Been A While
Apr. 24th, 2014 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6So, yeah, see title. No excuses, I've been reading my flist, just, didn't really feel like I had enough to say to be worth an entry, and when I did, I just didn't feel up to it.
There was my Birthday last month. Thanks to those of you who gave well-wishes or gifts if I haven't responded to you personally (or hey, even if I had, thanks again!). Birthdays don't really mean much to me anymore, but it's still nice to hear.
And Easter (which includes my half-birthday, Good Friday) wasn't bad, turned out to be a lot of Greek Food. Weather's warmed up, which I guess is good, although I prefer ultra cold to the heat of summer, which is coming. Maybe this year I'll try to get a window air conditioner... I can afford it, my main worry is whether my room (or apartment as a whole)'s electrical system can handle it. It's already a bit iffy. But maybe I'll give it a try.
There was some news I was going to write on the 'social interactions with other human beings' front, but it sort of took an unexpected turn, but I guess it's still sort of worth mentioning and who knows, might still work out okay:
I am/was developing a work friend. I'm friendly enough with most of the people there, but it's on a very superficial level, but there's a guy that's there one of the days I work who's about my age, so we have a lot of the same cultural milestones: remembering the same old TV shows, etc, and, as it turns out, a number of the same tastes, both past and present, in media, and it's been fun talking to him on those days about stupid stuff like our crackmayor or the finer points of zombie survival, enough that I actually looked forward to showing up to work. He's a bit more of the 'party dude' type where a lot of his stories involve getting drunk, whereas I'm a more sedate homebody type, so it might not grow beyond just having enjoyable, easygoing, conversations at work, but it's more than I've had in a long time outside of family.
And, apparently, he had to go to the hospital last week. I don't know what the issue is, exactly, apparently he's okay but one of the bosses at work mentioned it's some kind of ongoing issue and they might have to switch his hours, in a way where I'd probably not encounter him again. Maybe that's only temporary, and regardless of where his schedule winds up being, I hope he recovers.
I also had a few weeks where one of the cashiers at one of the grocery stores I went to seemed to take a spontaneous interest me and asking me random questions, but that petered out, so I was probably imagining that.
Anyway... do I really want to walk about TV or movies? Well, movies I think are definitely out, I don't think I've even watched any since last time. Oh, I did watch the Veronica Mars movie of course, which I liked, but I don't have a lot to say for it except that it felt like the pilot to a new series and I kind of wish it was.
TV? Walking Dead, GoT are both good. Arrow's also doing well and SHIELD finally has started kicking into high gear. The 100 is a little cheesy, and definitely teen-y, but I kind of like it so far... they have at least taken some daring moves that I didn't see coming, where I was too used to expecting the safe choice. Beyond that, there's not much going on... networks will be announcing their new shows for next year soon (some already have announced potentials, but I haven't spotted anything really exciting yet).
Online TV, I've been enjoying Tabletop with Wil Wheaton lately (it's like pretending I have friends!), and apparently they're going the crowdfunding route for season 3. I donated, because I'm a fan of the show and I'm a fan of the "crowdfund and give away free after" business model. It's already pretty well successful, but I'm rooting for them to hit $1 million for the RPG spinoff campaign show they've been talking about it. If anyone here's interested, the fundraising page is here (and Tabletop itself can be watched on Geek and Sundry's Youtube channel).
So let's finish this up with the usual roundup of books:
Finished: Coyote, by Allen Steele
Coyote tells the story of a small group of colonists who land on a distant, livable planet (actually a moon of a gas giant), and try to make a go of starting a new life there.
This book kind of surprised me in a couple of different ways. One, I expected it to be a novel, and, in some ways it was, but mostly, it's a collection of short stories linked in time. This has some good effects and some bad ones. Of the good, it was refreshing to get slightly different perspectives from time to time, and some of them were engaging, others not so much... which leads to one of the other surprise, it turned out to be a much better book than I was expecting from the first section, where dissidents of an oppressive future US government engineer a plot to steal the colonization mission. It was okay, but I wasn't involved, and mid-way through I had a strong feeling that, even though Coyote is the first book in a series, I was only going to be going as far as this one. But then suddenly we moved into another section, possibly the best in the book, involving a lone crew member revived from cryonic suspension early in the flight, and after that everything changed for the better, enough that I'm thinking I'll probably move on to atl east one more volume. The problem with the short story approach is that it doesn't entirely satisfy as a whole... there were times where tense situations were set up, and then the conflicts I was expecting to build for the rest of the book simple... disappear, say with a sudden death or change of heart or unexpected development. You're left wondering what the point of including that element in the first place was, because it didn't seem to mean anything. Overall the effect is that the story meanders a little, and when it picks up again, it's mostly just to set up the next book.
The book does a good job at exploring the alien biology of the world, mostly in little details, but they're pleasant little details that give you a sense of being there. Less successful, with the world itself... this is a planet farther from the sun than our own, in orbit around a gas giant, and except for a few passages, this didn't shine through... it just felt like they were on an Earth-like world with an Earth-like sky and day/night cycle. There's a beautiful alien skyscape in on the cover... I never got that feel from the text. But it's a minor problem, I guess.
There is one last surprise that should be noted... I thought the book was much older than it was. It was only in the end that they mentioned a term I'd come to associate with somewhat newer SF that got me thinking, and then I checked the referenced at the end and realized that, while I thought the book was written in the early 1990s, it was actually written in the early 21st century. It just feels old fashioned. I'd have guessed it was even earlier if not for two things: that the politics didn't get bogged down with references to the soviet union, and that the characterization was slightly more in-depth and in-focus than I would expect from a novel (at least a novel of this particular type: colonization stories) of earlier decades. My guess is that if you like those kinds of stories of the past, this might well appeal to you.
I put the book at three stars, but it's on the high end of three stars. If it told a more satisfying overall story, it might have made four
Finished: Limit of Vision, by Linda Nagata
Limit of Vision imagines a game-changing invention of artificial life forms, called LOVs because they're small enough that they exist at the Limit of Vision, tiny sparks of light that organize into neural networks, and where it's possible to implant them in a human to enhance their intelligence (and allow them collaborate and share emotions even more easily than ideas). (More behind cut: Short version, I quite liked this, it has flaws but I think it went undeservedly under-the-radar)
They're studied only under the strictest conditions to avoid their spread, but part of the research involves forcing an evolutionary process on the LOVs to make them more effective... but evolution, even forced evolution, doesn't always follow predictable paths. Even more dangerous, a few people involved in the project have already decided to implant LOVs in themselves. When they're discovered, it begins a series of events that lead to the LOVs escaping containment and crashing in an area of Vietnam... where those who want to protect them as intelligent, although different, life forms and those who want to destroy them reach an uneasy standoff... all while the LOVs continue to evolve.
I've been getting particularly into Nagata's work lately, and although I'm not sure this is the best one that I've read, it is quite possibly the most accessible for newer readers of SF. It's a lot simpler than The Bohr Maker or Deception Well, at least, but that doesn't mean it's simplistic. It explores question of the rights of intelligence and of humans to determine their own destiny, of the tendency of people to exploit, the role of emotions in intelligence, and of course, plenty of wonder-inducing concepts of AI and nanotechnology that seem very plausible. One of the most interesting things about the book is that the LOVs aren't the only potentially-sentient AI species in play... just like in the real world, we often converge towards big developments ideas from multiple directions at once. In fact, the interaction between these two elements lead to some of the most compelling bits of the story.
In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Nexus, which was written more than a decade later... both deal with intelligence-enhancing technologies that some people don't want to spread because of the potential chaos, and explore the questions of whether suppressing it does more damage than it's worth. Both even take place in similar parts of the world (Nexus takes place largely in Thailand, and LoV, although one of the character starts there, it largely takes place in nearby Vietnam).
As far as flaws... I do feel some of the characters weren't quite as fleshed out as I'd like... they're not exactly two-dimensional, but it felt like there was a little something lacking, like they needed a little more grounding before we saw how the LOVs were affecting them. It wasn't bad enough that it seriously hampered my enjoyment of the book, but it might be what separated a good book from a great book.
I was thinking I was going to give this three stars.. but it really kicked into high gear with the ending, which leads me to my second problem... this is a book that ends just when it starts getting its coolest. I wanted more. Which is possibly the best flaw you could ask for in a book. It's not even a cliffhanger ending... it could be read as a satisfying, although somewhat open-ending conclusion that implies the unresolved issues will work themselves out with a little effort, but there's absolutely room to tell those stories.
I think the book, unfortunately, flew under the radar when it released, so maybe a sequel was planned and sales didn't justify it. But in the Internet Age, an unjustly overlooked book can always get new attention and hopefully this review will be some small contribution towards that (and Nagata herself was recently nominated for a Nebula for her novel The Red: First Light, so maybe that'll shine a spotlight on her earlier work). The good news is that even in the more than a decade since the book's release, nothing about it feels particularly dated. It still could exist comfortably in our near future, and I suspect it still could for several years to come. So a theoretical sequel therefore wouldn't be stuck in that weird limbo where you're torn between updating the world and keeping true to the original. I'll keep my fingers crossed the world decides to give the book another look and Nagata decides she might want to return.
Finished: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross (reread)
Freya is a human-form android... more specifically, a sexbot, designed to provide companionship to humanity. One problem? Humanity has been extinct for nearly a century before she woke up. For the sixty years since then, she and her siblings (constructed from the same model) have done what they can in a solar system where robots have replaced their masters. In fact, they've done much better in some ways, because they can survive much better on places like Mercury or Venus than any human can, and really, space travel was made for robots. But some robots can turn out to be as cruel and twisted as any human, particularly the richest robots who've decided that owning other robots makes good business sense. When Freya offends one of the aristocrats, she has to flee her most recent home on the planet Mercury, and in doing so gets drawn into a conspiracy that may have consequences for all robotkind.
This novel was created as something of a homage to Robert A. Heinlein, specifically to his novel Friday, for the 100th anniversary of his birth, although it also heavily relies on Asimov's work, his famous Three Laws of Robotics, and there are numerous subtler references to other science fiction. But it's also it's own thing, and quite a good thing too. I liked it more on the reread than I did the first time around.
One things should be stated up front... there is a lot of sex in this book. The main character is, after all, a sexbot, and just because there are no humans, doesn't mean there's no sex. There's a lot of it (and reference to sexual matters as well), some of it rather kinky, and often it feels somewhat gratuitous (I think that's also part of being a homage to Heinlein, who got pretty smutty especially in his later years). This may turn some people off (or some people on), but I think it works for the book.
The main story is a complicated spy game involving shared memories, interplanetary travel, and different robot factions struggling for domination over the others. But like vN, which I read for the first time recently, the book's real message seems to be about the slavery and horror inherent in "controls" over artificial life that seem like good ideas, like the Three Laws, and, by extension, the injustice of slavery in general. vN does this directly, making the whole book about the struggle for rights, while Saturn's Children buries the message in a spy tale. While both are good, I think this is more successful at it, it's a more mature approach (albeit wrapped up in a lot of juvenile sex references).
The spy story is, however, quite complicated, and even on the reread, there are points that I still can't entirely make heads or tails of, although on the whole it's clearer and even not understanding bunches, like the first time I read it, it was still a load of fun, and I enjoyed little in-jokes or twisted takes on other SF ideas, or poking fun at cherished notions of humans traveling to the stars (because even for robots, it's no picnic, and they can shut themselves down for years at a time).
Worth reading if you're a Heinlein fan, a Stross fan, like robots, or a good adventure, as long as you don't mind a lot of sex. I'll probably be picking up Neptune's Brood soon enough, which is set in the same universe.
Finished: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks (reread)
Gurgeh lives in the Culture, a galaxy-spanning utopia, where lives are long and anybody can do almost anything they want, and almost nobody suffers from anything more than occasional boredom. He is a skilled and well-respected game expert. But the whole universe is not the Culture, and Gurgeh is manipulated into helping the Culture's "Special Circumstances" branch in dealing with another culture they've encountered, a violent and imperial group, with a curious twist. Their society is based around a complex game called Azad, to the extent that success in the game determines your posts in government, and whoever wins the regular Azad tournament becomes Emperor. (more behind the cut, and obviously if it's a reread I like it)
Special Circumstances wants Gurgeh to go and play Azad on behalf of the Culture. It's symbolic, even if he wins, he'll get no post, and they don't expect to win. They just want to see how he does. And so does he, as Azad may be the most interesting game he's ever played.
With the sad death of author Iain M. Banks, I wanted to revisit his most famous universe. Although Consider Phlebas is the first book he read set in the Culture Universe, most of the books are independent of each other, and The Player of Games may be one of the best starting points.
By all rights this is a book that should not work. It's about a guy from a perfect society going to another and observing it with a mixture of horror and attraction. It's about a guy who's only goal is to play a game and win. It's not even a particularly likeable guy, nor is anybody else in the book. And while the main character's in occasional danger, he's largely in the superior position in every instance, protected by technology far and above those of his hosts.
Yet somehow it does work. Banks certainly does have a gift for imaginative details... often he'll toss off details of a small game that captures your attention enough that you wish it was real and that you could play it, or some bizarre planetary dynamic or cultural twist, or even torture technique, where even though it's a little out there and unbelievable, somehow you buy into it as just part of the strangeness you might encounter in a vast and varied universe. And there is certainly some depth in the story, using the classic trick of commenting on the excesses and unfairness of our own world by portraying them, and worse than them, on aliens (but in a way where it would not be surprising to find ourselves as a species doing many of the same things).
Largely, though I think it succeeds on the strength of the Culture itself, the desire for it actually to exist, even though most of the story doesn't take place there (it's a hard thing to set one there, considering it's a utopia, most of the books take place around their interactions with other worlds), it's always looming in the background, not as a threat but a promise of what we could achieve, a universe full of healthy people in control of their own lives, of intelligent spaceships with charmingly funny names (that are also in control of their own lives), a world where cooperation is a better strategy than competition, where even death is usually a matter of choice because most accidents can be repaired. And that's a universe I want to visit a lot, and I'm sad that Banks is no longer around to bring us there, at least with new stories.
But rereading his old books can be good enough.
Finished: The Troop, by Nick Cutter
A small troop of Boy Scouts and their leader are stranded on a deserted Canadian island, when a sick man with an unnatural hunger comes seeking help. But what he's got is infectious and will change what is supposed to be a wilderness adventure into a real struggle for survival against the natural world, and each other.
I received this book for free as part of a Goodreads giveaway, in exchange for an honest review. And that review is that I liked it. But I wanted to like it more.
The book is regularly described as Lord of the Flies meets 28 Days Later. As a description of plot, that's a decent label. As a description of quality? Well, it falls a little short.
But let's start with the good. Once it gets going, it does move with a high-energy pace, a good horror movie pace, neither dragging out nor disposing of people too quickly to care. The language is generally pretty good (although those with sensitive dispositions should be aware there's a fair bit of cursing and graphic violence, but that's to be expected in a horror book), not just for providing evocative descriptions of the gory scenes but also setting the stage and giving a good feel just of the beauty (and underlying threat) of the wilderness.
It does get genuinely scary at times, and gross and disturbing, although the reviews that promised I might "lose my lunch" at parts were a bit overambitious (but maybe that's just me). Though another warning that should be pointed out, the most disturbing and repellant scenes do not directly involve the horror MacGuffin, but rather everyday abuse of animals... and those who have particular trouble with graphic scenes like that should probably avoid the book. They're powerful, but gratuitous... all of them, perhaps save one scene, cheap and unnecessary.
The main narrative is broken up by news clippings and transcripts and evidence from investigations after the fact, which occasionally I enjoyed, but mostly I'd have preferred to see the information relayed to the reader in other ways, or maybe even not at all, especially because around midway through they spoil how many, if any, survive the island. We don't really need a detailed explanation for what caused the illness to be, seeing the effects and rampant speculation are good enough. Same for revealing character motivations, I feel like a better approach would be to get to know the boys through their actions. The strategy does give the book one of its more poignant moments towards the end, with a Facebook message, though.
Which brings us to my biggest problem with the book, the boys. While it's too simplistic to say they don't get any depth, they all strongly fit into archetypes, and those archetypes are hammered home early on to the point that they're almost annoying stereotypes. One particular character is the worst, the moment he's introduced you can tell he's the group psycho, described in ways so cliche the only mystery about it was whether the author would go THAT obvious with what was going to happen with him, because there had to be some surprise, right? But no, largely, there were no surprises, who you met in the first few pages were who you got, they may have surprised with their resourcefulness or lack of it but their natures were neatly fit into boxes and it was often easy to guess things (including how they end up) from that. They didn't feel real, they felt custom designed to fill the roles the plot required. Even the backstories given felt strangely artificial because of this. I also don't think the author quite nailed the mix of childishness and adult knowledge appropriate for their age, they all read a little too young to me (but then, it's been a long time since I was that age or hung around boys that age, maybe the media's giving me a false impression).
But maybe, in a horror novel, the characters aren't as important as in other stories... after all, many of them are going to wind up dead, anyway. Still, it distanced me a little, and I couldn't help but think that the book would be better if more time was spent on this.
And again, I did like it... the plot's pretty good (although I think one boy's fate was a little too unbelievably over the top), and the book gets intense at time, and the "horror element" is genuinely creepy. I just wanted to like it more. There was a little something missing. Not enough that it should stop people from reading it, but in a field saturated with books that tread on this territory (the 'not quite zombies but a plague that has similarity with them' territory), it doesn't stand far enough from the pack in terms of quality, and I suspect in a few years it'll wind up being considered just "yet another plague book."
Finished: Among Others, by Jo Walton
This is the story of a 15-year-old girl from Wales in 1979 who, after a series of events including the death of her twin sister, is sent to boarding school by the father she only recently met. There, she struggles with her wounded leg and making friends in a system she doesn't understand or care for, and indulging her love for science fiction books. Also, she sees faeries, does magic, and her mother's possibly an actual witch.
This is one of those books where you could almost read it as a completely conventional novel. It's written as a series of diary entries, and so you could easily imagine the story as being about a girl who's slightly delusional, until the end (and even then, it doesn't take that much to hold on to that alternative hypothesis). I'd heard that it was one of these types of books before I read it, and, to be honest, the only reason I did was that I try to read every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and this one won both. I didn't expect to like it very much, not because I think these sorts of things are bad, but just because they're 'not my thing.'
It's still not my thing, but I did like it. Maybe in part because it's a love-letter to reading... SF in particular, but also the general enrichment that can come with a life loving books. Certain passages seethe with enthusiasm. Sometimes I was more interested in seeing what she would read next, and think about it, rather than what was going on in the story, but even the rest is relentlessly charming. That's about the word that came to mind the most, the book is charming.
A few flaws do somewhat detract though, at least for my personal tastes. It's very much a 'slice-of-life' type story. Characters get introduced and you think it's going somewhere but then just fade from the plot... some big dramatic events happen but just swept under the rug and not acknowledged by any characters except for the single diary entry. And although there is a 'final confrontation' of sorts, it feels tacked on, like the author realized that she needed to write an ending and so pushed some kind of resolution into the final few diary entries. As a story, it doesn't really satisfy... as a peek into one particular character and a vehicle for nostalgia, it does, but I like a little more in the way of plot.
I can see how this book won the Nebula, which often goes for books that are a little off-the-beaten-path, but I'm frankly a little surprised it won the Hugo, the award that requires more mass-popularity (particularly with the competition, which included a couple popular ongoing series and fan-favorite authors). I guess a well-written slice-of-life story of a unrepentant SF fan finding her way in the world really plays to the base.
But I liked it more than I expected to, and I might not have read it otherwise, so I can't really complain.
Finished: Great North Road, by Peter F. Hamilton
The North family largely consists of exact clones of their progenitor, and many are filthy rich thanks to their domination of the bio oil markets. When one of them is found murdered, the investigation is bound to get a lot of attention... but when it turns out they've been murdered by the same means as another prominent North was, decades earlier, along with all of his household, everybody starts freaking out. Because the lone survivor of the first murder, the one who was charged and convicted for the crime, insisted that an alien monster was responsible. No one believed her, until the monster apparently has come back. Now, while local police do their best to solve the murder their way, an expedition is launched to the planet of St. Libra, in search of a potential alien threat to humanity.
Peter F. Hamilton falls into the category of authors that I like JUST enough that I keep buying their books. I don't usually love them, but they're entertaining enough to keep them going. One of his major flaws is that a lot of his characters seem flat and unmemorable (even the ones I dislike, which is a large number of them, I barely remember). Another is that there's too many of them, and they take up too much time. These books are LONG. And because they're not as engaging as I'd like, it takes me even longer to read them, because I'm constantly wondering if it's yet another new viewpoint character, or just an older one that I forgot, or my mind just plain wanders. This book is no exception, and for most of it I found reading it to be a slog. Too many characters with more focus than they needed, too many times where characters were getting updates about what other characters were doing (that we just read about), and few of them felt authentic. There was one point where a character's romantic interest happened so suddenly that I was certain it was meant to be introducing some mind-control plot, but no, turns out it was meant to be played straight.
It's not all bad... the basic plot, were it condensed a fair bit, was pretty interesting, and, towards the last 100 pages or so, it does come together in an exciting way. The conclusion is even reasonably, although not completely, satisfying. And, throughout the text, there are little chunks of extremely cool new technologies or alien biology facts (it's a shame that Hamilton's worlds are often more developed than his characters). Although I was a little disappointed that one of the most interesting aspects of the book is relegated to almost set dressing, a looming threat that everybody's worried about but that doesn't really play a direct role in the story. I was more curious about that far more than the main alien monster (although it also had its moments).
I was planning on giving it a two, but the ending kicking in was just enough to bump it up to three. Like I said, Hamilton's an author I like JUST enough to keep me buying his books, and he did the same thing here.
Finished: War & Space: Recent Combat, (short story collection)
A collection of stories all focusing on, surprisingly enough, war, and space. Usually both in the same story, although a few take place entirely on Earth and deal with those left behind, or those on the fringes of war, or the aftermath. Still, it's safe to say that this is a fairly well-titled analogy (the subtitle "Recent Combat" is a little iffy, considering it all takes place in the future, but why quibble?).
As an anthology, it's, by nature, a mixed bag. Some stories will grab you, some will leave you cold, and two different people reading it will often disagree on which stories fall into which category. For my tastes, my favorite was *The Long Chase* by Geoffrey A Landis, but most were solid... a few would have been great if not for some weird decision made for stylistic reasons that makes no logical sense at all (like technology that stores consciousness and allows severed body parts to be reanimated with the 'soul' of the person who mostly died, but apparently can't be connected into an artificial voice box and let them speak). But those moments were few, my main complaint was simply that some stories didn't interest me as much, but even they usually had some good idea or image I could smile over for a moment.
Single-theme anthologies can sometimes run the risk of burnout, where you lose interest in the theme and thus don't enjoy it as thoroughly as you would an anthology that takes you all sorts of different directions... and this is no exception, but it's a reasonably mild problem here.
Started: The Living Dead 2 (short story collection)
Started: Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
There was my Birthday last month. Thanks to those of you who gave well-wishes or gifts if I haven't responded to you personally (or hey, even if I had, thanks again!). Birthdays don't really mean much to me anymore, but it's still nice to hear.
And Easter (which includes my half-birthday, Good Friday) wasn't bad, turned out to be a lot of Greek Food. Weather's warmed up, which I guess is good, although I prefer ultra cold to the heat of summer, which is coming. Maybe this year I'll try to get a window air conditioner... I can afford it, my main worry is whether my room (or apartment as a whole)'s electrical system can handle it. It's already a bit iffy. But maybe I'll give it a try.
There was some news I was going to write on the 'social interactions with other human beings' front, but it sort of took an unexpected turn, but I guess it's still sort of worth mentioning and who knows, might still work out okay:
I am/was developing a work friend. I'm friendly enough with most of the people there, but it's on a very superficial level, but there's a guy that's there one of the days I work who's about my age, so we have a lot of the same cultural milestones: remembering the same old TV shows, etc, and, as it turns out, a number of the same tastes, both past and present, in media, and it's been fun talking to him on those days about stupid stuff like our crackmayor or the finer points of zombie survival, enough that I actually looked forward to showing up to work. He's a bit more of the 'party dude' type where a lot of his stories involve getting drunk, whereas I'm a more sedate homebody type, so it might not grow beyond just having enjoyable, easygoing, conversations at work, but it's more than I've had in a long time outside of family.
And, apparently, he had to go to the hospital last week. I don't know what the issue is, exactly, apparently he's okay but one of the bosses at work mentioned it's some kind of ongoing issue and they might have to switch his hours, in a way where I'd probably not encounter him again. Maybe that's only temporary, and regardless of where his schedule winds up being, I hope he recovers.
I also had a few weeks where one of the cashiers at one of the grocery stores I went to seemed to take a spontaneous interest me and asking me random questions, but that petered out, so I was probably imagining that.
Anyway... do I really want to walk about TV or movies? Well, movies I think are definitely out, I don't think I've even watched any since last time. Oh, I did watch the Veronica Mars movie of course, which I liked, but I don't have a lot to say for it except that it felt like the pilot to a new series and I kind of wish it was.
TV? Walking Dead, GoT are both good. Arrow's also doing well and SHIELD finally has started kicking into high gear. The 100 is a little cheesy, and definitely teen-y, but I kind of like it so far... they have at least taken some daring moves that I didn't see coming, where I was too used to expecting the safe choice. Beyond that, there's not much going on... networks will be announcing their new shows for next year soon (some already have announced potentials, but I haven't spotted anything really exciting yet).
Online TV, I've been enjoying Tabletop with Wil Wheaton lately (it's like pretending I have friends!), and apparently they're going the crowdfunding route for season 3. I donated, because I'm a fan of the show and I'm a fan of the "crowdfund and give away free after" business model. It's already pretty well successful, but I'm rooting for them to hit $1 million for the RPG spinoff campaign show they've been talking about it. If anyone here's interested, the fundraising page is here (and Tabletop itself can be watched on Geek and Sundry's Youtube channel).
So let's finish this up with the usual roundup of books:
Finished: Coyote, by Allen Steele
Coyote tells the story of a small group of colonists who land on a distant, livable planet (actually a moon of a gas giant), and try to make a go of starting a new life there.
This book kind of surprised me in a couple of different ways. One, I expected it to be a novel, and, in some ways it was, but mostly, it's a collection of short stories linked in time. This has some good effects and some bad ones. Of the good, it was refreshing to get slightly different perspectives from time to time, and some of them were engaging, others not so much... which leads to one of the other surprise, it turned out to be a much better book than I was expecting from the first section, where dissidents of an oppressive future US government engineer a plot to steal the colonization mission. It was okay, but I wasn't involved, and mid-way through I had a strong feeling that, even though Coyote is the first book in a series, I was only going to be going as far as this one. But then suddenly we moved into another section, possibly the best in the book, involving a lone crew member revived from cryonic suspension early in the flight, and after that everything changed for the better, enough that I'm thinking I'll probably move on to atl east one more volume. The problem with the short story approach is that it doesn't entirely satisfy as a whole... there were times where tense situations were set up, and then the conflicts I was expecting to build for the rest of the book simple... disappear, say with a sudden death or change of heart or unexpected development. You're left wondering what the point of including that element in the first place was, because it didn't seem to mean anything. Overall the effect is that the story meanders a little, and when it picks up again, it's mostly just to set up the next book.
The book does a good job at exploring the alien biology of the world, mostly in little details, but they're pleasant little details that give you a sense of being there. Less successful, with the world itself... this is a planet farther from the sun than our own, in orbit around a gas giant, and except for a few passages, this didn't shine through... it just felt like they were on an Earth-like world with an Earth-like sky and day/night cycle. There's a beautiful alien skyscape in on the cover... I never got that feel from the text. But it's a minor problem, I guess.
There is one last surprise that should be noted... I thought the book was much older than it was. It was only in the end that they mentioned a term I'd come to associate with somewhat newer SF that got me thinking, and then I checked the referenced at the end and realized that, while I thought the book was written in the early 1990s, it was actually written in the early 21st century. It just feels old fashioned. I'd have guessed it was even earlier if not for two things: that the politics didn't get bogged down with references to the soviet union, and that the characterization was slightly more in-depth and in-focus than I would expect from a novel (at least a novel of this particular type: colonization stories) of earlier decades. My guess is that if you like those kinds of stories of the past, this might well appeal to you.
I put the book at three stars, but it's on the high end of three stars. If it told a more satisfying overall story, it might have made four
Finished: Limit of Vision, by Linda Nagata
Limit of Vision imagines a game-changing invention of artificial life forms, called LOVs because they're small enough that they exist at the Limit of Vision, tiny sparks of light that organize into neural networks, and where it's possible to implant them in a human to enhance their intelligence (and allow them collaborate and share emotions even more easily than ideas). (More behind cut: Short version, I quite liked this, it has flaws but I think it went undeservedly under-the-radar)
They're studied only under the strictest conditions to avoid their spread, but part of the research involves forcing an evolutionary process on the LOVs to make them more effective... but evolution, even forced evolution, doesn't always follow predictable paths. Even more dangerous, a few people involved in the project have already decided to implant LOVs in themselves. When they're discovered, it begins a series of events that lead to the LOVs escaping containment and crashing in an area of Vietnam... where those who want to protect them as intelligent, although different, life forms and those who want to destroy them reach an uneasy standoff... all while the LOVs continue to evolve.
I've been getting particularly into Nagata's work lately, and although I'm not sure this is the best one that I've read, it is quite possibly the most accessible for newer readers of SF. It's a lot simpler than The Bohr Maker or Deception Well, at least, but that doesn't mean it's simplistic. It explores question of the rights of intelligence and of humans to determine their own destiny, of the tendency of people to exploit, the role of emotions in intelligence, and of course, plenty of wonder-inducing concepts of AI and nanotechnology that seem very plausible. One of the most interesting things about the book is that the LOVs aren't the only potentially-sentient AI species in play... just like in the real world, we often converge towards big developments ideas from multiple directions at once. In fact, the interaction between these two elements lead to some of the most compelling bits of the story.
In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Nexus, which was written more than a decade later... both deal with intelligence-enhancing technologies that some people don't want to spread because of the potential chaos, and explore the questions of whether suppressing it does more damage than it's worth. Both even take place in similar parts of the world (Nexus takes place largely in Thailand, and LoV, although one of the character starts there, it largely takes place in nearby Vietnam).
As far as flaws... I do feel some of the characters weren't quite as fleshed out as I'd like... they're not exactly two-dimensional, but it felt like there was a little something lacking, like they needed a little more grounding before we saw how the LOVs were affecting them. It wasn't bad enough that it seriously hampered my enjoyment of the book, but it might be what separated a good book from a great book.
I was thinking I was going to give this three stars.. but it really kicked into high gear with the ending, which leads me to my second problem... this is a book that ends just when it starts getting its coolest. I wanted more. Which is possibly the best flaw you could ask for in a book. It's not even a cliffhanger ending... it could be read as a satisfying, although somewhat open-ending conclusion that implies the unresolved issues will work themselves out with a little effort, but there's absolutely room to tell those stories.
I think the book, unfortunately, flew under the radar when it released, so maybe a sequel was planned and sales didn't justify it. But in the Internet Age, an unjustly overlooked book can always get new attention and hopefully this review will be some small contribution towards that (and Nagata herself was recently nominated for a Nebula for her novel The Red: First Light, so maybe that'll shine a spotlight on her earlier work). The good news is that even in the more than a decade since the book's release, nothing about it feels particularly dated. It still could exist comfortably in our near future, and I suspect it still could for several years to come. So a theoretical sequel therefore wouldn't be stuck in that weird limbo where you're torn between updating the world and keeping true to the original. I'll keep my fingers crossed the world decides to give the book another look and Nagata decides she might want to return.
Finished: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross (reread)
Freya is a human-form android... more specifically, a sexbot, designed to provide companionship to humanity. One problem? Humanity has been extinct for nearly a century before she woke up. For the sixty years since then, she and her siblings (constructed from the same model) have done what they can in a solar system where robots have replaced their masters. In fact, they've done much better in some ways, because they can survive much better on places like Mercury or Venus than any human can, and really, space travel was made for robots. But some robots can turn out to be as cruel and twisted as any human, particularly the richest robots who've decided that owning other robots makes good business sense. When Freya offends one of the aristocrats, she has to flee her most recent home on the planet Mercury, and in doing so gets drawn into a conspiracy that may have consequences for all robotkind.
This novel was created as something of a homage to Robert A. Heinlein, specifically to his novel Friday, for the 100th anniversary of his birth, although it also heavily relies on Asimov's work, his famous Three Laws of Robotics, and there are numerous subtler references to other science fiction. But it's also it's own thing, and quite a good thing too. I liked it more on the reread than I did the first time around.
One things should be stated up front... there is a lot of sex in this book. The main character is, after all, a sexbot, and just because there are no humans, doesn't mean there's no sex. There's a lot of it (and reference to sexual matters as well), some of it rather kinky, and often it feels somewhat gratuitous (I think that's also part of being a homage to Heinlein, who got pretty smutty especially in his later years). This may turn some people off (or some people on), but I think it works for the book.
The main story is a complicated spy game involving shared memories, interplanetary travel, and different robot factions struggling for domination over the others. But like vN, which I read for the first time recently, the book's real message seems to be about the slavery and horror inherent in "controls" over artificial life that seem like good ideas, like the Three Laws, and, by extension, the injustice of slavery in general. vN does this directly, making the whole book about the struggle for rights, while Saturn's Children buries the message in a spy tale. While both are good, I think this is more successful at it, it's a more mature approach (albeit wrapped up in a lot of juvenile sex references).
The spy story is, however, quite complicated, and even on the reread, there are points that I still can't entirely make heads or tails of, although on the whole it's clearer and even not understanding bunches, like the first time I read it, it was still a load of fun, and I enjoyed little in-jokes or twisted takes on other SF ideas, or poking fun at cherished notions of humans traveling to the stars (because even for robots, it's no picnic, and they can shut themselves down for years at a time).
Worth reading if you're a Heinlein fan, a Stross fan, like robots, or a good adventure, as long as you don't mind a lot of sex. I'll probably be picking up Neptune's Brood soon enough, which is set in the same universe.
Finished: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks (reread)
Gurgeh lives in the Culture, a galaxy-spanning utopia, where lives are long and anybody can do almost anything they want, and almost nobody suffers from anything more than occasional boredom. He is a skilled and well-respected game expert. But the whole universe is not the Culture, and Gurgeh is manipulated into helping the Culture's "Special Circumstances" branch in dealing with another culture they've encountered, a violent and imperial group, with a curious twist. Their society is based around a complex game called Azad, to the extent that success in the game determines your posts in government, and whoever wins the regular Azad tournament becomes Emperor. (more behind the cut, and obviously if it's a reread I like it)
Special Circumstances wants Gurgeh to go and play Azad on behalf of the Culture. It's symbolic, even if he wins, he'll get no post, and they don't expect to win. They just want to see how he does. And so does he, as Azad may be the most interesting game he's ever played.
With the sad death of author Iain M. Banks, I wanted to revisit his most famous universe. Although Consider Phlebas is the first book he read set in the Culture Universe, most of the books are independent of each other, and The Player of Games may be one of the best starting points.
By all rights this is a book that should not work. It's about a guy from a perfect society going to another and observing it with a mixture of horror and attraction. It's about a guy who's only goal is to play a game and win. It's not even a particularly likeable guy, nor is anybody else in the book. And while the main character's in occasional danger, he's largely in the superior position in every instance, protected by technology far and above those of his hosts.
Yet somehow it does work. Banks certainly does have a gift for imaginative details... often he'll toss off details of a small game that captures your attention enough that you wish it was real and that you could play it, or some bizarre planetary dynamic or cultural twist, or even torture technique, where even though it's a little out there and unbelievable, somehow you buy into it as just part of the strangeness you might encounter in a vast and varied universe. And there is certainly some depth in the story, using the classic trick of commenting on the excesses and unfairness of our own world by portraying them, and worse than them, on aliens (but in a way where it would not be surprising to find ourselves as a species doing many of the same things).
Largely, though I think it succeeds on the strength of the Culture itself, the desire for it actually to exist, even though most of the story doesn't take place there (it's a hard thing to set one there, considering it's a utopia, most of the books take place around their interactions with other worlds), it's always looming in the background, not as a threat but a promise of what we could achieve, a universe full of healthy people in control of their own lives, of intelligent spaceships with charmingly funny names (that are also in control of their own lives), a world where cooperation is a better strategy than competition, where even death is usually a matter of choice because most accidents can be repaired. And that's a universe I want to visit a lot, and I'm sad that Banks is no longer around to bring us there, at least with new stories.
But rereading his old books can be good enough.
Finished: The Troop, by Nick Cutter
A small troop of Boy Scouts and their leader are stranded on a deserted Canadian island, when a sick man with an unnatural hunger comes seeking help. But what he's got is infectious and will change what is supposed to be a wilderness adventure into a real struggle for survival against the natural world, and each other.
I received this book for free as part of a Goodreads giveaway, in exchange for an honest review. And that review is that I liked it. But I wanted to like it more.
The book is regularly described as Lord of the Flies meets 28 Days Later. As a description of plot, that's a decent label. As a description of quality? Well, it falls a little short.
But let's start with the good. Once it gets going, it does move with a high-energy pace, a good horror movie pace, neither dragging out nor disposing of people too quickly to care. The language is generally pretty good (although those with sensitive dispositions should be aware there's a fair bit of cursing and graphic violence, but that's to be expected in a horror book), not just for providing evocative descriptions of the gory scenes but also setting the stage and giving a good feel just of the beauty (and underlying threat) of the wilderness.
It does get genuinely scary at times, and gross and disturbing, although the reviews that promised I might "lose my lunch" at parts were a bit overambitious (but maybe that's just me). Though another warning that should be pointed out, the most disturbing and repellant scenes do not directly involve the horror MacGuffin, but rather everyday abuse of animals... and those who have particular trouble with graphic scenes like that should probably avoid the book. They're powerful, but gratuitous... all of them, perhaps save one scene, cheap and unnecessary.
The main narrative is broken up by news clippings and transcripts and evidence from investigations after the fact, which occasionally I enjoyed, but mostly I'd have preferred to see the information relayed to the reader in other ways, or maybe even not at all, especially because around midway through they spoil how many, if any, survive the island. We don't really need a detailed explanation for what caused the illness to be, seeing the effects and rampant speculation are good enough. Same for revealing character motivations, I feel like a better approach would be to get to know the boys through their actions. The strategy does give the book one of its more poignant moments towards the end, with a Facebook message, though.
Which brings us to my biggest problem with the book, the boys. While it's too simplistic to say they don't get any depth, they all strongly fit into archetypes, and those archetypes are hammered home early on to the point that they're almost annoying stereotypes. One particular character is the worst, the moment he's introduced you can tell he's the group psycho, described in ways so cliche the only mystery about it was whether the author would go THAT obvious with what was going to happen with him, because there had to be some surprise, right? But no, largely, there were no surprises, who you met in the first few pages were who you got, they may have surprised with their resourcefulness or lack of it but their natures were neatly fit into boxes and it was often easy to guess things (including how they end up) from that. They didn't feel real, they felt custom designed to fill the roles the plot required. Even the backstories given felt strangely artificial because of this. I also don't think the author quite nailed the mix of childishness and adult knowledge appropriate for their age, they all read a little too young to me (but then, it's been a long time since I was that age or hung around boys that age, maybe the media's giving me a false impression).
But maybe, in a horror novel, the characters aren't as important as in other stories... after all, many of them are going to wind up dead, anyway. Still, it distanced me a little, and I couldn't help but think that the book would be better if more time was spent on this.
And again, I did like it... the plot's pretty good (although I think one boy's fate was a little too unbelievably over the top), and the book gets intense at time, and the "horror element" is genuinely creepy. I just wanted to like it more. There was a little something missing. Not enough that it should stop people from reading it, but in a field saturated with books that tread on this territory (the 'not quite zombies but a plague that has similarity with them' territory), it doesn't stand far enough from the pack in terms of quality, and I suspect in a few years it'll wind up being considered just "yet another plague book."
Finished: Among Others, by Jo Walton
This is the story of a 15-year-old girl from Wales in 1979 who, after a series of events including the death of her twin sister, is sent to boarding school by the father she only recently met. There, she struggles with her wounded leg and making friends in a system she doesn't understand or care for, and indulging her love for science fiction books. Also, she sees faeries, does magic, and her mother's possibly an actual witch.
This is one of those books where you could almost read it as a completely conventional novel. It's written as a series of diary entries, and so you could easily imagine the story as being about a girl who's slightly delusional, until the end (and even then, it doesn't take that much to hold on to that alternative hypothesis). I'd heard that it was one of these types of books before I read it, and, to be honest, the only reason I did was that I try to read every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and this one won both. I didn't expect to like it very much, not because I think these sorts of things are bad, but just because they're 'not my thing.'
It's still not my thing, but I did like it. Maybe in part because it's a love-letter to reading... SF in particular, but also the general enrichment that can come with a life loving books. Certain passages seethe with enthusiasm. Sometimes I was more interested in seeing what she would read next, and think about it, rather than what was going on in the story, but even the rest is relentlessly charming. That's about the word that came to mind the most, the book is charming.
A few flaws do somewhat detract though, at least for my personal tastes. It's very much a 'slice-of-life' type story. Characters get introduced and you think it's going somewhere but then just fade from the plot... some big dramatic events happen but just swept under the rug and not acknowledged by any characters except for the single diary entry. And although there is a 'final confrontation' of sorts, it feels tacked on, like the author realized that she needed to write an ending and so pushed some kind of resolution into the final few diary entries. As a story, it doesn't really satisfy... as a peek into one particular character and a vehicle for nostalgia, it does, but I like a little more in the way of plot.
I can see how this book won the Nebula, which often goes for books that are a little off-the-beaten-path, but I'm frankly a little surprised it won the Hugo, the award that requires more mass-popularity (particularly with the competition, which included a couple popular ongoing series and fan-favorite authors). I guess a well-written slice-of-life story of a unrepentant SF fan finding her way in the world really plays to the base.
But I liked it more than I expected to, and I might not have read it otherwise, so I can't really complain.
Finished: Great North Road, by Peter F. Hamilton
The North family largely consists of exact clones of their progenitor, and many are filthy rich thanks to their domination of the bio oil markets. When one of them is found murdered, the investigation is bound to get a lot of attention... but when it turns out they've been murdered by the same means as another prominent North was, decades earlier, along with all of his household, everybody starts freaking out. Because the lone survivor of the first murder, the one who was charged and convicted for the crime, insisted that an alien monster was responsible. No one believed her, until the monster apparently has come back. Now, while local police do their best to solve the murder their way, an expedition is launched to the planet of St. Libra, in search of a potential alien threat to humanity.
Peter F. Hamilton falls into the category of authors that I like JUST enough that I keep buying their books. I don't usually love them, but they're entertaining enough to keep them going. One of his major flaws is that a lot of his characters seem flat and unmemorable (even the ones I dislike, which is a large number of them, I barely remember). Another is that there's too many of them, and they take up too much time. These books are LONG. And because they're not as engaging as I'd like, it takes me even longer to read them, because I'm constantly wondering if it's yet another new viewpoint character, or just an older one that I forgot, or my mind just plain wanders. This book is no exception, and for most of it I found reading it to be a slog. Too many characters with more focus than they needed, too many times where characters were getting updates about what other characters were doing (that we just read about), and few of them felt authentic. There was one point where a character's romantic interest happened so suddenly that I was certain it was meant to be introducing some mind-control plot, but no, turns out it was meant to be played straight.
It's not all bad... the basic plot, were it condensed a fair bit, was pretty interesting, and, towards the last 100 pages or so, it does come together in an exciting way. The conclusion is even reasonably, although not completely, satisfying. And, throughout the text, there are little chunks of extremely cool new technologies or alien biology facts (it's a shame that Hamilton's worlds are often more developed than his characters). Although I was a little disappointed that one of the most interesting aspects of the book is relegated to almost set dressing, a looming threat that everybody's worried about but that doesn't really play a direct role in the story. I was more curious about that far more than the main alien monster (although it also had its moments).
I was planning on giving it a two, but the ending kicking in was just enough to bump it up to three. Like I said, Hamilton's an author I like JUST enough to keep me buying his books, and he did the same thing here.
Finished: War & Space: Recent Combat, (short story collection)
A collection of stories all focusing on, surprisingly enough, war, and space. Usually both in the same story, although a few take place entirely on Earth and deal with those left behind, or those on the fringes of war, or the aftermath. Still, it's safe to say that this is a fairly well-titled analogy (the subtitle "Recent Combat" is a little iffy, considering it all takes place in the future, but why quibble?).
As an anthology, it's, by nature, a mixed bag. Some stories will grab you, some will leave you cold, and two different people reading it will often disagree on which stories fall into which category. For my tastes, my favorite was *The Long Chase* by Geoffrey A Landis, but most were solid... a few would have been great if not for some weird decision made for stylistic reasons that makes no logical sense at all (like technology that stores consciousness and allows severed body parts to be reanimated with the 'soul' of the person who mostly died, but apparently can't be connected into an artificial voice box and let them speak). But those moments were few, my main complaint was simply that some stories didn't interest me as much, but even they usually had some good idea or image I could smile over for a moment.
Single-theme anthologies can sometimes run the risk of burnout, where you lose interest in the theme and thus don't enjoy it as thoroughly as you would an anthology that takes you all sorts of different directions... and this is no exception, but it's a reasonably mild problem here.
Started: The Living Dead 2 (short story collection)
Started: Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
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Date: 2014-04-29 10:15 pm (UTC)