Long overdue massive update
Dec. 21st, 2013 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6I haven't posted anything substantive in a while. Just... meh. Nothing to say. Ever get the feeling you're the extra in a movie, and disappear the moment you're off-screen? And it's not even an exciting movie, it's like some romantic comedy or something, which is fine if you're center stage, but just disappointing if you're on of the extras.
Anyway. Christmas coming up. Done most of my shopping, because most of my shopping is gift cards. Yay for thoughtless presents! Not all of it is giftcards, though. And I bought a turkey for a needy family. Not directly, but at the grocery story they were having a 'donate a turkey' thing. The charity played dirty, though, they had kids run up to people who were in that area of the grocery store and ask if I wanted to buy a turkey for a needy family. A few of them were even dressed as turkeys. How could I say no to kids dressed as turkeys for charity? Totally not fair. But I don't mind.
Had a freaky scare with one of the cats. (cut cause perhaps TMI and disgusting details). Anyway, first it was sickness, some weeks ago. We think it was something to do with food, but he was throwing up a lot and dropped a lot of weight. That got under control, he was eating again, but the smaller kitty (who the big one frequently bullied) took advantage of the weakness and just attacked him, hurting his back/side. But despite that, he seemed to be getting better, he had a tender spot on his back but was eating and moving slowly, with some effort, like it hurt him, and maybe a little listless, probably for the same reason. Then last Friday, it looked like he threw up again, but he was nowhere to be found. And when I next saw him, just before bed... he had a huge chunk of fur suddenly missing from his side and what LOOKED like a huge chunk of flesh, too and pus streaming out. It freaked all of us out, although the cat didn't seem bothered, and what we eventually figured out was that he had some kind of huge boil or something under the fur filling with fluid, and when it burst (leaving what we thought was throw-up) the fur soon came off in that area too, maybe to promote wound healing, and much of what looked like flesh missing was just inflammation on the skin. Anyway, we took him to the vet the next morning, and since my roommates/the cat's technical owners aren't really doing well financially (the reason there was a 'wait and see' approach for the earlier problems, where he always seemed to be getting better just before they thought a vet visit might be necessary), I offered to pay for it and an antibiotic shot. He's still got the missing patch of fur but there are signs of it starting to grow back, and the inflammation's gone down and the wound is really tiny, and his mood overall's much better (he's back to demanding ice from me almost every time I get water). But yeah, it was freaky for a while there.
TV... not much has been going on. Still watching SHIELD, although it's been a disappointment. Arrow's enjoyable. Enjoyed the Doctor Who 50th, for the most part... had a few issues, but mostly it made me smile.
I think the only new show to speak of since last time is Almost Human. Where we learn a lot about the future (minor spoiler ahoy). In the future...
...everything is randomly electrified and has visible arcs rolling over their surfaces.
...robots can analyze your breath to see what you ate, but criminals can still smuggle stuff in toilets.
...people will care so little about videos that as soon as you watch them it will ask you if you want to delete it, and if you happen to click 'delete', it won't even ask for a confirmation, just get rid of that precious family memory.
...bioscience has progressed so little in the coming decades that instead of just taking the relatively safe approach of grabbing some samples and growing an infinite supply of skin on some kind of scaffolding (something we can almost do NOW), they abduct women, keep them prisoner with tubes coming out of them, and harvest it from them to make sexbots.
...Disco is remembered by people with parents who probably weren't born during the short period it was popular.
...Holograms are EVERYWHERE, even on things that have a video display right beneath the hologram showing the same thing.
...Police use drones to deliver radios to talk to hostage takers, but never think to arm them and immediately shoot the hostage takers
Many other examples of rather inconsistently-thought out advances in technology... but... I kid, mostly, rather than rant. I mean, these are all pretty ridiculous, but I find myself enjoying the show nonetheless.
Continuum, another show that depicts Cops in the future probably makes similar mistakes, but they're not as bad because we don't focus on that world 24/7 in every ep (since they time-travelled to modern-day Vancouver). I did catch up on S2 of that finally, and enjoyed it enough that I'll keep watching.
Walking Dead was... well, it had a good start, and then dropped the ball again with the Governor. The finale wasn't too bad, but we REALLY didn't need the two episodes before that. Still, zombies are a guilty pleasure so I'm not dropping it even if it gets really bad (and there are plenty of ridiculous bits there too).
I've also caught up a bit on watching movies that I've been overdue for. Dredd was actually rather fun. Total Recall had nice visuals but was pretty dumb. Man of Steel, meh, dragged on an I didn't like the ending. Pacific Rim turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was, particularly for the genre. Dark Knight Rises overrated. Couple other that were okay but forgettable.
Finally, books... read a lot of them. In fact, as of this writing, I've completed my goal of 50 books in 2013. Still a chance I might get another 1 or 2 (I think I got a reasonable shot at 51, 52... maybe if the weather cooperates). But I usually write my reviews, and I have been slacking off, so, here we go, all in a rush at the end of the post, if you usually skip these, you can just stop reading here. As usual, I'm mostly copy/pasting from my Goodreads reviews... minor spoilers many be behind most cuts, but I don't think there's anything that would ruin a person's enjoyment... if there's anything major I'll try to single it out for a special warning.
Finished: The World's Best SF 4, (short story collection)
The Year's Best SF books are a reliable source for entertaining and thought-provoking short stories. This edition holds stories published in 1998.
Although you can always find something to enjoy, they're usually something of a mixed bag... a few you really like, a lot that are just okay, and a couple that you outright dislike. In volume 4, the standouts for me were "Radiant Doors," by Michael Swanwick, a dark and depressing but gripping story involving a bizarre refugee crisis and the limits of compassion and "The Story of Your Life", by Ted Chaing, the story of a mother and a linguist and her time being drafted to help bridge the communication gap between humans and an alien race, and "Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling, about a revolutionary AI gaining control and influence that may or may not be a good thing for people. Of those that rubbed me the wrong way, only "The Allies" by Mark S. Greston is really memorable for leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and even that one had a couple novel concepts.
Considering the year, there are a lot of rather prescient ideas being used to create stories, from the widespread increase in data-mining for niche marketing purposes, to flash mobs, and also a few old classic tropes, space opera, time travel, alternate timelines and speculations on different gender dynamics.
Something for everybody, in short.
Finished: Defining Diana, by Hayden Trenholm (received for free!)
Full disclosure, I received this book free through the Goodreads First Reads program.
2043, Calgary, Canada, Frank Steele leads a group of police officers who tackle the cases that are too big or too weird for anybody else. But when they discover the body of a young girl who doesn't exist in any of the usual databases, with apparently nothing wrong with her that might cause her death, they get a mystery that may connect with some of their other open cases... and have worldwide consequences.
Police procedurals aren't my favorite genre, but when you add cyborgs and biotech to ANYTHING, it becomes better (shut up, purists, it does!)! The cast also begins as an appealing mix of coworkers with different personalities and believable relationships and interactions among them (some of that changes later, although there are potentially good reason for that), and even some of the secondary characters get a compelling amount of depth.
And setting anything in Canada is also a plus. As a minor gripe, while it does feel convincingly like a future Canada, it doesn't really feel like a world with thirty years of progress ahead of our own. Even with all the cyborgs and changes in social policy and advancement in biosciences... too much is familiar and unimproved, it feels more like it's merely ten or fifteen years ahead. For thirty, I'd expect a lot more changes.
As for the story itself? I'm a little mixed. I only have a few outright complaints, but it never dragged me in and made me excited about what was coming except, a little, towards the end, when some of the manipulations behind the scenes became obvious and a lot of what I'd previously wondering about became explained. And, to the book's credit, it does a wonderful job of provoking an 'Aha' moment, where things come together and you realize that many of the things you thought were inconsistent or odd storytelling choices, suddenly made perfect sense. The book is one of those that would probably benefit from a reread.
The ending also comes a bit too abruptly, and it doesn't feel like the character arcs or the mystery come to a satisfying conclusion. Maybe some of that's intended for a sequel, but right now it feels like one of those Law & Order episodes that suddenly goes to the credits right after it's revealed something dramatic happened with the case they were investigating... there are still a lot of open questions, but it feels like the author decided they were moot. I, personally, would have much appreciated maybe another dozen or so pages (it's not an especially long novel as it is) to clarify some of the hows and whys and, in a few cases, being explicit about whether certain behaviors were due to an involvement the central mystery, or just the people acting weirdly for other reasons. Or maybe I'm just an idiot and missed some obvious pointers to that the first time around.
All in all, I'd recommend it to fans of police procedurals, or those who find the back-of-the-book blurb interesting on their own, but it's not the kind of book I'm liable to call a favorite myself. Certainly enjoyable, but not particularly memorable.
Finished: Backwards, by Todd Mitchell (received for free!)
Full disclosure: I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads program.
The story follows a disembodied spirit with no memory, who witnesses the suicide of a teenager named Dan, and finds himself drawn inside... only to wake up inside Dan's body and everything's fine. Soon he realizes that every day he lives through takes him one day further back in time, and through watching his host's actions, and the actions of his family, former friends, schoolmates, as well as the girl he seems obsessed with, the mysteries of the people around him gradually become unveiled and The Rider becomes convinced he has a purpose. He has to gain control of this body and change what happened, somehow.
I actually quite liked the book, it's brisk and engaging, and, one major good sign, while I was between reading sessions, I frequently found myself thinking back to what might happen. The characters felt real, to the point I actually wanted more info about their lives than we got, and the central mystery caught my imagination (although it did that merely from reading the description).
It's not perfect, of course. Some aspects of it, including major parts of the 'big mystery' are a little too predictable, and the main character doesn't seem to think of rather obvious things to try (or ask rather obvious questions about his nature)... and, as I said, I do wish we could have gotten more on some of these characters and their lives. The nature of the story makes that difficult, but it felt like there were some plot threads that led nowhere, and I would have rather he found a way to have it all pay off. My biggest problem is with the ending. Now, to be fair, for any story where time-travel-like-shenanigans are involved, the ending is always the trickiest part, and even some of the most famous in the genre muck it up. So I don't hold it against it as I might with a more straightforward story... but it still disappointed me. It was too quick, too pat, and it felt like it rendered much of the main character's early struggles almost worse than pointless. I don't think it really fits all that well with the themes I think the author was going for, either. But it's one of those cases where I liked the journey enough to forgive the ending.
As it's a Young-Adult novel, I always try to do that mental calculation about how I would have felt about it, were I still in the targeted age group, and I think I would have liked it even more. I was a little less critical and the setting would be at least somewhat more relevant to my life. It deals with almost stereotypical 'teen issues' like bullying and teen suicide, and others, and might come off slightly too targeted to an older reader. I believe I'd probably give it 4 stars were I a teen, compared to 3 now, and, in this case, I think it's more fair to make my 'official' score what teen-me would think. But both scores are firmly in the 'enjoyment' camp, and, were it not for the weak ending, I probably would have given it four stars even as an adult. I will probably, at some point, read it again to view the story with the benefit of hindsight over how everything turns out, which puts it above most books already. I do think this is one of those teen novels that can be enjoyed by adults and teens alike (as long as those adults don't mind reading about the lives of teens).
Finished: The Star Fraction, by Ken Macleod
In the near future, the UK is divided into microstates, each with their own laws, and many independent groups vying for the future of humanity. Some are struggling to bring their vision of a communist revolution to fruition, while others fear that unregulated computer science may be bringing about the creation of an uncontrollable artificial intelligence that could threaten the world. There's also a possibility that it's already happened.
What can I say about this book? I really, really, wanted to like it. There were some great ideas, and, at times, I was engaged with the characters. But the world they inhabited didn't entirely ring true to me, and even when it did... I just didn't care about it. I came for a science fiction novel, and, while political science might be a thing, if a book's going to be about conflicting political ideologies, it had better be a damned good book. This one isn't good enough to justify that. It feels more like I showed up to a family event that was supposed to be fun, only to have to sit next to a relative who won't shut up about their political opinions. Even when I actually agree with a point, I don't think "Yes, yes, you're so right!" I just tune out and concentrate on nodding. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, can you pass the pie?"
No, that's not quite it, because that doesn't capture the feeling of missed opportunity for wonder. It's a little more like having a few hours of access to a wonderful TV that tunes into all the stations of a parallel universe... and the person with the remote is obsessed with a game of Bungee-Foot-Hockey. Between periods and during the timeouts, he'll flip quickly through the other channels and give me tantalizing glimpses of stuff I actually want to see, but before long he turns back to a game I care nothing about. There may be some exciting plays, and there may be a little fun piecing together the rules to the game... in smaller doses, I might even find such exploration fascinating, but, at the end of the day, I'm not that interested in spending a few hours watching sports on MY world, so doing it on this miraculous television isn't that much better when there's so much more you can do.
I've tried a few Ken Macleod books now, and, in his other major series (the one that starts with
Cosmonaut Keep), I noticed a similar problem. It wasn't his unconventional politics there (though that played a role, he found a more comfortable balance between that and a good story), but I keep getting the feeling that he's focusing on a rather boring (to me) area that's RIGHT NEXT to a really cool SF plot that captures my imagination, and the feeling I was left with was more disappointment than anything else. Maybe we're just incompatible.
In any event, in this book, I often found myself glazing over and just skimming rather than reading... I wasn't deliberately trying to do this, I just tuned out. The characters are okay, but they seem to jump to new emotional states rather than go through a character arc. I've heard that later in the series we get to some plotlines that, in another author, would get me to buy the book right away, but... I'm not sure if I want to take the effort to get there with Macleod.
Finished: Embassytown, by China Mieville
Avice Cho lives in Embassytown, a small human outpost on an alien world. She doesn't talk to the alien Hosts who are born to the world.. because they don't understand humans, except for specially trained Ambassadors. Because of a quirk of evolutionary history, the Hosts only perceive language that is spoken with two mouths, speaking different words, at the same time, with the same mind. As such, Ambassadors are specially-created clones, bred and trained from birth specifically to communicate with the Hosts, effectively being one person in two bodies. Avice isn't an Ambassador.. but she does occupy a special place in the Host's language, she's a living similie, something the Hosts compare things to. The Hosts' language is changing thanks to contact with humans, and that is changing them and their society. But when a new team of Ambassadors arrives, their use of the Language throws the world into turmoil. Short version of review: liked it, high quality, but I appreciated the quality more than I actually enjoyed it.
Mieville is obviously incredibly skilled with language, and world-building, and here he crafts an incredibly vivid world and a plot that held my attention, with an alien race that, even though it strained suspension of disbelief at times, as a whole felt incredibly real, and yet still very alien.
He even went the extra mile and created a whole universe to embed the world in... the plot of the book didn't even require this level of thought about how things work outside of Arieka, it could easily have been set in a bog-standard universe with interstellar travel, but reading about the way space-travel operates in this world, through the immer, was compelling and evocative and felt like it could support many other books.
The plot meanders a bit, but in a good sense of the word, there were a couple of points where I thought, "this feels like where the book might end", but there was too many pages left for that to be true, and, indeed, new developments stretched out the story, not like padding, but growing organically. In fact, much of my favorite parts of the book started in the last third.
If the star rating was based on how impressed I was with the quality, it'd get a 4 or maybe a 5 star rating (maybe a four, because in order to make his story and alien race functional he did have to take a few cheap outs that I don't think were logically justified). But it's based on my personal, subjective enjoyment of the work, and on that level, I have to give it a three. I liked it, I'm glad I read it, but there was just something missing on the level of visceral enjoyment that prevents me from saying, with my vote, "I really liked it." There was little "wow I'm loving this", merely persistent sense of "this is really well done". Rather like watching a really skilled dancer or player at a sporting event: I'll enjoy it a little, but I'm appreciating the talent more than really having fun. So, a three, but a high three, and I would be interested in reading if he ever sets something else in the universe, although I'd prefer it to center on some other locale or alien race.
Finished: Postsingular, by Rudy Rucker
In Postsingular, tiny machines devour the Earth and copy everybody they eat into a simulation... luckily, one of the machine's developers also created a backdoor, and with the help of his autisitc son, they're able to reverse the situation, restoring everybody.
Soon after, another set of tiny self-replicating machines are released, which don't devour, merely reproduce until they cover every inch of the Earth, sharing information with each other and the people they're on, changing society forever as everyone can instantly access information about virtually anything.
That's all in the first fifty pages. And after that, the story starts to get REALLY weird.
But that's the point of Singularity fiction, that it's hard to really predict the technologies and social changes that will develop in the wake of one, but it can be a lot of fun trying. And in this case, Rudy Rucker both seems to be having and providing a lot of fun, tossing off nifty ideas and a mostly compelling storyline as humans try to keep control of their own fates or carve out meaning in a rapidly changing world. There's a satirical tone to the whole thing, but it's rather lighter than I would have expected, he takes jabs at politicians and spammers and reality TV, or maybe more at the utopian dreams of SF that believe these won't be dragged along into any new advancement that changes our world, but it never feels like a polemic, more like a he's writing with a grin on his face and a tongue firmly in his cheek, and you never feel like the plot itself is just a vehicle for jokes and thus not worth caring over what happens.
It compares favorably to Accelerando by Charles Stross, which also nicely manages the balance between satire and seriousness, but it's also different... in Accelerando they jump ahead in time at a rapid pace, skipping over a lot of the adjustment period and focusing on where society winds up, whereas in Postsingular they get weird quick and deal more directly with how swiftly the world is changing for the people living in it.
I do have a few complaints... I really liked the plotlines on Earth, but whenever the other dimensional "Hibrane", or it's inhabitants, became involved, I sort of just rolled my eyes and pressed through... I'd have rather that element be left out entirely, but unfortunately it's an important part of the book. Other people might not have a problem with it, it simply didn't fit in with my tastes or anything I wanted out of the book, and instead like a cheap way to introduce some "fun" fantasy elements under a label of SF. Secondly, the book uses a lot of made-up slang and new scientific terms that all sound vaguely childish (or hippie-like, or both). Finally, the characters and their interactions... it's a bit hard to qualify, because I wouldn't say they're flat or lack depth... maybe a little compared to a more serious SF novel, but not excessively so. Yet, I guess I kind of felt like they all had the same... voice, underlying their differences. It felt a little like watching a one-man stage production, where that one man plays every role, and maybe does it well, but in the back of your mind it still feels like it's just one guy pretending to be a whole cast. It probably doesn't help that too many of them are essentially reality show stars in the newly changed world.
Still, I liked the book enough that I moved on to the sequel, Hylozoic, even despite my fear that some of the elements I wasn't as keen on are going to be even more of a focus. If he hadn't included the Hibrane subplot, I probably would have given it four stars. As it is, three, but a high three.
Finished: Wormholes: A Novel, by Dennis Meredith (received for free!)
Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book free through Goodreads "First Reads" program.
Weird events have been happening all over the world, either matter is disappearing, or appearing, and often with disastrous results for those nearby. One scientist figures out what's happening (psst, the answer's in the title), and then works to harness this power.
I'm afraid I never really got into this book. The premise is an interesting one, from a distance, but, there are just too many issues with the plot. In short, it never felt real, which is especially a shame considering how it mostly tried to stick to an Earth-based plot with scientists investigating a new phenomenon, rather than explore the wilder frontiers of SF. (slightly more spoilery than usual)
One of the big problems was that the characters, and world in general, seem to take too long to reach conclusions that should be obvious, and often it's all the same guy making the discoveries. I can, just barely, accept that the novel's scientist-protagonist may be the first one to realize wormholes are causing all the variety of weird problems. But even if the book wasn't called "Wormholes!" I think I, and a lot of other people who are fans of science fiction would make that connection at least as a possibility, so scientists absolutely should have (in fairness, it's quite possible the character knew right away but was cagey about his ideas to everybody else in the story and perhaps other scientists were the same). I can give that one a pass. But when other problems come up in tracking or controlling the wormholes, or saving everybody from a threat, and that same scientist is STILL the one who figures out every development (except one insight provided by his love interest who's not a physicist at all), when the whole world is aware of the phenomenon? That's just too simplistic, and feels like poor writing in the most egregious cases. In fact, when there comes a big threat that, for a time, everyone in the world thinks it's hopeless, there was an obvious solution that I came up with immediately, but nobody else seems to until the main character decides it's just the thing to do. A lone scientist hero who solves everything can work in a story where the science is secret, but when the whole world's watching, it's not believable. A few times I was crying out just for a few references to problems being solved thanks to a paper by a scientist in another lab elsewhere in the world that we never heard from before or see again, but who kept up on the initial theory and made his little contribution. THAT's how science is done, and it's lovelier for that.
And even leaving aside how the discoveries are made... it's not really presented in a very entertaining manner. The first third of the book is everyone investigating and figuring out that a lot of disparate phenomenon are actually due to wormholes. But "Wormholes: A Novel" is the title of the book, so it's hardly like it'll be a surprise to the reader. Instead it feels like a slog as characters trudge slowly towards the conclusion the readers knew about from the cover page. And later in the book, it seems to not be that interested in directly exploring the wider potential of the scientific developments that wormholes present to the human species, and how it might affect their society, we're merely told about all the wild potential, and the action instead sticks mostly to mundane tech problems (that can cost lives or risk the whole world) and solutions. Now that kind of book CAN work, especially in science fiction. You can produce a work that's more about how science is done, the tension leading to the discovery rather than the discovery itself, but it takes a skillful writer to pull it off, and, as I just mentioned, the struggles to figure out what's going on, and sudden insights by the hero, don't feel genuine. The book does have some entertaining scenes of the damage the uncontrolled wormholes bring to the Earth, but it's not worth the long wait. The only time I thought, "Okay, cool, we're getting into interesting territory here," only about 2/3 of the way into the book, and even that plotline is swiftly abandoned for another. My favorite part of the book was the brief exploration of an alien planet, and that was genuinely cool for a while, but far too short.
The characters are a little on the one-dimensional side... it's not as bad an issue as the plotting, and the author seems to be trying to give them depth, but they come off a little like the sort of one-note archetypes you'd see in a disaster movie. In fact, the book could probably be adapted into a pretty entertaining disaster film, as there's a lot of good visuals and a threat that hasn't been done to death. The worst is probably the scientist hero, who seems to be constructed almost from a template of a Heroic Scientist. Brilliant, Kind and Caring, Incredibly Rich, with a few problems, but mostly they highlight his good qualities: he's got Daddy issues with a jerky father to contrast what a great caring guy he is, he's a little awkward but doesn't let it stop him, and all his peers come to ridicule his theory (but he'll show them, he turns out to be right!). The rest of the cast are better, but mostly they don't come alive, and, worse, the poor plotting comes into play here as well, as the team that eventually winds up investigating the wormholes more thoroughly once they're tamed includes a geologist, two cops, and a medical examiner, all of whom just happened to be investigating sites of wormhole activity and got friendly with the Heroic Scientist rather than being particularly qualified or suited to be on the frontiers of science. They don't organically form a team or seem like they belong together, and it renders even the ones I like (like the cops) more ridiculous when I have to suspend my disbelief, not for the exotic physics causing the wormholes to act as they do, but just to accept why these guys are still playing driving roles in the book.
I'm being a little harsh here, particularly for what I think is a first novel, but only because I genuinely think there's a chance for improvement. It's not a total trainwreck. There's nothing wrong with the prose style itself. It's got some genuinely tense moments of action, there are some vivid descriptions that provoke a sense of wonder, and it flowed well from sentence to sentence (even if there were problems with the overall pacing of the plot). The scientific underpinnings of the story... I can't judge whether they're correct, but they're at least plausible and believable. And as I said, the characters are mostly okay... compared to some early SF works that are still considered classics, they're well ahead of the game. But we're not in that era anymore, where the science and the idea are enough, they have to all come together in a compelling plot. I don't think they do that here... but I think the author can get there in future works, if he pays a little more attention to plotting and pacing, and cut out the elements that don't work.
Finished: Hylozoic, by Rudy Rucker
Putting the description behind the cut too, because it kind of spoils Postsingular's ending. Short version: some decent ideas, and enjoyed it, but didn't like it as much as Postsingular.
After the events of Postsingular, not only can every human on Earth teleport and use telepathy, every bit of matter on the planet, from a stream, to the individual droplets in the stream, to the individual atoms that make it up, has its own consciousness and can be communicated with. Rocks can implore you not to move them, or they may ask to be made into a wall next to other rocks they like. But this new world has attracted the attention of other alien races, who wish to exploit the newly hylozoic planet Earth, or the human inhabitants, for their own ends. It's up to Thuy and Jayjay and Chu to save the world, if they can get over their own personal drama in the progress.
Postsingular was pretty weird, but this takes it to a whole new level. And yet, there's still a dazzling array of ideas, and he really manages to sell not only the central notion of the book, of what it would be like in a world where you could talk to anything, but also introduces the threat of two alien races, one of whom has a particularly innovative method of attack... stealing the world's "gnarl" to press-gang matter into performing their own calculations. It's hard to explain well, but it's a nifty concept that I was surprised I wound up liking as much as I did.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from the same problems its predecessor did, only moreso. First, the characters feel a little flat, with a very similar voice. Like they're all one person performing several roles with a few changes like a different accent, or a little less emotion. It's only worse when one of the plot points is these characters literally becoming more simplistic and stereotyped for short periods of time. Secondly, it seems just when we're focusing on fascinating territory, he suddenly goes off in a completely separate direction and we spend a load of time in, say, 16th century Netherlands in a parallel universe. The Hibrane is one of the concepts I liked least about the previous book, and it comes up here again, and the author is far more interested with predestination time loops and deus ex machinas than I am.
There's still some things to enjoy, and over all I did like the book, I just wanted it to be a couple notches less weird.
Finished: He is Legend, (short story collection)
A collection of short stories honoring Richard Matheson, legend of horror, by some other famous and not-so-famous authors. Each story is either a sequel, prequel, alternate point of view, or otherwise inspired by something in Matheson's work.
I like Matheson's work, and if this book taught me one thing it's that I haven't read much of it, as I didn't remember many of the stories (but many of his stories that I do remember liking aren't dealt with). And that's a problem when many stories don't really have the same resonance without the originals to directly compare to, and even those that did... when you're directly basing a work off a classic short story, there's two big traps you can fall into, you can either tell basically the same story, rendering yours almost irrelevant, or you can do the opposite, where in a sequel to a story where a monster wins, the monster gets defeated, and, that's usually just not satisfying. And of course, there's the risk of just spitting on or not living up to the other story, or not getting it right. This was unfortunately the problem in the story I was looking forward to the most, another story in the universe of I Am Legend. The author decided to tell the story of Neville's neighbor, but he makes up stuff to try and make it pack more emotional punch, and doesn't even seem to match the details of the original story. So we're left with a tale of a minor character that denigrates the main character of the original seemingly just for the sake of doing it.
The best stories in the collection were probably the ones that were only loosely inspired by a tale, but even on there, there were no standouts. That's pretty much my feeling on the book as a whole: no standouts, few complete stinkers, it was all just okay. For a book honoring Richard Matheson, he deserves a lot better than 'okay.'
I want to close the review pointing out again that I'm not especially familiar with most of the stories that served as inspiration (some I remember only vaguely, as if I read them long ago and can't remember more than the briefest details)... someone who's a lot more in touch with his work might find the stories read better.
Finished: A book that shall not be named that I got for free
I did not like this book, and I don't want to name it for fear the author might google himself and find my LJ (though he read my review and was polite about it)... and also I don't want to further bash it connected to the name. But since I'm not naming it, I will, here, completely spoil it and one of the big issues with it: One of the main characters used to be associated with some bad people, and her revealing something they'd done in the past kicks off all the problem in the book. Throughout the text, we regularly see into her mind, her worrying about betraying them, or thinking they'll kill her, or feeling guilty for her role in everything before. Then, at the end, SURPRISE! She's been working WITH them all along, everything bad that happened was actually HER PLAN, along with them. It made absolutely no sense with how it was written. It wasn't couched where her regrets or fears were all something she told somebody else, or the looks into her thoughts were phrased misleadingly, it outright contradicted the early view into her mind. It was literally like he came up with the twist as he was nearly finished the book and decided to run with it and didn't edit anything.
The book is generally poorly written in many areas, and has a thoroughly unpleasant outlook besides that, but that was just inexcusable.
Finished: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
A teenage boy awakens without memory, having arrived in a location called the Glade, filled with other boys who were all in the same predicament, having arrived once a month, also remembering little more than their names. Thomas, like those before him, learns that the Glade is surrounded by a maze, filled every night with monsters. By day, everyone has jobs to keep their little community going... but the elite of the group, the Maze Runners, run out and try their best to solve the mystery of the shifting walls and look for a way out so they can go home and find out who they really are. But Thomas is different from the others, he develops a growing feeling that he's been there before, and a certainty that he must become a Maze Runner. And everything changes when, shortly after he arrives, for the first time, a girl arrives in the Glade.
It's a YA novel, and, as you might expect, marketed as being a good book for fans of The Hunger Games, so it's only natural to compare them. Well, it's not nearly as good as that, but it's a solidly enjoyable read. The central conceit, the kids being forced to solve an impossible maze, the walls that shut every night, the monsters, all play out well, and the plot moves along briskly, thanks to short chapters usually ending in a cliffhanger. Sure there's a sense of some things being a little on the superficial end, where things (including the whole building of the maze) happen for not really good reasons that I can buy into, and they're just done because the writer wanted to tell this kind of story, but... for a YA novel, I tend to forgive such things. I certainly had to do that with the Hunger Games series a few times.
Two things stand out in the negative column. One, there's heavy use of an artificial slang that... never really feels real. It feels like the author knew that in a book marketed to teenagers, they'd never let him fill it with swear words, and yet actual teenagers swear quite a bit, so he struck a compromise, inventing swear words and using them instead. Secondly is the lack of girls, which, again, strikes me as the author not necessarily being sexist or of having a specific justification in the story, but rather not wanting to deal with throwing teen sexual dynamics in the mix. You could argue that the "Creators" wanted to avoid the same thing, but, from what what I've gathered so far there's no real good reason for this, and I think a richer story could have developed from a more balanced approach. And, just from a marketing standpoint, having only one female main character, who spends a good deal of the book in a coma and then after that is very much in a support role, may alienate half the audience. I guess a third could be that you don't really get complete answers... the book does come to a conclusion, but it's very set up for a sequel, and with a sense that some of what we learned may not be entirely true.
Otherwise, it's an appealing book, not great, but I enjoyed it, and I might check out the movie when it comes out next year. As for the sequels? Unlike The Hunger Games, I'm not immediately eager to track down the next book and see where it goes, but I'm at least curious enough that I might pick it up down the line, especially if I see it in a used bookstore for a decent price.
Finished: Pump Six and other stories, by Paulo Bacigalupi (Short story collection)
This is a series of short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, best known for his novel The Windup Girl. Two of the stories are set in the world of that novel.
Short story collections are usually a mixed bag of quality, themes, and styles... but when they're all by one author, they can be less varied than even a collection centered around a theme, and certainly more than a "Best Of" collection. In this case, we have a set of stories that I'd describe as well-written, and individually, I might enjoy, but when you take the collection as a whole... it gets to be too one note. Almost all of the stories involve either new technology or lack of resources (or some weird combination, like lack of technology as a resource), or, occasionally, no reason at all, causing either a person or society as a whole to engage in acts or develop attitudes we'd considered abhorrent. Most of the main characters are either treating others as less than human, or are considered that way by others (and occasionally both), and either horribly abusing or murdering, or suffering such a fate, often for exceedingly petty reasons. In lighter tales, deliberately causing severe environmental damage or killing a dog is the worst that's done, compared to others where state-sanctioned killing of children is in or slavery has come back.
In short, the dehumanizing effect of technology and need seem to be a central theme in his work so far, along with human selfishness winning out over morals. And that can be a good basis for a story in small doses, but I find it hard to root for most of his characters, and the relentless parade made me not enjoy the collection as a whole as much as I should have. My favorite in the book was probably "The Fluted Girl," which does contain that theme, but does it particularly well (and was early in the book so maybe I just hadn't gotten sick of it).
If I'd encountered any of these stories in isolation in another collection (and a few I have), I might have a higher opinion of them, because again, I feel they're well-written. To his credit, he does include other cultures as central parts of his stories more often than most authors I read, where it's set in some North American city with a mostly American cast (or set in space or on another planet, but it feels like it might as well just be Americans in space), and that level of variety is appreciated. I just don't really connect to his characters and I'm starting to think that his writing in general may not work for me.
Finished: Outcasts of Heaven's Belt, by Joan D. Vinge
A starship arrives in the Heaven system, hoping to trade, only to discover that in their years of transit, the system has suffered a severe civil war... and now their own spaceship is a prize every faction feels they need in order to survive. Short version: Bit flat and dry, some interest for fans of Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe.
I read this work because I read an article suggesting that the author and her now ex-husband, but still friend, (Vernor Vinge) later decided that the book takes place in the world of Vernor's Zones of Thought universe, seen in A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, but especially the latter. Furthermore Joan Vinge was considering writing, with Vernor's permission, a novel (which might include a rework of this story itself) where the characters from this book meet Vernor Vinge's Pham Nuwen character, one of my favorites. So when I saw the book in a used bookstore, I picked it up to see what I might be getting in for.
First, it is easy to see the novel fitting in the Zones of Thought universe, perhaps with a tiny bit of modification, but even that might not be needed. One of the two cultures uses the convention of counting time in seconds, kiloseconds (4 ksec is a little over an hour), gigaseconds, etc., which can be a bit awkward to those of us using conventional timescales, but it is distinctive. Moreover, the theme of the work, that a civilization spanning a single star system is prone to disaster that it can't pull itself out of, especially if it doesn't have an Earth-like planet to retreat to for a low-technology dark age, and trade from other systems is essential. So yes, I could immediately buy it as taking place in the same universe.
As a story? It's a little flat and dry. But, it should be stated that it's Joan Vinge's first published novel (and written based on notes from Vernor Vinge, who also helped edit, but this was in the period where his writing wasn't all that memorable either), and her later works I recall being much better (including her Hugo-winning The Snow Queen written only a couple years later). It's more interesting as a curiosity than a compelling story, decent but nothing memorable. However, if the author ever completes the story with Pham Nuwen in it, I absolutely will read that.
Started: The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson (reread)
Started: The Bohr Maker, by Linda Naginata (reread, but I only read it once probably 15 years ago so I barely remember it)
That's it until next post. Merry Christmas to all that celebrate it. I'll try to post before the New Year if only to post my complete reading list, but if not, Happy New Year too.
Anyway. Christmas coming up. Done most of my shopping, because most of my shopping is gift cards. Yay for thoughtless presents! Not all of it is giftcards, though. And I bought a turkey for a needy family. Not directly, but at the grocery story they were having a 'donate a turkey' thing. The charity played dirty, though, they had kids run up to people who were in that area of the grocery store and ask if I wanted to buy a turkey for a needy family. A few of them were even dressed as turkeys. How could I say no to kids dressed as turkeys for charity? Totally not fair. But I don't mind.
Had a freaky scare with one of the cats. (cut cause perhaps TMI and disgusting details). Anyway, first it was sickness, some weeks ago. We think it was something to do with food, but he was throwing up a lot and dropped a lot of weight. That got under control, he was eating again, but the smaller kitty (who the big one frequently bullied) took advantage of the weakness and just attacked him, hurting his back/side. But despite that, he seemed to be getting better, he had a tender spot on his back but was eating and moving slowly, with some effort, like it hurt him, and maybe a little listless, probably for the same reason. Then last Friday, it looked like he threw up again, but he was nowhere to be found. And when I next saw him, just before bed... he had a huge chunk of fur suddenly missing from his side and what LOOKED like a huge chunk of flesh, too and pus streaming out. It freaked all of us out, although the cat didn't seem bothered, and what we eventually figured out was that he had some kind of huge boil or something under the fur filling with fluid, and when it burst (leaving what we thought was throw-up) the fur soon came off in that area too, maybe to promote wound healing, and much of what looked like flesh missing was just inflammation on the skin. Anyway, we took him to the vet the next morning, and since my roommates/the cat's technical owners aren't really doing well financially (the reason there was a 'wait and see' approach for the earlier problems, where he always seemed to be getting better just before they thought a vet visit might be necessary), I offered to pay for it and an antibiotic shot. He's still got the missing patch of fur but there are signs of it starting to grow back, and the inflammation's gone down and the wound is really tiny, and his mood overall's much better (he's back to demanding ice from me almost every time I get water). But yeah, it was freaky for a while there.
TV... not much has been going on. Still watching SHIELD, although it's been a disappointment. Arrow's enjoyable. Enjoyed the Doctor Who 50th, for the most part... had a few issues, but mostly it made me smile.
I think the only new show to speak of since last time is Almost Human. Where we learn a lot about the future (minor spoiler ahoy). In the future...
...everything is randomly electrified and has visible arcs rolling over their surfaces.
...robots can analyze your breath to see what you ate, but criminals can still smuggle stuff in toilets.
...people will care so little about videos that as soon as you watch them it will ask you if you want to delete it, and if you happen to click 'delete', it won't even ask for a confirmation, just get rid of that precious family memory.
...bioscience has progressed so little in the coming decades that instead of just taking the relatively safe approach of grabbing some samples and growing an infinite supply of skin on some kind of scaffolding (something we can almost do NOW), they abduct women, keep them prisoner with tubes coming out of them, and harvest it from them to make sexbots.
...Disco is remembered by people with parents who probably weren't born during the short period it was popular.
...Holograms are EVERYWHERE, even on things that have a video display right beneath the hologram showing the same thing.
...Police use drones to deliver radios to talk to hostage takers, but never think to arm them and immediately shoot the hostage takers
Many other examples of rather inconsistently-thought out advances in technology... but... I kid, mostly, rather than rant. I mean, these are all pretty ridiculous, but I find myself enjoying the show nonetheless.
Continuum, another show that depicts Cops in the future probably makes similar mistakes, but they're not as bad because we don't focus on that world 24/7 in every ep (since they time-travelled to modern-day Vancouver). I did catch up on S2 of that finally, and enjoyed it enough that I'll keep watching.
Walking Dead was... well, it had a good start, and then dropped the ball again with the Governor. The finale wasn't too bad, but we REALLY didn't need the two episodes before that. Still, zombies are a guilty pleasure so I'm not dropping it even if it gets really bad (and there are plenty of ridiculous bits there too).
I've also caught up a bit on watching movies that I've been overdue for. Dredd was actually rather fun. Total Recall had nice visuals but was pretty dumb. Man of Steel, meh, dragged on an I didn't like the ending. Pacific Rim turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was, particularly for the genre. Dark Knight Rises overrated. Couple other that were okay but forgettable.
Finally, books... read a lot of them. In fact, as of this writing, I've completed my goal of 50 books in 2013. Still a chance I might get another 1 or 2 (I think I got a reasonable shot at 51, 52... maybe if the weather cooperates). But I usually write my reviews, and I have been slacking off, so, here we go, all in a rush at the end of the post, if you usually skip these, you can just stop reading here. As usual, I'm mostly copy/pasting from my Goodreads reviews... minor spoilers many be behind most cuts, but I don't think there's anything that would ruin a person's enjoyment... if there's anything major I'll try to single it out for a special warning.
Finished: The World's Best SF 4, (short story collection)
The Year's Best SF books are a reliable source for entertaining and thought-provoking short stories. This edition holds stories published in 1998.
Although you can always find something to enjoy, they're usually something of a mixed bag... a few you really like, a lot that are just okay, and a couple that you outright dislike. In volume 4, the standouts for me were "Radiant Doors," by Michael Swanwick, a dark and depressing but gripping story involving a bizarre refugee crisis and the limits of compassion and "The Story of Your Life", by Ted Chaing, the story of a mother and a linguist and her time being drafted to help bridge the communication gap between humans and an alien race, and "Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling, about a revolutionary AI gaining control and influence that may or may not be a good thing for people. Of those that rubbed me the wrong way, only "The Allies" by Mark S. Greston is really memorable for leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and even that one had a couple novel concepts.
Considering the year, there are a lot of rather prescient ideas being used to create stories, from the widespread increase in data-mining for niche marketing purposes, to flash mobs, and also a few old classic tropes, space opera, time travel, alternate timelines and speculations on different gender dynamics.
Something for everybody, in short.
Finished: Defining Diana, by Hayden Trenholm (received for free!)
Full disclosure, I received this book free through the Goodreads First Reads program.
2043, Calgary, Canada, Frank Steele leads a group of police officers who tackle the cases that are too big or too weird for anybody else. But when they discover the body of a young girl who doesn't exist in any of the usual databases, with apparently nothing wrong with her that might cause her death, they get a mystery that may connect with some of their other open cases... and have worldwide consequences.
Police procedurals aren't my favorite genre, but when you add cyborgs and biotech to ANYTHING, it becomes better (shut up, purists, it does!)! The cast also begins as an appealing mix of coworkers with different personalities and believable relationships and interactions among them (some of that changes later, although there are potentially good reason for that), and even some of the secondary characters get a compelling amount of depth.
And setting anything in Canada is also a plus. As a minor gripe, while it does feel convincingly like a future Canada, it doesn't really feel like a world with thirty years of progress ahead of our own. Even with all the cyborgs and changes in social policy and advancement in biosciences... too much is familiar and unimproved, it feels more like it's merely ten or fifteen years ahead. For thirty, I'd expect a lot more changes.
As for the story itself? I'm a little mixed. I only have a few outright complaints, but it never dragged me in and made me excited about what was coming except, a little, towards the end, when some of the manipulations behind the scenes became obvious and a lot of what I'd previously wondering about became explained. And, to the book's credit, it does a wonderful job of provoking an 'Aha' moment, where things come together and you realize that many of the things you thought were inconsistent or odd storytelling choices, suddenly made perfect sense. The book is one of those that would probably benefit from a reread.
The ending also comes a bit too abruptly, and it doesn't feel like the character arcs or the mystery come to a satisfying conclusion. Maybe some of that's intended for a sequel, but right now it feels like one of those Law & Order episodes that suddenly goes to the credits right after it's revealed something dramatic happened with the case they were investigating... there are still a lot of open questions, but it feels like the author decided they were moot. I, personally, would have much appreciated maybe another dozen or so pages (it's not an especially long novel as it is) to clarify some of the hows and whys and, in a few cases, being explicit about whether certain behaviors were due to an involvement the central mystery, or just the people acting weirdly for other reasons. Or maybe I'm just an idiot and missed some obvious pointers to that the first time around.
All in all, I'd recommend it to fans of police procedurals, or those who find the back-of-the-book blurb interesting on their own, but it's not the kind of book I'm liable to call a favorite myself. Certainly enjoyable, but not particularly memorable.
Finished: Backwards, by Todd Mitchell (received for free!)
Full disclosure: I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads program.
The story follows a disembodied spirit with no memory, who witnesses the suicide of a teenager named Dan, and finds himself drawn inside... only to wake up inside Dan's body and everything's fine. Soon he realizes that every day he lives through takes him one day further back in time, and through watching his host's actions, and the actions of his family, former friends, schoolmates, as well as the girl he seems obsessed with, the mysteries of the people around him gradually become unveiled and The Rider becomes convinced he has a purpose. He has to gain control of this body and change what happened, somehow.
I actually quite liked the book, it's brisk and engaging, and, one major good sign, while I was between reading sessions, I frequently found myself thinking back to what might happen. The characters felt real, to the point I actually wanted more info about their lives than we got, and the central mystery caught my imagination (although it did that merely from reading the description).
It's not perfect, of course. Some aspects of it, including major parts of the 'big mystery' are a little too predictable, and the main character doesn't seem to think of rather obvious things to try (or ask rather obvious questions about his nature)... and, as I said, I do wish we could have gotten more on some of these characters and their lives. The nature of the story makes that difficult, but it felt like there were some plot threads that led nowhere, and I would have rather he found a way to have it all pay off. My biggest problem is with the ending. Now, to be fair, for any story where time-travel-like-shenanigans are involved, the ending is always the trickiest part, and even some of the most famous in the genre muck it up. So I don't hold it against it as I might with a more straightforward story... but it still disappointed me. It was too quick, too pat, and it felt like it rendered much of the main character's early struggles almost worse than pointless. I don't think it really fits all that well with the themes I think the author was going for, either. But it's one of those cases where I liked the journey enough to forgive the ending.
As it's a Young-Adult novel, I always try to do that mental calculation about how I would have felt about it, were I still in the targeted age group, and I think I would have liked it even more. I was a little less critical and the setting would be at least somewhat more relevant to my life. It deals with almost stereotypical 'teen issues' like bullying and teen suicide, and others, and might come off slightly too targeted to an older reader. I believe I'd probably give it 4 stars were I a teen, compared to 3 now, and, in this case, I think it's more fair to make my 'official' score what teen-me would think. But both scores are firmly in the 'enjoyment' camp, and, were it not for the weak ending, I probably would have given it four stars even as an adult. I will probably, at some point, read it again to view the story with the benefit of hindsight over how everything turns out, which puts it above most books already. I do think this is one of those teen novels that can be enjoyed by adults and teens alike (as long as those adults don't mind reading about the lives of teens).
Finished: The Star Fraction, by Ken Macleod
In the near future, the UK is divided into microstates, each with their own laws, and many independent groups vying for the future of humanity. Some are struggling to bring their vision of a communist revolution to fruition, while others fear that unregulated computer science may be bringing about the creation of an uncontrollable artificial intelligence that could threaten the world. There's also a possibility that it's already happened.
What can I say about this book? I really, really, wanted to like it. There were some great ideas, and, at times, I was engaged with the characters. But the world they inhabited didn't entirely ring true to me, and even when it did... I just didn't care about it. I came for a science fiction novel, and, while political science might be a thing, if a book's going to be about conflicting political ideologies, it had better be a damned good book. This one isn't good enough to justify that. It feels more like I showed up to a family event that was supposed to be fun, only to have to sit next to a relative who won't shut up about their political opinions. Even when I actually agree with a point, I don't think "Yes, yes, you're so right!" I just tune out and concentrate on nodding. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, can you pass the pie?"
No, that's not quite it, because that doesn't capture the feeling of missed opportunity for wonder. It's a little more like having a few hours of access to a wonderful TV that tunes into all the stations of a parallel universe... and the person with the remote is obsessed with a game of Bungee-Foot-Hockey. Between periods and during the timeouts, he'll flip quickly through the other channels and give me tantalizing glimpses of stuff I actually want to see, but before long he turns back to a game I care nothing about. There may be some exciting plays, and there may be a little fun piecing together the rules to the game... in smaller doses, I might even find such exploration fascinating, but, at the end of the day, I'm not that interested in spending a few hours watching sports on MY world, so doing it on this miraculous television isn't that much better when there's so much more you can do.
I've tried a few Ken Macleod books now, and, in his other major series (the one that starts with
Cosmonaut Keep), I noticed a similar problem. It wasn't his unconventional politics there (though that played a role, he found a more comfortable balance between that and a good story), but I keep getting the feeling that he's focusing on a rather boring (to me) area that's RIGHT NEXT to a really cool SF plot that captures my imagination, and the feeling I was left with was more disappointment than anything else. Maybe we're just incompatible.
In any event, in this book, I often found myself glazing over and just skimming rather than reading... I wasn't deliberately trying to do this, I just tuned out. The characters are okay, but they seem to jump to new emotional states rather than go through a character arc. I've heard that later in the series we get to some plotlines that, in another author, would get me to buy the book right away, but... I'm not sure if I want to take the effort to get there with Macleod.
Finished: Embassytown, by China Mieville
Avice Cho lives in Embassytown, a small human outpost on an alien world. She doesn't talk to the alien Hosts who are born to the world.. because they don't understand humans, except for specially trained Ambassadors. Because of a quirk of evolutionary history, the Hosts only perceive language that is spoken with two mouths, speaking different words, at the same time, with the same mind. As such, Ambassadors are specially-created clones, bred and trained from birth specifically to communicate with the Hosts, effectively being one person in two bodies. Avice isn't an Ambassador.. but she does occupy a special place in the Host's language, she's a living similie, something the Hosts compare things to. The Hosts' language is changing thanks to contact with humans, and that is changing them and their society. But when a new team of Ambassadors arrives, their use of the Language throws the world into turmoil. Short version of review: liked it, high quality, but I appreciated the quality more than I actually enjoyed it.
Mieville is obviously incredibly skilled with language, and world-building, and here he crafts an incredibly vivid world and a plot that held my attention, with an alien race that, even though it strained suspension of disbelief at times, as a whole felt incredibly real, and yet still very alien.
He even went the extra mile and created a whole universe to embed the world in... the plot of the book didn't even require this level of thought about how things work outside of Arieka, it could easily have been set in a bog-standard universe with interstellar travel, but reading about the way space-travel operates in this world, through the immer, was compelling and evocative and felt like it could support many other books.
The plot meanders a bit, but in a good sense of the word, there were a couple of points where I thought, "this feels like where the book might end", but there was too many pages left for that to be true, and, indeed, new developments stretched out the story, not like padding, but growing organically. In fact, much of my favorite parts of the book started in the last third.
If the star rating was based on how impressed I was with the quality, it'd get a 4 or maybe a 5 star rating (maybe a four, because in order to make his story and alien race functional he did have to take a few cheap outs that I don't think were logically justified). But it's based on my personal, subjective enjoyment of the work, and on that level, I have to give it a three. I liked it, I'm glad I read it, but there was just something missing on the level of visceral enjoyment that prevents me from saying, with my vote, "I really liked it." There was little "wow I'm loving this", merely persistent sense of "this is really well done". Rather like watching a really skilled dancer or player at a sporting event: I'll enjoy it a little, but I'm appreciating the talent more than really having fun. So, a three, but a high three, and I would be interested in reading if he ever sets something else in the universe, although I'd prefer it to center on some other locale or alien race.
Finished: Postsingular, by Rudy Rucker
In Postsingular, tiny machines devour the Earth and copy everybody they eat into a simulation... luckily, one of the machine's developers also created a backdoor, and with the help of his autisitc son, they're able to reverse the situation, restoring everybody.
Soon after, another set of tiny self-replicating machines are released, which don't devour, merely reproduce until they cover every inch of the Earth, sharing information with each other and the people they're on, changing society forever as everyone can instantly access information about virtually anything.
That's all in the first fifty pages. And after that, the story starts to get REALLY weird.
But that's the point of Singularity fiction, that it's hard to really predict the technologies and social changes that will develop in the wake of one, but it can be a lot of fun trying. And in this case, Rudy Rucker both seems to be having and providing a lot of fun, tossing off nifty ideas and a mostly compelling storyline as humans try to keep control of their own fates or carve out meaning in a rapidly changing world. There's a satirical tone to the whole thing, but it's rather lighter than I would have expected, he takes jabs at politicians and spammers and reality TV, or maybe more at the utopian dreams of SF that believe these won't be dragged along into any new advancement that changes our world, but it never feels like a polemic, more like a he's writing with a grin on his face and a tongue firmly in his cheek, and you never feel like the plot itself is just a vehicle for jokes and thus not worth caring over what happens.
It compares favorably to Accelerando by Charles Stross, which also nicely manages the balance between satire and seriousness, but it's also different... in Accelerando they jump ahead in time at a rapid pace, skipping over a lot of the adjustment period and focusing on where society winds up, whereas in Postsingular they get weird quick and deal more directly with how swiftly the world is changing for the people living in it.
I do have a few complaints... I really liked the plotlines on Earth, but whenever the other dimensional "Hibrane", or it's inhabitants, became involved, I sort of just rolled my eyes and pressed through... I'd have rather that element be left out entirely, but unfortunately it's an important part of the book. Other people might not have a problem with it, it simply didn't fit in with my tastes or anything I wanted out of the book, and instead like a cheap way to introduce some "fun" fantasy elements under a label of SF. Secondly, the book uses a lot of made-up slang and new scientific terms that all sound vaguely childish (or hippie-like, or both). Finally, the characters and their interactions... it's a bit hard to qualify, because I wouldn't say they're flat or lack depth... maybe a little compared to a more serious SF novel, but not excessively so. Yet, I guess I kind of felt like they all had the same... voice, underlying their differences. It felt a little like watching a one-man stage production, where that one man plays every role, and maybe does it well, but in the back of your mind it still feels like it's just one guy pretending to be a whole cast. It probably doesn't help that too many of them are essentially reality show stars in the newly changed world.
Still, I liked the book enough that I moved on to the sequel, Hylozoic, even despite my fear that some of the elements I wasn't as keen on are going to be even more of a focus. If he hadn't included the Hibrane subplot, I probably would have given it four stars. As it is, three, but a high three.
Finished: Wormholes: A Novel, by Dennis Meredith (received for free!)
Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book free through Goodreads "First Reads" program.
Weird events have been happening all over the world, either matter is disappearing, or appearing, and often with disastrous results for those nearby. One scientist figures out what's happening (psst, the answer's in the title), and then works to harness this power.
I'm afraid I never really got into this book. The premise is an interesting one, from a distance, but, there are just too many issues with the plot. In short, it never felt real, which is especially a shame considering how it mostly tried to stick to an Earth-based plot with scientists investigating a new phenomenon, rather than explore the wilder frontiers of SF. (slightly more spoilery than usual)
One of the big problems was that the characters, and world in general, seem to take too long to reach conclusions that should be obvious, and often it's all the same guy making the discoveries. I can, just barely, accept that the novel's scientist-protagonist may be the first one to realize wormholes are causing all the variety of weird problems. But even if the book wasn't called "Wormholes!" I think I, and a lot of other people who are fans of science fiction would make that connection at least as a possibility, so scientists absolutely should have (in fairness, it's quite possible the character knew right away but was cagey about his ideas to everybody else in the story and perhaps other scientists were the same). I can give that one a pass. But when other problems come up in tracking or controlling the wormholes, or saving everybody from a threat, and that same scientist is STILL the one who figures out every development (except one insight provided by his love interest who's not a physicist at all), when the whole world is aware of the phenomenon? That's just too simplistic, and feels like poor writing in the most egregious cases. In fact, when there comes a big threat that, for a time, everyone in the world thinks it's hopeless, there was an obvious solution that I came up with immediately, but nobody else seems to until the main character decides it's just the thing to do. A lone scientist hero who solves everything can work in a story where the science is secret, but when the whole world's watching, it's not believable. A few times I was crying out just for a few references to problems being solved thanks to a paper by a scientist in another lab elsewhere in the world that we never heard from before or see again, but who kept up on the initial theory and made his little contribution. THAT's how science is done, and it's lovelier for that.
And even leaving aside how the discoveries are made... it's not really presented in a very entertaining manner. The first third of the book is everyone investigating and figuring out that a lot of disparate phenomenon are actually due to wormholes. But "Wormholes: A Novel" is the title of the book, so it's hardly like it'll be a surprise to the reader. Instead it feels like a slog as characters trudge slowly towards the conclusion the readers knew about from the cover page. And later in the book, it seems to not be that interested in directly exploring the wider potential of the scientific developments that wormholes present to the human species, and how it might affect their society, we're merely told about all the wild potential, and the action instead sticks mostly to mundane tech problems (that can cost lives or risk the whole world) and solutions. Now that kind of book CAN work, especially in science fiction. You can produce a work that's more about how science is done, the tension leading to the discovery rather than the discovery itself, but it takes a skillful writer to pull it off, and, as I just mentioned, the struggles to figure out what's going on, and sudden insights by the hero, don't feel genuine. The book does have some entertaining scenes of the damage the uncontrolled wormholes bring to the Earth, but it's not worth the long wait. The only time I thought, "Okay, cool, we're getting into interesting territory here," only about 2/3 of the way into the book, and even that plotline is swiftly abandoned for another. My favorite part of the book was the brief exploration of an alien planet, and that was genuinely cool for a while, but far too short.
The characters are a little on the one-dimensional side... it's not as bad an issue as the plotting, and the author seems to be trying to give them depth, but they come off a little like the sort of one-note archetypes you'd see in a disaster movie. In fact, the book could probably be adapted into a pretty entertaining disaster film, as there's a lot of good visuals and a threat that hasn't been done to death. The worst is probably the scientist hero, who seems to be constructed almost from a template of a Heroic Scientist. Brilliant, Kind and Caring, Incredibly Rich, with a few problems, but mostly they highlight his good qualities: he's got Daddy issues with a jerky father to contrast what a great caring guy he is, he's a little awkward but doesn't let it stop him, and all his peers come to ridicule his theory (but he'll show them, he turns out to be right!). The rest of the cast are better, but mostly they don't come alive, and, worse, the poor plotting comes into play here as well, as the team that eventually winds up investigating the wormholes more thoroughly once they're tamed includes a geologist, two cops, and a medical examiner, all of whom just happened to be investigating sites of wormhole activity and got friendly with the Heroic Scientist rather than being particularly qualified or suited to be on the frontiers of science. They don't organically form a team or seem like they belong together, and it renders even the ones I like (like the cops) more ridiculous when I have to suspend my disbelief, not for the exotic physics causing the wormholes to act as they do, but just to accept why these guys are still playing driving roles in the book.
I'm being a little harsh here, particularly for what I think is a first novel, but only because I genuinely think there's a chance for improvement. It's not a total trainwreck. There's nothing wrong with the prose style itself. It's got some genuinely tense moments of action, there are some vivid descriptions that provoke a sense of wonder, and it flowed well from sentence to sentence (even if there were problems with the overall pacing of the plot). The scientific underpinnings of the story... I can't judge whether they're correct, but they're at least plausible and believable. And as I said, the characters are mostly okay... compared to some early SF works that are still considered classics, they're well ahead of the game. But we're not in that era anymore, where the science and the idea are enough, they have to all come together in a compelling plot. I don't think they do that here... but I think the author can get there in future works, if he pays a little more attention to plotting and pacing, and cut out the elements that don't work.
Finished: Hylozoic, by Rudy Rucker
Putting the description behind the cut too, because it kind of spoils Postsingular's ending. Short version: some decent ideas, and enjoyed it, but didn't like it as much as Postsingular.
After the events of Postsingular, not only can every human on Earth teleport and use telepathy, every bit of matter on the planet, from a stream, to the individual droplets in the stream, to the individual atoms that make it up, has its own consciousness and can be communicated with. Rocks can implore you not to move them, or they may ask to be made into a wall next to other rocks they like. But this new world has attracted the attention of other alien races, who wish to exploit the newly hylozoic planet Earth, or the human inhabitants, for their own ends. It's up to Thuy and Jayjay and Chu to save the world, if they can get over their own personal drama in the progress.
Postsingular was pretty weird, but this takes it to a whole new level. And yet, there's still a dazzling array of ideas, and he really manages to sell not only the central notion of the book, of what it would be like in a world where you could talk to anything, but also introduces the threat of two alien races, one of whom has a particularly innovative method of attack... stealing the world's "gnarl" to press-gang matter into performing their own calculations. It's hard to explain well, but it's a nifty concept that I was surprised I wound up liking as much as I did.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from the same problems its predecessor did, only moreso. First, the characters feel a little flat, with a very similar voice. Like they're all one person performing several roles with a few changes like a different accent, or a little less emotion. It's only worse when one of the plot points is these characters literally becoming more simplistic and stereotyped for short periods of time. Secondly, it seems just when we're focusing on fascinating territory, he suddenly goes off in a completely separate direction and we spend a load of time in, say, 16th century Netherlands in a parallel universe. The Hibrane is one of the concepts I liked least about the previous book, and it comes up here again, and the author is far more interested with predestination time loops and deus ex machinas than I am.
There's still some things to enjoy, and over all I did like the book, I just wanted it to be a couple notches less weird.
Finished: He is Legend, (short story collection)
A collection of short stories honoring Richard Matheson, legend of horror, by some other famous and not-so-famous authors. Each story is either a sequel, prequel, alternate point of view, or otherwise inspired by something in Matheson's work.
I like Matheson's work, and if this book taught me one thing it's that I haven't read much of it, as I didn't remember many of the stories (but many of his stories that I do remember liking aren't dealt with). And that's a problem when many stories don't really have the same resonance without the originals to directly compare to, and even those that did... when you're directly basing a work off a classic short story, there's two big traps you can fall into, you can either tell basically the same story, rendering yours almost irrelevant, or you can do the opposite, where in a sequel to a story where a monster wins, the monster gets defeated, and, that's usually just not satisfying. And of course, there's the risk of just spitting on or not living up to the other story, or not getting it right. This was unfortunately the problem in the story I was looking forward to the most, another story in the universe of I Am Legend. The author decided to tell the story of Neville's neighbor, but he makes up stuff to try and make it pack more emotional punch, and doesn't even seem to match the details of the original story. So we're left with a tale of a minor character that denigrates the main character of the original seemingly just for the sake of doing it.
The best stories in the collection were probably the ones that were only loosely inspired by a tale, but even on there, there were no standouts. That's pretty much my feeling on the book as a whole: no standouts, few complete stinkers, it was all just okay. For a book honoring Richard Matheson, he deserves a lot better than 'okay.'
I want to close the review pointing out again that I'm not especially familiar with most of the stories that served as inspiration (some I remember only vaguely, as if I read them long ago and can't remember more than the briefest details)... someone who's a lot more in touch with his work might find the stories read better.
Finished: A book that shall not be named that I got for free
I did not like this book, and I don't want to name it for fear the author might google himself and find my LJ (though he read my review and was polite about it)... and also I don't want to further bash it connected to the name. But since I'm not naming it, I will, here, completely spoil it and one of the big issues with it: One of the main characters used to be associated with some bad people, and her revealing something they'd done in the past kicks off all the problem in the book. Throughout the text, we regularly see into her mind, her worrying about betraying them, or thinking they'll kill her, or feeling guilty for her role in everything before. Then, at the end, SURPRISE! She's been working WITH them all along, everything bad that happened was actually HER PLAN, along with them. It made absolutely no sense with how it was written. It wasn't couched where her regrets or fears were all something she told somebody else, or the looks into her thoughts were phrased misleadingly, it outright contradicted the early view into her mind. It was literally like he came up with the twist as he was nearly finished the book and decided to run with it and didn't edit anything.
The book is generally poorly written in many areas, and has a thoroughly unpleasant outlook besides that, but that was just inexcusable.
Finished: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
A teenage boy awakens without memory, having arrived in a location called the Glade, filled with other boys who were all in the same predicament, having arrived once a month, also remembering little more than their names. Thomas, like those before him, learns that the Glade is surrounded by a maze, filled every night with monsters. By day, everyone has jobs to keep their little community going... but the elite of the group, the Maze Runners, run out and try their best to solve the mystery of the shifting walls and look for a way out so they can go home and find out who they really are. But Thomas is different from the others, he develops a growing feeling that he's been there before, and a certainty that he must become a Maze Runner. And everything changes when, shortly after he arrives, for the first time, a girl arrives in the Glade.
It's a YA novel, and, as you might expect, marketed as being a good book for fans of The Hunger Games, so it's only natural to compare them. Well, it's not nearly as good as that, but it's a solidly enjoyable read. The central conceit, the kids being forced to solve an impossible maze, the walls that shut every night, the monsters, all play out well, and the plot moves along briskly, thanks to short chapters usually ending in a cliffhanger. Sure there's a sense of some things being a little on the superficial end, where things (including the whole building of the maze) happen for not really good reasons that I can buy into, and they're just done because the writer wanted to tell this kind of story, but... for a YA novel, I tend to forgive such things. I certainly had to do that with the Hunger Games series a few times.
Two things stand out in the negative column. One, there's heavy use of an artificial slang that... never really feels real. It feels like the author knew that in a book marketed to teenagers, they'd never let him fill it with swear words, and yet actual teenagers swear quite a bit, so he struck a compromise, inventing swear words and using them instead. Secondly is the lack of girls, which, again, strikes me as the author not necessarily being sexist or of having a specific justification in the story, but rather not wanting to deal with throwing teen sexual dynamics in the mix. You could argue that the "Creators" wanted to avoid the same thing, but, from what what I've gathered so far there's no real good reason for this, and I think a richer story could have developed from a more balanced approach. And, just from a marketing standpoint, having only one female main character, who spends a good deal of the book in a coma and then after that is very much in a support role, may alienate half the audience. I guess a third could be that you don't really get complete answers... the book does come to a conclusion, but it's very set up for a sequel, and with a sense that some of what we learned may not be entirely true.
Otherwise, it's an appealing book, not great, but I enjoyed it, and I might check out the movie when it comes out next year. As for the sequels? Unlike The Hunger Games, I'm not immediately eager to track down the next book and see where it goes, but I'm at least curious enough that I might pick it up down the line, especially if I see it in a used bookstore for a decent price.
Finished: Pump Six and other stories, by Paulo Bacigalupi (Short story collection)
This is a series of short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, best known for his novel The Windup Girl. Two of the stories are set in the world of that novel.
Short story collections are usually a mixed bag of quality, themes, and styles... but when they're all by one author, they can be less varied than even a collection centered around a theme, and certainly more than a "Best Of" collection. In this case, we have a set of stories that I'd describe as well-written, and individually, I might enjoy, but when you take the collection as a whole... it gets to be too one note. Almost all of the stories involve either new technology or lack of resources (or some weird combination, like lack of technology as a resource), or, occasionally, no reason at all, causing either a person or society as a whole to engage in acts or develop attitudes we'd considered abhorrent. Most of the main characters are either treating others as less than human, or are considered that way by others (and occasionally both), and either horribly abusing or murdering, or suffering such a fate, often for exceedingly petty reasons. In lighter tales, deliberately causing severe environmental damage or killing a dog is the worst that's done, compared to others where state-sanctioned killing of children is in or slavery has come back.
In short, the dehumanizing effect of technology and need seem to be a central theme in his work so far, along with human selfishness winning out over morals. And that can be a good basis for a story in small doses, but I find it hard to root for most of his characters, and the relentless parade made me not enjoy the collection as a whole as much as I should have. My favorite in the book was probably "The Fluted Girl," which does contain that theme, but does it particularly well (and was early in the book so maybe I just hadn't gotten sick of it).
If I'd encountered any of these stories in isolation in another collection (and a few I have), I might have a higher opinion of them, because again, I feel they're well-written. To his credit, he does include other cultures as central parts of his stories more often than most authors I read, where it's set in some North American city with a mostly American cast (or set in space or on another planet, but it feels like it might as well just be Americans in space), and that level of variety is appreciated. I just don't really connect to his characters and I'm starting to think that his writing in general may not work for me.
Finished: Outcasts of Heaven's Belt, by Joan D. Vinge
A starship arrives in the Heaven system, hoping to trade, only to discover that in their years of transit, the system has suffered a severe civil war... and now their own spaceship is a prize every faction feels they need in order to survive. Short version: Bit flat and dry, some interest for fans of Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe.
I read this work because I read an article suggesting that the author and her now ex-husband, but still friend, (Vernor Vinge) later decided that the book takes place in the world of Vernor's Zones of Thought universe, seen in A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, but especially the latter. Furthermore Joan Vinge was considering writing, with Vernor's permission, a novel (which might include a rework of this story itself) where the characters from this book meet Vernor Vinge's Pham Nuwen character, one of my favorites. So when I saw the book in a used bookstore, I picked it up to see what I might be getting in for.
First, it is easy to see the novel fitting in the Zones of Thought universe, perhaps with a tiny bit of modification, but even that might not be needed. One of the two cultures uses the convention of counting time in seconds, kiloseconds (4 ksec is a little over an hour), gigaseconds, etc., which can be a bit awkward to those of us using conventional timescales, but it is distinctive. Moreover, the theme of the work, that a civilization spanning a single star system is prone to disaster that it can't pull itself out of, especially if it doesn't have an Earth-like planet to retreat to for a low-technology dark age, and trade from other systems is essential. So yes, I could immediately buy it as taking place in the same universe.
As a story? It's a little flat and dry. But, it should be stated that it's Joan Vinge's first published novel (and written based on notes from Vernor Vinge, who also helped edit, but this was in the period where his writing wasn't all that memorable either), and her later works I recall being much better (including her Hugo-winning The Snow Queen written only a couple years later). It's more interesting as a curiosity than a compelling story, decent but nothing memorable. However, if the author ever completes the story with Pham Nuwen in it, I absolutely will read that.
Started: The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson (reread)
Started: The Bohr Maker, by Linda Naginata (reread, but I only read it once probably 15 years ago so I barely remember it)
That's it until next post. Merry Christmas to all that celebrate it. I'll try to post before the New Year if only to post my complete reading list, but if not, Happy New Year too.
