (or whatever internal structural parts) are. I'll probably read it as something aside from my "a novel every night I'm not otherwise socially obligated" thing.