Clarke’s billion-year-old city shows his talents and his weaknesses

They had lived in the same city, had walked the same miraculously unchanging streets, while more than a billion years had worn away.
Title: The City and the Stars
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Year: 1953
Rating: 3/5 stars
A city that has stood for a billion years, protecting its population on a future Earth long since [...]

Lady of Mazes is a concept-heavy exploration of different realities

Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago, and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accomodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies.
Title: Lady of Mazes
Author: [...]

Deepness proves Vinge a master of quality space opera

The Qeng Ho fleet was the first to arrive at the OnOff star. That might not matter. For the last fifty years of their voyage, they had watched the torch-plumes of the Emergent fleet as it decelerated toward the same destination.
This was a situation where treachery might be rewarded, and both sides knew [...]

Read science fiction, and go, and sin no more!

Here we have stories which, in the science fiction mode, exemplify and illustrate each of the Seven Deadly Sins, and give each a dimension perhaps not thought of by Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Title: The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction
Editors: Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg
Year: 1980
Rating: 2/5 stars
When I read an anthology, [...]