SciFi - Alastair Reynolds II

Pushing Ice is fantastic!  Imagine if a moon suddenly left its orbit and starting flying off in a direction of an unknown destination...  Imagine you followed it to find out it wasn't a moon at all.

Then imagine something happened and you crashed and were stranded on this marvel of technology (and that it was the cause of that crash).

Then find that you are being pulled into a kind of galactic zoo.  That beings far more advanced and intelligent lured you there, because to them, you're animals - interesting to look at, but unworthy and too undeveloped or advanced to be considered sentient.

How crazy would that be?  And what would you do about it?

This was a very different kind of story.  House of Suns features the shatterlings - innumerable clones of one who wished to explore the universe.  The shatterlings meet every so often to converge with their gathered intelligence.  The latest is that someone or something is trying to wipe them out.

The story centers around a male and female clone who fell in love and are trying to get to the bottom of who is behind this systematic eradication of their people - and why.

To be honest, it's been quite some time since I read Galactic North.  I do remember it is a collection of short stories that are all equally interesting.  The final, I believe, ties into the bigger storyline more directly.

I also recall that one is about a scientist who discovers a frozen asteroid that shows patterns of activity like a giant brain.  All the stories are interesting and thought-provoking.  It's a nice breath of fresh air from the super long and mentally demanding epics that Reynolds fills pages with, usually.  Plus each story gives you another angle, another glimpse of the futuristic reality of his other books.

Century Rain was probably the most different from any of Reynolds' books I've read.

After Earth is rendered uninhabitable by infectious and out of control nanotechnology, two factions bicker and argue over who was responsible.  In the meantime, through one of the numerous wormholes they've discovered, they find, at the end of one, a perfect replica of Earth in the past.

The story follows one agent sent to investigate this planet, and one second-rate detective living on the planet, in Paris. In this book I learned about Amusica - a disorder that renders the idea or comprehension of music impossible to the listener.  I didn't know such a thing existed before, but apparently, rhythm and melody are lost on them.  Crazy, huh?  At any rate, I'll say this - it's unique and the child-like monsters are creepy.