Conversation

Finished Iain M. Banks’ Matter last night. Probably my favorite display of writing virtuosity so far. The sheer amount of world-building crammed into a single story... and literally into a single world. Wow. The shellworld idea is a sci-fi narrative engineering masterpiece.
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So that’s 4/9 Culture novels finished Use of Weapons Hydrogen Sonata Look to Windward Matter Next up: Player of Games which I started but abandoned previously. Probably the most inventive and richly imagined (in a baroque way) SF world-building I’ve read ever.
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Vernon Vinge (Deepness in the Sky) is the only thing I’ve read that seems to be imagined on a similarly lavish scale, and evoke operatic space of similar narrative proportions. Both are galaxy-sized stories for galaxy-sized canvasses. They don’t feel like stretched planet-scale.
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By contrast, Asimov’s foundation, despite being otherwise pioneering in the genre, feels like planet-scale narrative stretched to fit galaxy-scale canvas, and the pixelation shows. It is self-admittedly just the decline-and-fall-of-Roman-empire transposed to a space-operatic key.
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