this book definitely reads different than when i first did... and that's not a bad thing.  the theme of the struggle after survival is prevalent, and something that did not resonate so much in my younger self.

Dust by Elizabeth Bear is one of my favorite novels, and was one of the easy selections for when I started doing this book club thing.  But while I reread Dust with some frequency, I think I only read Chill (Jacob's Ladder #2) once, immediately after purchasing it.  There's a good chance that my reading of it was too colored by my expectations and memories of Dust, a younger me wanting the exact same thing as before, only new and different.  Similar to  my experiences with American Gods and Anasazi Boys, except Chill is a true sequel.

What I remember is that this is a story of after and of pushing through.  The Jacob's Ladder is again in motion, reduced through deliberate effort and through the abuse of its rough relaunch.  Similarly, the characters are in a state of flux, challenge, and recovery.  Perceval struggles with the unwanted mantle of Captain, the cost of power and conflict, and the ghost of Rein that now lives in the AI of the ship. Tristen and Benedick go from support characters in Perceval and Rein's quest, to a quest of their own as they deal with their own ghosts of a sort.

So, we'll see how this read goes, and I'll attempt to have my review of it up within February!

damn i forgot how much i liked this one.

At it's core, The Quantum Thief is a heist story, but within its post-human setting the object of the heist is nothing so simple as something like the Hope Diamond or a Casino vault.  Instead we journey through theft and reclaiming of time and memory.

All-in-all, it makes for a blistering smart and layered hard sci-fi adventure.

This book had a little less specific discussion questions for me to draw out, but it was a fantastic and fascinating read.  Should I actually sit down with other people who've read it, there's definitely a lot to knock about, but the questions and discussion prompts themselves are harder for me to quantify.

Discussion Fodder:

• Let's talk about the Prisoner's Dilemma.  What is it, and in what ways is it used in this story?  What do you think of the Dilemma Prison?
• What are the different ways humanity and cultures manifest in the story?  How are they shaped by technology (or vice versa)?
• An Oubliette is a dungeon with an opening only at the top or a place of forgetting.  What is the Oubliette in this story?  What are the roles of memory and privacy in this society?  How do they interact?  How do they shape the culture?
• In this setting, what counts as human? 

One of my all-time favorite books.  First time listening to it though.

Used it as book club pick last year if people are curious:

http://libromancersapprentice.blogspot.com/2014/12/book-review-dust.html

I wonder if I should make a discussion group for my speculative fiction book club at some point.