Stewart Hotston
Well-Known Member
I'm a big fan of big thinking stories. I read them wherever they come from and occasionally they come up on Sci-fi and Fantasy. There are three big purveyors of this kind of sci-fi. Mieville, Vandemeer and Adam Roberts.
The Thing Itself is a story that explains Kant's systematic ontology. Now, this may sound boring but it's also a fantastic story loosely based on the movie the 'thing' with elements of 'Three men in a boat' and a hint of Connie Willis.
Roberts has a decent grasp of the source material and weaves it into a great sci-fi thriller with some especially weird bits where Kant meets the world as we experience it everyday.
This may not be everyone's cup of tea - after all there's little pew pew and not a whole bunch of gratuitous violence but it is full of intrigue, thought, excitement and is, overall, a very well crafted tale.
I continue to hold that this triumverate of authors are some of the most exciting* genre fiction being written in English today.
*by exciting I mean creating content that explores the edges of fiction as an art, ideas as currency and ask the reader big questions that they'll have to think about to answer.
The Thing Itself is a story that explains Kant's systematic ontology. Now, this may sound boring but it's also a fantastic story loosely based on the movie the 'thing' with elements of 'Three men in a boat' and a hint of Connie Willis.
Roberts has a decent grasp of the source material and weaves it into a great sci-fi thriller with some especially weird bits where Kant meets the world as we experience it everyday.
This may not be everyone's cup of tea - after all there's little pew pew and not a whole bunch of gratuitous violence but it is full of intrigue, thought, excitement and is, overall, a very well crafted tale.
I continue to hold that this triumverate of authors are some of the most exciting* genre fiction being written in English today.
*by exciting I mean creating content that explores the edges of fiction as an art, ideas as currency and ask the reader big questions that they'll have to think about to answer.
