To remember my age...

I need this it seems:
http://www.mathcats.com/explore/age/calculator.html
Got it wrong again and am a year younger than I though!

Don’t believe all you read - A couple of sci-fi reads of late

Blue Earth Remembered by Alastair Reynolds was OK but a bit disappointing. It would have been good if this had been a new author but his Revelation Space and Chasm City books were fantastic and the hype for this book lead me to believe it would be the same.  The previous books had been major tomes creating vast futurist universes which were as enjoyable as Iain M Banks’ culture novel. In Blue Earth Remembered the setting is a near future earth where human kind has only spread across the solar system. There’s many a neat extrapolation from our current technology, such as keyboards being obsolete because everything is voice commanded or thought of in augmented reality. However my main gripe was the beginning story petered out to be insignificant and what became the major plot seemed to me to be a tag on at the end. Entertaining but he has done much better in my opinion.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl had the opposite effect. I picked this up as it had won the Hugo award in 2009 but I’d also some reviews saying it wasn’t that great. And sure enough it started off slow and I was thinking it was more of an industrial espionage thriller that happened to be set in the future. His future is a bioengineered chaos where crops have failed, fossil fuel run out and a Thailand surrounded by sea walls try’s to remain independent of multination GM crop companies. And that’s not even going into what the windup girl is all about.

The joy with this book I found is the plot quickly developed but slowly (?) perhaps effortlessly is a better term. You got to know and identify with the characters and different plot lines were woven into a beautiful tapestry you couldn’t imagine before but never did it seem complicated or scattered. And the pace at the end was phenomenal - like being hoist up on a rollercoaster, enjoying the view from the top, then freefalling and being thrilled by the ride. I was almost breathless at the end, a read I’d recommend to any sci-fi fan.