Jack Vance - Demon Princes

This is a five-book series which cumulatively relate the story of one Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried his village off into slavery during his childhood. Each novel deals with his pursuit of one of the five Princes.

The books are, in order of publication:

• Star King (1964). The antagonist is Attel Malagate, a renegade from a species called the Star Kings, who are driven to imitate and surpass the most successful species they encounter; with their contact with humanity in antiquity, they began consciously evolving into imitations of human beings. The bait Gersen uses to trap him is an undeveloped and fantastically beautiful planet whose location is known only to Gersen, which Malagate covets to become the father of a new race that can outdo both humans and his own species.

•  The Killing Machine (1964). Kokor Hekkus, a 'hormagaunt', has prolonged his life by the vivisection of human beings to obtain hormones and other substances from their living bodies. But eternal life can be boring, and so he has converted the lost planet Thamber into a stage wherein he acts out his fantasies.

•  The Palace of Love (1967). Viole Falushe, an impotent megalomaniac ironically fixated on sex. He was so obsessed with a girl in his youth, he created a number of clones of her in a vain attempt to get one of them to love him back. This novel contains some of Vance's most compelling and unforgettable characters, such as the mad poet, Navarth, who has a central role.

•  The Face (1979). Lens Larque, a sadist and monumental trickster. In the course of the novel, the protagonist experiences some of the same outrages that motivated the villain to concoct his most grandiose jest, leading to one of the most humorous endings in all Vance's work.

   

• The Book of Dreams (1981). Howard Alan Treesong, a 'chaoticist', who embodies elements of all the foregoing, and has the most imaginatively ambitious plans of all.

Great book but you know I really love Vance's writting so perhaps I'm not impartial.

Jack and Norma Vance

Catherine Asaro - Sunrise Alley

From School Library Journal vía Amazon.com 

vía Dreaming About Other Worlds Blog

Samantha Bryton, a brilliant young biotech engineer working on machine intelligence, has retired because of unresolved ethical issues concerning how the industry uses her work. On the beach near her secluded cabin, she finds a shipwrecked man, and it quickly becomes apparent that there is something unusual about him. It turns out that the original Turner Pascal is legally dead, but he has been brought back to life in a technologically enhanced but human-appearing body by the shadowy scientist Charon, who uses illegal and amazingly advanced technology. Self-aware, independent AIs (called EIs if they evolve to that state) are extremely rare and prone to psychological instability, and Sam is one of the few people in the world who understands and can work with them. It is no coincidence that Turner has ended up on her beach in his attempt to escape from Charon. As they flee villains who want to acquire Turner's technology, the two try to unravel the mystery of the identity of Charon and the true nature of "Sunrise Alley," a secret society of escaped EIs who may pose a threat to humans. Through many trials and adventures, friendship and sexual attraction gradually develop between Sam and Turner (though she worries about his nonhuman characteristics and dubious legal status). The plot is an epic chase across a near-future landscape, enlivened by twists, complicated puzzles to solve, plenty of intriguing technology, and a strong element of romance. - Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

And here are my favourite reviews of the book:

By 

Arthur W. Jordin (Smyrna, GA USA)This novel explores the legal implications of self-aware emergent intelligences who can pass the most stringent Turing tests (...) In many respects, this novel is similar in concept to the story "Jerry Was a Man" by Heinlein and other SF tales regarding civil liberties for non-humans. Asimov also addressed this subject in The Caves of Steel with R. Daneel Olivaw, the humanoid robot who acts as the partner of Elijah Baley. Unlike this story, R. Daneel displays all the aspects a sentient creature, yet is never invested with the status of citizen.

By 

Cyber Malt
The story is about slicing a brain into a cybernetic conciousness.

By 

Mrs. Baumann
This is a sci-fi romantic thriller all rolled up into one neat package.

But if you'd rather read the review of someone who didn't love the book that much, this one by Jesse Willis is both interesting and fun.

And if you want a somewhat more impartial review, you can find it here and this is an excerpt of the end of the article:

Sunrise Alley is an interesting look at the nature of what makes someone human. Exactly how much of a person can be replaced and have the result still be regarded as that person? With the exception of the somewhat weak nature of the romantic storyline and a wholly unconvincing and mostly extraneous memory-loss subplot that crops up late in the book, the book is well-executed, with a strong story full of intrigue, dramatic tension, and a fascinating exploration of what counts as human, or more broadly, what counts as a person.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catherine Asaro is a Nebula Award winner for her novel The Quantum Rose (I didn't like this one), part of her popular Skolian Empire series. Her novels have three times been named the best science fiction novel of the year by Romantic Times Book Club. She has also won numerous other awards, including the Analog Readers Poll award, the Homer, and the Sapphire. She has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard, and has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and danced on both the west and east coasts. She has written eleven novels in the popular Skolian Saga, the latest being Schism: Triad, Book I (Tor, 2004), several fantasies, including The Charmed Sphere, as well as two near-future technothrillers, The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code. She currently runs Molecudyne Research and lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter. 

Charles Stross: Iron Sunrise

Rachel Mansour works as a hostage negociator. As soon as she has finished a job with a psychotic performance artist harboring a nuclear warhead, she's enlisted in a secret operation. She's to investigate  an act of apparent sabotage: Moscow's (one remote interstellar colony) host star exploded, annihilating an entire solar system and forcing the evacuation of nearby colonies. the answers to such questions may lie with Wednesday, a rambunctious adolescent girl whose family is fleeing the expanding explosion, and between whose story and Rachel's the novel alternates.

This is a sequel to "Singularity Sky" but that outdoes its achievements in every particular. Character that become beliavable people. Great (but awkward) sense of humour. One faultless space-opera, full of emotion, evil but believable villains, exciting action and good dialogue.

Clever building of a fascist nazi-type society, the ReMastered who call themselves "Ubermensch" (like Nietzsche's) and, ultimately, great great read.

Ian Watson: The Embedding

 The novel opens in a British research institute, where the linguist Chris Sole teaches a rare form of language to four children living in an artificial environment. The language is English, but grammatically restructured by a computer: an English "autoembedded" that no person regularly socialized can speak. The aim of the experiment is to discover if the grammar is inherent in the human brain, or if you can train individuals to think in more complex grammars, which would open new possibilities for the mind.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, a friend of Chris Sole is studying an Indian tribe known as xemahoa. A flood threatens the territory of the xemahoa because of a large dam built by the Brazilian military government with the financial and technical assistance from the United States. Anthropologist Pierre Darriand is proud to have discovered that xemahoa speak two kinds of language: everyday language and a second language, rhapsodic, employed under the influence of a drug. This "xemahoa B" is a language "autoembedded" with a seemingly incomprehensible syntax, very similar to the artificial language Sole teaches the four children in England.

A third element appears in the story. An alien spaceship arrives, and Chris Sole is sent to the United States to try to communicate with the occupants of the ship. The aliens call themselves sp'thra and learn English very quickly. Sole discovers that languages ​​are its main concern: they want to exchange technology for live human brains, "programmed" to speak different languages ​​on Earth and grow greatly excited by the discoveries of Pierre Darriand in the Amazon basin and ask for some live xemahoa brains.

As Carlos Jürchik wrote for Stardust

"Ian Watson speculates in his most famous and award-winning novel about language. No, on the perception of language. No, not only that, on learning and intelligence, and perception of the dimensions in the language. And on imperialism and its consequences. And on a first contact with aliens. And on the role of science and ethics. And also on a strange rite of passage, on drugs, on terrorism, almost a revolution, in a country taken over by the military. ... by making narrative zapping, it manages to resolve all those issues in only 200 pages..."Embedded" is also difficult to read. Not that is badly written, just the opposite, but their characters are so unsympathetic, and even a good stretch of the narrative you don't know exactly what they do or what they want.


the main theme of the novel  is that our learning and reasoning are affected by the structure of language and the amount of space junk or surplus that exists between the information and it's therefore essential to create a language without these spaces, a language "embedded " so we could get a satisfactory understanding of many concepts which now escape us. This theme is no doubt fascinating and unusual, like many other critical issues with background fields in this story. The problem is that Watson doesn't make it easy to imagine what he does not explain."

And a link to Watson's biografy

Hal Clement - Mission of Gravity

Mesklin is a very large and very dense planet. Its surface gravity varies greatly from 3g at the equator to 700g at the poles.

 
The oceans are liquid methane and  snow is frozen ammonia. Under these nightmarish conditions live mesklinitas, who have developed a culture and a society perfectly suited to the conditions of their environment. Barlemann, a bold mesklinita sailor agrees to undertake an impossible journey to save an expensive Earth probe broken on the pole of the planet. For mesklinitas the trip is a wonderful opportunity to discover science and progress in the path of knowledge, and this is the driving force that guides them through many adventures motivated by working and negociating with humans.



This is "hard" science-fiction, of the kind that pays special attention to scientific and technical details of the story. The most characteristic aspect of this book is the clarity of its approach.  Clement introduces his characters without further preamble, and in fact does not even bother to explain how humans managed to arrive to Mesklin and there's no hesitation, no doubt or speculation. The mesklinitas are remarkably intelligent, and therefore smart and cunning, basic characteristics of any self-respecting adventurer. In that sense, they can seem too human but that's part of the clarity of approach. 

Masterpiece and classic.  

Harry Clement Stubbs (May 30, 1922 – October 29, 2003) better known by the pen name Hal Clement, was an American science fiction writer and a leader of the hard science fiction subgenre. He went to Harvard, graduating with a B.S. in astronomy in 1943. His further educational background includes an M.Ed. (Boston University 1946) and M.S. in chemistry (Simmons College 1963).

During World War II Clement was a pilot and copilot of a B-24 Liberator and flew 35 combat missions over Europe with the 8th Air Force. After the war, he served in the United States Air Force Reserve, and retired with the rank of colonel. He taught chemistry and astronomy for many years at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts.

He also painted astronomically oriented artworks under the name George Richard.

He created (below from wikipedia) a number of notably unusual fictional planets as settings for his works. They include:

• Abyormen – A planet circling a dwarf star (Theer), which in turn circles a blue giant. This produces a hot and a cold season, each of 65 years' duration. The native intelligent life forms undergo a seasonal mass death. From Cycle of Fire.
• Dhrawn – A high-gravity world settled by Mesklinites in Star Light.
• Habranha - A planet that is tidally locked with its sun, such that the far side is a mix of solid CO₂, solid methane, and ice, and the other side completely ocean, in Fossil.
• Hekla – An ice-age planet in Cold Front (short story, Astounding July 1946).
• Kaihapa – An uninhabited ocean planet, twin of Kainui, in Noise.
• Kainui – An inhabited ocean planet in Noise.
• Mesklin — A planet with ultra-high gravity (up to 700 g) in Mission of Gravity. Clement later corrected his model of Mesklin and determined that the maximum surface gravity would be "only 250 gravities".
• Sarr – An extremely hot planet with an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur ('air') and liquid copper sulphate ('water') in Iceworld
• Tenebra – A high-gravity world with a corrosive atmosphere in Close to Critical.
• Enigma 88 - A small planet near η Carinae in Still River. The interior of the object is honeycombed with caves, due to evaporation of accreted ice-rich planetoids. Unusually for Clement, Enigma's structure is not fully consistent with the laws of physics.