Time by Gregory Benford is a fairly entertaining piece of classic science fiction. The premise is that a set of super intelligent children born in one generation have the ability to understand time in a way no-one else does. This leads to a set of events some of which cause themselves.
The book is headlined by Reid Malenfant who is an american iconclast trying to get past the government red tape to mine the asteroids (shades of atlas strugged here but it’s not the point of the book). At the same time he’s being convinced by a rather strange character that the human race has only 200 years of existence left (based on the doomsday argument). He’s led by a signal from the future to change his destination and finds a time gate which shows an alternate fate for humanity. However since people seem to be able to reach in an amnipulate events before they occur, all bets are off.
It drifts a bit at points and ponders a little too much on some kind of anti-Nasa bias but overall a pretty good read.

Just finished Fisher goes to war about the famous chess match between Fisher and Spasky in the 70s. Chess doesn’t sound like a dramatic enough subject for a book but this is very well written and fraught with drama – mostly generated by the reasonable insane Fisher. It gives a good insight into the man who’s a bit of a mysterious figure these days. Interesting to read but not to dip in and out of.

Marc Andressen recent posted his list of the top 10 science fiction novelists of the ’00s — so far. Impressively it lines up very well with what I’ve been reading and enjoying. I disagree on a few points (Accelerando wasn’t one of my favourites and I never finished it though the concept was cute). Just for this Marc’s been added to my google reader feeds and I’ll read his stuff every day.