The Dervish House
Seven days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core--the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself--that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama and a ticking clock of a thriller.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2015–2024years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The first time I heard about this term and practice was in Ian McDonald's "the dervish house"[1]. It's definitely one of my favourite sci-fi books of the past couple of years. I'd suggest that you check it out if you're into this kind of stuff.
- Anything by Alastair Reynolds - his Revelation Space series is great, and House of Suns is a fantastic one-off. He's probably the closest to Ian Banks in creating galaxy-spanning civilisations across eons of time.
Ian MacDonald is another good one. My favourite of his is The Dervish House, but his others are definitely worth reading.
Charles Stross is good. Didn't get on with Accelerando, but his Laundry books are a fun mix of HP Lovecraft/Len Deighton/IT Crowd. Halting State and Rule 34 are good explorations of pervasive augmented reality and intelligent algorithms. Also Glasshouse as an exploration of post-singularity society. Never managed to finish a Cory Doctorow book though.
I found William Gibson's Bigend trilogy a slog, but I really enjoyed The Peripheral - it's a fun read.
Enders Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card are fantastic, but the remaining books suffer from diminishing returns (with the possible exception of Ender's Shadow). There are a lot of books in the series, but basically, the series finishes wherever you get bored reading it.
Anything by China Mieville is well worth your time.
Oh, I also really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's Jacobs Ladder trilogy, set on a generation ship where the inhabitants have forgotten who they are and where they're going.
For some older stuff:
The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester – I was surprised at how good it is and how well it stands up. I couldn't believe it was written nearly 50 years ago.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - possibly my favourite of his. I want to start a lunar revolution with a sentient mainframe...
I'm currently working my way through all the Hugo Award winners, from 1953 up, and there's some real gems there.
- I don't think any of Blackout/All Clear, Ancillary Justice, Three-Body Problem, A Memory Called Empire or A Desolation Called Peace live up to Hugo standards (and I didn't read The Calculating Stars because I didn't think The Lady Astronaut of Mars did either). Looking at the post-2009 shortlists I think at least Anathem, Ninefox Gambit (and, frankly, both its sequels), The Goblin Emperor and Too Like the Lightning (even if the series ended poorly) were Hugo-winner-quality and The Dervish House was borderline (I appreciate that that that's two for 2015).
- That is just amazing and insane at the same time.
Relevant to this I think is the Mellified man [1]. First read about it in the novel The Dervish House by Ian McDonald which involved the search for one. The idea is that people would start eating and bathing only in honey, eventually die, and would be placed in a coffin filled with honey. Eventually the body would become pretty much a candy that was supposed to heal pretty much everything.
- Reminds me of the bitbots in The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6993091-the-dervish-hous...
The Dervish House from Ian McDonald has a plot thread based around that idea.
