I finally finished Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi epic, The Ministry for the Future. It's a brilliant and important book in many ways, but not a great novel. Parts of the story are chilling and compelling, but other parts are more like a treatise on non-capitalist economic policy - an important subject, but not one that makes for easy reading. I found myself skimming a lot. I did find the last third of the novel quite engaging and liked that he ended on an optimistic note, an optimism that I do not share.
I am now re-reading Charlie Stross' The Merchant Princes series, in the new omnibus editions, starting with The Bloodline Feud. I have been looking forward to the sequel series for some years, and the third book will be published later this month (I have it on pre-order with Amazon). Re-reading the first series was not an easy decision, given the number of books in my to-be-read collection, but I thought that it would help with reading the new series. So far, I've read about 15 percent of the book, and I am hooked. Stross is eminently readable, and I'm looking forward to revisiting his multiverse and picking up some details I missed the first time.
As an aside, I've decided that I have to cut back on my online browsing, especially Twitter. I have many fascinating people on my Twitter feed, and it's possible to spend an hour reading posts and checking out links that people post. But Twitter is like a river, it keeps flowing, and trying to read everything just takes too much time. I'm going to restrict myself to just browsing the last hour or two of tweets and leaving it at that. When I have spare time, I will read my book instead. The Kindle and my phone synchronize position so I can jump from one device to another without losing my place.
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