Currently re-reading:
James Blish's "Citys in Flight".
This topic was created by jake .
"James Blish's "Citys in Flight"."
It's also worth reading James Blish's "The Seedling Stars". Written in 1957 Blish had the foresight to predict GMOs and the way that human beings could be engineered to live in new environments, or rather that their children would be adapted to new environments.
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Hmm, I quite agree about Dan Brown.
I remember that when the hype was getting really breathless over "The Da Vinci Code" I went out and bought a copy to see what everyone was on about.
The fact that my previous read had been Iain M. Banks' lastest oeuvre only served to enhance the feeling that I was reading a "Janet and John" book. The only thing missing was the "New word" footnote on each page.
When the court case over blatant plagiarism of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" came up, my only reaction was "Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking after the first couple of chapters.".
So it's someone else's plot with a hero, villain and dolly bird dropped in, rewritten to appeal to the terminally thick.
I first ran across the series at San Francisco International Airport ... I read "Heat", "Ice" and "Lightning" on a non-stop to Heathrow in roughly 1988 ... I haven't read all of 'em yet, but I might try the sequential thing, now that you've reminded me of the books.