Excession is the 5th book inIain M Bank's Culture series (if you count State of the Art, the short story collection) - this is a story focussing on Ships, Ship Minds, and the groupings, games, and politics amongst themselves as well as within the wider Culture.
2500 years ago, a ship found a dead star, estimated to be 3 trillion years old. Given that this is about 50 times the age of the universe this was a rather odd result. Next to the star it found an artefact – a black-body sphere, impenetrable by scans, or anything else. And then the artefact, and the star, vanished. Now the artefact is back, and is found by a ship of the Zetetic Elench, a splinter group who try not to change the cultures etc they encounter, but to be changed by them. Their ship is taken over, completely and swiftly, and is only just able to send a warning to the Culture, who in turn engage the 'Interesting Times Gang' of old-time ship minds to manage this potential OCP they call the 'Excession'.
Orbus is the 3rd book inNeal Asher's Spatterjay sequence, and it's a worthy addition to the series, even if it's a bit different from the two that went before (The Skinner, and Voyage of the Sable Keech). The book picks up where 'Voyage of the Sable Keech' stopped – we find Old Captain Orbus, who gives the book its name, as captain of the space ship Gurnard now, outbound from Spatterjay, and on the search for his sanity and balance of mind. One of his old ship mates, Drooble, has also hired as crew. Plus we get two stowaways who urgently need to get away from the place – Sniper and 13 (still in his sea horse body) have smuggled themselves into the Cargo Hold in a large crate.
Orbus (and the Gurnard AI, more importantly) are being contracted by a Reif (a reification, literally a moving, embalmed dead body with the mind of its current and former occupant on a crystal, controlling it) named Cymbeline to retrieve a Prador carapace from a space station in the Graveyard, the demilitarized zone between the Policy and the Prador 3rd Kingdom. Arriving there they stumble over a Prador agent, so it's very convenient (overly so, actually) to have an Old Captain and a war drone on board who both hate the Prador, and who have experience of battling them.
Involution OceanisBruce Sterling's first published Novel – and I very nearly threw it back on the 'read sometimes later' pile after reading the blurb on the back: "The only habitable portion of Nullaqua is a handful of islands at the bottom of an immense crater. Surrounding the islands is a sea of the finest dust. And in the sea live the dust whales whose bodies yield Flare, a potent, exhilarating drug."
What does this sound like? Cheap Dune rip-off, anyone? But fear not Dear Reader, it isn't … except in the very brief summary/blurb there are no similarities with Dune; this story has it's very own scenario and storyline.
The story takes place in the crater mentioned in the blurb – one heck of a crater it is; 70 miles deep, 500 miles across, and is filled with near-mono-atomic dust. As the only part of Nullaqua (now there's a descriptive name for you) that has breathable air and is thus inhabitable, it has some rather interesting flora, fauna, and of course history. The area just outside the crater sports the ruins of two Elder Culture Outposts, which makes the main human industry (Dust Whaling on the surface of the Dust lake of indeterminate depth) a rather interesting one if you think about it for a while. The story follows the steps of one John Newhouse, connaisseur of the drug Flare, who ventures onto a Dust Whaler (Lunglance, captained by Nils Desperandum) to secure future provisioning of the drug, made from Dustwhale oil. On the Luglance he meets Dalusa, a winged, surgically beautiful alien, and embarks on a rather unusual relationship with her (Dalusa is allergic to physical contact with him).
Marcus Chown is the 'Cosmology Consultant' (whatever that is) for the New Scientist, and The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead is booked as 'Dispatches from the Front Line of Science". It contains a number of loosely aligned essays on a wide variety of topics of cutting edge/fashionable/speculative (delete as inclined) science, mainly around cosmology and large/general scale concepts; i.e. very little in terms of application, or even applicability.
The contents, at least for me, fell into three distinct categories. On the one hand there is, for want of a better term, 'classic advanced science' like General and Specific Relativity, parts of Quantum Theory and similar things. These are well written, informative (if a tad too dumbed down from my point of knowledge), and frequently entertaining. A good read.
The Throne of Madness is the second book in Somtow Sucharitkul's Inquestor series. Two comments before we get going – firstly, despite the title of book & series (and the hideous covers, IMHO) – this is SF. Large, sweeping Space Opera. And it's a grand tale, and, within the boundaries of what I've read so far in my life, my preferred series. So, be warned, possible gushing ahead.
The story picks up shortly after the point where the first book in the series, The Light on the Sound, left off. Kelver (or Ton Keverell n'Davaren Toth, as he is now known with honorific, full name and clan) is now on Uran s'Varek, the heart of the dispersal of man and inquestral homeworld, to be trained as an Inquestor, and face the long pilgrimage and aloneness that precedes attainment of the rank. Uran s'Varek sits at the centre of man's dispersal - both figuratively as the Inquest's homeworld, but also literally at the heart of the galaxy that man has spread across. It's a construct, pre-dating humanity (never mind the Inquest), 446 million km wide, with a black hole at its centre, and 1.8 million stars in its cubic parsec. It has an atmosphere thousands of km thick to scatter the light of all those stars. And once every century or so one of those stars falls, guided by the Thinkhives, through one of the open poles of Uran s'Varek and into the black hole at its heart. The power of the inquest stems from these 'Lightfalls' – and the simile of the black hole at the heart of the Inquest is heavily played upon.
This is Charles Stross' first published novel – and to start, let's just make clear that it's a cracker. 'The Atrocity Archives' is a Secret Service/Spy story, with a heavily occult slant (it's all science, of course. But you knew that.), populated by math & IT geeks (as in the ones that will inherit the earth). One of those geeks is Robert 'Bob' Howard, who works for the 'Laundry'. Now, the Laundry is a secret organization, which is why you haven't heard of it. It's secret under the Official Secrets Act (of which you might have heard), Section 3 (which is secret under the previous two sections, which is why you've never heard of it). The Laundry specializes in Bureaucracy like any good Civil Service, and in Black Ops style field work, with a focus on the Occult dangers to our world, and especially the United Kingdom (most of these dangers have to do with applied advanced mathematics. No, really). Bob qualified himself for the Laundry (he was, like most members,forcibly recruited), as he worked out 'the geometry curve iteration method for invoking Nyarlathotep' – or, in the words of his boss, a way of 'landscaping Birmingham without planning permit'. Owing to the blessings of Matrix-management he has two lines of responsibility – firstly to the mysterious Angleton, who seems to know and be able to affect more than is his share, and to Harriet (and thus her boss Bridget) who are the classic bean-counter-play-it-by-the-rules careerists (and thus a pain in some posterior body parts) that every civil service needs, and attracts in droves. This provides as much plot as it provides comical relief, especially at not being the person caught up in this matrix.
Excession
Orbus
Involution Ocean 
The Throne of Madness
