In the past couple weeks, I blew through Asimov's Foundation (just the first one), three books by Jon Ronson (Them, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare At Goats), Neal Stephenson's recent nonfiction compilation Some Remarks, and all but the last book in Charles Stross's Family Trade series, because I'm a slacker. Asimov was not as painful as I remember him being, and Ronson always pleases. Stephenson and Stross I've ranted about before.
If my bad reading habits continue, I plan to go through the cross-section of foundational science fiction I bought at great cost from the used bookstore. A couple Heinlein things I haven't read, a couple Dune books, a Bradbury book that was never recommended to me in school (hard to find -- turns out he wrote The Toynbee Convector, presumably in 2001 to ressurect dead on planet Jupiter), a Brunner book (The Sheep Look Up), and Breakfast of Champions. The thing about the Zamatayin book (and a couple others I picked up) is that it was very much mined by later works and had almost nothing to offer except stylistically -- sort of like if Alphaville actually had an original plot when it was made. This is totally the opposite experience from what I had with Non-Stop and Solaris, so I completely expected upon reading this book whose plot had been rehashed endlessly to see something fresh that no adaptation had taken. Apparently, no. Maybe it's the translator's fault.
Tangentially, if you want some really mind-blowing science fiction, I recommend the Semiotext(e) SF collection, and anything by either Cordwainer Smith or Rudy Rucker. There are reality tunnels so strange that I couldn't project myself into them without becoming pretty warped, and while Semiotext(e) SF is the whirlwind tour (plus a couple entries by Sterling or by RAW that didn't really do much for me), the other two corpora are just pure crazy. Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, who wrote the book on psychological warfare and was the domain expert in world war two and immediately afterward. I don't know what Rucker's excuse is. Maybe it's because he's a mathematician and did a lot of acid.
