I'm actually looking for something fresh to read in Science Fiction.
Anyone have any recommendations?
I extremely strongly recommend Vernor Vinge's two books
A Deepness in the Sky and
A Fire Upon the Deep. The first book is an amazingly well-written (and more than a little bit sad) account of the difficulties of sustaining planetary civilizations in a universe where the Speed of Light cannot be transcended, along with the difficulties of attempting to organize and sustain a interstellar trading company under such circumstances.
In the afforementioned second book, however, we find out that the reason why humanity could not travel faster than C was that Earth is located inside a special "Slow Zone" in the galaxy, where C is the topmost limit of velocity. However, it turns out there are
other such "zones", in which C is no longer an absolute factor and in which interstellar trading civilizations are not only possible but common. In even higher "zones" still, superhuman intelligences abound and Dyson Spheres, Mind-machine meldings and Ringworlds are the order of the day. This is where the so-called "Powers" reside (see Wiki article).
This brilliant innovation is referred to as Vinge's
"Zones of Thought" -Universe. Basically, what he did was to turn the
Singularity sideways into a set of spatial boundaries from having originally been a temporal one. To quote from Wikipedia:
Vinge has often expressed an opinion that realistic fiction set after the development of superhuman intelligence — an event that he calls the Singularity and considers all but inevitable — would necessarily be too strange for a human reader to enjoy, if not impossible for a human writer to create. To sidestep the issue, he turns the Singularity sideways from time into space, postulating that the galaxy has been divided (possibly by some unknown super-technology in the distant past) into "zones of thought".
I really recommend these books. Some of the best science-fiction I've ever read, bar none.
"The fact that the Forestry Department had partitioned the urban networks was a very bad sign for Triland's future."
