Burning Chrome by William Gibson. A collection mostly of pre-Neuromancer short stories, including several that built out the Sprawl setting (“New Rose Hotel”, “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Burning Chrome”). Others range from present day weird fiction (“The Gernsback Continuum”) to Gateway-like future humanity facing an utterly mysterious hyperspace network (“Hinterlands”) to very 80s near futures (“Dogfight”, “Red Star, Winter Orbit”, “The Winter Market”). Even the pieces that have aged poorly have a lot of merit, and I enjoyed the reread.
Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years by Paula Fredrikson. This is great. Erickson organizes her material thematically, with separate chapters on topics like canon formation, hierarchy, and relations with civil authority and society. I wasn’t sure I’d like that, but she makes it work. I learned a lot and gained fresh perspective on bits I already knew. She integrates the use of Greek and Latin super smoothly - it reminded me of good sf/fantasy usage, respectful of the reader and encouraging with the sense that understanding the sounds and shades of meaning these people used helps us understand them more fully. Highly recommended.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. This is the first book I’ve read by Hurley, wow. It’s excellent, in a really brutal way. It’s set a hundred years in the future, with six corporations ruling a world a world suffering massive devastation from war and pollution. There’s a complex situation with Martian colonists turned independent, some returned to Earth to help restore it, with the corporations at war with them. The narrator is a young South American woman in the midst of all this, who finds she’s having strange problems with the teleportation system soldiers use. Complications ensue in a deeply satisfying way. Hurley pulls zero punches with the violence of combat or the degradation the characters must live with. It’s not an unmitigated crapsack of a story or a grimdark resolution, but this absolutely not going to be what some readers want or need, and I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone into reading a story that’ll just make them miserable. But if you’re up for this kind of thing, it’s superb.
Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years by Paula Fredrikson. This is great. Erickson organizes her material thematically, with separate chapters on topics like canon formation, hierarchy, and relations with civil authority and society. I wasn’t sure I’d like that, but she makes it work. I learned a lot and gained fresh perspective on bits I already knew. She integrates the use of Greek and Latin super smoothly - it reminded me of good sf/fantasy usage, respectful of the reader and encouraging with the sense that understanding the sounds and shades of meaning these people used helps us understand them more fully. Highly recommended.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. This is the first book I’ve read by Hurley, wow. It’s excellent, in a really brutal way. It’s set a hundred years in the future, with six corporations ruling a world a world suffering massive devastation from war and pollution. There’s a complex situation with Martian colonists turned independent, some returned to Earth to help restore it, with the corporations at war with them. The narrator is a young South American woman in the midst of all this, who finds she’s having strange problems with the teleportation system soldiers use. Complications ensue in a deeply satisfying way. Hurley pulls zero punches with the violence of combat or the degradation the characters must live with. It’s not an unmitigated crapsack of a story or a grimdark resolution, but this absolutely not going to be what some readers want or need, and I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone into reading a story that’ll just make them miserable. But if you’re up for this kind of thing, it’s superb.
