Looks like it’ll be an interesting reading month.
One of the reasons I like reading British sci-fi authors, is that they have enough room in their head for alternative political systems. Witness Iain M. Banks in regards to his Culture series Via MetaFilter:
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
Despite not really enjoying Banks’ Consider Phlebas, this might be enough encouragement to check out the forthcoming Surface Detail.
In addition, I’ve got William Gibson’s Zero History on pre-order with Amazon. And I’m now reading China Mieville’s The City & The City. Really working the cream of the crop.