Feels like I'm out of touch...
Jun. 25th, 2014 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Well, I'm always somewhat out of touch, of course. I don't even know what's going on with my life anymore. Not that anything actually is, but, I just feel adrift disconnected from time and space.
Which also means lately I've completely fallen down on wishing people on my flist happy birthdays. If I missed yours, my apologies. And today, happy birthday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redlantern2051!
But if I don't have a world of my own, at least I have worlds of fiction, at least somewhat. Legend of Korra season 3 starts Friday... apparently some of the epsiodes were leaked and I guess they rushed it to air to minimize the damage. But I won't complain, I like the show (even if it's still nowhere as good as Avatar).
Game of Thrones is over for the year, and it was pretty good, although now there's kind of a gap until Doctor Who, which is in August, which might as well be the new fall season. I guess there's Defiance, which is okay (some of the old Farscape feel there)... Falling Skies, which was never great, so disappointed me with the S4 premiere that I'm almost done with the show. And I still haven't tried The Last Ship or Penny Dreadful, but I want to, eventually, just for curiosity's sake. And S2 of Orphan Black I also need to get to (along with S3 of Continuum... Canada's really kind of doing well with SFTV, let's keep that up).
I don't have anything to say about movies, because I haven't really watched any. I've been playing the Batman Arkham Games over the last few weeks... Asylum and City, not Origins, I don't have that one, but I got the Game of the Year version of the other two off a Humble Bundle some time back and I'm finally getting around to them. They're fun... Asylum had a story that made more sense, but City has better gameplay options (especially when you have the options to play Catwoman, Robin, and Nightwing, as I do... if only they included Cassandra Cain). I actually got 100% completion on Arkham Asylum, every achievement, and completed the main game on City and... well, I'm still having fun on some of the associated challenges... I doubt I'll go 100% for it, but I'm ejoying it. And it's been eating my brain a little.
Fan Expo's been adding to its guest list, and apparently we're getting Matt Smith (the Eleventh Doctor), and Nathan Fillion, who was here last year... a few Walking Dead people, Arrow from Arrow, Patrick Stewart, Stan Lee, Shatner... but right now, although I'm a little tempted with Matt Smith, there's really nobody that will draw me out from my hermit tendencies and make me make the trek to a con and the inevitable tiredness and depression that follow. So, right now, I may be skipping this year. We'll see. Maybe they'll add somebody extra cool, or maybe I'll just be in a mood to go.
And books. Speaking of, although I've largely avoided reddit, I have been drawn a little to one community that discusses print SF (it's r/printSF), which at least satisfies some small amount of my yearnings for social interaction. Anyway, book foo! As usual, most of my thoughts are cut and pasted from Goodreads. Since last time, I've...
Finished: Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
Steward's memories are fifteen years out of date, because, even though he had clone insurance when he died, he hadn't updated the memory backup ever since he got out of training as a mercenary soldier. In those intervening years, the brutal corporate wars in space that he was recruited for ended after long years of conflict when an alien race made contact with Earth. Steward himself, aside from making difficult decisions in those wars, also got divorced twice... oh, and was murdered on a distant planet. His clone is somewhat adrift, driven by a desire to get back into space and find answers, but there are bigger games going on.
Voice of the Whirlwind is in the cyberpunk subgenre, a world of hi-tech implants and gritty street-level characters, film noir mixed with SF, often dealing with themes of government breakdown and corporate domination that are surprisingly relevant today. But it is a book of it's time... granted, a very good book. I think if I read this while I was in my big cyberpunk phase, it would have blown my mind and quickly become a favorite. As it stands today, I'm a little weary of some of the tropes, and some of it feels a little dated (particularly some of the hacking scenes where it feels like the author expected computers to continue to resemble MS-DOS). That said, it is enjoyable, and I think the prose is largely well-written (if it perhaps repeats itself a little too much for my tastes), and it's filled with some really cool (and pretty novel for it's time) ideas.
If you like Cyberpunk, this is a book to try, if you haven't already. If not... well, it still might be worth a look.
Finished: Only Superhuman, by Christopher L. Bennett
Mankind has spread out through the solar system, living in habitats in the asteroid belt, among other exotic places. And such exotic places have lead to exotic people... while highly restricted on Earth, elsewhere, mods that alter the human form and potential are common. Some of them have banded together and deliberately taken on the trappings of superheroes, to defend others and help foster acceptance of their differences. One of these is Emerald Blaze, a new Troubleshooter with a checkered past... but after her mentor dies and the team decides to get more proactive, she's drawn in the middle of a conflict between multiple factions and must decide where her loyalties lie.
This book was described as a "hard SF superhero story", which seemed like an intriguing idea, particularly for one like me who likes both SF and comics. I picked the book up on a whim seeing it on sale in a bookstore that was closing, so how could I lose?
Unfortunately, the book doesn't really live up to the promise, or it does too well, depending on your point of view. The hard SF aspect is pretty good, actually. And the basics of the superhero plot, while not especially novel, is solid. Combining the two should be a natural fit.
The problem is, I think, he also threw in a bunch of the worst parts of superhero comics... the kind of things that, by fusing it with hard SF, I was hoping to avoid. The book's full of corny dialogue, groan-worthy puns, and, worst of all, it's treatment of women feels shallow and borders on exploitative male-fantasy. There's a lot of sex in the book... not hardcore in description, aside from breasts very little is described in details, but the ever-present nature of it and how it's treated feels... extremely juvenile. Comics are full of skin-tight costumes with poses focusing on the breasts or ass, and here... well, you could probably base a drinking game on the number of times somebody's breasts or ass were mentioned either as direct objects of appeal, or in a tongue-in-cheek way. It doesn't help that characters deliberately flash, play strip poker, or casually fall into bed with each other on only the slightest of pretexts.
I'm not a prude, and I'm not opposed to sex in my SF, I've read many books that handles even high levels of sex in a mature way that I don't think it's worthy of comment. Here, it just feels awkwardly jammed in because superheroes are supposed to be sexy. I think the author was trying to go for a more sexually open society in general, but it doesn't work, the characters just aren't in depth enough, so it comes off as more of the same kind of attitudes that are holding comics back, where the female characters are more important for their sex appeal. Even with the lead character being female doesn't compensate for this (particularly with how she spends much of the book duped and occasionally directly under the sexual powers of another). Other major female characters are similarly dupes or sexual temptress types.
I want to make it clear, I don't think the author's a misogynist or anything like that, it's super-easy to fall into the traps of characters like these just using the common superhero tropes we're familiar with, that the author may well have grown up with and, uncritically, wants to honor... and in particular, the plotline he built his story on tended to lend itself to some of this (although I think that if he'd toned down the sex everywhere else, where it needed to be for plot reasons, would have been more effective). I'm more just disappointed... he had an opportunity to avoid these problems and he missed it, and that makes the book far less than it could have been. And it's hard to take it seriously with all the juvenile sexual imagery.
Perhaps it's unfair, but when I read a book based on comic book themes, I have a tendency to try to picture it as a comic. And in this case, it's a comic that I'd dismiss as cheesecake bordering on softcore porn. And that's a shame, because there really are decent, relatively novel ideas in here, more from the superhero side of things rather than the hard SF thing, but still, they're there... they're just buried.
So on average I only thought this one was 'okay.' If the author ever decides to write more in this universe, I might give him another chance, because I think he has potential... I'd just hope he'd manage the fusion in a way that elevates the superhero genre, rather than drag the hard SF genre down.
Finished: The Living Dead 2 (short story collection)
Another collection of zombie tales, from a variety of authors.
I think I liked this one a little more than its immediate predecessor, The Living Dead, but it's a bit tricky to judge... because while I can't think of a standout story from this collection, I also didn't find any that were just a slog and I hated reading, except perhaps the last couple, but to be fair I think that was more about me coming down with a case of STAF (Single Theme Anthology Fatigue) rather than the stories themselves. In the previous volume, I experienced both extremes (although the ones I didn't care for at all outweighed the other one.
The thing I liked more about volume 2 is that virtually all of the stories were about the traditional zombie apocalypse model. There were variations on the theme, of course... some caused by an infection, some caused by supernatural, some where the zombies had intelligence or retained their personality, some historical, some that were based on a specific genre book with its own rules, but the basics of the zombie apocalypse genre: a spreading plague where if you get bitten, you become one, was pretty much constant (there are exceptions, but they're extremely rare). In the previous volume there were too many stories were the zombies were one-offs, a vengeful spirit seeking revenge or animated by a magic curse (or technology) but not spreading the illness. They were tales of the Living Dead, but not "zombie apocalypse" stories (which I distinguish from just plain zombie stories). Those other types of stories are all fine, but they're really not what I, personally, look for when I want to scratch this particular itch. So, on the whole, this volume satisfied me more, and similarly might satisfy those who are fans more of The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later than horror fans in general.
Finished: The Year's Best Sf 16 (short story collection)
A collection of some of the best stories of the year 2010, in the opinions of the editors, at least. As usual, sometimes they really hit on my tastes, and sometimes are wide off the mark.
Most of the stories were mildly enjoyable, but didn't leave much impression. In fact, now, reading back over the table of contents, a few I completely struggle to remember what they're about. That said, there were some bright spots... one that I thought I was going to dislike, based on the introduction and type of story it was, but actually enjoyed... Damien Broderick's "Under the Moons of Venus." I also enjoyed David Langford's "Graffiti in the Library of Babel" about aliens using a bizarre method to make first contact. My absolute favorite in the book, though, was Karl Schroeder's "To Hie From Far Cilenia," which was apparently his entry in the shared-world METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization set in the near urban future, and deals with using virtual worlds to form new societies and affect reality in weird ways... it's hard to describe, and honestly, I think I may need to read it a few times to grasp fully, but I loved the feeling of my mind stretching. It treads on a few of the ideas that make up a small portion of his novel Lady of Mazes which is one of my favorite SF novels ever.
On the downside... while I can't really call it bad, just very much not to my tastes, Paul Park's "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance", which closes out the anthology, completely left me cold and had me mentally saying "shut up and get to the point" several times. I probably would also have to read it several times to grasp what it's about... the difference, in this case, I would never WANT to read it again.
But overall, as these things usually go, it's a fairly pleasant anthology.
Finished: The Halcyon Drift, by Brian Stableford (reread)
I've reviewed this several times in this journal over the years, so I'll just cut the whole thing.
Despite being one of the best star pilots out there, Grainger's spaceship crashed on a barely liveable and unnamed world on the edge of one of the worst areas of distorted space, The Halcyon Drift. He managed to survive, though his engineer and partner died in the crash. Rescued, years later, he's left with two unwelcome burdens... one everyone knows about, a massive debt levied against him as a "salvage fee" by the corporation that answered his distress beacon, and one he keeps to himself. For his brain's been colonized by an alien mind-symbiont. It's not a threat... it just needs a place to live, and wants to help him. Of course, Grainger doesn't like to be helped, which is also why when he's offered a job that will clear out the monetary debt, he's leery, despite the opportunity to fly a new kind of ship, a fusion between human and alien science. He's even leerier when he learns the first mission is to return to the Halcyon Drift. But he has no choice.
This is a traditional space opera action story you'd find in the 70s, full of travel at many multiples of the speed of light, alien worlds, and action, but it's got a few twists. One is the book's attitude towards violence. The series is sometimes listed as one of the few examples of pacifistic science fiction... that's not quite true, but as science fiction goes, it's closer than most. The author was concerned what some of his more violence-filled adventure novels in the past might be saying about him, so he deliberately set out to write a book where the main character's attitude towards violence matched his own: that it was usually best avoided as it was lead to more trouble than it saved. As such, over the several books in the series, the main character rarely throws a punch much less fires a gun (though he does occasionally use one as a threat), and occasionally even warns those trying to kill him away from danger. And one of the minor conflicts of the book is resolved with the main character convincing somebody to help him. It's tricky to make a book like this work, but it does, largely because there's still a lot of action, it's just the action often involves flying a space ship through entertainingly adverse conditions, or trying to escape a situation that somebody ELSE thought would be better solved with violence.
The other thing that makes it stand out, for me, is the character of Grainger and his uneasy relationship with the voice in his head, that he calls only "the wind." Grainger himself, despite being a character who is very much prone to non-violence, is no Star Trek-style utopian "we come in peace, let our people be friends" cardboard man. He's subtly socially stunted with a strong tendency to keep people at a distance... and if they try to get too close, to push them away. He's sarcastic, acerbic, more than a little bitter, and occasionally an outright jerk to other people for no good reason. And I love him for it. Usually, when you have a character who has an alien presence in his head, the alien is the bad one. In this, although neither are evil (Grainger himself is even heroic all the while inventing reasons why he's not being heroic at all), the wind is the sociable, nice one, trying to push Grainger into connecting with people more, into not immediately assuming the worst of everybody, and pointing out the flaws in his thinking. It's a device that lets the author use an unreliable narrator and still call out the narrator on his own BS sometimes, and gives him a limited edge over the average person. But mostly, it's just fun to read them snipe back and forth and watch their relationship grow over the books.
I've reread this series many times over the years, all in one (in fact, although I initially bought them as single novels, I'm actually rereading them now as part of the collected edition,
Swan Songs: The Complete "Hooded Swan" Collection... so, obviously I liked them enough to buy them twice), and it's difficult to give a truly objective score for a first time reader, particularly for the single novel installments, because I know how the story and relationships evolve... the secondary characters might seem a little stiffer in the first novel, for example (part of this may be Grainger's own perspective minimizing their depth in order to keep them at a distance). It's also certainly dated a little (the author obviously doesn't anticipate how much computer development would change the society... computers are still large, unwieldy things). And I do think the first novel is weaker than some of the others. But I'm going to give it four stars anyway.
The series is under-read from what I've seen, but if you like 70s space opera, it's definitely worth a try. I'm moving directly to the second book, Rhapsody in Black.
Finished: Redshirts, by John Scalzi
Redshirts tells the story of a young ensign and his friends assigned to the flagship ship of a Star Trek-like galactic civilization. At first he's excited, but then comes to realize how often people die on away missions. Everybody except the Captain, Science Officer, Chief Engineer, and one particular lieutenant are at risk for sudden gory inexplicable death. And the rest of the ship's crew seems to know it, too, always contriving to be somewhere else when somebody's needed for a mission. And that's not the only weird thing going on, there's plenty that just doesn't make sense.
It's hard to talk much about the book without 'spoiling' it, if it's even a spoiler, because I knew it in advance and think even if I didn't, I would have figured it out in the first few pages. The book's about what happens when Star Trek-style redshirts figure out they're actually living in a badly written science fiction series, with all the tropes that go along with it.
Most of the cover blurbs make the book out to be an uproariously funny comedy book... and I guess I can see that this is mostly intended, and it's certainly a parody of Star Trek in various and sundry ways... but it never really made me laugh. On several occasions, I nodded and smiled a little while thinking, "I see what you did there." But Star Trek parodies are cheap ways to produce humor in geeks, and I've seen most of these types of jokes before, from sketch comedy shows to webcomics to Galaxy Quest (which, btw, is a far better and funnier film than this was a book)... so many times that the jokes have worn thin and I can't even manage a hearty chuckle. I see what they were going for. It was, indeed, mildly amusing. Didn't laugh out loud once.
But leaving that aside, the central premise was still relatively novel, and interesting even if only mildly funny... for about the first half of the book or so. Once they realize what's going on, and take deliberate actions to change things, the story goes off the rails for me.
Largely, because what they do makes zero sense. As in, none. There are fundamental plot holes that are just ridiculous and things happen for no other reason than that's the way the story needs to turn out. And I get that what Scalzi's trying to do with that is possibly a metajoke (particularly based on the last pre-Coda scene of the novel), but that doesn't make it okay. It doesn't matter if you're deliberately making me a horribly tasting dinner, I'm the one who has to taste it. I was hoping you were going to give me a fabulous meal that just looked like crap, or was based on crap ingredients. But no, you gave me a story that made no sense, and so I couldn't get invested in what the characters do to solve it... because anything they do, it works if the writers want it to. I would have much rather read a story that started with this premise and the characters reacted in ways that make sense rather than relying on plot holes or the hoariest genre cliche there is in a way that doesn't even make sense (I can even think of a way an author could have gone that would have been much more interesting and entertaining to me).
There's a similar problem (which can be defended with a similar argument that similarly is unsatisfying). I didn't really give a damn about the characters, they were practically two-dimensional. They have slight backstories, sketched in. They have roles in the plot. But you could replace almost any line of dialogue of one character with another and never notice. Their differences rarely mean anything. The one shining moment with the main characters might have been a female character realizing what her upcoming death was supposed to do for the plot, but it becomes a throwaway line and doesn't influence the story any more after that.
Even worse, the author shows that he is clearly capable of writing in-depth characters... because he writes an extended coda (or series of codas) delving into the lives of three very minor characters in the story after their part in the story, in which THEY actually feel like real people with real personalities and real problems. It feels completely tacked on to the story, but at least they feel real. Which just shows that the lame characters in the main story was due to either the author being lazy (or getting too lost in trying to be funny to do a good job on the characters) or deliberately preparing me a poorly tasting meal as some kind of ironic point, and then trying to give me these character studies to make up for it.
For the early part, I was thinking I'd give it three stars. Once they started taking deliberate actions, I was ready to lower it to two (despite my complaints, I still found it okay, just only especially memorable for the concept and the failure to live up to it). The codas, though they felt unnecessary, were at least of sufficient quality that they almost bring it up to safe three territory. I guess I'll leave it at three, barely. Still, I honestly can't see this as being worthy of the Hugo award or the praise it received. It's not awful. It's an okay book that might particularly resonate with SF fans in a pleasant way (although partly due to it pandering to them). It does some mildly clever things from time to time. It's not a particularly GOOD book. And if it really was the best SF novel of the year it came out, then it must have been a very poor year.
Finished: Rhapsody in Black, by Brian Stableford (reread)
Again, part of one of my favorite series, reviewed here several times, so, cut.
Star pilot Grainger (along with the mind-symbiot that uneasily shares his brain) are called back into service by their employer, Titus Charlot. Unlike their adventure in The Halcyon Drift, the piloting is easy... just ferry a group of religious exiles back to their homeworld, Rhapsody, where the people live in underground caverns relying on the absolute minimum of light to get by. Something very valuable's been discovered on Rhapsody, and Charlot wants it for New Alexandria. But because what's found is so potentially valuable, the political situation's become unstable, and soon Grainger finds himself drawn unwillingly into the center of things.
Another of the short novels that make up the Hooded Swan series, the first in which the titular starship is barely involved. This is not a bad thing because the author, having trained as a biologist, gets to explore his element. Although the plot deals with an ultra-religious community that has deliberately withdrawn from society (in a somewhat cynical but still surprisingly tolerant way), at the core there's sort of a biological mystery tale that Grainger must figure out, and Stableford does a good job of bringing you along into understanding it without getting too complicated. And, of course, there's the constant dialogue between Grainger and the wind, as they interact in a slightly more comfortable but still standoffish way. This novel, more than any except the last, focuses on their relationship to the exclusion of most of the rest of the series' recurring characters... for a long time the two are alone, or alone except some religious outcasts who aren't particularly friendly.
As I mentioned in my review of The Halcyon Drift, I may not be able to be entirely objective on the books in this series, I enjoy them too much and have read them too many times to worry so much about the flaws... but still, I give it 4 stars.
Finished: The Risen Empire, by Scott Westerfield
The Rix, a cult of machine-augmented humans who want to propagate planet-scale AIs throughout the galaxy, have just launched a major operation on the planet Legis XV, a world part of the Risen Empire, and the current location of the Emperor's little sister. If Captain Laurent Zai doesn't get her back, not only is a major war likely, but he'll be expected to sacrifice his life for his failure. This is how it is in the Empire, a society long on traditions established by the immortal leader, who discovered the secret to granting eternal life, though death, to himself and others, and using that knowledge to establish a perpetual rule over eighty worlds.
This is an ambitious space opera with loads of imaginative ideas, both in terms of technology and the social policy consequences of it. It has the seeds of being one of the great space operas that the genre remembers for decades, if not forever. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to them.That's not to say I didn't like it... I did, quite a bit, but while it zings with inventive SF concepts (there's even a dogfight on a ship the size of a dust mote in the first few chapters), I just didn't fully connect to the characters or overall plot.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is both of the two main "sides" in the conflict aren't very sympathetic. You can pull this off in fiction if everything else is great, that kind of ambiguity can even lead to a story with a much fuller, rounder texture... but when it's not quite up to that level, sometimes it helps to have somebody to root for. Here, I didn't. On the one hand we've got a stodgy government run by someone willing to sacrifice billions to protect his own power, and on the other, we've got essentially an AI cult that views human lives as not especially worth caring about. I responded more to the cult, but I couldn't entirely root for them.
The characters do a little better... they're at least largely sympathetic, regardless of which side they're on, but there's still a curious distance I felt between me and them. This, I think, is due to the tactic of jumping around in point of view, and time, several times, and not just with the leads, but, occasionally, with what seem to be relatively minor characters... it took quite a while before I was even sure who the main characters were supposed to be. But even beyond that, I never completely connected with them, at least in this book.
This is the part of a two-book series, but I learned after reading that it was originally intended to be one novel. This wouldn't be a surprise to anybody who reads it... it certainly ends on a cliffhanger, with nothing resolved, which is another knock against it. There's also a lot of references to a secret of the Emperor's being discovered, but they never actually (unless I missed it), say what it is, as though they're saving it for a big reveal in the second half. These are probably not the author's fault... publishers often divide books for silly reasons and the authors get no say... but regardless, what I have in front of me does not feel like a complete story, nor one that satisfies some of the smaller issues like an good series-installment.
Despite these frustrations and minor failings, I still enjoyed the book quite a bit... I just think it fell a little short of great, which is a shame. If it's really the first half of what was intended to be a single longer novel, maybe it's not entirely fair to judge it yet, maybe the characters were intended to be built up over time, and maybe there's an epic conclusion that ties everything together. But fair or not, this is what I've got access to. And so far, I'd give it three stars. It's a high three stars, though, and I will be reading the sequel, The Killing of Worlds, when I find it. Hopefully that one will improve on it.
Finished: Promised Land, by Brian Stableford (reread)
Third in the series of Stableford's Graigner series, about an abrasive but intelligent pilot and expert in alien environment, who shares his head with an alien mind symbiot. In this story, he's tasked to hunt down an alien kidnapped from an experiment run by his employer, kidnapped by one of her own people and taken to her home planet. That home planet is also home to a human colony, reached there by long slow generation ship before the development of FTL, and because of how long the journey took, they think of it as their Promised Land, despite the presence of an alien race. To find the kidnapped girl, he and Eve must hike through the jungle with some of these colonists and some of the alien Anacoana, and in the process discover how alien they really are.
This is the story that I liked least in the series, for no good reason. It actually says far more interesting things, about what gets destroyed when cultures assimilate into the dominant, and about the nature of alien... and it's a turning point in the relationship between Grainger and the wind. Yet somehow it doesn't do as much for me as the others. I still like it, mind you, just not as much as the others.
Finished: The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com (short story collection, ebook)
This is a huge collection of about 150 stories that have appeared over the last five years on Tor's website, that I've been reading in dribs and drabs on my phone over the past year or so.
It's hard to talk about it because there are just so many in there, I honestly can't remember in most cases if a story comes from there, or from another, smaller, short story collection I read in the intervening time. Nor, often, can I really remember many of the details.
In a general sense, though, for me, personally, it was only okay, largely due to two factors... one, the book has a very high proportion of fantasy (maybe even most of it), some of the traditional sword and sorcery, some of the urban fantasy/paranormal romance. There is nothing wrong with any of these genres, except that, largely, they do not interest me. A lot of stories I found myself just wanting to get through because it was so distinctly Not My Thing. A few I outright disliked (there seemed to be at least a couple stories where an amoral being with godlike powers for no apparent reason wanders through the world doing stuff that I didn't give a damn about).
The other problem is that there was a lot of "here are the first few chapters of this novel I've released," which don't really satisfy as stories, and, I may be mistaken, but I believe in every single case, it was in those genres that I have little interest in. I read them, but I feel like it was a waste of time, because I neither want to read the full novel, nor did I get a satisfying complete story (even of a type that isn't my favorite).
There were some stories that I recall remembering... "The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model" by Charlie Jane Anders is one. Also, the set of stories called "The Palencar Project" were quite interesting... basically a set of different authors each wrote a story based on a SF painting (by an artist with the last name Palencar)... it's fascinating to see how different ideas can spring from the same source.
But because of the high proportion of stories that did not interest me, I can only give the collection two stars... it was okay.
Finished: Memory, by Linda Nagata
On Jubilee's world, there is the silver, that rises on some nights over the land, covering everything not specially protected. For structures and tools, the silver sometimes leaves them alone, sometimes wipes them away, and sometimes returns buildings or items from the distant past. For living things, though, being swallowed by the silver is a death sentence. Jubilee's brother Jolly was taken by the silver as a youth, in front of her eyes. Years later, she meets somebody who can survive the silver... someone who claims her brother is still alive.
This is one of those books that are a curious blend between SF and Fantasy. This is a relatively common subgenre, that can occur in many different ways and ratios. In terms of the plot-behind-the-plot, Memory's clearly SF... everything can be explained by nanotechnology and AI and various other regular tropes of the genre. But to the characters we follow, this is just the natural way of the world, and they speak of dark gods and goddesses, and essentially, the adventure reads a lot like a fantasy. It's a particularly novel fantasy, and the image of the silver bringing back lost cities on a whim is particularly evocative. There are also other things that set it apart from a usual fantasy novel... this is a fantasy where people have cell phones and internet (albeit, a highly modified version of them that is, due to the conditions of the world, not very reliable), rather than being an pre-industrial revolution situation. Still, bogeys can be considered angry spirits, kobolds magical creatures or items, the villain could very easily stand in for an "evil wizard" and so on.
I started out really enjoying it, but by the end, I didn't think it lived up to it. Maybe this is just my personal tastes, but I was hoping for more of a SF ending, and what we got was a typically fantasy ending: the main characters use fantasy tools they only barely understand and everything only works out in the way it does because that's the magic rules of the technology that the author has decided on. The kind of SF ending I'd have liked would have had the results more or less being predictable given what we already know about technology... or, alternately, having the main characters leave the fantasy world for a greater SF understanding. Instead, it stayed mainly a fantasy novel that happened to have a SF base. And while I appreciate the base, I'm more a SF reader and so was hoping for a little more. Even if it had stayed a fantasy novel, I would have preferred to stick with exploring some of the intricacies of the silver destroying current things and sometimes returning ancient structures, books, etc, along with the constant reincarnation of people, rather than the quest they eventually went on, which seemed to stray too close to "traditional" fantasy.
The characters were decent, I didn't dislike them but they didn't particularly stand out for me, either, though the particular method where people find their loves made it hard to get a handle on them at times.
A decent outing, with some really imaginative ideas but ultimately not what I was hoping for, although others might like it more.
Finished: The Paradise Game, by Brian Stableford (reread)
It's a planet that resembles a garden of Eden... which makes it very valuable for the Caradoc company to slightly terraform and then sell as a playground for the very rich. There's just one problem... there's already an alien race living there, who seem utterly peaceful and compliant. So compliant that the Caradoc company has produced a contract between them pledging complete acceptance of and cooperation with anything the corporation decides to do. Star Pilot Grainger's boss, Titus Charlot, is trying to find some pretext to kick Caradoc off the planet, and, since Grainger has a score to settle with them, he's more than willing to help. But this Paradise isn't all what it seems, and misunderstanding that might prove deadly... for everybody.
Another in the Grainger/Hooded Swan series that combines space opera with biological mysteries. My usual disclaimer applies: I have a particular fondness for this series that may not make me entirely objective about it's quality, so take your chances. This one is one of my favorites of the cycle... you get Grainger working more or less peacefully towards a common goal with the guy who is normally something of an antagonist, you get some classic SF tropes with a threat that may be old hat now but is still rather cool, and you get some surprisingly still timely-feeling ruminations on corporations acting in their own best interests at the expense of everybody else and government not being able to effectively reign them in. It's not an environmentalist polemic, either... there's a "protect the natives at all costs" group that the main character ridicules like he does almost everything else, not so much for their ideals but for their unwillingness to find legitimate evidence of poor behavior by the company and how they portray their message hurting their cause (and I'm not sure I entirely agree with all of his assessments of them, but that's okay).
Four stars, I really enjoyed revisiting this one.
Finished: The Killing of Worlds, by Scott Westerfield
This is the sequel to The Risen Empire, but really it's the second half of a longer work that was split in two to meet retailer demands. (as such, much of the review itself is spoilery for the first book, and I'll cut it entirely: short version... disappointing on a plot level)
It starts after a cliffhanger, and much of the first bit is an extended battle sequence, which is pretty good as these things go... lots of tense moments, surprising attacks and counter-moves, and some cool ideas. I don't typically connect to battle scenes personally, and this never rose above that level, but that's a matter of personal tastes.
I mentioned in my review of the previous book that I felt a certain distance that prevented me from really connecting to the main characters... and unfortunately, that continued, at least with the two leads, the ones we spent the most time on. We get Laurent Zai, who's the mostly loyal captain, the one who comes up with the brilliant moves that keeps his crew alive against all odds, and generally speaking does the right thing, but I never got much sense of him as a person. The senator is slightly better, but not much... I mostly connected to the first officer, and the Rixwoman.
I rated the last one three stars, and mentioned that I hoped that the conclusion might make me raise it to four. That didn't happen. Not just because of the character thing, but there were plot reasons as well. Without getting too spoilery, I hope, the book hinges on secrets being revealed, secrets that are not only kept from the society, but also from the reader for much of the two books. They're built up as huge things, teasingly kept away from us, even when individual people in the story stumble upon it. The problem is twofold... one, that the secret itself, is ultimately disappointing... it's actually something that should be independently speculated on by a large portion of the society, and as such, as a revelation it doesn't really work, because if a character spills it, they should be dismissed as a crank.
The second problem is part of a greater problem in the book... the keeping of the secret doesn't really make sense. There are ways that, if somebody wanted to reveal it (and apparently somebody did), the secret should have been spread out across the galaxy at the speed of communication. Information isn't that hard to get out, but the author devises all sorts of artificial and never-quite-believable barriers to this happening. Another minor gripe I had, one that has nothing to do with the secret itself, illustrates the problem. There's an AI who transmits itself from one location to another. Doing so, for no apparent reason we can discover, somehow REMOVES it from the original site. This is not how information works, and if you're writing a book where the plot hinges on information, you should at least be aware of how information works.
I still give this, and the two books together, three stars, because I did like it, largely due to the worldbuilding. If the author ever wrote another book in the setting, I'd probably read it, although that reminds me of another problem I had with the book... the ending leaves so much unresolved, it's like another book was planned but never materialized. It's not as bad as the cliffhanger between the two halves of what was written as one novel, but I was left thinking, "Okay, so... what happens?" I'm never one who appreciates the "let the reader imagine that" approach much, if that was intended. If they're going to take that tack, I might as well imagine the whole book. However, three stars is where it sits... enjoyable, but it'll never be one of my favorites.
Started: The Apex Book of World SF (short story collection, ebook)
Started: The Fenris Device, by Brian Stableford
Started: The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
That's it, I guess, probably all I have to say for another few months. But despite my relative silence, I have been reading every post on my friends list (though sometimes up to a week or so late), so if you're like me sometimes wondering, yes, people are out there reading!
PS: Seriously, LJ? You still haven't fixed the bug where if you hit the "post" button on the My-LJ page, it takes you to the more options page, and if you hit the "More options" it just posts what you've got? Anyway, fixed the half-completed post.
Which also means lately I've completely fallen down on wishing people on my flist happy birthdays. If I missed yours, my apologies. And today, happy birthday
redlantern2051! But if I don't have a world of my own, at least I have worlds of fiction, at least somewhat. Legend of Korra season 3 starts Friday... apparently some of the epsiodes were leaked and I guess they rushed it to air to minimize the damage. But I won't complain, I like the show (even if it's still nowhere as good as Avatar).
Game of Thrones is over for the year, and it was pretty good, although now there's kind of a gap until Doctor Who, which is in August, which might as well be the new fall season. I guess there's Defiance, which is okay (some of the old Farscape feel there)... Falling Skies, which was never great, so disappointed me with the S4 premiere that I'm almost done with the show. And I still haven't tried The Last Ship or Penny Dreadful, but I want to, eventually, just for curiosity's sake. And S2 of Orphan Black I also need to get to (along with S3 of Continuum... Canada's really kind of doing well with SFTV, let's keep that up).
I don't have anything to say about movies, because I haven't really watched any. I've been playing the Batman Arkham Games over the last few weeks... Asylum and City, not Origins, I don't have that one, but I got the Game of the Year version of the other two off a Humble Bundle some time back and I'm finally getting around to them. They're fun... Asylum had a story that made more sense, but City has better gameplay options (especially when you have the options to play Catwoman, Robin, and Nightwing, as I do... if only they included Cassandra Cain). I actually got 100% completion on Arkham Asylum, every achievement, and completed the main game on City and... well, I'm still having fun on some of the associated challenges... I doubt I'll go 100% for it, but I'm ejoying it. And it's been eating my brain a little.
Fan Expo's been adding to its guest list, and apparently we're getting Matt Smith (the Eleventh Doctor), and Nathan Fillion, who was here last year... a few Walking Dead people, Arrow from Arrow, Patrick Stewart, Stan Lee, Shatner... but right now, although I'm a little tempted with Matt Smith, there's really nobody that will draw me out from my hermit tendencies and make me make the trek to a con and the inevitable tiredness and depression that follow. So, right now, I may be skipping this year. We'll see. Maybe they'll add somebody extra cool, or maybe I'll just be in a mood to go.
And books. Speaking of, although I've largely avoided reddit, I have been drawn a little to one community that discusses print SF (it's r/printSF), which at least satisfies some small amount of my yearnings for social interaction. Anyway, book foo! As usual, most of my thoughts are cut and pasted from Goodreads. Since last time, I've...
Finished: Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
Steward's memories are fifteen years out of date, because, even though he had clone insurance when he died, he hadn't updated the memory backup ever since he got out of training as a mercenary soldier. In those intervening years, the brutal corporate wars in space that he was recruited for ended after long years of conflict when an alien race made contact with Earth. Steward himself, aside from making difficult decisions in those wars, also got divorced twice... oh, and was murdered on a distant planet. His clone is somewhat adrift, driven by a desire to get back into space and find answers, but there are bigger games going on.
Voice of the Whirlwind is in the cyberpunk subgenre, a world of hi-tech implants and gritty street-level characters, film noir mixed with SF, often dealing with themes of government breakdown and corporate domination that are surprisingly relevant today. But it is a book of it's time... granted, a very good book. I think if I read this while I was in my big cyberpunk phase, it would have blown my mind and quickly become a favorite. As it stands today, I'm a little weary of some of the tropes, and some of it feels a little dated (particularly some of the hacking scenes where it feels like the author expected computers to continue to resemble MS-DOS). That said, it is enjoyable, and I think the prose is largely well-written (if it perhaps repeats itself a little too much for my tastes), and it's filled with some really cool (and pretty novel for it's time) ideas.
If you like Cyberpunk, this is a book to try, if you haven't already. If not... well, it still might be worth a look.
Finished: Only Superhuman, by Christopher L. Bennett
Mankind has spread out through the solar system, living in habitats in the asteroid belt, among other exotic places. And such exotic places have lead to exotic people... while highly restricted on Earth, elsewhere, mods that alter the human form and potential are common. Some of them have banded together and deliberately taken on the trappings of superheroes, to defend others and help foster acceptance of their differences. One of these is Emerald Blaze, a new Troubleshooter with a checkered past... but after her mentor dies and the team decides to get more proactive, she's drawn in the middle of a conflict between multiple factions and must decide where her loyalties lie.
This book was described as a "hard SF superhero story", which seemed like an intriguing idea, particularly for one like me who likes both SF and comics. I picked the book up on a whim seeing it on sale in a bookstore that was closing, so how could I lose?
Unfortunately, the book doesn't really live up to the promise, or it does too well, depending on your point of view. The hard SF aspect is pretty good, actually. And the basics of the superhero plot, while not especially novel, is solid. Combining the two should be a natural fit.
The problem is, I think, he also threw in a bunch of the worst parts of superhero comics... the kind of things that, by fusing it with hard SF, I was hoping to avoid. The book's full of corny dialogue, groan-worthy puns, and, worst of all, it's treatment of women feels shallow and borders on exploitative male-fantasy. There's a lot of sex in the book... not hardcore in description, aside from breasts very little is described in details, but the ever-present nature of it and how it's treated feels... extremely juvenile. Comics are full of skin-tight costumes with poses focusing on the breasts or ass, and here... well, you could probably base a drinking game on the number of times somebody's breasts or ass were mentioned either as direct objects of appeal, or in a tongue-in-cheek way. It doesn't help that characters deliberately flash, play strip poker, or casually fall into bed with each other on only the slightest of pretexts.
I'm not a prude, and I'm not opposed to sex in my SF, I've read many books that handles even high levels of sex in a mature way that I don't think it's worthy of comment. Here, it just feels awkwardly jammed in because superheroes are supposed to be sexy. I think the author was trying to go for a more sexually open society in general, but it doesn't work, the characters just aren't in depth enough, so it comes off as more of the same kind of attitudes that are holding comics back, where the female characters are more important for their sex appeal. Even with the lead character being female doesn't compensate for this (particularly with how she spends much of the book duped and occasionally directly under the sexual powers of another). Other major female characters are similarly dupes or sexual temptress types.
I want to make it clear, I don't think the author's a misogynist or anything like that, it's super-easy to fall into the traps of characters like these just using the common superhero tropes we're familiar with, that the author may well have grown up with and, uncritically, wants to honor... and in particular, the plotline he built his story on tended to lend itself to some of this (although I think that if he'd toned down the sex everywhere else, where it needed to be for plot reasons, would have been more effective). I'm more just disappointed... he had an opportunity to avoid these problems and he missed it, and that makes the book far less than it could have been. And it's hard to take it seriously with all the juvenile sexual imagery.
Perhaps it's unfair, but when I read a book based on comic book themes, I have a tendency to try to picture it as a comic. And in this case, it's a comic that I'd dismiss as cheesecake bordering on softcore porn. And that's a shame, because there really are decent, relatively novel ideas in here, more from the superhero side of things rather than the hard SF thing, but still, they're there... they're just buried.
So on average I only thought this one was 'okay.' If the author ever decides to write more in this universe, I might give him another chance, because I think he has potential... I'd just hope he'd manage the fusion in a way that elevates the superhero genre, rather than drag the hard SF genre down.
Finished: The Living Dead 2 (short story collection)
Another collection of zombie tales, from a variety of authors.
I think I liked this one a little more than its immediate predecessor, The Living Dead, but it's a bit tricky to judge... because while I can't think of a standout story from this collection, I also didn't find any that were just a slog and I hated reading, except perhaps the last couple, but to be fair I think that was more about me coming down with a case of STAF (Single Theme Anthology Fatigue) rather than the stories themselves. In the previous volume, I experienced both extremes (although the ones I didn't care for at all outweighed the other one.
The thing I liked more about volume 2 is that virtually all of the stories were about the traditional zombie apocalypse model. There were variations on the theme, of course... some caused by an infection, some caused by supernatural, some where the zombies had intelligence or retained their personality, some historical, some that were based on a specific genre book with its own rules, but the basics of the zombie apocalypse genre: a spreading plague where if you get bitten, you become one, was pretty much constant (there are exceptions, but they're extremely rare). In the previous volume there were too many stories were the zombies were one-offs, a vengeful spirit seeking revenge or animated by a magic curse (or technology) but not spreading the illness. They were tales of the Living Dead, but not "zombie apocalypse" stories (which I distinguish from just plain zombie stories). Those other types of stories are all fine, but they're really not what I, personally, look for when I want to scratch this particular itch. So, on the whole, this volume satisfied me more, and similarly might satisfy those who are fans more of The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later than horror fans in general.
Finished: The Year's Best Sf 16 (short story collection)
A collection of some of the best stories of the year 2010, in the opinions of the editors, at least. As usual, sometimes they really hit on my tastes, and sometimes are wide off the mark.
Most of the stories were mildly enjoyable, but didn't leave much impression. In fact, now, reading back over the table of contents, a few I completely struggle to remember what they're about. That said, there were some bright spots... one that I thought I was going to dislike, based on the introduction and type of story it was, but actually enjoyed... Damien Broderick's "Under the Moons of Venus." I also enjoyed David Langford's "Graffiti in the Library of Babel" about aliens using a bizarre method to make first contact. My absolute favorite in the book, though, was Karl Schroeder's "To Hie From Far Cilenia," which was apparently his entry in the shared-world METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization set in the near urban future, and deals with using virtual worlds to form new societies and affect reality in weird ways... it's hard to describe, and honestly, I think I may need to read it a few times to grasp fully, but I loved the feeling of my mind stretching. It treads on a few of the ideas that make up a small portion of his novel Lady of Mazes which is one of my favorite SF novels ever.
On the downside... while I can't really call it bad, just very much not to my tastes, Paul Park's "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance", which closes out the anthology, completely left me cold and had me mentally saying "shut up and get to the point" several times. I probably would also have to read it several times to grasp what it's about... the difference, in this case, I would never WANT to read it again.
But overall, as these things usually go, it's a fairly pleasant anthology.
Finished: The Halcyon Drift, by Brian Stableford (reread)
I've reviewed this several times in this journal over the years, so I'll just cut the whole thing.
Despite being one of the best star pilots out there, Grainger's spaceship crashed on a barely liveable and unnamed world on the edge of one of the worst areas of distorted space, The Halcyon Drift. He managed to survive, though his engineer and partner died in the crash. Rescued, years later, he's left with two unwelcome burdens... one everyone knows about, a massive debt levied against him as a "salvage fee" by the corporation that answered his distress beacon, and one he keeps to himself. For his brain's been colonized by an alien mind-symbiont. It's not a threat... it just needs a place to live, and wants to help him. Of course, Grainger doesn't like to be helped, which is also why when he's offered a job that will clear out the monetary debt, he's leery, despite the opportunity to fly a new kind of ship, a fusion between human and alien science. He's even leerier when he learns the first mission is to return to the Halcyon Drift. But he has no choice.
This is a traditional space opera action story you'd find in the 70s, full of travel at many multiples of the speed of light, alien worlds, and action, but it's got a few twists. One is the book's attitude towards violence. The series is sometimes listed as one of the few examples of pacifistic science fiction... that's not quite true, but as science fiction goes, it's closer than most. The author was concerned what some of his more violence-filled adventure novels in the past might be saying about him, so he deliberately set out to write a book where the main character's attitude towards violence matched his own: that it was usually best avoided as it was lead to more trouble than it saved. As such, over the several books in the series, the main character rarely throws a punch much less fires a gun (though he does occasionally use one as a threat), and occasionally even warns those trying to kill him away from danger. And one of the minor conflicts of the book is resolved with the main character convincing somebody to help him. It's tricky to make a book like this work, but it does, largely because there's still a lot of action, it's just the action often involves flying a space ship through entertainingly adverse conditions, or trying to escape a situation that somebody ELSE thought would be better solved with violence.
The other thing that makes it stand out, for me, is the character of Grainger and his uneasy relationship with the voice in his head, that he calls only "the wind." Grainger himself, despite being a character who is very much prone to non-violence, is no Star Trek-style utopian "we come in peace, let our people be friends" cardboard man. He's subtly socially stunted with a strong tendency to keep people at a distance... and if they try to get too close, to push them away. He's sarcastic, acerbic, more than a little bitter, and occasionally an outright jerk to other people for no good reason. And I love him for it. Usually, when you have a character who has an alien presence in his head, the alien is the bad one. In this, although neither are evil (Grainger himself is even heroic all the while inventing reasons why he's not being heroic at all), the wind is the sociable, nice one, trying to push Grainger into connecting with people more, into not immediately assuming the worst of everybody, and pointing out the flaws in his thinking. It's a device that lets the author use an unreliable narrator and still call out the narrator on his own BS sometimes, and gives him a limited edge over the average person. But mostly, it's just fun to read them snipe back and forth and watch their relationship grow over the books.
I've reread this series many times over the years, all in one (in fact, although I initially bought them as single novels, I'm actually rereading them now as part of the collected edition,
Swan Songs: The Complete "Hooded Swan" Collection... so, obviously I liked them enough to buy them twice), and it's difficult to give a truly objective score for a first time reader, particularly for the single novel installments, because I know how the story and relationships evolve... the secondary characters might seem a little stiffer in the first novel, for example (part of this may be Grainger's own perspective minimizing their depth in order to keep them at a distance). It's also certainly dated a little (the author obviously doesn't anticipate how much computer development would change the society... computers are still large, unwieldy things). And I do think the first novel is weaker than some of the others. But I'm going to give it four stars anyway.
The series is under-read from what I've seen, but if you like 70s space opera, it's definitely worth a try. I'm moving directly to the second book, Rhapsody in Black.
Finished: Redshirts, by John Scalzi
Redshirts tells the story of a young ensign and his friends assigned to the flagship ship of a Star Trek-like galactic civilization. At first he's excited, but then comes to realize how often people die on away missions. Everybody except the Captain, Science Officer, Chief Engineer, and one particular lieutenant are at risk for sudden gory inexplicable death. And the rest of the ship's crew seems to know it, too, always contriving to be somewhere else when somebody's needed for a mission. And that's not the only weird thing going on, there's plenty that just doesn't make sense.
It's hard to talk much about the book without 'spoiling' it, if it's even a spoiler, because I knew it in advance and think even if I didn't, I would have figured it out in the first few pages. The book's about what happens when Star Trek-style redshirts figure out they're actually living in a badly written science fiction series, with all the tropes that go along with it.
Most of the cover blurbs make the book out to be an uproariously funny comedy book... and I guess I can see that this is mostly intended, and it's certainly a parody of Star Trek in various and sundry ways... but it never really made me laugh. On several occasions, I nodded and smiled a little while thinking, "I see what you did there." But Star Trek parodies are cheap ways to produce humor in geeks, and I've seen most of these types of jokes before, from sketch comedy shows to webcomics to Galaxy Quest (which, btw, is a far better and funnier film than this was a book)... so many times that the jokes have worn thin and I can't even manage a hearty chuckle. I see what they were going for. It was, indeed, mildly amusing. Didn't laugh out loud once.
But leaving that aside, the central premise was still relatively novel, and interesting even if only mildly funny... for about the first half of the book or so. Once they realize what's going on, and take deliberate actions to change things, the story goes off the rails for me.
Largely, because what they do makes zero sense. As in, none. There are fundamental plot holes that are just ridiculous and things happen for no other reason than that's the way the story needs to turn out. And I get that what Scalzi's trying to do with that is possibly a metajoke (particularly based on the last pre-Coda scene of the novel), but that doesn't make it okay. It doesn't matter if you're deliberately making me a horribly tasting dinner, I'm the one who has to taste it. I was hoping you were going to give me a fabulous meal that just looked like crap, or was based on crap ingredients. But no, you gave me a story that made no sense, and so I couldn't get invested in what the characters do to solve it... because anything they do, it works if the writers want it to. I would have much rather read a story that started with this premise and the characters reacted in ways that make sense rather than relying on plot holes or the hoariest genre cliche there is in a way that doesn't even make sense (I can even think of a way an author could have gone that would have been much more interesting and entertaining to me).
There's a similar problem (which can be defended with a similar argument that similarly is unsatisfying). I didn't really give a damn about the characters, they were practically two-dimensional. They have slight backstories, sketched in. They have roles in the plot. But you could replace almost any line of dialogue of one character with another and never notice. Their differences rarely mean anything. The one shining moment with the main characters might have been a female character realizing what her upcoming death was supposed to do for the plot, but it becomes a throwaway line and doesn't influence the story any more after that.
Even worse, the author shows that he is clearly capable of writing in-depth characters... because he writes an extended coda (or series of codas) delving into the lives of three very minor characters in the story after their part in the story, in which THEY actually feel like real people with real personalities and real problems. It feels completely tacked on to the story, but at least they feel real. Which just shows that the lame characters in the main story was due to either the author being lazy (or getting too lost in trying to be funny to do a good job on the characters) or deliberately preparing me a poorly tasting meal as some kind of ironic point, and then trying to give me these character studies to make up for it.
For the early part, I was thinking I'd give it three stars. Once they started taking deliberate actions, I was ready to lower it to two (despite my complaints, I still found it okay, just only especially memorable for the concept and the failure to live up to it). The codas, though they felt unnecessary, were at least of sufficient quality that they almost bring it up to safe three territory. I guess I'll leave it at three, barely. Still, I honestly can't see this as being worthy of the Hugo award or the praise it received. It's not awful. It's an okay book that might particularly resonate with SF fans in a pleasant way (although partly due to it pandering to them). It does some mildly clever things from time to time. It's not a particularly GOOD book. And if it really was the best SF novel of the year it came out, then it must have been a very poor year.
Finished: Rhapsody in Black, by Brian Stableford (reread)
Again, part of one of my favorite series, reviewed here several times, so, cut.
Star pilot Grainger (along with the mind-symbiot that uneasily shares his brain) are called back into service by their employer, Titus Charlot. Unlike their adventure in The Halcyon Drift, the piloting is easy... just ferry a group of religious exiles back to their homeworld, Rhapsody, where the people live in underground caverns relying on the absolute minimum of light to get by. Something very valuable's been discovered on Rhapsody, and Charlot wants it for New Alexandria. But because what's found is so potentially valuable, the political situation's become unstable, and soon Grainger finds himself drawn unwillingly into the center of things.
Another of the short novels that make up the Hooded Swan series, the first in which the titular starship is barely involved. This is not a bad thing because the author, having trained as a biologist, gets to explore his element. Although the plot deals with an ultra-religious community that has deliberately withdrawn from society (in a somewhat cynical but still surprisingly tolerant way), at the core there's sort of a biological mystery tale that Grainger must figure out, and Stableford does a good job of bringing you along into understanding it without getting too complicated. And, of course, there's the constant dialogue between Grainger and the wind, as they interact in a slightly more comfortable but still standoffish way. This novel, more than any except the last, focuses on their relationship to the exclusion of most of the rest of the series' recurring characters... for a long time the two are alone, or alone except some religious outcasts who aren't particularly friendly.
As I mentioned in my review of The Halcyon Drift, I may not be able to be entirely objective on the books in this series, I enjoy them too much and have read them too many times to worry so much about the flaws... but still, I give it 4 stars.
Finished: The Risen Empire, by Scott Westerfield
The Rix, a cult of machine-augmented humans who want to propagate planet-scale AIs throughout the galaxy, have just launched a major operation on the planet Legis XV, a world part of the Risen Empire, and the current location of the Emperor's little sister. If Captain Laurent Zai doesn't get her back, not only is a major war likely, but he'll be expected to sacrifice his life for his failure. This is how it is in the Empire, a society long on traditions established by the immortal leader, who discovered the secret to granting eternal life, though death, to himself and others, and using that knowledge to establish a perpetual rule over eighty worlds.
This is an ambitious space opera with loads of imaginative ideas, both in terms of technology and the social policy consequences of it. It has the seeds of being one of the great space operas that the genre remembers for decades, if not forever. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to them.That's not to say I didn't like it... I did, quite a bit, but while it zings with inventive SF concepts (there's even a dogfight on a ship the size of a dust mote in the first few chapters), I just didn't fully connect to the characters or overall plot.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is both of the two main "sides" in the conflict aren't very sympathetic. You can pull this off in fiction if everything else is great, that kind of ambiguity can even lead to a story with a much fuller, rounder texture... but when it's not quite up to that level, sometimes it helps to have somebody to root for. Here, I didn't. On the one hand we've got a stodgy government run by someone willing to sacrifice billions to protect his own power, and on the other, we've got essentially an AI cult that views human lives as not especially worth caring about. I responded more to the cult, but I couldn't entirely root for them.
The characters do a little better... they're at least largely sympathetic, regardless of which side they're on, but there's still a curious distance I felt between me and them. This, I think, is due to the tactic of jumping around in point of view, and time, several times, and not just with the leads, but, occasionally, with what seem to be relatively minor characters... it took quite a while before I was even sure who the main characters were supposed to be. But even beyond that, I never completely connected with them, at least in this book.
This is the part of a two-book series, but I learned after reading that it was originally intended to be one novel. This wouldn't be a surprise to anybody who reads it... it certainly ends on a cliffhanger, with nothing resolved, which is another knock against it. There's also a lot of references to a secret of the Emperor's being discovered, but they never actually (unless I missed it), say what it is, as though they're saving it for a big reveal in the second half. These are probably not the author's fault... publishers often divide books for silly reasons and the authors get no say... but regardless, what I have in front of me does not feel like a complete story, nor one that satisfies some of the smaller issues like an good series-installment.
Despite these frustrations and minor failings, I still enjoyed the book quite a bit... I just think it fell a little short of great, which is a shame. If it's really the first half of what was intended to be a single longer novel, maybe it's not entirely fair to judge it yet, maybe the characters were intended to be built up over time, and maybe there's an epic conclusion that ties everything together. But fair or not, this is what I've got access to. And so far, I'd give it three stars. It's a high three stars, though, and I will be reading the sequel, The Killing of Worlds, when I find it. Hopefully that one will improve on it.
Finished: Promised Land, by Brian Stableford (reread)
Third in the series of Stableford's Graigner series, about an abrasive but intelligent pilot and expert in alien environment, who shares his head with an alien mind symbiot. In this story, he's tasked to hunt down an alien kidnapped from an experiment run by his employer, kidnapped by one of her own people and taken to her home planet. That home planet is also home to a human colony, reached there by long slow generation ship before the development of FTL, and because of how long the journey took, they think of it as their Promised Land, despite the presence of an alien race. To find the kidnapped girl, he and Eve must hike through the jungle with some of these colonists and some of the alien Anacoana, and in the process discover how alien they really are.
This is the story that I liked least in the series, for no good reason. It actually says far more interesting things, about what gets destroyed when cultures assimilate into the dominant, and about the nature of alien... and it's a turning point in the relationship between Grainger and the wind. Yet somehow it doesn't do as much for me as the others. I still like it, mind you, just not as much as the others.
Finished: The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com (short story collection, ebook)
This is a huge collection of about 150 stories that have appeared over the last five years on Tor's website, that I've been reading in dribs and drabs on my phone over the past year or so.
It's hard to talk about it because there are just so many in there, I honestly can't remember in most cases if a story comes from there, or from another, smaller, short story collection I read in the intervening time. Nor, often, can I really remember many of the details.
In a general sense, though, for me, personally, it was only okay, largely due to two factors... one, the book has a very high proportion of fantasy (maybe even most of it), some of the traditional sword and sorcery, some of the urban fantasy/paranormal romance. There is nothing wrong with any of these genres, except that, largely, they do not interest me. A lot of stories I found myself just wanting to get through because it was so distinctly Not My Thing. A few I outright disliked (there seemed to be at least a couple stories where an amoral being with godlike powers for no apparent reason wanders through the world doing stuff that I didn't give a damn about).
The other problem is that there was a lot of "here are the first few chapters of this novel I've released," which don't really satisfy as stories, and, I may be mistaken, but I believe in every single case, it was in those genres that I have little interest in. I read them, but I feel like it was a waste of time, because I neither want to read the full novel, nor did I get a satisfying complete story (even of a type that isn't my favorite).
There were some stories that I recall remembering... "The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model" by Charlie Jane Anders is one. Also, the set of stories called "The Palencar Project" were quite interesting... basically a set of different authors each wrote a story based on a SF painting (by an artist with the last name Palencar)... it's fascinating to see how different ideas can spring from the same source.
But because of the high proportion of stories that did not interest me, I can only give the collection two stars... it was okay.
Finished: Memory, by Linda Nagata
On Jubilee's world, there is the silver, that rises on some nights over the land, covering everything not specially protected. For structures and tools, the silver sometimes leaves them alone, sometimes wipes them away, and sometimes returns buildings or items from the distant past. For living things, though, being swallowed by the silver is a death sentence. Jubilee's brother Jolly was taken by the silver as a youth, in front of her eyes. Years later, she meets somebody who can survive the silver... someone who claims her brother is still alive.
This is one of those books that are a curious blend between SF and Fantasy. This is a relatively common subgenre, that can occur in many different ways and ratios. In terms of the plot-behind-the-plot, Memory's clearly SF... everything can be explained by nanotechnology and AI and various other regular tropes of the genre. But to the characters we follow, this is just the natural way of the world, and they speak of dark gods and goddesses, and essentially, the adventure reads a lot like a fantasy. It's a particularly novel fantasy, and the image of the silver bringing back lost cities on a whim is particularly evocative. There are also other things that set it apart from a usual fantasy novel... this is a fantasy where people have cell phones and internet (albeit, a highly modified version of them that is, due to the conditions of the world, not very reliable), rather than being an pre-industrial revolution situation. Still, bogeys can be considered angry spirits, kobolds magical creatures or items, the villain could very easily stand in for an "evil wizard" and so on.
I started out really enjoying it, but by the end, I didn't think it lived up to it. Maybe this is just my personal tastes, but I was hoping for more of a SF ending, and what we got was a typically fantasy ending: the main characters use fantasy tools they only barely understand and everything only works out in the way it does because that's the magic rules of the technology that the author has decided on. The kind of SF ending I'd have liked would have had the results more or less being predictable given what we already know about technology... or, alternately, having the main characters leave the fantasy world for a greater SF understanding. Instead, it stayed mainly a fantasy novel that happened to have a SF base. And while I appreciate the base, I'm more a SF reader and so was hoping for a little more. Even if it had stayed a fantasy novel, I would have preferred to stick with exploring some of the intricacies of the silver destroying current things and sometimes returning ancient structures, books, etc, along with the constant reincarnation of people, rather than the quest they eventually went on, which seemed to stray too close to "traditional" fantasy.
The characters were decent, I didn't dislike them but they didn't particularly stand out for me, either, though the particular method where people find their loves made it hard to get a handle on them at times.
A decent outing, with some really imaginative ideas but ultimately not what I was hoping for, although others might like it more.
Finished: The Paradise Game, by Brian Stableford (reread)
It's a planet that resembles a garden of Eden... which makes it very valuable for the Caradoc company to slightly terraform and then sell as a playground for the very rich. There's just one problem... there's already an alien race living there, who seem utterly peaceful and compliant. So compliant that the Caradoc company has produced a contract between them pledging complete acceptance of and cooperation with anything the corporation decides to do. Star Pilot Grainger's boss, Titus Charlot, is trying to find some pretext to kick Caradoc off the planet, and, since Grainger has a score to settle with them, he's more than willing to help. But this Paradise isn't all what it seems, and misunderstanding that might prove deadly... for everybody.
Another in the Grainger/Hooded Swan series that combines space opera with biological mysteries. My usual disclaimer applies: I have a particular fondness for this series that may not make me entirely objective about it's quality, so take your chances. This one is one of my favorites of the cycle... you get Grainger working more or less peacefully towards a common goal with the guy who is normally something of an antagonist, you get some classic SF tropes with a threat that may be old hat now but is still rather cool, and you get some surprisingly still timely-feeling ruminations on corporations acting in their own best interests at the expense of everybody else and government not being able to effectively reign them in. It's not an environmentalist polemic, either... there's a "protect the natives at all costs" group that the main character ridicules like he does almost everything else, not so much for their ideals but for their unwillingness to find legitimate evidence of poor behavior by the company and how they portray their message hurting their cause (and I'm not sure I entirely agree with all of his assessments of them, but that's okay).
Four stars, I really enjoyed revisiting this one.
Finished: The Killing of Worlds, by Scott Westerfield
This is the sequel to The Risen Empire, but really it's the second half of a longer work that was split in two to meet retailer demands. (as such, much of the review itself is spoilery for the first book, and I'll cut it entirely: short version... disappointing on a plot level)
It starts after a cliffhanger, and much of the first bit is an extended battle sequence, which is pretty good as these things go... lots of tense moments, surprising attacks and counter-moves, and some cool ideas. I don't typically connect to battle scenes personally, and this never rose above that level, but that's a matter of personal tastes.
I mentioned in my review of the previous book that I felt a certain distance that prevented me from really connecting to the main characters... and unfortunately, that continued, at least with the two leads, the ones we spent the most time on. We get Laurent Zai, who's the mostly loyal captain, the one who comes up with the brilliant moves that keeps his crew alive against all odds, and generally speaking does the right thing, but I never got much sense of him as a person. The senator is slightly better, but not much... I mostly connected to the first officer, and the Rixwoman.
I rated the last one three stars, and mentioned that I hoped that the conclusion might make me raise it to four. That didn't happen. Not just because of the character thing, but there were plot reasons as well. Without getting too spoilery, I hope, the book hinges on secrets being revealed, secrets that are not only kept from the society, but also from the reader for much of the two books. They're built up as huge things, teasingly kept away from us, even when individual people in the story stumble upon it. The problem is twofold... one, that the secret itself, is ultimately disappointing... it's actually something that should be independently speculated on by a large portion of the society, and as such, as a revelation it doesn't really work, because if a character spills it, they should be dismissed as a crank.
The second problem is part of a greater problem in the book... the keeping of the secret doesn't really make sense. There are ways that, if somebody wanted to reveal it (and apparently somebody did), the secret should have been spread out across the galaxy at the speed of communication. Information isn't that hard to get out, but the author devises all sorts of artificial and never-quite-believable barriers to this happening. Another minor gripe I had, one that has nothing to do with the secret itself, illustrates the problem. There's an AI who transmits itself from one location to another. Doing so, for no apparent reason we can discover, somehow REMOVES it from the original site. This is not how information works, and if you're writing a book where the plot hinges on information, you should at least be aware of how information works.
I still give this, and the two books together, three stars, because I did like it, largely due to the worldbuilding. If the author ever wrote another book in the setting, I'd probably read it, although that reminds me of another problem I had with the book... the ending leaves so much unresolved, it's like another book was planned but never materialized. It's not as bad as the cliffhanger between the two halves of what was written as one novel, but I was left thinking, "Okay, so... what happens?" I'm never one who appreciates the "let the reader imagine that" approach much, if that was intended. If they're going to take that tack, I might as well imagine the whole book. However, three stars is where it sits... enjoyable, but it'll never be one of my favorites.
Started: The Apex Book of World SF (short story collection, ebook)
Started: The Fenris Device, by Brian Stableford
Started: The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
That's it, I guess, probably all I have to say for another few months. But despite my relative silence, I have been reading every post on my friends list (though sometimes up to a week or so late), so if you're like me sometimes wondering, yes, people are out there reading!
PS: Seriously, LJ? You still haven't fixed the bug where if you hit the "post" button on the My-LJ page, it takes you to the more options page, and if you hit the "More options" it just posts what you've got? Anyway, fixed the half-completed post.
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Date: 2014-06-26 02:12 am (UTC)But yeah, it will be a crazy busy Fan Expo this year now that they've announced a New Who Doctor. But the local Whovians must be going nuts. They should try to break that Dalek world record again and get Matt Smith to judge it, like Colin Baker did last year.
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Date: 2014-06-26 04:21 pm (UTC)Though they still haven't announced anyone on the SF authors list, there's a slight chance I might want to attend for one of those.