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I'm on a big C. J. Cherryh kick at the moment. Just read Port Eternity, which was excellent, and now reading Rimrunners which is also quite good (and very gritty.)

Continuing with the Cherryh kick, I'm now reading Voyager in Night. Comments Here.

Now reading The Beserker War by Fred Saberhagen. Classic SF, with a bit more of a military bent than most of what I prefer to read. But then humanity is taking on the ultimate life-destroying doomsday machines, so I guess they have little choice but to get militaristic...

I'm now trying out C.J. Cherryh's Gene Wars universe, which so far only has two novels. The first, Hammerfall is so far quite engrossing and deals with a people on a quest to determine the source of their "madness" which I'm guessing must be some sort of genetic code tampering.

I finished Hammerfall, and it was start to finish, a brilliantly exciting piece of SF writing. I am forced to say one of Cherryh's best, but there are so many on that list that it almost doesn't do this one justice to say that!

I just started the next (and so far only other) book in the Gene Wars universe Forge of Heaven. It begins with a section called Reference that explains the actual universe that the world of Hammerfall is unfortunate enough to be stuck in the middle of. While many authors tend to put this sort of section at the back of their books rather than the front, Cherryh creates such complicated backstory here that it is completely necessary to read it first. While there is virtually no sign of nanotechnology and biotech in her classic Alliance/Union series, this universe is overrun with both, and the primitive people of Marak's world in Hammerfall don't even begin to understand the forces that have shaped their lives.

I have yet to get into the actual story of Forge of Heaven, but if it is anything along the lines of it's predecessor, I'm in for a ride!

Currently reading Pavane by Keith Roberts as part of the SF board group read. These reads are great as they get me to try things I might not get to on my own. Pavane is set in the twentieth century in an alternate Earth where the Dark Ages never really ended as Queen Elizabeth I had been assassinated by the Catholics, allowing the Spanish Armada to triumph and install a Catholic empire across Europe.

I'm reading Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson which concerns itself with immortal humans hiding among the gene pool going back to the ancient world. So it's science fiction that reads like historical fiction.