I’ve been meaning to write this exact post on the singularity. Apparently I no longer have to. Thanks, lazyweb!
Nova is a gem of a novel. If you can get past one huge faux pas, any sf buff with half a brain should find something to enjoy in this book.
Nova is primarily a space opera. If you don’t like space opera, don’t worry, the book is more than just space opera. It is a thoughtful extrapolation of the future (well, except for the faux pas), as well as a philosophical mind- twister. But it is primarily a space opera.
I just finished reading Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book. Let me just say that I am significantly less than whelmed. If there’s a bar here, about yay high, and it’s got “Whelmed” written on it in big block letters, this book is significantly under the bar.
Now I understand why it is a popular book. It is conventional. Very few, if any, science fiction tropes are involved at all (aside from some cutesie names, such as “vids” for “movies”, all phone calls are videophone calls [although none of those are cellphone calls; the book was written in the painfully early nineties, so it gets a pass on that one], and time travel). The drama of the story is in efforts of the two protagonists, Kivrin in the 1300s and Dunworthy in the 2050s, trying to get Kivrin out of the plague. But the drama is conventional drama. There is no sensawonder here. Which would be fine, if there were some Weighty Concepts of Great Literature being explored here. But there’s none of those either. Here’s what I would consider the themes of the book (if I was forced to by an English Teacher with a weapon of some sort):