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The Risen Empire
Aug. 15th, 2005 10:19 amSo I've been poking through the Austin Library's Librarians List of Best Recent SciFi and checking out a couple of them. I am really impressed with Scott Westerfeld's Risen Empire series. I think my favorite sub-genre of science fiction is Space Opera, I like large stories, interplays of societies as experienced through individuals. I think it is this genre that most cogently addresses the fundamental question of "why are we here" by looking at what we can be.
I initally thought this might be a vampire novel, since its blurb touts a 1600 year old undead emperor, but it isn't really. I like the meditation on transhuman-human interaction and the the gooey love story in the middle of the yummy space battles is superfine.
The same day I got the first half of this book I also got Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion it wasn't as good. Not utterly a waste but there was too much romance novel meets mediocre anime about it. It feels like she wrote a really bad novel, then went through and tried to salvage it and didn't completely succeed. She wrote a later novel that won a nebula, The Quantum Rose that I'll probably get around to reading but I am not in a great hurry.
I initally thought this might be a vampire novel, since its blurb touts a 1600 year old undead emperor, but it isn't really. I like the meditation on transhuman-human interaction and the the gooey love story in the middle of the yummy space battles is superfine.
The same day I got the first half of this book I also got Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion it wasn't as good. Not utterly a waste but there was too much romance novel meets mediocre anime about it. It feels like she wrote a really bad novel, then went through and tried to salvage it and didn't completely succeed. She wrote a later novel that won a nebula, The Quantum Rose that I'll probably get around to reading but I am not in a great hurry.
