Long Time No Post
Nov. 1st, 2014 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6This time, though, my life's actually changed some in the intervening months (aside from the slow pull of entropy), though really it's spillover from my brother's life. Shortly after my last post, at the beginning of Sept, he and his GF of more than twelve years broke up, and she moved out. The three of us had shared an apartment for about the last ten years... now, it's just me and my brother. And the cats. The cats which were mostly hers, but she apparently left behind because she was moving a long distance to go back to her parents and it would be too hard I guess to take them too. I dunno, I don't get that, but I like the cats, so I (mostly) don't mind taking care of them more. Anyway, it wasn't acrimonious or anything, or, as far as I've been able to tell, caused by a single event, it was just one of those "haven't been happy for a while" type situations (I was more blindsided by it than he was, I think). I don't really know all the details though, my family's not really big on the talking especially on painful subjects. My brother's seemed a bit depressed, as you can imagine, but he's had school to throw himself into at least to distract him.
Me? I was always friendly with her but never especially close... she never even actually said goodbye to me, which I guess says something, so I miss her mostly because my brother seemed to be happier with her.
The big effect in my own life (aside from worrying over my brother and the additional cat chores) is in food. See, she was always the cook of the group (she didn't work or even bring in any money through social services or anything, which I guess also means we now are spending less money to maintain the same standard of living), which meant I never really had to do much of anything beyond occasionally putting something in the microwave or oven and coming back when it was done, and could allow my lack of any skills in the area continue to exist (or is it not-exist if it's a lack?). Although my brother does cook some, and did when she didn't feel up to it, he's working a lot with school and actual work, and I didn't want to add to his burden by asking him to cook for me, and in fact the reverse, that at least I could help out by making sure he had a decent hot meal without having to do much work when he comes home (though he often cooks on the weekends so it's not totally one-sided). So I've taken it upon myself to finally learn to cook.
Nothing super dramatic, but baby steps. A lot of frozen and things like packaged-side-dish type thing, along with some meats (sometimes merely Shake-and-Baked), but at least assembled into a full meal. Learned how to do sausages on the skillet first, then burgers (which were far simpler than I imagined). About the closet to "from scratch" has been spaghetti (and there I used a pre-made sauce and pre-made pasta, and just put in a bunch of vegetables). Not actually much less quality than we normally ate, actually (more complex things like roasts she did occasionally make, and maybe eventually I'll get there as well). And mostly self-taught, too (though occasionally with a teeny bit of instruction on times and temperatures).
On the whole, I seem to be fairly good at it, at least the time management aspect, so that the whole meal is ready at once (aside from the difficulty in estimating things like how fast a pot of water boils), and I haven't killed us or made us sick yet! And I have learned that adding mushrooms to virtually any meal is a good idea to beef it up without actually using meat. I buy them all the time now.
My knife skills though, those completely suck, I cannot cut or chop things with any sophistication and am probably using the wrong knives to do it. Even slicing a tomato looks like it was done by some kind of angry madman. Oh well, hopefully I'll improve on those with time too.
Still, I'm somewhat proud of myself for that, although it is a bit of a time sink and I kind of miss just being able to eat when something's ready instead of having to spend half an hour or an hour making it every day.
But let's move on from that. Other than that, my life's pretty much the same. Didn't do anything for Halloween (though it was cold and rainy so kids probably didn't enjoy it either... since we never get any Trick or Treaters at our apartment, I might have considered just going out for a walk to see what costumes were on display if not for that). Time does seem to be moving at a rapid pace, except for me, though. I almost feel like I'm in one of those SF stories about time dilation.
Anyway, TV... mildly enjoying stuff this year. Of new shows, Flash is okay fun, and Gotham I'm still not sure it works but it's mostly been holding my attention. It is, if nothing else, pretty well cast, I can believe Catwoman-girl becomes Catwoman and Penguin-Guy becomes Penguin. As for old stuff, Walking Dead's been pretty good, SHIELD's been somewhat better than this time last year, and most of the rest of the stuff is okay but unremarkable.
I should single out DW for special attention, because New Doctor. So far, I like the Doctor, but the writing is mixed. My favorites were probably Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline, both of which were written by the same guy, so I hope he does more next year. Though I have to say I really disliked the Forest one, also by a new writer. Just shoddy all around, maybe one good moment in it ruined by being such an awful episode. But in general, some new writers would be nice (especially a few women), and I think Moffat needs to step away. He's been at it a while, and he's reusing a lot of the same old ideas in new dresses... he's had the 50th anniversary, invented a new doctor and fudged the regeneration count so that he could tell the story of his final-of-12 regenerations, and introduced the first of a new set... that's enough, it's time to let somebody else put their mark on it. (And I hope whoever does it next ditches the "standalone episodes that dangle an ongoing mystery that gets unsatisfyingly resolved in some big finale" pattern and just gives us great episodes and a great finale that comes out of NOWHERE.
Also, I miss the old live-in companion style, rather than what it's been for Clara and about half of Amy/Rory, where they have a normal life that the Doctor just pops in on now and then. I want the Doctor to be that strange man who takes you off on a wild set of adventures that lasts as long as you can stand to stay, a roller coaster ride for as long as you can hold on, and changes your life forever, not to be Cosmic Kramer who keeps popping into your place to try and drag you into his latest crazy scheme (it occurs to me that Seinfeld is probably a dated reference by now). I guess tonight (probably just before the To Be Continued) we learn who Missy is, but so far I'm kind of meh on that too.
Anyway, let's finish with my book list since last time. As usual, the reviews are pulled from my Goodreads account.
Finished: Blindsight by Peter Watts (reread)
Reread this in preparation for Echopraxia, already reviewed it several times here.
Finished: Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross
Five thousand years in the future, humanoid artificial life form Krina investigates the disappearance of her sister that may be connected to an ancient financial scam.
This is set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but aside from sharing the same setting of a hard SF, no-FTL universe where humanity has died out and robots have replaced them, there's very little in common... the plots don't connect and the characters are all unrelated. (Short version: more interesting than entertaining, and on the whole not as fun as SC)It sheds the arguably overly-sexed tone of the first book in favor of a story that's almost all business.
Financial business, to be exact. The book is very interested in how money works in the future of slow interstellar travel, and how it can be scammed, and explores it at great length and in detail. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book, and unfortunately possibly the greatest flaw. For, while this exploration is often very interesting, it's seldom actually entertaining, and that's my assessment of the book as a whole as well. I don't think it's a bad book, I just didn't love it like I hoped, or even as much as Saturn's Children. Neptune's Brood is interesting, and I think it's worth reading (particularly for potential science fiction authors who should really see how much thought went into it, and perhaps to steal ideas from), but I wanted it to be more fun, and, for me, financial skullduggery just isn't, and much of the robot stuff was already better explored in SC. Your mileage may vary, and it might thrill you.
Finished: Zero Echo Schadow Prime by Peter Samet (received for free)
Full disclosure: I received this book for free as part of a Goodreads giveaway, but I'll do my best to give it a fair and honest review.
Zero Echo Shadow Prime tells the story of Charlie Nobunga, a young genius who just programmed a new sort of AI assistant that actually feels like a real person. In the midst of her fame, she's diagnosed with cancer, the same kind that killed her twin sister, but the head of a cutting edge technology company proposes a solution... to scan her brain and copy her personality into a stronger, artificial body. Charlie's unsure about the whole thing, but the procedure goes ahead... and many different Charlies awaken, each unaware of the others, sometimes unaware of a lot more. First, there's Prime, the planned superior body, a form that could be a cyborg supersolider. There's also Echo, a four-armed warrior with no memories, in a digital world full of other, slightly different Echos. There's Shadow, who's been converted into an AI assistant in somebody's head. And finally, there's Charlie's original body, which wasn't destroyed during the scan but never intended to be reawoken unless there was a problem... except it's been kidnapped by Luddites, who want her help to take down the company that scanned her.
This book's not only a first novel, but a self-published one. This normally makes me very leery of potential poor quality works (I've been burned before), although I'm certainly willing to give a first novel a little more leeway, and the book's concept was impressive and ambitious. So does it live up to it, and is it a successful novel that you could expect to get published on its own?
The answer to both questions is, yes, mostly. Some flaws (and I will get a little nitpicky about them, but only in the hopes of helping the author improve), but clearly this is an author with a lot of potential. The story is well-paced and the changes in perspective keep you interested, and what could turn out to be a complicated mess, with many copies of the same people running around, never falls outside his control. The stories are separate at first, but tie together in believable ways and with excellent timing, neither too slowly or too quick (although maybe I'd have liked a little more solo time on a couple of them). For the most part the science and technology is believable without being overwhelming. In fact, I think this is quite a good novel to introduce people to various singularity-type themes without requiring them to be versed in a lot of prior SF.
As for the flaws? Well, a lot of it depends on whether this is intended to be a full-on SF novel, or a (higher-age) Young Adult SF book. It's not absolutely clear from the descriptions and promotion, but there are a few markers for option B. The character being 18, for example, suggests it may be marketed towards teens, and the romance angle felt a little on the YA side, opposite sides, immediate attraction and suddenly falling for each others. However a few things point in the other direction, like the ending which seems to set up for a sequel that is decidedly less YA and more complex.
The prose is pretty good, overall, but I did notice some examples of what's called "Said Bookism", where the author notably avoids using the word "said", and instead characters insist, implore, chime in, drone, and so on, some of which is certainly okay for variety, but when it's done too often, it can be distracting. In this case, it's on the edge of being a problem, so this is one of the nitpicky points, something the author should be careful of in the future. Some parts are worse than others, but it's not a huge problem overall.
Charlie's big development that led to her Shadow winning the Turing test seems a little facile, described as a stunning breakthrough, when really it seems like a fairly obvious thing that would be tried many times in many different ways. Similarly, the "replicator" she invents is a little sci-cute rather than consistant and thought out (if it's possible under the technology of the world, there ought to be a lot of them produced by a lot of people, a big problem that society has ways to deal with). Both of these are things I'd completely overlook if I were to consider it a YA novel... the main characters being sort of exceptional-in-a-way-that's-easy-for-the-audience-to-relate-to is a common trope, and it's easier to give her a simple insight that for some reason nobody else has thought of than bog the younger reader down with a lot of technical gobbledegook. But I'd like a little more rigor in a full-fledged, no-qualifier SF novel.
Another thing in that category (things that are more forgiveable if you consider the book to be a YA) is one of my minor disappointments in the book. There seems like a lot of characters, but... in many ways, there's really one character, seen in many different ways and contexts, sometimes interacting with herself. But, in the end, I wound up finding her a little bland as a character: a generally good person who's smart and has a real stubborn streak. The almost archetypical hero, with only a few details above and beyond that. In a YA, this isn't a problem (and may even be ideal) because a somewhat bland character is easier to project yourself into and inhabit, and it can become less about who the character is as it is about what you might do in that situation. But in a more adult, deeper work, I'd expect a lot more exploration into what certain characteristics lead to which parts of our personality, how removing memory or putting us in complex scenarios might alter our natures, how an invulnerable Charlie is different from one dying of cancer, at the very least, know that feature character inside out. But after reading about all these different versions, I never really got the sense that I knew the character any better, any more deeply, than I would in a TV show. There's a bit of a difference between the Echos and the others, but most of that is caused by stuff that happens off page and left for a potential sequel.
There is one final bit that rankled me particularly, and that's involving Charlie's cancer. First, the idea that cancer is still a worry in a world where nanotechnology can build new bodies for people from scratch is one of those few inconsistent moments (surely it would be easier to have some nano searching her body for tumors and eliminating them... even if it couldn't be a full cure, something to make her functional instead of sickly), but that's not even my biggest problem. My biggest problem is there's a point in the story where Charlie is told "Cancer's an electrolyte imbalance, chemo is the worst thing you can do," and told to drink something. Now, this is a Luddite character who may not know what they're talking about, but... it's never really refuted in the story, either, and she's portrayed as educated in this field particularly. A lot of their other ideas are shown to be wrong, but at other points it's clear they might have some valid points, and in the case of this cancer cure... it's an awfully specific claim about cancer that borders on woo and could wind up hurting real people if they took it on faith as they might many of the other technological advancements. That bothered me. I wouldn't even mind if they still claimed they have a cure for cancer (true or not), as long as they weren't specific about how it worked and claim that current medical advice is the WORST thing you could do... but if you're going to declare something about a real medical condition that goes directly against current medical thinking, I think it's your responsibility to either prove it, declare it explicitly an alternate universe that has no basis in fact, or refute it directly in the text.
Otherwise, it's a very solid first novel. So yes, there are flaws, but even a professional first novel from one of the big publishing companies might have issues like these, and they don't seriously harm the book. On the whole, I was engaged, never bored, and always looking forward to what happened next. The ultimate test of a first novel is, would I read a sequel (or another novel by the author), and the answer in this case is an unequivocal yes (particularly a sequel). A final rating is still somewhat complicated, because as a normal SF book, it's good and shows a lot of potential, but takes a few too many shortcuts and so it's not quite up there with my favorites. I'd put it as a high three, maybe getting close to four. If I were to consider this a Young Adult book (again, edging towards the higher end of the teen years), it comes off much better. In fact, I'd wager to say it's probably one of the most enjoyable YA pure-SF books I've read (although admittedly, there aren't many). I'd put it firmly in four territory, and if Goodreads allowed half-stars, a 4.5 might be what I'd score it. I guess the best thing to do is split the difference and call it a four, because I did really enjoy it, just with some reservations.
Finished: The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke tells the tale of the last human city, Diaspar, a billion years in the future, and eternally stable thanks to a population engineered to their environment. But one man lacks the fear of the outside world that grips everybody else, and driven by a curiosity about what lies outside the gates.
This is, I'm told, a rework of another work, Against the Fall of Night, but I haven't read it to compare, and I'm unlikely to. Suffice it to say, it's an ambitious book that, while it has some typical failings of SF books of its era, is full of sense of wonder and ably conveys a sense of awe.
Let's get the flaws out of the way first. The characters are rather flat, with most characters notable only for the role they play in the story rather than any feeling they're a real person. The prose sometimes over-explains with exposition, rather than taking the reader on a journey of discovery. There aren't really any significantly important female characters (and there is a little casual, perhaps even unconscious sexism when discussing one of the female characters who does play a small role). And maybe the spans of time seem a little unbelievable for the human race to remain static and at the same time more or less comprehensible. Finally, the ending devolves a little more into exposition than even the rest of the book, and the character's journey doesn't feel like it ends in the way that matches the rest of the story.
Still, although this there's something compelling above all that that makes this a memorable book, above and beyond the mere historical interest that can be, itself, a worthy reason for reading classic SF.
The book contains a lot of echoes of other authors, before and after the book... some may be deliberate homages (either by Clarke or of Clarke), others may be coincidence. But I found in some elements similarities that reminded me of Olaf Stapledon's vistas of ever-evolving man, of HP Lovecraft's bizarre alien beings, of HG Wells and his divided human races, of movies like Logan's Run. There's even some tropes that you come to expect from post-Singularity fiction, which wasn't even really a thing when this was written. And sure, some of it falls under Clarke's Law (any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic), but it still feels like technology.
If you're a fan of classic SF, this is definitely one to check out (or, perhaps, the earlier version under a different title... from what little I've research, opinions are firmly divided on which one is better). If old-style fiction tends to leave you a little cold, it still might be worth reading, because SF builds itself on the shoulders of prior authors, and this is a very good example of it, still using ideas that came before it but also presaging ideas that have come to become popular.
Finished: The Year's Best SF 17 (short story collection)
A collection of short stories published in 2011, chosen as the best by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. As usual, it's a mixed bag. While none completely left me cold, save perhaps Paul Pope's "Ragnarok" (but that's in large part because it's written as poetry), I didn't find any standouts that blew me away, either. Most of them were mildly pleasing, and a few I'd already read, so their impact wasn't as good as it may have been. I've liked other Years Best volumes more even when they had stories I absolutely hated, just because there was something really memorable along for the ride.
If I had to choose, my favorites would be "The Education of Junior Number Twelve" by Madeline Ashby and "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Fields of Reindeer" by Ken Liu.
Finished: Crux by Ramez Naam
Crux continues the story begun in Nexus, in which a technology-based drug installs an operating system and wireless interface in people's brains. Nexus is growing in popularity, more and more kids are being born with Nexus in their systems or growing up learning how to be mentally connected, and groups wanting to stop the technology's spread are growing more desperate. And those who are finding ways to abuse it growing more crafty. Kaden Lane, one of the inventors of the latest version of Nexus, is doing what he can against both groups, using his secret back-door code to shut down those who use Nexus to hack into people's brains and control them for profit, perverted kicks, or political motives, but he has to question whether even he has the right to control others in that way.
It's an exciting book that works both as an action/adventure technothriller and as Earth-based hard SF. Like Nexus, Crux feels extremely well-thought out and authentic, looking at all the potential uses, and abuses, of this technology, and unlike a lot of SF, it's very easy to believe that these are going to be issues we might one day be facing. No surprise, as Naam is a scientist and it shows (and in the afterword he discusses some of the precursor technologies that are already being developed). While clearly full of dangers, there's a part of me that really wants the technology to be real, soon. That's one of the reasons I read SF, to be able to vicariously experience technologies that aren't here yet, and I might never see... this book hits that button hard, and often.
The book's well-paced, if it errs, it errs on the side of being too fast... what's a several hundred page book just seemed to fly by, and I never felt like it was dragging. Several stories intertwine and come together in a believable way, the villains, with a few exceptions, generally feel humanized and you can sympathize with some of their goals if not their methods, and there's the chance for even bad people to be redeemed.
One of the problems I had with the first book was too much perspective shifting, often to exceedingly minor characters like a grunt on the ground in an assault. In this book, although it still shifts perspective a fair bit, it seems to be much more manageable (perhaps I've just grown used to the style, but it feels like he decided to focus more on main characters rather than needing us to see events from every angle), so, on a technical level it's superior than the first. On the overall enjoyment level, it's probably about even, maybe slightly better, the only area where it lags behind is the novelty factor, which kind of HAS to drop in a sequel.
It's still not a perfect book... there are times when the character moments feel somewhat... I'm not even sure of the right word. A tiny bit simplistic, or cliche, or unsubtle, rolled into one, just to the level where it feels a bit more like, say, the novel equivalent of an action movie rather really convincing me that these were real people. It's not a constant problem, and there are times when characters get a fair bit of depth, and he certainly puts some through the emotional wringer, but at a few times I felt some artificial distance, even when seeing their emotions laid bare. Maybe that's even part of it, like when I see a dream in a movie and it sort of pulls me out of believing it because it doesn't actually capture how I dream, all the ever-shifting background elements and surreal logic... in this book, while I can believe in the character motivations, the actual portrayal of them doesn't always feel like how I think and feel, all the subtle conflicting desires are lost. In which case, it may be entirely a subjective problem. And, as problems go, it's a very minor one, one off-note in what's otherwise a very entertaining ride.
How entertaining? As soon as I finished, I was ready to go online and, as part of my next bundle of online purchases, I was going to include the next book in the series, Apex... only to find out that I was mistaken and it's actually not released yet. And I was very disappointed in that, because I really want to see where it goes.
Finished: Echopraxia by Peter Watts
In Echopraxia, posthumans rule the world, but there's still a place for ordinary baseline humans... just barely, as a failsafe, a measure of comparison, a pawn in the schemes of hive minds, alien intelligences and more. Daniel Bruks is one such baseline, manipulated into joining a scientific religious order out on a search for the source of signals from space, which may be an alien intelligence, but the hive mind thinks might be God.
This is a follow-up to Blindsight one of my favorite SF books ever, and as such, has a pretty high bar right off the bat. (Short version: Not as good, but still on my shortlist for best SF novel of the year)And, at least if you liked Blindsight, this is a very entertaining read with a lot of the same appealing features. There's unflinching looks at human nature. There's cutting edge science dribbled throughout, sometimes related to the main plot, sometimes just as background. There's a lot of interest in neurology and the myriad of ways brains can go wrong. There's a controversial thesis that the author doesn't necessarily force belief in, but lets you explore along with him. And there are some messed-up characters but who you wind up liking nonetheless. There's manipulations by people who are way smarter than humans. There's a vampire that's worth reading even if you hate vampires in fiction.
However, and perhaps this is inevitable, though good, Echopraxia is not quite as good. Blindsight was like a perfect jewel discovered in the wild... the themes and the science and the central "big idea" thesis and the story just fit together, no scene wasted, everything bounced off everything else, resonating, everything in service of the perfect structure. Here, at least on first glance, it's like a vein of precious metal... still valuable, still well worth going after, but it's more muddled and haphazard, it meanders here and there without a clear direction, and there'll probably be some digging involved to get the full worth out of it. The characters aren't quite as memorable (although the relationship between Bruks and Moore is a standout), there's more suspension of disbelief required, and and on a visceral level the story isn't quite as satisfying. The first book had a had sort of a theme of "humans (who may be somewhat manipulated by transhumans who are more intelligent than them, but still comprehensible) going up against something they are woefully unequipped for, nobly trying their best anyway, and stumbling upon a mind-blowing truth", which is emotionally satisfying. Echopraxia is sort of "guy tags along incomprehensible superior life forms on a quest and muddles through a hopeless situation without much understanding" which is... less so.
I started thinking of it almost as a "The Fantastic Journey"-type story written by posthumans... a tale about some particularly clever pets (humans) who lose track of their masters and try to make their way back home without them.
These are complaints of degrees of great. I still love the book. It's still on my short-list for best SF novel of the year. And if there's every a third one, I'll absolutely buy it (and chalk up any problems with this one as "middle book syndrome"). It's only by comparison that it suffers, just a little bit. It's even possible some of this will be improved on a reread... every time I reread Blindsight I got more out of it, and noticed more poetic turns of phrase that I completely missed the first time. This one might be the same way... but, as it stands now, those are my feelings.
Oh, and while you CAN read this without having read Blindsight, I don't recommend it, you lose a lot of the texture to Jim Moore's story. But buy both, they're worth it (and you can download Blindsight for free from the author's website if you don't want to buy it).
Finished: Homeland by Cory Doctorow
Homeland continues the story of Marcus Yallow, who appeared in Doctorow's excellent Little Brother, fighting against those who use the threat of terrorism to undermine the rights of the law-abiding. It's been some years since he told his story of imprisonment and fighting back, and the fame's ended, and just surviving is getting tough with the recession. But when an old associate comes to him and hands him a batch of leaked documents with the instructions to release them if anything happens... and then later witnesses her being abducted by the same forces behind his own imprisonment, he has to decide whether to get involved again. (Short version: Liked it up until the end dropped the ball)
Like the novel before it, this is a mix of stirring up rage against the system, corporate and government collusion to screw over people for their own profit (while not everything in the book is actually happening, a lot of it is pretty close to real stuff you can find out about), a quick HOW-TO primer on lots of geeky technology that the author finds cool that's mostly apolitical, hurts nobody and might be a lot of fun, and also a look at the ethical and anonymous handling of leaks. It doesn't seem to have as much of the nuance of the first book (aside from the fact that they read the documents before releasing them to avoid the problem, they never really address the issue that some of the leaks might lead to people getting killed, etc), but on the whole it's pretty good and, I feel, worth reading for a politically-minded or activist young person.
I was all set to give this book four stars (even despite the frequent ad breaks in the free downloadable version that I read)... and then it ended. Suddenly, abruptly, with emotional notes and personal changes that did not seem to follow from the rest of the book, and virtually no resolution to the 'fighting against a corrupt system' story. The latter I could have handled, as it's a fight that must continue to go on and is a little unrealistic if it gets handily won, but the former really hurt my enjoyment of the book. It literally felt like the author decide, "Huh, okay, I've written about a novel's worth... let's write one more chapter to give it some sort of big ending... guess I can't have him suddenly win, so I'll just do this..." I still enjoyed it on the whole, but it wasn't as good.
Finished: The Ultra Thin Man by Patrick Swenson (received for free)
Two private detectives who are working for the government's spy agency uncover some kind of conspiracy after a terrorist attack on a distant planet kills millions of people. (short version: didn't like it)
Full disclosure, I won a free copy of this through a giveaway (although not one through Goodreads). This did not affect my review.
I should also note that this is a first novel, and traditionally I give those a little more leeway... however, even with that leeway, I can't say I really enjoyed it very much.
The book is a somewhat awkward fusion of noir tropes and SF. I say awkward because it doesn't really work. Not being particularly into noir, I can't really say how well that angle was handled.. to me it seemed to be nothing particularly special, but not terribly bad, either. It's when you combine them with SF that it doesn't work.
The major problem is that the SF elements, for the most part, feel clumsy and poorly thought out. The technology doesn't feel like an organic whole... there seem to be two categories of new technology: there is stuff that only works the way it does because that's what the plot requires, and there's normal stuff with a science word thrown on. Otherwise, it might as well be present day, or even the past. The world (or conspiracy) has access to wondrous technology that does (spoiler intentionally left out), but it only works when (convenient restriction) applies. This happens again and again, so often I found myself rolling my eyes and saying "really?" several times. And a guy doesn't take the bus, he takes the Holo-bus! That's not an actual example, that's just a exaggerated illustration of the types of nods to technological advancement given (although, to be fair, it's at the worst at the start of the book... once the story gets going they don't grate quite so much). There's no sense of how technology and society all fit together in this new society, and I never got the sense that it was a real, living world. The biggest problem is where things like communications come in... it's a world where hardly anybody seems to actually communicate, except for face-to-face. They have tools that enable that (except planet-to-planet, because the plot requires them to be out of communication... this is a forgivable use of those convenient technology rules that pervade the book), but people just don't seem to use them, not good guys, not bad guys, except in the most simplistic of cases.
I can see an argument being made that this is deliberate, to evoke the noir part of the setting, like an old detective movie set in the 40s, before the omnipresent internet. And in more skilled hands, it might have even worked, given a believable, well-thought out justification or just conveyed that this is an alternate world where these are the rules, maybe becoming noirpunk (like steampunk, but with noir aesthetics replacing the Victorian trappings), but here... it just lead to a world I could not buy into.
In terms of the rest of the writing? Well, the novel alternates between two points of view, one first person, one third person, which is pretty distracting, and, furthermore, kind of sets up how one of those points of view ends. More damning, both point of views, aside from the difference of first/third person... felt pretty much the same. They were both male detectives. I couldn't, now, tell you which one was which name or any of their distinctive personality traits, save one who was in love with a girl he met in a bar long ago, and one who the most significant physical changes happen to. They might as well be clones (that might actually have made a more interesting story). The rest of the characters don't especially stand out either... a few make a little bit of an impact, but I'm not going to remember them very long either. There's also a weird laid backness to the level of urgency... the book starts with a terrorist attack that threatens to kill or displace millions... granted, it's on a different planet from the main characters, but they're involved in the investigation, and, from all we see of their emotional reaction, it might as well be just a random murder they're investigating. As the story progresses, there's far too many convenient twists, some related to technologies that only work the way the author needs them to, some just plain plot. The criminals seem to have a bizarrely elaborate and yet simultaneously slipshod and not-particularly-strategic plan for what they're capable of. Leaving that aside, the storytelling seems competent enough, the action works, and the story mostly goes at a decent pace... if he was writing straight noir, and avoiding all the interplanetary conspiracies high-technology... it certainly wouldn't be my thing, but I could see it potentially being called "good"... there was just too much that failed for me as a SF reader to do anything but leave a bad taste in my mouth... it reminded me more of TV sci-fi, which is okay in its place, but for books (and especially books published by a major SF publisher), I've come to expect a lot better.
Oh, and there are aliens. Here's where I at least have something genuinely good to say. While the aliens themselves (the ones that are just part of the background setting, I mean, the ones that would take us into spoilery territory just made me roll my eyes) aren't particularly novel, the author DOES do a good job at sprinkling in little details that make you think that there actually is a culture there, and makes you want to know more. For the most part they never get successfully fleshed out in a way I wanted them to be, but it does add a lot of texture to those scenes, and it's presumably something to look forward to if he did a sequel and you were to read it. I say you, because... I don't think I will be, personally. But I could see him potentially growing past the awkward first novel stage and developing a talent for SF, and if he does, I suspect alien cultures will be something he should focus on.
In my scoring, I teeter between one and two stars here, between 'okay' and 'did not like it'. But even though my review's harsh and I'd probably say, outloud, that I didn't really like it... it's not offensively bad or hard to get through. It's readable in the same way TV SF is watchable, if you turn off your brain some and just roll with it... as a book, it's ultimately forgettable, and doesn't live up to it's potential, but it was never a chore, even if I didn't entirely like it. And honestly, I liked it a little more than the first book of another SF writer I'll not name who writes similar types of spy-space-opera with, apparently, a decent-sized audience. So with that and the traditional first novel leniency, I'll score it a two.
Finished: Last Plane To Heaven: The Final Collection by Jay lake (short story collection, received for free)
The final collection of short stories from Jay Lake, a SF/Fantasy writer who recently died of cancer.
Full disclosure, I received an ARC of this book free through Goodreads' "First Reads" program. I don't believe that's affected my review.
I also feel that I need to point out that, aside from the occasional short story I may have read in an anthology, my only experience with Jay Lake's work in the past was not positive. I read his novel Mainspring, and although I thought the concept was great, several of the storytelling choices did not agree with me and thus, overall, I did not like the book. However, even there I can acknowledge that the prose was well-crafted, and that others might have liked it a lot more than me.
I had a similar, although less intense, reaction to this book. It's good, but too much of it doesn't run towards my tastes. One might think that I'm trying to be extra-kind out of respect for his recent passing, but the truth is, unlike Mainspring, I can't even point to anything that I feel could have been done better... it really all did come down to a difference in tastes. Not everything appeals to everyone.
Structurally, the book is divided into sections... SF in one section, Steampunky-mixed genres in another, and fantasy in another. I actually went back and forth on how I felt about this. Because my interest is largely in SF, and fantasy, generally, leaves me a little cold (this was perhaps part of my negative reaction to Mainspring). And the SF section is the very first section, and rather short. The stories in it were generally good, and most of my favorites are in that section, although some I have read before and thus their impact was lessened. After that section was over, I was worried it was going to be a slog for somebody of my tastes to get through the rest, since I have no real hope of running into the type of stories I like most.
As I continued, I started to think maybe it was a good idea after all, that I could just relax my expectations and enjoy stories for what they are. By the end, I wound up somewhere in between... there were stories I enjoyed more than I thought I would, but it was a little bit of a notable stretch of "not for me" stories.
Even in the stories I didn't enjoy for the plot, though, I could appreciate the craft, the prose is detailed and mostly provides good mental images (although there were a couple where I have to admit I didn't get a good idea of what the world was supposed to be... some of these are set in worlds he's already established in novel form, so this may be why). Despite the circumstances in which they were written, the stories are not death-obsessed... it doesn't shy from the theme when appropriate, but it's not overwhelming. It's only with the last work, more of an essay about life with cancer, that you'd have any idea what happened (assuming you had never heard of Jay Lake before reading the book, and skipped the foreword).
Short stories are a tricky genre, and there are usually two distinct camps. There are short stories which feel like a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end of their own that satisfies like a novel, but on a much reduced level. And there are short stories that just briefly explore a character or setting but very little seemingly gets resolved, and in the end feel like teasers for longer works.
My personal taste runs towards the first category, but a large number of the stories in this volume are in the other. Some of my favorite stories in this work felt like they got cut off right when they got going.
Which, in a way, is perhaps itself a fitting tribute for an author like Jay Lake.
My favorites were probably "Hello, Said the Gun", "Permanent Fatal Errors", "The Starship Mechanic", "Grindstone", the title story, and I think there was one in the horror section I quite liked, but honestly, I can't remember the title or circumstances. I generally disliked the angel-focused interludes, although one or two weren't bad.
Anthology collections are hard to rate on the star-scale, since they're ALWAYS a mixed bag. If a novel had the same proportion of "stuff I like" and "stuff I didn't care for" it would probably get a two, but that rating's unfair and even misleading for a short story collection, where you're often skimming through stuff that's not your tastes. So I'll give it a three.
Finished: iD: The Second Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby
iD picks up where vN leaves off, except it focuses on vN Javier, who's found love with Amy but still has his failsafe that makes doing harm to humans unthinkable. And that fact is used against him, to force him into betraying his love. Once that's done, he must go on a quest for redemption, falling on his old techniques of charm and seduction to find someone who might have a backup copy of Amy's personality.
The book deals with many of the same themes as the first one, but even less subtly. That sounds like a criticism, but really, it's more mixed than that, and it does some good hammering home the point of the horror of being forced to be in love with any human you come across, but at the same time it's hard to be excited about it. The ideas aren't as novel the second time over, and there's very little new, and some of the villainous characters are even more cartoonish than they were before.
Focusing as it does on a character who's mainly survived as a gigolo boytoy, there's a fair bit of sex in the book, mostly, but not exclusively, of the male-on-male variety and some of it fairly explicit. This may put some readers off... personally, it doesn't bother me, but nor does it even give me the undercurrent of enjoyment that straight sex might (although, given the context that much of the sex occurs, perhaps it's for the best that it doesn't trigger pleasurable feelings), so mostly it just didn't interest me.
The only thing that stood out for me positively, beyond just "more of the same" was that I did like the bit at the beginning, where one of the people who develop the failsafe is somebody who acts a bit robotic himself... I'm not sure it entirely paid off by the end, but it was a nice bit on it's own.
Overall, it feels like one of those movie sequels where it doesn't take many chances with the storytelling, it just attempts to replicate mostly what you liked in the first one, with a couple twists. Like Men In Black 2... fans of the first one can enjoy it, but it doesn't quite capture the magic. And in that regard (assuming the sexual content doesn't put you off) it's largely going to be successful. I certainly enjoyed it. I'll probably read book three, if there's a sequel. I'm just not as excited over it as I was the first.
Finished: Starfire by Peter Watts (semi-reread)
A geothermal power facility on the bottom of the ocean floor isn't the most inviting place to work. Overwhelming pressure, constant danger, near-complete darkness, monsters of the deep, not to mention them having to cut into your body to let you survive the necessary excursions outside the station. Under such conditions, normal people might bend, or break, in unpredictable ways. So if you're a big corporation that just wants to get the job done, it might occur to you to send down people who were already broken... people who've grown up with constant pressure and fear, who had monsters in their own family or have become monsters themselves... people who've grown addicted to being used and abused. These are people who your studies indicate might break, but do so in more predictable ways, ways that don't compromise the mission. Of course, you've forgotten that extreme environments can serve as crucibles, that sometimes broken things put themselves back together stronger, stranger than before. And there are other things at the bottom of the ocean, things that have evolved in those extreme environments, stranger and more dangerous than dysfunctional workers, and together they might change everything.
Peter Watts wrote one of my favorite novels, Blindsight. Starfish was his first novel, and despite being set at the bottom of the sea rather than deep space, there are a lot of similarities. In Starfish, he tests and plays around with loads of ideas that eventually mature into Blindsight, so they might seem familiar. They are nonetheless still cool, even if you've read the other book, and if you haven't, might qualify as mind-blowing. I particularly liked how he handled organic AI, cultured brain tissue that functions as a literal neural network and learns without a traditional consciousness. Again, he's explored similar themes in later novels and goes even farther, but it's still entertaining.
Mostly, though, the similarity is Watts' ability to write beautifully broken people and make you care about them. The main character, Lenie Clarke, often feels disconnected, sometimes standing by when most people would be acting, and yet you really feel for her, and even some of the more extreme characters get humanized, either through seeing things through their own view, or the changes that occur over the course of the book. In some ways it's even more daring than he's done in other books.. it takes a lot to ask you to sympathize with some of these characters, and yet he mostly manages. He even manages to make the head of the corporation into a person just trying to do the best she can.
The book is broken up into sections that feel a bit like individual short stories, giving the novel as a whole something of a disjointed feel. You get to know some character developments, and then suddenly everything shifts months in the future and one character is gone, for example. I'd have liked it to be more cohesive, but it's not a flaw that seriously damages the story. The prose, while it drops into technical language a fair bit, is mostly clear and carries a poetry and emotional punch that I've come to expect from his work... not quite as polished, but still at times very powerful.
If I were going to recommend any book of this author, it'd still be Blindsight... but Starfish is pretty good too, and well worth checking out.
Finished: Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
The aristocratic class of Grass go hunting for creatures they call "foxen", on things they call "mounts", led by beasts they call "hounds", but it's a much darker game on the planet Grass, where these alien creatures are much more dangerous, and stranger, than the earthly ones they're named after. It's more than a cultural institution, it's practically an obsession among the nobles of this one insular world. The nobles would be happy if nobody from the outside world set foot on Grass ever again, but the rest of the galaxy is secretly facing a plague... and there's some evidence that Grass is the only place that plague doesn't exist. So Grass is pressured in to accepting a family of ambassadors, who's mission it is to find out if there is a cure there, all while hopefully keeping the plague secret. But to do that, they must uncover the dark secrets of Grass.
It took a while for me to get into the book, I have to admit. I'm not super-fond of stories that focus on a hereditary aristocratic class much like medieval times, only in the future. And a lot of the characters and institutions were thoroughly unlikeable. A couple of the main characters (once they emerged... it was difficult to tell at first) I liked, but they were mostly stuck in bad situations and often surrounded by unlikeable people. But eventually it started to build up a momentum to where I wanted to see what would happen next, and find a solution to the mystery.
That mystery, and the solution, mostly satisfies... maybe it's a bit hard to buy into the idea that it couldn't have been detected earlier, but I can go with it, and the biology of the world seems pretty well-thought out. On a character level... it's better than I thought it might be from the first few chapters, but it went to a few weird places and some of it left me cold. Of the many characters in the book, pretty much three people rose to being of mostly positive interest, the main female character, and two monks who have no choice in serving the religion they don't believe in. For a while, one of the noblemen fell in that category too, but later faded away. Though I have to confess, I'm pleased they didn't go with certain obvious routes I was expecting. I also have to give the book credit for creating a religion not directly based on a current one (and coexisting with the current one... the main character and her family are mostly Catholics), that was both interesting and plausible. And although it was mostly a corrupt institution, I enjoyed learning about it more than I usually do.
One thing I didn't care much for, purely as a matter of taste, was the perspective. The prose used an omniscient perspective, often jumping into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters in a single scene, sometimes listing off what everybody in a room was thinking in reaction to an event, sometimes mostly focusing on one person and then suddenly swinging to tell us the thoughts of another. I find that style a little distracting (as I'm forced to wonder if stuff isn't being revealed not because the character I'm following doesn't know it, but because the author simply is deciding not to tell us the thoughts of the one character who does know at the right time), and it took some getting used to.
On the whole, I liked it, am glad I read it, but it wasn't mind-blowing and I don't think it's a book I'm going to read again anytime soon.
Started: Exo by Steven Gould (Jumper, Book 4)
Started: Maelstrom, by Peter Watts (Rifters, Book 2)
Started: Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Me? I was always friendly with her but never especially close... she never even actually said goodbye to me, which I guess says something, so I miss her mostly because my brother seemed to be happier with her.
The big effect in my own life (aside from worrying over my brother and the additional cat chores) is in food. See, she was always the cook of the group (she didn't work or even bring in any money through social services or anything, which I guess also means we now are spending less money to maintain the same standard of living), which meant I never really had to do much of anything beyond occasionally putting something in the microwave or oven and coming back when it was done, and could allow my lack of any skills in the area continue to exist (or is it not-exist if it's a lack?). Although my brother does cook some, and did when she didn't feel up to it, he's working a lot with school and actual work, and I didn't want to add to his burden by asking him to cook for me, and in fact the reverse, that at least I could help out by making sure he had a decent hot meal without having to do much work when he comes home (though he often cooks on the weekends so it's not totally one-sided). So I've taken it upon myself to finally learn to cook.
Nothing super dramatic, but baby steps. A lot of frozen and things like packaged-side-dish type thing, along with some meats (sometimes merely Shake-and-Baked), but at least assembled into a full meal. Learned how to do sausages on the skillet first, then burgers (which were far simpler than I imagined). About the closet to "from scratch" has been spaghetti (and there I used a pre-made sauce and pre-made pasta, and just put in a bunch of vegetables). Not actually much less quality than we normally ate, actually (more complex things like roasts she did occasionally make, and maybe eventually I'll get there as well). And mostly self-taught, too (though occasionally with a teeny bit of instruction on times and temperatures).
On the whole, I seem to be fairly good at it, at least the time management aspect, so that the whole meal is ready at once (aside from the difficulty in estimating things like how fast a pot of water boils), and I haven't killed us or made us sick yet! And I have learned that adding mushrooms to virtually any meal is a good idea to beef it up without actually using meat. I buy them all the time now.
My knife skills though, those completely suck, I cannot cut or chop things with any sophistication and am probably using the wrong knives to do it. Even slicing a tomato looks like it was done by some kind of angry madman. Oh well, hopefully I'll improve on those with time too.
Still, I'm somewhat proud of myself for that, although it is a bit of a time sink and I kind of miss just being able to eat when something's ready instead of having to spend half an hour or an hour making it every day.
But let's move on from that. Other than that, my life's pretty much the same. Didn't do anything for Halloween (though it was cold and rainy so kids probably didn't enjoy it either... since we never get any Trick or Treaters at our apartment, I might have considered just going out for a walk to see what costumes were on display if not for that). Time does seem to be moving at a rapid pace, except for me, though. I almost feel like I'm in one of those SF stories about time dilation.
Anyway, TV... mildly enjoying stuff this year. Of new shows, Flash is okay fun, and Gotham I'm still not sure it works but it's mostly been holding my attention. It is, if nothing else, pretty well cast, I can believe Catwoman-girl becomes Catwoman and Penguin-Guy becomes Penguin. As for old stuff, Walking Dead's been pretty good, SHIELD's been somewhat better than this time last year, and most of the rest of the stuff is okay but unremarkable.
I should single out DW for special attention, because New Doctor. So far, I like the Doctor, but the writing is mixed. My favorites were probably Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline, both of which were written by the same guy, so I hope he does more next year. Though I have to say I really disliked the Forest one, also by a new writer. Just shoddy all around, maybe one good moment in it ruined by being such an awful episode. But in general, some new writers would be nice (especially a few women), and I think Moffat needs to step away. He's been at it a while, and he's reusing a lot of the same old ideas in new dresses... he's had the 50th anniversary, invented a new doctor and fudged the regeneration count so that he could tell the story of his final-of-12 regenerations, and introduced the first of a new set... that's enough, it's time to let somebody else put their mark on it. (And I hope whoever does it next ditches the "standalone episodes that dangle an ongoing mystery that gets unsatisfyingly resolved in some big finale" pattern and just gives us great episodes and a great finale that comes out of NOWHERE.
Also, I miss the old live-in companion style, rather than what it's been for Clara and about half of Amy/Rory, where they have a normal life that the Doctor just pops in on now and then. I want the Doctor to be that strange man who takes you off on a wild set of adventures that lasts as long as you can stand to stay, a roller coaster ride for as long as you can hold on, and changes your life forever, not to be Cosmic Kramer who keeps popping into your place to try and drag you into his latest crazy scheme (it occurs to me that Seinfeld is probably a dated reference by now). I guess tonight (probably just before the To Be Continued) we learn who Missy is, but so far I'm kind of meh on that too.
Anyway, let's finish with my book list since last time. As usual, the reviews are pulled from my Goodreads account.
Finished: Blindsight by Peter Watts (reread)
Reread this in preparation for Echopraxia, already reviewed it several times here.
Finished: Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross
Five thousand years in the future, humanoid artificial life form Krina investigates the disappearance of her sister that may be connected to an ancient financial scam.
This is set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but aside from sharing the same setting of a hard SF, no-FTL universe where humanity has died out and robots have replaced them, there's very little in common... the plots don't connect and the characters are all unrelated. (Short version: more interesting than entertaining, and on the whole not as fun as SC)It sheds the arguably overly-sexed tone of the first book in favor of a story that's almost all business.
Financial business, to be exact. The book is very interested in how money works in the future of slow interstellar travel, and how it can be scammed, and explores it at great length and in detail. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book, and unfortunately possibly the greatest flaw. For, while this exploration is often very interesting, it's seldom actually entertaining, and that's my assessment of the book as a whole as well. I don't think it's a bad book, I just didn't love it like I hoped, or even as much as Saturn's Children. Neptune's Brood is interesting, and I think it's worth reading (particularly for potential science fiction authors who should really see how much thought went into it, and perhaps to steal ideas from), but I wanted it to be more fun, and, for me, financial skullduggery just isn't, and much of the robot stuff was already better explored in SC. Your mileage may vary, and it might thrill you.
Finished: Zero Echo Schadow Prime by Peter Samet (received for free)
Full disclosure: I received this book for free as part of a Goodreads giveaway, but I'll do my best to give it a fair and honest review.
Zero Echo Shadow Prime tells the story of Charlie Nobunga, a young genius who just programmed a new sort of AI assistant that actually feels like a real person. In the midst of her fame, she's diagnosed with cancer, the same kind that killed her twin sister, but the head of a cutting edge technology company proposes a solution... to scan her brain and copy her personality into a stronger, artificial body. Charlie's unsure about the whole thing, but the procedure goes ahead... and many different Charlies awaken, each unaware of the others, sometimes unaware of a lot more. First, there's Prime, the planned superior body, a form that could be a cyborg supersolider. There's also Echo, a four-armed warrior with no memories, in a digital world full of other, slightly different Echos. There's Shadow, who's been converted into an AI assistant in somebody's head. And finally, there's Charlie's original body, which wasn't destroyed during the scan but never intended to be reawoken unless there was a problem... except it's been kidnapped by Luddites, who want her help to take down the company that scanned her.
This book's not only a first novel, but a self-published one. This normally makes me very leery of potential poor quality works (I've been burned before), although I'm certainly willing to give a first novel a little more leeway, and the book's concept was impressive and ambitious. So does it live up to it, and is it a successful novel that you could expect to get published on its own?
The answer to both questions is, yes, mostly. Some flaws (and I will get a little nitpicky about them, but only in the hopes of helping the author improve), but clearly this is an author with a lot of potential. The story is well-paced and the changes in perspective keep you interested, and what could turn out to be a complicated mess, with many copies of the same people running around, never falls outside his control. The stories are separate at first, but tie together in believable ways and with excellent timing, neither too slowly or too quick (although maybe I'd have liked a little more solo time on a couple of them). For the most part the science and technology is believable without being overwhelming. In fact, I think this is quite a good novel to introduce people to various singularity-type themes without requiring them to be versed in a lot of prior SF.
As for the flaws? Well, a lot of it depends on whether this is intended to be a full-on SF novel, or a (higher-age) Young Adult SF book. It's not absolutely clear from the descriptions and promotion, but there are a few markers for option B. The character being 18, for example, suggests it may be marketed towards teens, and the romance angle felt a little on the YA side, opposite sides, immediate attraction and suddenly falling for each others. However a few things point in the other direction, like the ending which seems to set up for a sequel that is decidedly less YA and more complex.
The prose is pretty good, overall, but I did notice some examples of what's called "Said Bookism", where the author notably avoids using the word "said", and instead characters insist, implore, chime in, drone, and so on, some of which is certainly okay for variety, but when it's done too often, it can be distracting. In this case, it's on the edge of being a problem, so this is one of the nitpicky points, something the author should be careful of in the future. Some parts are worse than others, but it's not a huge problem overall.
Charlie's big development that led to her Shadow winning the Turing test seems a little facile, described as a stunning breakthrough, when really it seems like a fairly obvious thing that would be tried many times in many different ways. Similarly, the "replicator" she invents is a little sci-cute rather than consistant and thought out (if it's possible under the technology of the world, there ought to be a lot of them produced by a lot of people, a big problem that society has ways to deal with). Both of these are things I'd completely overlook if I were to consider it a YA novel... the main characters being sort of exceptional-in-a-way-that's-easy-for-the-audience-to-relate-to is a common trope, and it's easier to give her a simple insight that for some reason nobody else has thought of than bog the younger reader down with a lot of technical gobbledegook. But I'd like a little more rigor in a full-fledged, no-qualifier SF novel.
Another thing in that category (things that are more forgiveable if you consider the book to be a YA) is one of my minor disappointments in the book. There seems like a lot of characters, but... in many ways, there's really one character, seen in many different ways and contexts, sometimes interacting with herself. But, in the end, I wound up finding her a little bland as a character: a generally good person who's smart and has a real stubborn streak. The almost archetypical hero, with only a few details above and beyond that. In a YA, this isn't a problem (and may even be ideal) because a somewhat bland character is easier to project yourself into and inhabit, and it can become less about who the character is as it is about what you might do in that situation. But in a more adult, deeper work, I'd expect a lot more exploration into what certain characteristics lead to which parts of our personality, how removing memory or putting us in complex scenarios might alter our natures, how an invulnerable Charlie is different from one dying of cancer, at the very least, know that feature character inside out. But after reading about all these different versions, I never really got the sense that I knew the character any better, any more deeply, than I would in a TV show. There's a bit of a difference between the Echos and the others, but most of that is caused by stuff that happens off page and left for a potential sequel.
There is one final bit that rankled me particularly, and that's involving Charlie's cancer. First, the idea that cancer is still a worry in a world where nanotechnology can build new bodies for people from scratch is one of those few inconsistent moments (surely it would be easier to have some nano searching her body for tumors and eliminating them... even if it couldn't be a full cure, something to make her functional instead of sickly), but that's not even my biggest problem. My biggest problem is there's a point in the story where Charlie is told "Cancer's an electrolyte imbalance, chemo is the worst thing you can do," and told to drink something. Now, this is a Luddite character who may not know what they're talking about, but... it's never really refuted in the story, either, and she's portrayed as educated in this field particularly. A lot of their other ideas are shown to be wrong, but at other points it's clear they might have some valid points, and in the case of this cancer cure... it's an awfully specific claim about cancer that borders on woo and could wind up hurting real people if they took it on faith as they might many of the other technological advancements. That bothered me. I wouldn't even mind if they still claimed they have a cure for cancer (true or not), as long as they weren't specific about how it worked and claim that current medical advice is the WORST thing you could do... but if you're going to declare something about a real medical condition that goes directly against current medical thinking, I think it's your responsibility to either prove it, declare it explicitly an alternate universe that has no basis in fact, or refute it directly in the text.
Otherwise, it's a very solid first novel. So yes, there are flaws, but even a professional first novel from one of the big publishing companies might have issues like these, and they don't seriously harm the book. On the whole, I was engaged, never bored, and always looking forward to what happened next. The ultimate test of a first novel is, would I read a sequel (or another novel by the author), and the answer in this case is an unequivocal yes (particularly a sequel). A final rating is still somewhat complicated, because as a normal SF book, it's good and shows a lot of potential, but takes a few too many shortcuts and so it's not quite up there with my favorites. I'd put it as a high three, maybe getting close to four. If I were to consider this a Young Adult book (again, edging towards the higher end of the teen years), it comes off much better. In fact, I'd wager to say it's probably one of the most enjoyable YA pure-SF books I've read (although admittedly, there aren't many). I'd put it firmly in four territory, and if Goodreads allowed half-stars, a 4.5 might be what I'd score it. I guess the best thing to do is split the difference and call it a four, because I did really enjoy it, just with some reservations.
Finished: The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke tells the tale of the last human city, Diaspar, a billion years in the future, and eternally stable thanks to a population engineered to their environment. But one man lacks the fear of the outside world that grips everybody else, and driven by a curiosity about what lies outside the gates.
This is, I'm told, a rework of another work, Against the Fall of Night, but I haven't read it to compare, and I'm unlikely to. Suffice it to say, it's an ambitious book that, while it has some typical failings of SF books of its era, is full of sense of wonder and ably conveys a sense of awe.
Let's get the flaws out of the way first. The characters are rather flat, with most characters notable only for the role they play in the story rather than any feeling they're a real person. The prose sometimes over-explains with exposition, rather than taking the reader on a journey of discovery. There aren't really any significantly important female characters (and there is a little casual, perhaps even unconscious sexism when discussing one of the female characters who does play a small role). And maybe the spans of time seem a little unbelievable for the human race to remain static and at the same time more or less comprehensible. Finally, the ending devolves a little more into exposition than even the rest of the book, and the character's journey doesn't feel like it ends in the way that matches the rest of the story.
Still, although this there's something compelling above all that that makes this a memorable book, above and beyond the mere historical interest that can be, itself, a worthy reason for reading classic SF.
The book contains a lot of echoes of other authors, before and after the book... some may be deliberate homages (either by Clarke or of Clarke), others may be coincidence. But I found in some elements similarities that reminded me of Olaf Stapledon's vistas of ever-evolving man, of HP Lovecraft's bizarre alien beings, of HG Wells and his divided human races, of movies like Logan's Run. There's even some tropes that you come to expect from post-Singularity fiction, which wasn't even really a thing when this was written. And sure, some of it falls under Clarke's Law (any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic), but it still feels like technology.
If you're a fan of classic SF, this is definitely one to check out (or, perhaps, the earlier version under a different title... from what little I've research, opinions are firmly divided on which one is better). If old-style fiction tends to leave you a little cold, it still might be worth reading, because SF builds itself on the shoulders of prior authors, and this is a very good example of it, still using ideas that came before it but also presaging ideas that have come to become popular.
Finished: The Year's Best SF 17 (short story collection)
A collection of short stories published in 2011, chosen as the best by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. As usual, it's a mixed bag. While none completely left me cold, save perhaps Paul Pope's "Ragnarok" (but that's in large part because it's written as poetry), I didn't find any standouts that blew me away, either. Most of them were mildly pleasing, and a few I'd already read, so their impact wasn't as good as it may have been. I've liked other Years Best volumes more even when they had stories I absolutely hated, just because there was something really memorable along for the ride.
If I had to choose, my favorites would be "The Education of Junior Number Twelve" by Madeline Ashby and "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Fields of Reindeer" by Ken Liu.
Finished: Crux by Ramez Naam
Crux continues the story begun in Nexus, in which a technology-based drug installs an operating system and wireless interface in people's brains. Nexus is growing in popularity, more and more kids are being born with Nexus in their systems or growing up learning how to be mentally connected, and groups wanting to stop the technology's spread are growing more desperate. And those who are finding ways to abuse it growing more crafty. Kaden Lane, one of the inventors of the latest version of Nexus, is doing what he can against both groups, using his secret back-door code to shut down those who use Nexus to hack into people's brains and control them for profit, perverted kicks, or political motives, but he has to question whether even he has the right to control others in that way.
It's an exciting book that works both as an action/adventure technothriller and as Earth-based hard SF. Like Nexus, Crux feels extremely well-thought out and authentic, looking at all the potential uses, and abuses, of this technology, and unlike a lot of SF, it's very easy to believe that these are going to be issues we might one day be facing. No surprise, as Naam is a scientist and it shows (and in the afterword he discusses some of the precursor technologies that are already being developed). While clearly full of dangers, there's a part of me that really wants the technology to be real, soon. That's one of the reasons I read SF, to be able to vicariously experience technologies that aren't here yet, and I might never see... this book hits that button hard, and often.
The book's well-paced, if it errs, it errs on the side of being too fast... what's a several hundred page book just seemed to fly by, and I never felt like it was dragging. Several stories intertwine and come together in a believable way, the villains, with a few exceptions, generally feel humanized and you can sympathize with some of their goals if not their methods, and there's the chance for even bad people to be redeemed.
One of the problems I had with the first book was too much perspective shifting, often to exceedingly minor characters like a grunt on the ground in an assault. In this book, although it still shifts perspective a fair bit, it seems to be much more manageable (perhaps I've just grown used to the style, but it feels like he decided to focus more on main characters rather than needing us to see events from every angle), so, on a technical level it's superior than the first. On the overall enjoyment level, it's probably about even, maybe slightly better, the only area where it lags behind is the novelty factor, which kind of HAS to drop in a sequel.
It's still not a perfect book... there are times when the character moments feel somewhat... I'm not even sure of the right word. A tiny bit simplistic, or cliche, or unsubtle, rolled into one, just to the level where it feels a bit more like, say, the novel equivalent of an action movie rather really convincing me that these were real people. It's not a constant problem, and there are times when characters get a fair bit of depth, and he certainly puts some through the emotional wringer, but at a few times I felt some artificial distance, even when seeing their emotions laid bare. Maybe that's even part of it, like when I see a dream in a movie and it sort of pulls me out of believing it because it doesn't actually capture how I dream, all the ever-shifting background elements and surreal logic... in this book, while I can believe in the character motivations, the actual portrayal of them doesn't always feel like how I think and feel, all the subtle conflicting desires are lost. In which case, it may be entirely a subjective problem. And, as problems go, it's a very minor one, one off-note in what's otherwise a very entertaining ride.
How entertaining? As soon as I finished, I was ready to go online and, as part of my next bundle of online purchases, I was going to include the next book in the series, Apex... only to find out that I was mistaken and it's actually not released yet. And I was very disappointed in that, because I really want to see where it goes.
Finished: Echopraxia by Peter Watts
In Echopraxia, posthumans rule the world, but there's still a place for ordinary baseline humans... just barely, as a failsafe, a measure of comparison, a pawn in the schemes of hive minds, alien intelligences and more. Daniel Bruks is one such baseline, manipulated into joining a scientific religious order out on a search for the source of signals from space, which may be an alien intelligence, but the hive mind thinks might be God.
This is a follow-up to Blindsight one of my favorite SF books ever, and as such, has a pretty high bar right off the bat. (Short version: Not as good, but still on my shortlist for best SF novel of the year)And, at least if you liked Blindsight, this is a very entertaining read with a lot of the same appealing features. There's unflinching looks at human nature. There's cutting edge science dribbled throughout, sometimes related to the main plot, sometimes just as background. There's a lot of interest in neurology and the myriad of ways brains can go wrong. There's a controversial thesis that the author doesn't necessarily force belief in, but lets you explore along with him. And there are some messed-up characters but who you wind up liking nonetheless. There's manipulations by people who are way smarter than humans. There's a vampire that's worth reading even if you hate vampires in fiction.
However, and perhaps this is inevitable, though good, Echopraxia is not quite as good. Blindsight was like a perfect jewel discovered in the wild... the themes and the science and the central "big idea" thesis and the story just fit together, no scene wasted, everything bounced off everything else, resonating, everything in service of the perfect structure. Here, at least on first glance, it's like a vein of precious metal... still valuable, still well worth going after, but it's more muddled and haphazard, it meanders here and there without a clear direction, and there'll probably be some digging involved to get the full worth out of it. The characters aren't quite as memorable (although the relationship between Bruks and Moore is a standout), there's more suspension of disbelief required, and and on a visceral level the story isn't quite as satisfying. The first book had a had sort of a theme of "humans (who may be somewhat manipulated by transhumans who are more intelligent than them, but still comprehensible) going up against something they are woefully unequipped for, nobly trying their best anyway, and stumbling upon a mind-blowing truth", which is emotionally satisfying. Echopraxia is sort of "guy tags along incomprehensible superior life forms on a quest and muddles through a hopeless situation without much understanding" which is... less so.
I started thinking of it almost as a "The Fantastic Journey"-type story written by posthumans... a tale about some particularly clever pets (humans) who lose track of their masters and try to make their way back home without them.
These are complaints of degrees of great. I still love the book. It's still on my short-list for best SF novel of the year. And if there's every a third one, I'll absolutely buy it (and chalk up any problems with this one as "middle book syndrome"). It's only by comparison that it suffers, just a little bit. It's even possible some of this will be improved on a reread... every time I reread Blindsight I got more out of it, and noticed more poetic turns of phrase that I completely missed the first time. This one might be the same way... but, as it stands now, those are my feelings.
Oh, and while you CAN read this without having read Blindsight, I don't recommend it, you lose a lot of the texture to Jim Moore's story. But buy both, they're worth it (and you can download Blindsight for free from the author's website if you don't want to buy it).
Finished: Homeland by Cory Doctorow
Homeland continues the story of Marcus Yallow, who appeared in Doctorow's excellent Little Brother, fighting against those who use the threat of terrorism to undermine the rights of the law-abiding. It's been some years since he told his story of imprisonment and fighting back, and the fame's ended, and just surviving is getting tough with the recession. But when an old associate comes to him and hands him a batch of leaked documents with the instructions to release them if anything happens... and then later witnesses her being abducted by the same forces behind his own imprisonment, he has to decide whether to get involved again. (Short version: Liked it up until the end dropped the ball)
Like the novel before it, this is a mix of stirring up rage against the system, corporate and government collusion to screw over people for their own profit (while not everything in the book is actually happening, a lot of it is pretty close to real stuff you can find out about), a quick HOW-TO primer on lots of geeky technology that the author finds cool that's mostly apolitical, hurts nobody and might be a lot of fun, and also a look at the ethical and anonymous handling of leaks. It doesn't seem to have as much of the nuance of the first book (aside from the fact that they read the documents before releasing them to avoid the problem, they never really address the issue that some of the leaks might lead to people getting killed, etc), but on the whole it's pretty good and, I feel, worth reading for a politically-minded or activist young person.
I was all set to give this book four stars (even despite the frequent ad breaks in the free downloadable version that I read)... and then it ended. Suddenly, abruptly, with emotional notes and personal changes that did not seem to follow from the rest of the book, and virtually no resolution to the 'fighting against a corrupt system' story. The latter I could have handled, as it's a fight that must continue to go on and is a little unrealistic if it gets handily won, but the former really hurt my enjoyment of the book. It literally felt like the author decide, "Huh, okay, I've written about a novel's worth... let's write one more chapter to give it some sort of big ending... guess I can't have him suddenly win, so I'll just do this..." I still enjoyed it on the whole, but it wasn't as good.
Finished: The Ultra Thin Man by Patrick Swenson (received for free)
Two private detectives who are working for the government's spy agency uncover some kind of conspiracy after a terrorist attack on a distant planet kills millions of people. (short version: didn't like it)
Full disclosure, I won a free copy of this through a giveaway (although not one through Goodreads). This did not affect my review.
I should also note that this is a first novel, and traditionally I give those a little more leeway... however, even with that leeway, I can't say I really enjoyed it very much.
The book is a somewhat awkward fusion of noir tropes and SF. I say awkward because it doesn't really work. Not being particularly into noir, I can't really say how well that angle was handled.. to me it seemed to be nothing particularly special, but not terribly bad, either. It's when you combine them with SF that it doesn't work.
The major problem is that the SF elements, for the most part, feel clumsy and poorly thought out. The technology doesn't feel like an organic whole... there seem to be two categories of new technology: there is stuff that only works the way it does because that's what the plot requires, and there's normal stuff with a science word thrown on. Otherwise, it might as well be present day, or even the past. The world (or conspiracy) has access to wondrous technology that does (spoiler intentionally left out), but it only works when (convenient restriction) applies. This happens again and again, so often I found myself rolling my eyes and saying "really?" several times. And a guy doesn't take the bus, he takes the Holo-bus! That's not an actual example, that's just a exaggerated illustration of the types of nods to technological advancement given (although, to be fair, it's at the worst at the start of the book... once the story gets going they don't grate quite so much). There's no sense of how technology and society all fit together in this new society, and I never got the sense that it was a real, living world. The biggest problem is where things like communications come in... it's a world where hardly anybody seems to actually communicate, except for face-to-face. They have tools that enable that (except planet-to-planet, because the plot requires them to be out of communication... this is a forgivable use of those convenient technology rules that pervade the book), but people just don't seem to use them, not good guys, not bad guys, except in the most simplistic of cases.
I can see an argument being made that this is deliberate, to evoke the noir part of the setting, like an old detective movie set in the 40s, before the omnipresent internet. And in more skilled hands, it might have even worked, given a believable, well-thought out justification or just conveyed that this is an alternate world where these are the rules, maybe becoming noirpunk (like steampunk, but with noir aesthetics replacing the Victorian trappings), but here... it just lead to a world I could not buy into.
In terms of the rest of the writing? Well, the novel alternates between two points of view, one first person, one third person, which is pretty distracting, and, furthermore, kind of sets up how one of those points of view ends. More damning, both point of views, aside from the difference of first/third person... felt pretty much the same. They were both male detectives. I couldn't, now, tell you which one was which name or any of their distinctive personality traits, save one who was in love with a girl he met in a bar long ago, and one who the most significant physical changes happen to. They might as well be clones (that might actually have made a more interesting story). The rest of the characters don't especially stand out either... a few make a little bit of an impact, but I'm not going to remember them very long either. There's also a weird laid backness to the level of urgency... the book starts with a terrorist attack that threatens to kill or displace millions... granted, it's on a different planet from the main characters, but they're involved in the investigation, and, from all we see of their emotional reaction, it might as well be just a random murder they're investigating. As the story progresses, there's far too many convenient twists, some related to technologies that only work the way the author needs them to, some just plain plot. The criminals seem to have a bizarrely elaborate and yet simultaneously slipshod and not-particularly-strategic plan for what they're capable of. Leaving that aside, the storytelling seems competent enough, the action works, and the story mostly goes at a decent pace... if he was writing straight noir, and avoiding all the interplanetary conspiracies high-technology... it certainly wouldn't be my thing, but I could see it potentially being called "good"... there was just too much that failed for me as a SF reader to do anything but leave a bad taste in my mouth... it reminded me more of TV sci-fi, which is okay in its place, but for books (and especially books published by a major SF publisher), I've come to expect a lot better.
Oh, and there are aliens. Here's where I at least have something genuinely good to say. While the aliens themselves (the ones that are just part of the background setting, I mean, the ones that would take us into spoilery territory just made me roll my eyes) aren't particularly novel, the author DOES do a good job at sprinkling in little details that make you think that there actually is a culture there, and makes you want to know more. For the most part they never get successfully fleshed out in a way I wanted them to be, but it does add a lot of texture to those scenes, and it's presumably something to look forward to if he did a sequel and you were to read it. I say you, because... I don't think I will be, personally. But I could see him potentially growing past the awkward first novel stage and developing a talent for SF, and if he does, I suspect alien cultures will be something he should focus on.
In my scoring, I teeter between one and two stars here, between 'okay' and 'did not like it'. But even though my review's harsh and I'd probably say, outloud, that I didn't really like it... it's not offensively bad or hard to get through. It's readable in the same way TV SF is watchable, if you turn off your brain some and just roll with it... as a book, it's ultimately forgettable, and doesn't live up to it's potential, but it was never a chore, even if I didn't entirely like it. And honestly, I liked it a little more than the first book of another SF writer I'll not name who writes similar types of spy-space-opera with, apparently, a decent-sized audience. So with that and the traditional first novel leniency, I'll score it a two.
Finished: Last Plane To Heaven: The Final Collection by Jay lake (short story collection, received for free)
The final collection of short stories from Jay Lake, a SF/Fantasy writer who recently died of cancer.
Full disclosure, I received an ARC of this book free through Goodreads' "First Reads" program. I don't believe that's affected my review.
I also feel that I need to point out that, aside from the occasional short story I may have read in an anthology, my only experience with Jay Lake's work in the past was not positive. I read his novel Mainspring, and although I thought the concept was great, several of the storytelling choices did not agree with me and thus, overall, I did not like the book. However, even there I can acknowledge that the prose was well-crafted, and that others might have liked it a lot more than me.
I had a similar, although less intense, reaction to this book. It's good, but too much of it doesn't run towards my tastes. One might think that I'm trying to be extra-kind out of respect for his recent passing, but the truth is, unlike Mainspring, I can't even point to anything that I feel could have been done better... it really all did come down to a difference in tastes. Not everything appeals to everyone.
Structurally, the book is divided into sections... SF in one section, Steampunky-mixed genres in another, and fantasy in another. I actually went back and forth on how I felt about this. Because my interest is largely in SF, and fantasy, generally, leaves me a little cold (this was perhaps part of my negative reaction to Mainspring). And the SF section is the very first section, and rather short. The stories in it were generally good, and most of my favorites are in that section, although some I have read before and thus their impact was lessened. After that section was over, I was worried it was going to be a slog for somebody of my tastes to get through the rest, since I have no real hope of running into the type of stories I like most.
As I continued, I started to think maybe it was a good idea after all, that I could just relax my expectations and enjoy stories for what they are. By the end, I wound up somewhere in between... there were stories I enjoyed more than I thought I would, but it was a little bit of a notable stretch of "not for me" stories.
Even in the stories I didn't enjoy for the plot, though, I could appreciate the craft, the prose is detailed and mostly provides good mental images (although there were a couple where I have to admit I didn't get a good idea of what the world was supposed to be... some of these are set in worlds he's already established in novel form, so this may be why). Despite the circumstances in which they were written, the stories are not death-obsessed... it doesn't shy from the theme when appropriate, but it's not overwhelming. It's only with the last work, more of an essay about life with cancer, that you'd have any idea what happened (assuming you had never heard of Jay Lake before reading the book, and skipped the foreword).
Short stories are a tricky genre, and there are usually two distinct camps. There are short stories which feel like a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end of their own that satisfies like a novel, but on a much reduced level. And there are short stories that just briefly explore a character or setting but very little seemingly gets resolved, and in the end feel like teasers for longer works.
My personal taste runs towards the first category, but a large number of the stories in this volume are in the other. Some of my favorite stories in this work felt like they got cut off right when they got going.
Which, in a way, is perhaps itself a fitting tribute for an author like Jay Lake.
My favorites were probably "Hello, Said the Gun", "Permanent Fatal Errors", "The Starship Mechanic", "Grindstone", the title story, and I think there was one in the horror section I quite liked, but honestly, I can't remember the title or circumstances. I generally disliked the angel-focused interludes, although one or two weren't bad.
Anthology collections are hard to rate on the star-scale, since they're ALWAYS a mixed bag. If a novel had the same proportion of "stuff I like" and "stuff I didn't care for" it would probably get a two, but that rating's unfair and even misleading for a short story collection, where you're often skimming through stuff that's not your tastes. So I'll give it a three.
Finished: iD: The Second Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby
iD picks up where vN leaves off, except it focuses on vN Javier, who's found love with Amy but still has his failsafe that makes doing harm to humans unthinkable. And that fact is used against him, to force him into betraying his love. Once that's done, he must go on a quest for redemption, falling on his old techniques of charm and seduction to find someone who might have a backup copy of Amy's personality.
The book deals with many of the same themes as the first one, but even less subtly. That sounds like a criticism, but really, it's more mixed than that, and it does some good hammering home the point of the horror of being forced to be in love with any human you come across, but at the same time it's hard to be excited about it. The ideas aren't as novel the second time over, and there's very little new, and some of the villainous characters are even more cartoonish than they were before.
Focusing as it does on a character who's mainly survived as a gigolo boytoy, there's a fair bit of sex in the book, mostly, but not exclusively, of the male-on-male variety and some of it fairly explicit. This may put some readers off... personally, it doesn't bother me, but nor does it even give me the undercurrent of enjoyment that straight sex might (although, given the context that much of the sex occurs, perhaps it's for the best that it doesn't trigger pleasurable feelings), so mostly it just didn't interest me.
The only thing that stood out for me positively, beyond just "more of the same" was that I did like the bit at the beginning, where one of the people who develop the failsafe is somebody who acts a bit robotic himself... I'm not sure it entirely paid off by the end, but it was a nice bit on it's own.
Overall, it feels like one of those movie sequels where it doesn't take many chances with the storytelling, it just attempts to replicate mostly what you liked in the first one, with a couple twists. Like Men In Black 2... fans of the first one can enjoy it, but it doesn't quite capture the magic. And in that regard (assuming the sexual content doesn't put you off) it's largely going to be successful. I certainly enjoyed it. I'll probably read book three, if there's a sequel. I'm just not as excited over it as I was the first.
Finished: Starfire by Peter Watts (semi-reread)
A geothermal power facility on the bottom of the ocean floor isn't the most inviting place to work. Overwhelming pressure, constant danger, near-complete darkness, monsters of the deep, not to mention them having to cut into your body to let you survive the necessary excursions outside the station. Under such conditions, normal people might bend, or break, in unpredictable ways. So if you're a big corporation that just wants to get the job done, it might occur to you to send down people who were already broken... people who've grown up with constant pressure and fear, who had monsters in their own family or have become monsters themselves... people who've grown addicted to being used and abused. These are people who your studies indicate might break, but do so in more predictable ways, ways that don't compromise the mission. Of course, you've forgotten that extreme environments can serve as crucibles, that sometimes broken things put themselves back together stronger, stranger than before. And there are other things at the bottom of the ocean, things that have evolved in those extreme environments, stranger and more dangerous than dysfunctional workers, and together they might change everything.
Peter Watts wrote one of my favorite novels, Blindsight. Starfish was his first novel, and despite being set at the bottom of the sea rather than deep space, there are a lot of similarities. In Starfish, he tests and plays around with loads of ideas that eventually mature into Blindsight, so they might seem familiar. They are nonetheless still cool, even if you've read the other book, and if you haven't, might qualify as mind-blowing. I particularly liked how he handled organic AI, cultured brain tissue that functions as a literal neural network and learns without a traditional consciousness. Again, he's explored similar themes in later novels and goes even farther, but it's still entertaining.
Mostly, though, the similarity is Watts' ability to write beautifully broken people and make you care about them. The main character, Lenie Clarke, often feels disconnected, sometimes standing by when most people would be acting, and yet you really feel for her, and even some of the more extreme characters get humanized, either through seeing things through their own view, or the changes that occur over the course of the book. In some ways it's even more daring than he's done in other books.. it takes a lot to ask you to sympathize with some of these characters, and yet he mostly manages. He even manages to make the head of the corporation into a person just trying to do the best she can.
The book is broken up into sections that feel a bit like individual short stories, giving the novel as a whole something of a disjointed feel. You get to know some character developments, and then suddenly everything shifts months in the future and one character is gone, for example. I'd have liked it to be more cohesive, but it's not a flaw that seriously damages the story. The prose, while it drops into technical language a fair bit, is mostly clear and carries a poetry and emotional punch that I've come to expect from his work... not quite as polished, but still at times very powerful.
If I were going to recommend any book of this author, it'd still be Blindsight... but Starfish is pretty good too, and well worth checking out.
Finished: Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
The aristocratic class of Grass go hunting for creatures they call "foxen", on things they call "mounts", led by beasts they call "hounds", but it's a much darker game on the planet Grass, where these alien creatures are much more dangerous, and stranger, than the earthly ones they're named after. It's more than a cultural institution, it's practically an obsession among the nobles of this one insular world. The nobles would be happy if nobody from the outside world set foot on Grass ever again, but the rest of the galaxy is secretly facing a plague... and there's some evidence that Grass is the only place that plague doesn't exist. So Grass is pressured in to accepting a family of ambassadors, who's mission it is to find out if there is a cure there, all while hopefully keeping the plague secret. But to do that, they must uncover the dark secrets of Grass.
It took a while for me to get into the book, I have to admit. I'm not super-fond of stories that focus on a hereditary aristocratic class much like medieval times, only in the future. And a lot of the characters and institutions were thoroughly unlikeable. A couple of the main characters (once they emerged... it was difficult to tell at first) I liked, but they were mostly stuck in bad situations and often surrounded by unlikeable people. But eventually it started to build up a momentum to where I wanted to see what would happen next, and find a solution to the mystery.
That mystery, and the solution, mostly satisfies... maybe it's a bit hard to buy into the idea that it couldn't have been detected earlier, but I can go with it, and the biology of the world seems pretty well-thought out. On a character level... it's better than I thought it might be from the first few chapters, but it went to a few weird places and some of it left me cold. Of the many characters in the book, pretty much three people rose to being of mostly positive interest, the main female character, and two monks who have no choice in serving the religion they don't believe in. For a while, one of the noblemen fell in that category too, but later faded away. Though I have to confess, I'm pleased they didn't go with certain obvious routes I was expecting. I also have to give the book credit for creating a religion not directly based on a current one (and coexisting with the current one... the main character and her family are mostly Catholics), that was both interesting and plausible. And although it was mostly a corrupt institution, I enjoyed learning about it more than I usually do.
One thing I didn't care much for, purely as a matter of taste, was the perspective. The prose used an omniscient perspective, often jumping into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters in a single scene, sometimes listing off what everybody in a room was thinking in reaction to an event, sometimes mostly focusing on one person and then suddenly swinging to tell us the thoughts of another. I find that style a little distracting (as I'm forced to wonder if stuff isn't being revealed not because the character I'm following doesn't know it, but because the author simply is deciding not to tell us the thoughts of the one character who does know at the right time), and it took some getting used to.
On the whole, I liked it, am glad I read it, but it wasn't mind-blowing and I don't think it's a book I'm going to read again anytime soon.
Started: Exo by Steven Gould (Jumper, Book 4)
Started: Maelstrom, by Peter Watts (Rifters, Book 2)
Started: Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
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Date: 2014-11-03 06:50 pm (UTC)Also sounds like a lot of interesting reading. I hadn't heard of Nexus before but I think I'll take a look at it--vN I enjoyed, and Blindsight has been on my list for a long time. I also slowly read many things by Stross, since he does look far ahead at strange futures.
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Date: 2014-11-13 06:05 pm (UTC)Stross does have some great mindbending speculation, although unfortunately he also seems to get a bit too obsessed with economics for my tastes (I hear one of her next works is some sort of ghost story involving the housing bubble), and on producing more books of his only-mildly-SF series rather than the stuff of his I REALLY like (I mean, as a Lovecraft fan I do mildly enjoy his Laundry stuff, but I wish that was his 'thing I do occasionally when the mood strikes' rather than, as it seems to be lately, his main focus).
Ashby I think is definitely one to watch, I wouldn't call her one of my faves yet, but I could see her getting there. And her publisher, Angry Robot Books (which also does Ramez Naam) does look like it's good at gathering a really promising (and reasonably diverse) slate of new SF writers so I've got my eye on them as well.