Robot Round-Up 04.01.13
Hello and welcome to the first Robot Round-Up of 2013! It’s been three weeks since our last, pre-holiday-season Round-Up, which means there’s absolutely loads to tell you about. So, without further ado or faff, strap yourselves in and off we’ll go.
It’s been a titanic few weeks for Ramez Naam, whose debut sf thriller Nexus was officially published on January 3rd, but actually came out in the US and ebook editions in mid-December. Here’s a run-down of the review coverage that we’ve seen so far:
• Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing: “Nexus is a superbly plotted high tension technothriller … full of delicious moral ambiguity … a hell of a read.”
• James Floyd Kelly at Wired.com’s GeekDad blog: “It’s good. Scary good. Take a chance and stop reading now and have a great time reading a bleeding edge technical thriller that is full of surprises.”
• Tom Shippey for the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Naam sees all the angles of future technology almost too imaginatively to keep up with … Nexus joins Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995) as a double-edged vision of the post-human.”
• David Pitt at BookList: “Naam has set himself a difficult challenge here: he’s telling a story in which much of the action and dialogue takes place inside the characters’ minds. But he succeeds admirably”.
• Ben Goertzel at H+ Magazine: “Nexus, as well as being a fun read, has something to contribute to the dialogue that humanity is now having with itself, as it creates the transhuman future.”
• Mieneke at A Fantastical Librarian: “Nexus was a fabulous read. The plot was riveting and this near future SF thriller was not just exciting because of its action scenes, but also because of the questions it poses the reader. It’s a compelling, intelligent and, above all, fun story that will keep you reading for far longer than you intended.”
• Dragana at Bookworm Dreams: “Nexus by Ramez Naam reminds me of my favorite science fiction authors: Cory Doctorow with dystopia/government conspiracy themes, Michael Crichton with unexpected twists and action/adventure, Arthur C. Clarke because everything Ramez Naam described has a scientific background.”
• Upcoming4me.com called it “Great and thought provoking stuff reminiscent of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson or Accelerando by Charles Stross.”
• Katherine McCarthy, writing for the Institute for Emerging Ethics & Technologies said: “If it isn’t the cinematic handling of some very futuristic images or the curious immersion of cybernetic pondering into the narrative flow; Ramez Naam’s Nexus will impress a reader with one very unusual device: it is the unadulterated humanity with its entire heritage that is the most alien and unfamiliar of this world.”
Page 1 of 5 | Next page