Sad to see this in the news Author Ray Bradbury dies, aged 91.

One of the sci-fi greats, to me he was one of those authors who gave sci-fi a kick up the ass and showed that it could go in a different direction than the rut the Golden Age had got stuck in, doing so a surprising number of years before New Wave got its act together to do the same thing.

He was also often willing to challenge the artificial boundaries of genres, writing works that could be equally well classified as fantasy, horror or sci-fi; producing a seamless blend of "its all just story-telling" in the truest tradition of genreless speculative fiction.

RIP Ray Bradbury, a pioneer and inspiration to many, you will be missed.

A number of events have conspired to remind me of the existence of Goodreads recently, combined with a couple of conversations from people wanting to tap into my awesome taste in sci-fi and fantasy (or at least the awesome extent of my reading).

So I finally got off my ass and created an account. I've been updating it a few hours at a time, here and there, so it only has around 500 rating so far: I hope to get around to getting it more complete as time permits. (For scale reference, I have somewhere between 1000 and 2000 sci-fi and fantasy books owned, let alone those I've borrowed from libraries over the years.)

Being an avid Charles Stross reader, both fiction and blog, I had heard the name Karl Schroeder mentioned a few times and even read some of his guest posts on Charlie's blog, and I eventually picked up one of his books from the local Forbidden Planet: Sun of Suns.

Set in a free-fall air bubble the size of a planet, it's a blend of swashbuckling "airships on mars"-style derring-do, political intrigue, and hints of post-human futurism.