The Across Realtime series was written in the latter half of the 80s, and it rather shows, being much concerned with totalitarianism, clashes of economic culture, and the post-apocalyptic landscape. Even so, the first book was a fun read, so I have high hopes for this one.

The first Vinge I ever read was A Fire Upon The Deep, a novel about the galactic usenet and the super-intelligences that ruled the edges of space. I was in high-school, and I guess I didn’t really understand the implications of what I was reading at the time. I’ve since gone back and re-read it, and wow, Vinge is pretty profound stuff. Further, he’s subtle. He doesn’t rub your nose in it. He just sort of shows it to you. It’s a little weird, but you buy it, and it gently warps the way you think about other things.

More recently, I picked up a paperback copy of Rainbows End, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I suspect that in some ways Rainbows End will seem as thematically dated in a decade or two as The Peace War seems now, but that’s ok. What’s powerful about it is the view it can provide of the present, using the mirror of a particular imagined future.

I hadn’t heard of Stross until he released Accelerando for free on the internet in 2004. I understand he’d written a few things here or there, but he wasn’t on my radar. I got as far as the second part, but the tedium of reading on a screen did me in. I didn’t read anything further of his until several years later, after buying the Sony Reader, and obtaining the huge collection of pirated e-books. I saw a review of one of his Laundry novels on Io9, and, remembering my truncated enjoyment of Accelerando, decided to see what of his was already in my collection.

I was delighted to discover that I already had almost his entire catalog, including the Singularity Sky set, Glasshouse, many of the Laundry stories, and the first three books of the Merchant Princes series. I started with the Atrocity Archives, and not having a copy of The Jennifer Morgue, bulldozed right through the Merchant Princes series, Glasshouse, re-read Accelerando (ah, the Glasshouse world makes sense now), Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, and through the rest of the story collection.

Having exhausted what was readily available, I checked Saturn’s Children out from the library, and put most of his other books on various waiting lists for borrowing or trading. It’s now been over a year since first trying to get a cheap copy of Halting State, so I gave in and got it from Amazon.

And voila, here I am.  I’m about 40 pages in, and thoroughly enjoying it.

I’ve put Iain M. Banks’s Excession down for now. It’s somewhat of a tedious read. Don’t know if I’ll go back to it or not.