Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2013

My reading this month was either student papers, university busy-work, or else unsatisfying, with two exceptions.

Catherine Jinks, The Reformed Vampire Support Group

Mind candy. A lot has been written about vampires as somehow-metaphorical expressions of fears about AIDS (and so a link between sex, blood, and death), but I don't think I've ever seen them done, consistently, as hapless sufferers from a debilitating chronic illness before. Funny, though it could probably have been compressed a bit without loss.

Alastair Reynolds, The Prefect

Mind candy: a hybrid of space opera and police procedural, where the plot turns on the not-really-parliamentary procedures of a solar-system-spanning electronic participatory democracy, with each little worldlet free to follow its own bizarre social path, so long as universal suffrage for the polls is respected. (I can't tell if there's a direct debt to Nozick, or only indirectly through MacLeod.) In the same universe as Reynold's Revelation Space and sequels (more specifically Chasm City), but stand-alone.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica