The second Lightmonthly Read hosted by Prometheus Unbound has begun!
For the month of June we will be reading and discussing another Prometheus Award finalist,
Ready Player One — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.
It’s currently available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle ebook. The paperback version is available for pre-order with a release date of June 5th, so I recommend going with the Kindle version. Buy your copy today, via the affiliate links above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.
Join us as we read and discuss Ready Player One.
You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.
May Recap
We enjoyed reading In the Shadow of Ares by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson. While it suffers from some of the flaws common to first novels, it features a sympathetic protagonist on a quest to unravel a compelling mystery. The plot drags in places, particularly in the first third of the novel and after the climax, but significant stretches are page turners.
I do not know the authors, but they may be libertarians. At the very least, they seem to be fellow travelers. The good guys in the novel exhibit an appreciation for free markets and private enterprise and distrust of what the bad guys stand for. The main antagonists are a bunch of elitist, meddling, central-planning bureaucrats out to squash the independent settlers of Mars and bring them to heel under the control of the Mars Development Authority. Unfortunately, they come off as rather cartoonish. Part of the problem here is too much tell and not enough show, a problem from which other parts of the book suffer as well, along with a lack of subtlety and not enough trust in the intelligence of the reader.
The conclusion is more radically libertarian than some past Prometheus Award winners, albeit still not as radical as we would like. However, the writing quality leaves something to be desired. All in all, while the book is enjoyable and we look forward to the authors’ next novel (as we see their potential and expect them to improve as writers), In the Shadow of Ares is not quite Prometheus Award material.
Stay tuned for a full review.
Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.
Nominations Open for July
Nominations are now open for the book we will read next month (July). Head on over to the July 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum to put your choice in the running.
Deadline for nominations is Sunday, June 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Wednesday, June 20th, when the winner will be determined.
IMPORTANT NOTE
We don’t want to clutter up the site with three posts per month about our book club, so we’re scaling back to just one post like this one on the first of every month. We will no longer be publishing the mid-month update-and-reminder posts on the site.
If you want to continue receiving mid-month updates and reminders, sign up for our mailing list. We’ll let you know via email on the 11th and 21st of every month when it’s time to vote and what the nomination and voting results are . We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks.
For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.
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