* Connie Willis's "Uncharted Territory", which got three votes. Entertaining, also contained lots of gender stuff. Not my favorite Willis, but pretty good.
* Ken Macleod's "Cosmonaut Keep", which got two votes and there were some nice comments about Macleod from people who didn't vote for it. This was very good and I think I will try to read it again in the (hopefully not too distant) future; it deserved more sustained attention than I was capable of giving it. Also if I understand correctly there is (or will be) a sequel and it would be a good idea to make sure I understood everything in this book before I read the next.
The book's chapters alternated between a (implied) near future world in which the European union is united under Communist rule, and the Russians make contact with an alien vessel. Information from the aliens accidentally makes its way to a member of the IWWWW (International Workers of the World Wide Web), who defects to the United States, then ends up on a Russian satellite ... The other chapters are in a more distant future on a planet settled (some time in the past) by cosmonauts, in which some humans team up with an intellilgent dinosaur to rediscover the secrets of celestial navigation, more or less. (Hopefully this is not too spoilery.)
* Keiichi Sigsawa's "Kino No Tabi: Book One of The Beautiful World", which got two votes. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I liked it better than the anime (I decided I liked the anime better), and then figuring out why I liked the anime better. There are some aspects of each not present in the other, but to say more would be to spoil certain things for people who have not already seen or read the series. (Which you should do. Both are quite good.)
I mailed this book to
paracelsvs, so maybe he will have some comments if he's read it yet.* Rudy Rucker's "Mad Professor". A bunch of short pieces, many of them collaborations, with some notes at the end. I have a weakness for conceptual science fiction stories, so I maybe liked 'Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation' (itself a collection of six even smaller pieces) or 'Visions of the Metanovel' best; of the relatively straightforward stories, I liked 'Jenna and Me' (about the presidential daughter) a lot, and 'Cobb Wakes Up' is a nice little piece (it's taken from an old draft of 'Realware').
* The July 2007 issue of Asimov's, which got one vote.
vardissakheli voted for this because it contained a Michael Swanwick piece, which turned out to be a goofy little riff on Asimov's recent anniversary and made me laugh many times.Not on the original list, but I read it anyway:
* Austin Grossman's "Soon I Will Be Invincible", a novel with two narrators. The first is Doctor Impossible, a supergenius supervillain who simultaneously plots to take over the world and ponders the question of why, if he's such a genius, he's ended up where he is in life. The second is Fatale, a newly-recruited cyborg superhero. My father got me this book for my birthday; it's quite good and I think
cgoldfish in particular would really like it.This is leading up to another poll, but I will save that for another post.