Book update, Pohl and Suarez
Mar 7th, 2010 by sarikan
Just in case you have not read Gateway, please do it. Pohl’s sci-fi is very impressive, focusing on a lead character who is quite defective. He is not even an anti-hero, he is just the guy in the focus, and I really appreciate that kind of balance about the depiction of lead characters. Certain aspects of this work reminds me of the Rama series, and there are two books following this one, making it a trilogy. The first book introduces so much potential for follow ups, and I hope Pohl’s following books are built on the right aspects. I may have found my new impressive sci-fi trilogy, years after reading Gibson, but it is too early to say this. Let’s see how the two other books are.
Suarez wrote a quite interesting book with Daemon, which I would call a pop tech thriller. What makes it interesting is its reasoning is build on things which exist today, and he is not pushing the limits too much, so technical people would not lose the aspect of believability easily. If you are a little bit too involved with code, AI and distributed computing however, you may still feel that familiar “that would not really work ” feeling. Still, worth taking a look at.