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Matthew Gray
matthew@gray.org
I am a father, board gamer and software engineer.

Internet

In addition to my blog (this page), you can find me on BoardGameGeek, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and various other places. I also have a slightly stale homepage.

Personal

I am an avid board gamer. I am one of the (volunteer) admins of BoardGameGeek, maintainer of the GameStoreDB, board game blogger, and gaming software geek.

Professional

I am a staff software engineer at Google. Previously, I was the CTO at an 802.11 location and security company, Newbury Networks in Boston. In June, 1999 I received my Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. I graduated from MIT (undergraduate) in June, 1997, in physics. Prior to that I was CTO of net.Genesis from 1994 to 1996.

While at MIT, I was one of the three members of the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) who set up www.mit.edu in the spring of 1993. I am also a former/inactive member of the Apache group, a volunteer group of developers of Apache, the world's most popular web server.

Blog

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Recent sci-fi reading

Over on Chris Shabsin's blog he posted his sci-fi reading list and I posted some comments (I've read just under half of his list, and I should harvest the remainder of). I thought I'd repeat some of those comments here and expand on them a bit.

Last year, I raved about Spin and thought Axis was pretty good, and this year I finally got around to reading some more Robert Charles Wilson. So far this year I've read Darwinia, Blind Lake, and The Harvest. None were as good as Spin, but all were good, and I especially liked Darwinia.

Other sci-fi authors I'd recommend:

  • Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, in particular, but the latter is barely sci-fi)
  • Stanislaw Lem (Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress were favorites when I was a teenager)
  • Timothy Zahn (almost everything)
  • Larry Niven (I remain impressed with how well most of his work has aged)
You can read my full comment on Chris' blog.

I'd also recommend goodreads.com or librarything.com as good sites for social-networky tracking of reading lists, reviews, recommendations, and read books. I'm currently using goodreads for this. My "read" list is far from complete, and as I think of it, I backfill with authors or books, but it's more about current reading. I'd welcome comments here (or on goodreads) on my current to-read list or new suggestions for additions.

Posted by Matthew Gray at 10:16 AM

2 comments:

EdShift said...

If you like larry niven you should check out the larry niven list. Intelligent debates about lots of Niven, general sci-fi and other off-topic stuff.

A really decent list with manageable traffic amounts.

Also have you read any Iain M Banks.
You'd probably like his stuff. Start with the player of games.

Just came across your blog.
Very interesting.
Thanks for your efforts.
:-)))
EdShift

14 December, 2009 17:49
matthewgray said...

I've read and enjoyed (some of) Banks' books including Player of Games. The whole Culture series is a very appealing mileu. Thanks for the list pointer, I'll consider it.

14 December, 2009 17:56

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I work for Google as a Software Engineer. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.