Book Thoughts: Service Model & Alien Clay
I forgot for a little bit there that listening to audiobooks could also just be done for fun. Not that I've not been having fun with Borges and "The Weird" short story collections, but I've been trying to challenge myself a little more than the usual sci-fi/fantasy fare.
Well after a few hellish months at work leading me to abandoning most of my hobbies and my morning stream I decided to take it a little easy and fall back to old habits and purchased some good old-fashioned sci-fi novels to keep me company on my walk.
I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, though I found the subsequent books in the series felt a bit more like watching a fun sci-fi TV show rather than having the impact of the first title. Nothing wrong with that, so I picked up two books that had a slightly similar feel to them: Service Model and Alien Clay -- both one-shot novels by the author.
Service Model follows a totally-not-sentient valet robot through an apocalyptic wasteland. It's campy and funny and overall very enjoyable junk-food with a handful of memorable moments.
Alien Clay is Australian Prison Colonies X 1000 with exoplanet exploration, authoritarian regimes, and alternate biological evolution. It's sarcastic and anti-authoritarian while it digs through its ideas about modular biology and alternative evolution.
I like them both a lot as fun sci-fi romps, though admittedly both felt like the author was a little too on-the-nose with the political undertones (or I guess just normal tones?) of the two books. I am a great lover of le conte philosophique, but a little creative subtlety goes a long way.
I don't think I'd recommend these books to people the way I recommend Children of Time (I have given away about 5 copies of that to people, now) but they gave me the lightweight audio entertainment I was craving.