purplecthulhu

Sailing Bright Eternity Greg Benford
Vacuum Diagrams Stephen Baxter
Gateway Fred Pohl
The Clan Corporate Charles Stross
Immortality Inc. Robert Sheckly
Darkland Liz Williams
Starfish Peter Watts
Maelstrom Peter Watts
The Oregon Experiment Alexander et al.
Missle Gap Charles Stross
Blindsight Peter Watts
Air Geoff Ryman
Freakonomics Levitt & Dubner
The Execution Channel Ken MacLeod
The Snake Agent Liz Williams
The Steep Approach to Garbadale Iain Banks
Sun of Suns Karl Schroeder


9Tail Fox Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Interesting and mostly enjoyable police procedural that's not really an SF novel. It works rather well as a procedural, which is another sub-genre I like, but the SFnal and Fantasy elements work less well. The SFnal element turns out to be a failed experiment anyway, which gets confused and mixed up with the fantasy transfer of the central character's consciousness to a new body when he's murdered through the intervention of the eponymous fox. While the thriller/procedural elements make for a good read this just makes the SF/fantasy aspects even more jarring. And while, unusually for JCG, it's told almost completely linearly in time, he compensates for this by making the storytelling so oblique to the plot, with information being deliberately and obviously withheld from the reader, that it can get quite frustrating.

So - enjoyable, but not as successful as it might have been.

Meanwhile, on a petty note, the edition I have has JCG's name misspelled on the embossed lettering on the spine. Ooops!