A few years ago a good friend of mine moved to Japan leaving me as custodian of his massive SciFi book collection. Since then I have been working my way through 1000+ books and I'm currently approaching the one third mark...

What I have found. For me nearly everything written before the mid 80s (pre Gibson's Neurmancer) really hasn't aged very well. There's some fantastic ideas, but they are mostly poorly executed. I've just finished "The Forever War" which is a brilliant concept - fighting a war with an enemy light years away where your intelligence is always at least 10 years out of date, and your soldiers have no idea how technologically advanced (or not) the enemy might be when they actually reach the convict zone. However the story telling itself is pretty average and the human interest sub-plots are either dull or simply don't ring true.

On the other hand I have discovered Walter John Williams. Everything I have read by him is great. Go out and read some today. If you can find a copy start with Metropolitan - one of my favourite books I have read in the last 10 years. AFAICS only his three most recent novels are currently in print and he's currently working in what I would call present day SciFi which takes technology that's currently still in development and assumes it's working and out there (in the same way that the most recent William Gibson Books have done). You do need to read them in the right order or you'll be even more confused that the main character in the last book by what is going on - start with "This Is Not A Game".

So what am I currently reading? "Perfecting Sound Forever" by Greg Milner. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of recording and recorded music in particular. Then I have a couple of recent SciFi books that I got for Christmas before it's back to my friends collection to see what other gems I can unearth.

Amazon remembers you - on looking up Williams, Pefecting Sound Forever was recommended

Interesting - Perfecting sound forever was bought for me by a friend. I'd never heard of it before. Also I don't think I've bought any WJW through Amazon.

As mentioned before, I'm reading a load of book samples on my Kindle.... why in fcuk's name do so many authors these days feel the need to give detailed descriptions of the jobs people had (not even the subject's jobs!), for instance, if it has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the book?

There's a section in Stephen King's book 'On Writing' where he tells the story of handing the first draft of his latest novel 'Bag Of Bones' to his wife to read. There's a bit near the beginning where King took three pages to describe what his main character was doing while suffering writer's block and carrying out a variety of low-paid or menial work. His wife thought it was overlong and unnecessary. When King protested that it was important to the development of the character, his wife said "Fine. But you don't have to bore me with it, do you?" It got reduced to one paragraph.

Incidentally, 'On Writing' is a fascinating and funny book on how and why King became the writer he did. I'd thoroughly recommend it even if you have little or no intention of becoming a writer yourself.

I'm loving the Kindle sale, still making my way through the samples so I could still wind up buying more 99p wonders

your collection is not complete until you buy mein kampf