https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/the-future-was-now-chris-nashawaty-book-review

Blade Runner, ET, The Road Warrior, The Thing, The Wrath of Khan, Tron (not very good, but OK), Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian (not really sci-fi but fit the fantasy theme) - some pretty heavy hitters here.

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Sci-fi novels I’ve read the last year or so:

The Forever War - It’s on that list fairly high but to me it just came across as an inferior Starship Troopers, to which it was deliberate rebuttal. I found it fairly mediocre all around - the military training passages were tedious, there is hardly any action (I don’t think they ever even see the enemy), most of the novel takes place earthside and deals with the timeshock of social changes that have taken place the hundreds of years the soldiers have been gone (I found the idea that humans have given up heterosexuality the most laughable part of the book - no, homo sapiens aren’t giving up sex any time soon).

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - It’s Murakami. You know what to expect. I haven’t read IQ1984 and don’t plan to any time soon. I’m a fan but really all his books tend to cover similar territory, so I only read one every few years or so.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Samuel R. Delaney - I finish 98% of the books I start even if I have to grind through, but I barely missed the halfway mark or even only a third of the way before returning this to the library. The “sex/gender is just a construct” trope rarely presents a compelling case from a biological perspective and mostly just seems to make for bad fiction. Not that that would generally be a problem (The Left Hand of Darkness covered similar territory brilliantly) but the prose here is borderline unreadable. And the main character spends whole tedious chapters talking about books and sagas and histories and scriptures he’s read that Delaney made up from this fictional planet’s culture, which is....boring and pointless.

Michael Moorcock - Nomad of the Timestream trilogy - These are a lot of fun! Nothing substantial aside from the hamfisted political subject matter (not allegories, Moorcock is pretty blunt in his critiques of capitalism and imperialism), just page-turning, exciting pulp fiction in an Edgar Rice Burroughs/Sax Rohmer vein. I have no interest in reading his other novels because fantasy is a genre that like horror I avoid like the rash. But this is groovy turn-of-the-century (he keeps returning to alternate versions of 1903) steam punk.

More than Human - Theodore Sturgeon - disliked, stories about misunderstood noble savage autistic mutants annoy me (it’s a big problem with the X-Men, too)
Eye in the Sky - Philip K. Dick - liked, but he’d write better ones later on
Children of Men - PD James - liked, haven’t seen movie

But really I spent most of last year doing a deep dive into Balzac, which I do not recommend. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the 100+ stories, novellas, and novels in the La Comédie Humaine, and let’s just say that Balzac was the poster boy for quantity over quality. I enjoyed a few stories and at least one novel but his hit to miss ratio is 1 out 3 or 4.