Yikes it's March and I'm only posting January's books now! Gotta go fast!

A Fire Upon The Deep - This was great! A 600 page space opera spanning billions of years and thousands of light years which had been on my wishlist for a few years but which got bought for me at Christmas by complete chance. This book contains about 5 ideas each of which could have spawned its own book but brought together forms a coherent and yet extremely distant universe. Having a storyline which included both the transcendentally evolved species and those at an approximately medieval level of development worked surprisingly well, and was probably one of the factors which helped keep the story interesting for the length of the book.

It jointly won the Hugo award in 1993 with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which I read a few years ago and was excellent - even now I still think about it occasionally. It's a sci-fi story set during the Black Death in England. I don't think A Fire... is quite as good, but they are both well worth your time.

I Who Have Never Known Men is quite a different prospect. A "heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world" indeed. I really loved this.

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the first book I've read by him which is boring, and I've read about a dozen of his books.

It's a space opera about giant moon-sized aliens eliminating planets by peeling back the layers and turning them into art. The overarching plot has been done a hundred times before and every single character is straight off a page on TVTropes. Some of the detail is good, and the different alien species are fun but that is not enough to sustain its 565 pages and the final quarter is the only decent part of the book, by the end of which (after checking with wikipedia since I knew I wasn't going to read the 2nd and 3rd books in this series) I'd guessed the underlying motivations and direction the story was going to take, including its conclusion.

My copy of this book also had several typos. I came in with quite high expectations so overall this was very disappointing.

Slow Time Between the Stars by John Scalzi (this book doesn't seem to have an ISBN so I can't link to it on anywhere but amazon!). This is part of Amazon's The Far Reaches collection of short stories by famous authors. The blurb says "An artificial intelligence on a star-spanning mission explores the farthest horizons of human potential—and its own purpose—in a mind-bending short story" and it was exactly what it says on the tin, pretty predictable from the first page but nicely written and took about half an hour to read. It was more interesting to read about why he bought a church.