October Book Foo! 2/2
Oct. 6th, 2015 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6I guess I'm going to have to start doing this more often so I don't have to make such huge megaposts of already read books.
Finished: Up Against It by M.J. Locke
On the edges of the solar system is a thriving asteroid colony... thriving, that is, until a disaster, which was possibly sabotage, threatens their regular ice shipment. After that, there's just barely enough resources to survive if everybody pulls together and they manage to make a deal for a new shipment... although, the only source close enough has ties to organized crime and might have been responsible for the initial disaster. Also, there may be a feral AI loose in the system which only adds to the chaos.
There are two main protagonists and point of view characters in this book. One is a traditional SF teenage male hero who's smart and resourceful. The other is a middle-aged woman who's the resource manager... administration, more or less. What's somewhat fascinating is that although the teenage hero gets the most exciting stuff to do, the far more interesting story is the resource manager, who has to make tough decisions and deals and investigate people, as well as deal with the needs of her family. I almost get the feeling that the writer wanted to tell her story, and the teenage hero plotline was added for marketability and to add a few action scenes, fighting pirates. The mix of the two isn't bad, but it is a little awkward.
A little awkward might be my major complaint about the book as a whole, although in a way it's hard to put your finger on, and maybe it's just a collection of tiny off notes that leave me with a slightly less enthusiastic about the book as a whole. I'll get to those in a moment, but first, let's talk about the things I really liked. First, this is hard SF (which I define as "science fiction that tries it's best to authentically play with science or technology and doesn't contain in anything that I personally can call out as impossible."), and more, it's not one of those that explores one idea... there's a huge array of neat stuff here, from playing with gravity and orbital mechanics (not subverting them with a made up technology), to exploring nanotechnology, to considering ubiquitous observation (part of how the colony is self-sufficient is that people on Earth can watch almost everything they do, like a reality show), and there's also AI and transhuman groups who use genetic engineering to change themselves. As mentioned before, I like the resource manager main character plot a lot more, it's something that sounds boring but worked out well (the teenage guy is okay, just a little more bland). Mostly the characters are believable and trying to do their best in a tricky situation, along with a few people trying to take advantage for their own ends, and there's also a good amount of diversity in the types of people you see. The story moves along at a brisk pace and there's always something going on so I never felt bored.
The slightly off notes? Well, although the pace is generally good, it might be a little too fast... the book practically starts with the disaster, and most of the rest of the book is solely consumed with dealing with it, which obviously constrains some of the possible interactions. I would have liked to see more about how the society functions when it wasn't under threat. Also, the crisis goes from all-consuming to "well, we'll probably go all right if things don't suddenly get worse" rather suddenly, not quite at the end, and then they focus on a few dangling plots and threats that just feels like too big a change. The big developments that change things in the actual ending also felt a little too convenient, and, for that matter, the "accident" that kicked everything else. Rather, the event itself seemed a kind of plausible SF coolness that could happen, but in a way where you'd think that it could all have been prevented with a few simple safety protocols (like painting the OUTSIDE of a tank with the material that's resistant to the stuff being kept inside). I liked the AI plot as a whole, but the author created a language for communicating with them that, although certainly more plausible than an English conversation, did not make for easy reading, and it made some of the climax of that plot into something like a chore. And, some of the interactions on the teenage hero plot didn't ring true to me, but rather like what a stereotypical teenager in TV might be like.
I still enjoyed the book, and I'll probably check out more by the author, I just thought that it was dancing on the edge of being really really good, but because of a few stumbles, it landed on the wrong side.
Finished: Linesman by S.K. Dunstall
I got an eARC of this free through Netgalley. I don't think it affected my review.
Spaceships travel through the galaxy using the Lines, mysterious things that some people have a psychic attunement to and ability to repair and influence. These are called Linesmen, ranked in ability from one (lowest) to ten (highest). Ean Lambert is level ten, the only level ten left who hasn't been sent to the Confluence, an alien collection of lines. Which has made him in demand, and particularly valuable, particularly to a new mission to try to seize an abandoned alien ship located in deep space. Of course, Ean's connection to the lines isn't quite the same as other Linesmen, and his unique point of view may lead to a new understanding of the lines.
Linesman has a certain amount of old-school feel to it, like a pulp adventure but brought to the modern age with a decent smattering of political intrigue. The central character plot is a familiar one, but also a classic in it's way... the character with special abilities, not the only one, but who has been self-taught, relying more on feel and instinct than formal training, and disdained for it... and yet might be better than anyone because of it. Ean's particular quirk is that he sings to get the lines repaired, rather than using a mental pushing or pulling, which is a fairly effective decision, since it not only makes him being faintly ridiculous in the eyes of the other Linesman believable, but also gives constraints to his abilities that others lack (since his voice can give out). And largely, his adventures are appealing to read about, as are those of the other characters he works with.
It doesn't blow me away, but there's not a lot to complain about, either... except for one thing that winds up being fairly significant to me, hampering my enjoyment more than anything else.
The book's premise centers around the existence of things called Lines, something every ship has ten different ones of, even though they only know what a few of them do. Why are they called Lines? Aside from some vague language of them being needed to be 'straightened' when they're not working right (but it's not a physical straightening), I can't really see a reason. There's very little sense of what they actually are, either in the grander scientific sense (which is forgivable for something that enables FTL travel) or in the gross mechanical sense (which is less forgivable). We're told there are ten of them, they're produced in factories, I don't recall ever seeing what the physical components look like being described, or mattering, and their construction and initial handling is more or less handwaved away. They might as well be called Flurbs. Except Flurbsman isn't as appealing a title, I'd imagine.
I'm willing to give them the name, of course, but the obscurity surrounding how it all works, as well as the things that didn't seem to make sense from what we did know, began to rankle the deeper I got in the book. Lines controlling FTL travel, great, I'm with the author there. That lines control communication... okay, so how does that work, and more importantly, why does it work? They say on occasion that if the line involving communications is broken, then communications don't work, but they can still go FTL because THAT line is operational. In that case, why use one of these lines for communications at all? Or especially life support, what another line controls, when the lines can go out of whack for no reason and need one of the special few with the magical ability to influence lines to come in and fix it. Taken as a granted that you need all ten lines installed in a ship (and presumably hooked up to key systems) in order for it to start work, something I only recall being mentioned towards the end of the book, why not, for safety's sake, break the Life Support line and install an independent life support system? Because as we've seen, a broken line doesn't stop the rest of the ship from working. And if the lines somehow control these systems without being connected to them, how can anyone in that society make the repeated claim that they're just tools with no intelligence? Actually, considering one of the lines interacts with the crew directly and is good if they're all working smoothly together, and out of tune if they're not... how can they believe it's just a dumb mindless tool? For that matter, how is life support, or security, or some of the other lines, fundamentally speaking, different from communications anyway? From a human perspective, sure, it makes sense to make distinctions, but humans aren't the ones making the distinctions, they just installed the lines as is, and some of them turned out to control life support and others they don't know what they do. And from an objective perspective, for example, security in particular is mostly a matter of communicating information (like, "Intruder in Sector 7-G") to somebody who can do something about it. This complaint may seem unnecessarily picky, but to certain types of minds, like mine, this will literally annoy, that the fundamental science behind the world doesn't feel terribly thought out, or at least explained to the reader (maybe the authors do indeed have a sense in which it all works)... I don't feel immersed in a story, I feel like I'm being handed a mess of mutually inconsistent rules so that the authors can make exactly the plot they wanted, with the character having the abilities to do what they wanted.
While I think my complaint is a valid one... I'm almost making it sound worse than it is. Is the book ruined because of it? No. I think it's a solid effort, on the whole, and the characters and the rest of the worldbuilding is interesting enough that I can look past it, it's just a flaw.
There are other minor complaints... one of the POV characters, another linesman... I never felt like his chapters added much to the story. Usually he just seemed to be there to insult the main character's abilities and make us feel more sympathetic towards him, a trick that works great when used judiciously, but he took it too far. And regularly referring to people as "sweetheart" was pretty annoying too. And there were a few times when I thought the pacing felt a little off in a way I couldn't put my finger on (although one thing is, when I was about halfway through the book, I thought we were nearing the end until I activated the page number display), but none of them are all that serious.
I didn't love it. Allowing for a bit of a bump for a first time novel (it's a rare novelist who turns out something great their first time), I'll give it a three. I personally probably wouldn't read another book in the setting, just because the things that annoyed me are unlikely to change, but I might read something else by these authors, and I can see how others might like the universe enough to continue.
Finished: The Starry Rift by James Tiptree Jr.
After the extinction of humanity, aliens visiting a galactic library study three tales from humanity's history.
This is a fix-up novel, that is, short stories wrapped up by a framing device to turn it into a novel.The stories are all set in the same universe, and sometimes reference the same locations and aliens, but the time is different enough that the same technological rules don't apply (although they're always at a spacefaring level).
Tiptree herself (James Tiptree Jr. being a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon) has been an author I've enjoyed several short stories of in the past, but at the same time, I felt like I haven't read enough. Moreover, she had quite a fascinating life. And, since we were coming up on what would have been her 100th birthday, when I saw this collection in a used book bin, I figured I'd give it a try.
It's not her best work, unfortunately. It showcases some of the same characteristics she's known for, explorations of gender and sexuality, power, and death, but none have the power of the few classic works, and, to a degree, they seem more like average pulp stories with, occasionally, a little extra.
Since there's only three, it's easy enough to discuss them individually, and then I'll discuss some of the things that apply to all of them.
In "The Only Neat Thing To Do" a teenage girl who wants nothing more to explore space is given a spacecraft by her parents, for local use, and promptly runs away to uncharted territories. There she encounters an alien being unknown to her and uncovers a potential threat to local humanity. This was the best story of the bunch, all told. The alien, although maybe requiring a bit of suspension of disbelief, was a lot of fun to imagine, and the growing horror of what might potentially happen was well-played, as well as the tragedy surrounding the whole situation, that it's not because of any particular maliciousness, but that like physics, biology can also be unforgiving.
"Good Night, Sweet Hearts," tells the story of a man who is out of time due to a large amount of traveling under cryogenic suspension. As part of a series of coincidences, he encounters the great lost love of his college years, now much older and changed in many ways beyond that... and later, encounters the descendant of a clone of hers that's the age that he knew her. Also, there are space pirates. The weakest of the bunch, I get the idea that the author was playing with (a choice between a second chance with a person you have history with that you still hold a torch for, but isn't how you remember her, or one who looks virtually the same but doesn't remember you), and I like how it was eventually dealt with, but too much about it seemed like a false choice and, perhaps oddly, it didn't seem to give enough agency or respect to the women themselves. The fact that the clone was rescued from being a slave (and endured some horrific things) kind of makes her not much like the woman he left behind, except in looks, which makes him shallow for even considering it. And, all in all, the story just didn't have a lot of what I was interested in, it ran more along the lines of a pulp style adventure.
The third story, "Collision", ranks somewhere in between. The alien race was actually quite well-conceived, with an interesting life cycle involving three genders, and the conflict between them and the humans made sense and was resolved more or less in a satisfying way... but there was just a bizarre subplot (involving people of any race, in certain regions of space, thinking that they should look like the primary inhabitants of that area) that was just... frankly, too silly for me. The worst part was, it had only the smallest consequences on the plot and could easily have been removed. It felt like an interesting idea the author wanted to explore, but didn't have a proper story, so she just shoved it into this one, and made it much worse in the process. But, I still have to give her credit for the alien race itself.
As for the framing story, it's not substantial enough to really enjoy, but there is one quality that takes it from being a neutral factor in the book to being a minor negative: too often, the author uses the alien's reactions to comment on her own writing, in a way that feels smarmy (even were she criticizing them, but there's some praise too).
Overall, there are some trends, mostly, unfortunately, to the negative. Not in a "I hate this book" sense, but simply that I might have enjoyed it more if they were improved. Some, you can't really blame Tiptree for... that is, the technology in these seems very dated. Particularly, storage capacities and the fact that tapes are regularly referred to, not as archaic language but as physical things that need to get respooled, threaded, and such, giving the impression that in the far future humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and discovered faster-than-light travel but still uses magnetic tape based cassettes. Of course, any fiction of a certain time period is going to have big gaps like this, and you sort of have to forgive them, but they can still have their effect on your enjoyment. Somewhat more distancing is some occasional language abnormalities. I'm not sure if these are meant to indicate linguistic drift, were particular dialogue quirks of the era or location Tiptree wrote, or some combination (her use of the word "minim" to denote a specific but undefined time period certainly seems to be some element of world-building, but it felt out of place), but it often felt not quite right, not quite natural. Some of the dialogue had the clipped rhythm you sometimes hear in military or pilot speak, where words that are not strictly necessary, but make your sentences feel more natural, get omitted. It's not a huge problem, but it made it harder to get into than I'd hoped.
I didn't dislike it, I just thought it was okay. Despite the weak review, it's not turning me off Alice Sheldon's work in general, it just might not be the best place for someone to get a deeper exposure to her.
Finished: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Harry August leads a relatively normal life in the 20th Century. And when it ends, he's reborn, as a child, in his own past, with full memory of all that's about to happen. After a few lifetimes, he learns that he's part of a small minority, throughout history, who exist like this, living life over again. But in one life, on his deathbed, he receives a visit from a little girl who gives him a warning to send back through time... the end of the world is coming... and in each cycle, it's happening earlier and earlier.
The concept of a person living their life over again, even several times, is not a terribly new one. But it's not yet been so used that a good example of it doesn't feel fresh and original. And this is a very good example of it. It has a perfect mix of historical speculation, alternate history (for, after all, sometimes things change in these lives), crazy sci-fi ideas, and that slight flavoring of wish fulfillment for those who wish they could get a do-over of their own lives (although the book also makes it clear the drawbacks to this).
While it might also not also be unique in the field, the biggest thing that makes it stand out is that Harry isn't the only one like him, that there are others before and after him, and they interact. Usually in a book where time travel is involved, the only "worldbuilding" is history and alternate history, but in this one, there's a whole other layer, of how timelines interact when there's not just one person, there's potentially hundreds, and they can pass messages back and forth through time (although it's a long process, requiring several lives). And, because it involves time travel, it's mind-bending and dizzying and you can't shake the sense that it might not really stand up to logical scrutiny... and yet, it's good enough that you go along for the ride nonetheless. And even if there are errors, it's like seeing a bear playing Mozart on the piano... you're so wowed that the feat was achieved at all, that you can forgive the occasional off-note. And as for the regular time-travel worldbuilding? That's also done very well, both convincingly taking us into a 20th century life, but also the changes that start to develop as books go on are, perhaps not extraordinary, at least very well done.
The story takes a little while to get going, and part of that is because the narrator jumps around in time, telling stories from one life or another, that all build towards the greater tale, but it's enjoyable getting to know his world, and, there's a certain point where the book takes on a different dimension and new elements appear and it starts moving from solidly enjoyable to really exciting.
I'd love to read other books set in this universe, different people, different eras, different stories. We could explore what it's like for one of these to live through a shift in history that's come from up from the actions of a past (perhaps even some of the ones in the book itself), and deal with having to live life over against when you DON'T know what's going to happen (and maybe it's only their second time through). This is, by the way, one of the few technical issues I had with the worldbuilding surrounding the ourobourans and how everything works. I'm not sure I'd even call it a glitch, but considering all the ourobourans of the past, even not trying to cause a change, it makes sense that a few changes would propagate up anyway just from them living different lives than they did the first time, and that we should have seen some evidence of this, some of Harry's first few lives. Yet, once again, I was so enjoying the bear playing, and it was only after being wowed that I stop to notice that this particular note was off.
The only other minor issues is that the pace, although I enjoyed it all the way through, feels a little uneven (in particular, it seems very slow at first and then the end seems to get resolved rather suddenly) and that might bother some people, and one minor stylistic thing that bothered me. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, when Harry relates a conversation, he leaves out the quotation marks for his side of the conversation. Sort of giving the impression, I suppose, that the conversation exists within the context of Harry telling the story of it to someone else, and at these points he's more illustrating his thought process rather than trying to repeat his exact words. Regardless of the reason, I found it distracting and annoying when it happened, but only to a tiny degree... if I had more significant flaws with the book, it probably wouldn't be worth mentioning, but as it is, it was the thing that bothered me the most.
I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it, even to people who aren't big SF readers, and I'm sure I'm going to read it again. If I'd read it in time, it probably would have made my list of Hugo nominees (not that it would have affected the final ballot any, but just to give you an idea of how much I enjoyed it).
Finished: Arslan by M.J. Engh
Warning, there are a few significant spoilers about the book behind the cut, I just couldn't talk about some of my problems without discussing parts of the ending. Also, there's a plot involving sexual abuse of children in the book that is discussed and some people might want to avoid it.
Somehow, a dictator from a small middle eastern country has taken over the world. And, while traveling through America, he decides to make a small town in Illinois his base of operations. There, he makes his first introduction with shocking, abhorrent acts, but over the course of the years and decades, many sides of Arslan are seen.
This is a strange book, and difficult to review. On the whole, it's not especially believable... but there are parts that ring incredibly true, and the majority of the rest of it are told in a matter-of-fact way that lets you suspend your disbelief, mostly. It's not an especially enjoyable read, considering some of what happens, but it's strangely compelling. I'm not sure I liked it, and at times I violently disagreed with it, but I think it was worth reading.
Let's move on to the premise. I mentioned that the book's not especially believable, and this is part of the why. When they finally get around to explaining how Arslan took power, it sounds almost silly. But I think the author realizes that, and that's why she keeps it off-screen and only mentioned by second- or third-hand stories which might be wrong. It matters less about how Arslan did it than that his control is almost total. This isn't a story in which a town resists a Dictator until they're rescued, although to be sure, there are some efforts at resistance. Moreover, though, it's of a town conquered, and doing it's best to survive while conquered, because to resist too much means certain death. And moreover, it's an examination of power, the types of people who can command respect even without being entirely worthy of it, and how power can warp the victims it is used against into strange, sometimes co-dependent relationships.
Before I go any further, I think it should be point out that this book deals fairly extensively with ongoing and repeated sexual assault, often against children. In fact, one of the first acts in the book, after Arslan secures the school, is to rape two students, a boy and a girl... the boy is one of the two viewpoint characters (the girl is, as far as I could tell, never mentioned again, which seemed a somewhat bizarre omission). And it doesn't end there. The event is not told in lurid detail, but it doesn't shy away and be cagey about what is happening, either.
And moreover, part of the story involves one of the characters coming to feel love for his rapist. Either of these might cause people not to want to touch this book, and I won't argue with that reaction, although I should point out that I think it's pretty clear that the "love" was not a romantic ending the author was building towards, but rather treated as an additional horror, that a character has become so completely reshaped by such a violation, not just by the act but by society's reactions, that their feelings turn this way is a tragedy. In some ways this is the most powerful part of the book.
Less successful is the transformation of the rest of the town, although the early parts of that were much more interesting to read.
The story is told from two major points of view. There is Franklin Bond, the principal of the school who is forced to share his house with Arslan, and becomes something of the local leader of government... not quite a collaborator, because everybody must collaborate, but over the years seems to do more to protect Arslan than he needs to, for reasons even he doesn't seem to be entirely sure of. The other POV is Hunt Morgan, the young boy Arslan raped the first day, who Arslan keeps with him and trains and educates. I have to give the author credit here, both POVs read very differently, they have completely different styles of expressing themselves, with Bond being more matter-of-fact and Morgan using a lot more literary references and poetic language, as well as drifting back and forth in time. However, Bond's POV was more interesting.
As for Arslan himself? He's a strange character, with the megalomaniac goals of a supervillain, the willingness to be cruel but at the same time a bizarre sense of honor, and a strange charisma despite knowing what he's done. The boldest thing Engh does is attempt to make you sympathize with him, at times, not so much to make him a hero but to raise the question of whether a monster might, in certain circumstances, become redeemable, or at least make us to acknowledge that there is honor and humanity in monsters, and perhaps aspects of monsters in the most honorable among us. I think she goes too far with this, myself, but until she does it's interesting to walk that tightrope.
The book begins to fail towards the end when the book has Arslan return to town, much diminished in power, but, now reasonably free of the fear of retribution, the town doesn't take revenge on him, because... I don't know. One character advances the bizarre argument that everything he did to the town qualifies as War Crimes, for which they don't have the authority to try him, and he hasn't committed any crimes they can. But that doesn't ring true because with crimes against humanity, any community could declare itself with the authority. I can understand a few individual characters, like Bond, being unwilling to kill a man, even a monster, or turn him over to a group that would, but it goes way beyond that apparently because the author wants to give Arslan another heroic turn.
Still, even then, taking it as some weird given like you might allow some other book the appearance of a talking dog, you can enjoy the conclusion to a degree, the continuation of the themes and revelation of character motivations started earlier... it's just not as effective as the rest of the book.
As I said, it's hard to rate. Three stars is usually "liked", but I can't say I liked it. Yet I think it's a little better than "okay." So I'll stick with three stars.
Finished: Harmony by Project Itoh
In the future, life is precious. Maybe too precious. Virtually everyone has medical nanotechnology that monitors their status, and anything that is potentially harmful is banned or at least heavily socially discouraged. Privacy is a word from the past, your medical records are open. The dominant philosophy is that your life does not belong to you, it belongs to society. Three teenage girls, still too young to get the nanotech, and social misfits, form a bond and as an act of rebellion, a suicide pact. Years later, Tuan Kirie, one of the survivors of that pact, has fit herself back with society, although somewhat uneasily, even working for the World Health Organization. But a shocking new crisis develops that she must investigate, and she believes that it may have some ties back to her own past, and her decisions may shape the future of humanity.
This is a novel written in Japanese and translated into English. I've read a number of these put out by the Haikasoru imprint of Viz Media, and while this isn't my favorite, it's right up there at the top of them.
Harmony is obviously in the classic mold of the ambiguous, perhaps even horrific from a certain perspective, utopia, like Brave New World, used to warn against certain trends that presumably the author worried about going too far. But it also goes beyond that, too, and tackles questions like the nature of consciousness and arguably morphs from "warning social commentary" to "full on science fiction" by the end.
It may be tempting to look at this as a book warning of the dangers of political correctness. Indeed, the words "publicly correct" appear quite a few times to refer to the sort of capitulation to the groupthink that is required, by the society. Usually, when somebody attacks political correctness, I'm not all that sympathetic, as I find it a desire to want to keep not caring about whether they're hurting other people. In this case, I think it's not so much against political correctness (and in fact virtually every time "publicly correct" is invoked, it has nothing to do with racist or sexist jokes or even actions towards others, and everything to do with keeping yourself healthy and at a minimum of risk), but rather against the tools being used to extend too far. It is, it seems, more of a reminder of the virtue of moderation than anything else. After all, the main character get into a suicide pact early on, and some of her friends fantasize about murder and terrorism... it's hard to imagine that the author is wholly endorsing their worldview, but rather painting them as an opposite extreme, an over-reaction to the over-reaction the rest of the world has imposed, and the ideal truth being somewhere in the middle. So at times you root for the main characters even when they're advocating extreme actions, and other times you hate them, and really, it's a nice balancing act that may go a bit too far in one direction or another, but keeps you questioning things, which is good. Still, the overall message isn't about the right to hurt other people, but rather the right to choose things for yourself that may not be the best for you.
And, as I said, it's more than just a book to promote a social message, it gets genuinely exciting when the plot kicks off, with moments of extreme creepiness and dramatic choices foisted upon the world, all leading to a conclusion that doesn't look like it was made to fit a message, but rather because the author thought it was a really cool idea. And in a way, it is. It's not necessarily an upbeat ending, either, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless (and, in these kind of books, endings that are too upbeat often feel like cheats anyway).
The book's very good, but it's not perfect. One of the conceits of the novel is that certain parts of it are highlighted in an "emotion-markup language" that looks like HTML, where certain passages might be enclosed in tags, like, say, "I'm fine." The idea of it, at least once the book gets to the ending and the point of them is revealed, might be interesting enough to keep, but in execution in fails, particularly because most of the time it's used to make lists of statements, lists that don't actually really have emotional content, just look ugly. And it's used just frequently enough to be annoying, and yet not frequently that you think it's legitimately used to tag all the emotional text. It's more like the author occasionally remembered to use it, and uses it then, but doesn't go back to make it a completely consistent motif.
There's also a little bit of unfortunate skeeviness, where teenage girls wax nostalgically about the past where men would pay to have sex with teenage girls, and seem to complain that the option is no longer open to them. And when, early on, they make a declaration of their own bodily independence but refer mostly to their sexual characteristics as they do so (when the society controls far more than that, and there's not even that much evidence that sexual freedoms themselves are particularly restricted). I can see valid arguments for these choices that make sense within the plot, and I think trying to read into it any particular opinions on the part of the author would be a mistake, but it is somewhat off-putting. It's actually not a lot, it's not a huge part of the book, but it happens early on and may turn people off, which is a shame. There is something of a revelation towards the end that both potentially explains some of this earlier part, and yet is also potentially a problematic trope of it's own, but on the whole I think it's small enough that the book might have been better off without it.
The only other negative thing I have to say is that sometimes character motivations seem to change abruptly and I'm not entirely sure if I missed some subtle clues or if they just changed their mind, but particularly towards the conclusion it made for a minor off-note.
Still, the book kept me both entertained and thinking all the way through, which is what I want out of books like this.
Finished: Near + Far by Cat Rambo
This is a collection of short fiction by Cat Rambo. The stories are divided into two categories, the "Near" ones are set, as you might expect, in the Near Future, on Earth. The "Far" ones are set either in the more distant future or on other planets. In paperback, from what I understand, this is done in a novel way, where the book has a front cover on each side, and you turn the book over and turn it upside down to read the other story's collection, and either one could legitimately be considered the "first" batch. Unfortunately, I read it in ebook form, where it's merely one collection followed by another.
I've read a few Cat Rambo stories in the past and enjoyed them, and one of hers, I believe made my personal Hugo nomination ballot last year (or, if not, it was very close, I can't remember for sure). I also had the mistaken impression she'd been writing a lot longer than is apparently the case... perhaps because of the resonance of her last name in the public consciousness, I thought she'd been a staple of SF for decades. And while she's had a few pieces of fiction published dating back to the 90s, she actually seems to have burst onto the SF scene in full around 2004-5, and most, if not all of the stories in this book are from the last ten years, which means none of them feels dated.
I was prepared for the usual mixed bag in a short story collection, but, when I started on the "Near" half, I found myself enjoying most of the stories in them. Firstly, almost all of the stories are SF, as opposed to Fantasy, which is not as much to my tastes. There are a few where the science is somewhat soft, or there are some more magical elements, but only one that I'd describe as outright fantasy (set in the modern day, though, it should be noted), and even that wasn't bad, just not my thing. The rest gave me a great variety, some small character pieces, some built off an interesting idea, a superhero tale, a cyberpunk tale, and a few takes on typical SF themes, but not really a disappointment. I'd thought, then, if it kept up that quality, I might consider it one of the best single-author anthologies I'd yet read.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite keep up. The "Far" stories, while not bad, and, indeed, still containing a few excellent examples, didn't seem to quite match, for me, the enjoyment I had for the first. Party of this was perhaps high expectations from the variety of the first... I was expecting, hoping, to see dozens of different futures or alien worlds that were as believable as her near future stories, but far more divergent, as, the farther you go in the future, the more you can speculate about what might be out there. Unfortunately, several of the "Far" stories seemed to take place in the SAME future, with, occasionally, the same setting and a few shared characters, a rather conventional space opera dynamic, and although they explored different themes and some of the aliens were quite interesting, the overall effect was narrow... for every story set in that typical space opera setting, I lamented about how there could have been one set in a completely different universe with no aliens at all, or where humanity met only one alien race and had a unique relationship with them, or maybe a mind-bending post-singularity tale. There were a few exceptions (or, perhaps, the space opera setting had a lot of varied elements added to it, and all of them were actually intended to take place within it), but on the whole the stories felt like different looks at a single future. There was some experimentalism, but much of it seemed to be of the more style experimentalism or deliberately modeling works of classic literature, techniques that leave me somewhat cold.
Still, even though it didn't quite live up to my highest hopes, it's quite good, and moreover, they tread a nice line where they can be enjoyable both to a long-time SF reader and someone who's a bit newer, because the science and speculation usually play second fiddle to character and clarity. My favorite stories of the collection, I think, were "The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each", "Peaches of Immortality" (the two stories that opened the "Near" batch), "Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut", "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars", and from the "Far" section, "Amid the Words of War", "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain" (which was a surprise as when I started I felt like it was going to be the kind of thing I disliked). Those are just the ones I really enjoyed. There are others that I liked, just, somewhat mildly, and only a few I didn't like at all (and only one that was a struggle to get through without just skipping ahead to the next story).
Rating-wise... I'll give it 4, which I might have given it anyway if I had liked the second batch as much as the first, but it would be a much higher four. This is a four just on the edge, but still worth the score. A very good collection, worth a look.
Finished: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
In near future Cape Town, South Africa, smartphones are more in our lives than ever. They're used to pay for everything, they work as keys, and they can even be used as a police to remotely administer an electrical shock if you're getting out of hand. Moreover, disconnection is a legal punishment to be feared, for it often means you can't get work or participate in many other parts of life. Meanwhile, corporations continue to do what they can to control the lives of their employees and customers. But for most people, life is just life, some people trying to rebel, some trying to get ahead, and some just trying to get by. We follow the stories of several people as their lives and stories intertwine and sometimes they end up in situations they never planned on.
Moxyland is the debut author of South African writer Lauren Beukes, and set in her native city, which lends it a certain authenticity (even though I have no personal experience to verify how well she captured the spirit and details). From an outsider (that is, North American) perspective such as my own, though, the setting is perhaps a little peculiar at times, but the country has enough European influence in its history that it doesn't feel particularly alien, either, a little like being set in England or Australia, there's an accent on everything, and a few things seem out of place, but it's easy enough to adapt. You could even read it without paying much attention to or being especially aware of the setting at all, although you'd obviously miss some of the texture. In fact it may be the science fictional elements that contribute to most of the feeling of dislocation that the book engenders (although certain elements, like slang, it's hard for me to be sure which category it belongs in). It's also set in the very near future, published in 2008 and only looking about ten years ahead then, it's nearly obsolete now. Still, it's one of those books that I think will be worth reading even after our date passes theirs.
The book is firmly in the subgenre of cyberpunk (although some might quibble and call it post-cyberpunk or some other term based on believing that we are in an era where the influences that gave birth to real cyberpunk are different and so this book must be categorized differently even if the tropes are the same, but to me, it's all the same beast), characterized by techological enhancement of people, corporate overreach, a gritty, pessimistic tone, and often street-level characters trying, in small ways, to rebel. High Tech and Low Lives, as some have described it, and that describes the type of book it is. One of the reasons that the genre isn't common anymore is that it can too easily fall into cliche, another is that it's easy to get sick of. Still, I think that this is a worthy piece of the genre, with well-developed characters, a good writing style, and some interesting ideas. Of course, in cyberpunk, those ideas are often about ways that those in power may find to screw the common people over in novel ways, and this is, I think, part of it's importance, an early-warning system of things to be watchful for before they enslave us. And in this respect, the novel also does a very good job, as I can see many of these ideas actually being tried in the near future. The ability to turn people's own phones into tasers is perhaps the least believable element, but as a reader you can still have fun with it.
The characters are strong, vivid, believable, and the book bounces between several of them as viewpoint characters, and I didn't find, as I often do, that one or multiple storylines were a drag that I was wading through to get to the ones I enjoyed. Sure, there were ones that I liked more than others, but I was interested in all of them. It is important to note though that the characters are interesting... but not particularly likable. Of them, there was maybe one that I genuinely liked. Others I thought were jerks, or the type of people I would be annoyed at having to associate with. It's a tricky thing, making unlikeable characters compelling, but I think the author mostly succeeds, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.
The prose is strong in a way it's hard to describe. Except, occasionally, with the slang, it was an easy read, but and it felt like it had depth where even when I was reading a fairly average description without much consequence, I was enjoying it more than I should have been... even though I can't later remember why.
If there's a weakness, it's in plot and pacing. It's not a huge negative, but I found myself more interested in the characters and the world than in what specifically they were doing, and what storylines I did find seemed to not get as successful a payoff as I'd hoped for. The overall effect was just of following certain characters through a particularly turbulent time period, but little to no sense of closure, why the events happened, or of why any of it mattered. Perhaps that was part of the point, but I wanted it to feel a little more like a story.
Still, as a first outing, it's quite well done, and as my first experience with this author, it's a very good one. I'd put it at a high three, it was very close to a four, and I think if it had just hung together a little better, it would have gotten it easily. But I was impressed in the quality of the writing enough that I'm going to make it a point to try another of the author's work.
Finished: Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee
Disclaimer: I received this book for free through a giveaway on Twitter. I don't think it affected my review.
Zeroboxer tells the tale of Carr Luka, an eager young athlete in the new sport of Zeroboxing... a kind of mixed martial arts match in the zero-gravity environment of a space station. He works his way up the ranks and becomes a rising star, but it's not just his opponents he has to worry about. He's got secrets, some that happened years ago and he didn't even know about, but which might threaten his career... or even his life.
Obviously this is a mix between a "boxer seeking the championship belt" type story, and a science fiction. I should point out up front that I may be predisposed against this type of book. I generally don't watch sports at all, and, in particular, I have, if possible, even less interest in the sports that involve two people fighting. So in particular I'm not the best person to judge the sports-side of things.
I will note that there are a lot of familiar tropes that even someone like me who doesn't have a particular interest in the genre can pick out. The friend turned rival, the crusty mentor/coach who is hard on the fighter but deep down cares, the inspiring love interest, the eager young fan who never gives up hope, the point where the character has to make a choice between doing something unethical or having some kind of negative consequence. You might call them cliches but I think that would be a little unfair, particularly when it's a hybrid story like this one, the familiar tropes help anchor the "sports" part of the plot and let you add the sci-fi elements.
The sci-fi elements are, honestly, decent, but nothing that really blew me away. I might have raised an eyebrow at the apparent casualness of a trip to Mars, but otherwise the science seemed solid, serving the story and adding some texture to the world, and raising a few questions. I was certainly more interested in this part of things than the sports side, and it had a it more depth than I was expecting.
The intersection of the two sides comes most strongly in the sport of Zeroboxing itself, and here I think the book shines most. The sport is believable and told in an engaging way, probably even exciting to the type of person who's excited about sports. The author did seem to have put a good deal of thought into how it worked at least, and the terminology surrounding it (even when adapted from boxing lingo) sounded believable.
I've seen the book marketed as YA, and although I think it's suitable to that audience, I also feel the label does a bit of a disservice to the book by suggesting that it's the type of thing that's mostly of interest to teens. Aside from the main character starting at a typical-YA age of seventeen, it doesn't tackle teen issues or harp on melodramatic love triangles, it's just a fairly straightforward rising star sports story with some reasonably well-done SF elements, and anyone who particularly likes both sports and SF, regardless of age, could probably get a lot out of the book. If you only really like one, it depends a lot more on how much enthusiasm you can drum up for the other part.
The story's a fairly brisk read, and the plot does what it needs to do but on many levels, just by the nature of the genre, it's predictable: if the main character has to win a fight to move on to the next stage, he obviously wins. The ending also fell a little flatter than I'd hoped, not the fight intself but more particularly with the protagonist's non-fight problem, which seemed to sort of fizzle. Still, overall, I think it's a decent book, and probably to people who's tastes run more towards boxing in general, it might even be a very good book. For me, I'd put it in the low three range, I enjoyed it, wasn't ever bored even in the action-heavy parts, but I doubt I'd read it again or follow on to a potential sequel, though I might give the author a try on another work.
Finished: Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey (Expanse #2)
(Since it's the second book in a series, synopsis behind the cut to avoid potentially spoiling anyone who hasn't read the first)Jim Holden and his crew now work for the Outer Planets Alliance, capturing pirates prowling the outer solar system and occasionally going on intelligence missions, and they're about to get a doozy. Because war has broken out between the UN and Mars on Ganymede, threatening untold lives. But the spark point is a genetically engineered super-soldier built using alien technology Earth can barely understand, much less control, the same technology that is currently doing inexplicable things to Venus. And while all of this is going on, a scientist searches for his kidnapped daughter, and Holden and his crew may be the only ones who can help...
I liked the first book in the series, Leviathan's Wake, but I was a little bit let down. Part of this was because I'd heard so many good things about the series, and although it was good, the hype was naturally hard to live up to.
This one, though, I enjoyed a lot more. It's still a sort of a highbrow version of big-budget movie or TV series SF (which is appropriate, considering it's being adapted), action heavy and fun but not particularly deep... but it's a very GOOD example of that kind of book. And this one, everything seemed a step above. The characters we knew about before gelled together more and felt more real, lived in, and the newer viewpoint characters were a lot more compelling. To be honest, there was something a little bit creepy about Miller's obsession with a teenage girl he'd never met, but Prax's quest for his daughter is a lot more relateable, as is the Martian Marine's struggle to cope with being the lone survivor of her squad, and the UN functionary was so fun to read it's easy to understand why she's apparently part of the cast of the TV series from the beginning, rather than the second season. And jumping back to the returning characters, in many ways they're stock archetypes, the tight-knit crew, but in other ways, they're refreshingly novel. It just feels so satisfying to find a character in a book who's first instinct when uncovering a massive conspiracy is "Okay I'm just going to tell everybody." Even if the book tries to point out that's not necessarily the right move at all times, it feels so rare in genre fiction that I root for him nonetheless.
The plot moves at a good pace, never dragging, and always promising a little more to come in the future. It may be a bit predictable or cliche at times, but the sheer enjoyment more than makes up for it.
When I read the first book, it took me months to get around to buying the second. When I finished this one, I ordered the third immediately. That alone should say something.
Finished: Crossfire by Nancy Kress
A privately held spaceship leaves Earth, full of thousands of rich eccentrics, scientists, members of religious and ethnic groups and others who have all paid for a chance to start again on another planet. But just as they're setting up, they find a complication... there are aliens already on the planet. And soon they discover they've stumbled upon a war between two races and forced to make moral choices that no one should be forced to make.
This book left me with mixed feelings, because there were some things that I really liked, some that left me somewhat cold, and some that I thought were below par.
Let's start with what the book did right. Firstly, it created some particularly cool aliens. Well, one of them was about average, but I really liked what Kress did with the second one, a different mindset and biology that I was really interested by, and it led smoothly into the moral dilemmas faced by the protagonists without feeling artificial. Sometimes the science veered into the science-magic type, but mostly I really enjoyed this side of things.
This is a science fiction novel, and for some fans, a good SFnal concept, or a familiar one handled well with a few twists, can excuse a lot of other flaws. This is mostly true for me, and why I'd say I didn't feel like the book was a waste of time. But that doesn't mean we don't notice the other flaws.
I normally like Kress' character work, but here not many spoke to me. The only character I consistently liked was the New Quaker doctor. His daughter came close but was too erratic, to the point that it felt like not a nuanced character, but rather an almost cartoonishly irrational one. The rest? A few I got invested in for brief periods, but mainly they just slid off me. The novel did have a built-in excuse for why a bunch of characters who probably aren't well-suited to this type of operation are there, and it serves well for that, but it feels too transparently an excuse.
Slightly related to the character work was some of the plot developments that just rubbed me as poorly handled or not well-thought out. For example, two characters dislike each other, and then realize they're attracted to each other. This is a classic trope, and it in itself isn't a bad thing, but to read these characters who were mildly in conflict through the rest of the book suddenly look into each other's eyes and, essentially, hold hands and agree that they're dating did not ring true to me. Similarly, one of the characters had a backstory where he committed a crime on Earth. This is revealed right at the beginning, but the nature of the crime is only hinted at until finally they reveal the truth... and it just lost all it's power for me because I could not believe the world worked in such a way that that particular crime would have been possible (at least, that he would have gotten away with it). As such, instead of working as part of a satisfying character arc, it made me roll my eyes. There are a few other times where characters seemed to make decisions because that was what the plot required, rather than it being what a real person would do in that situation.
The tone seemed to jump around a little, and it took a while before I had a good idea what kind of story the book was going to be, not in terms of plot, but in terms of feel. But it didn't take too long, so it's one of the more minor problems.
All in all, the book was okay. But it could have been much better.
Still Reading (or finished but haven't done my review): Artemis Awakening by Jane Lindskold, The Trials, by Linda Nagata (The Red #2), Alien Contact (themed short story collection), My Real Children, by Jo Walton, Rapture, by Kameron Hurley (The Bel Dame Apocrypha #3)
Finished: Up Against It by M.J. Locke
On the edges of the solar system is a thriving asteroid colony... thriving, that is, until a disaster, which was possibly sabotage, threatens their regular ice shipment. After that, there's just barely enough resources to survive if everybody pulls together and they manage to make a deal for a new shipment... although, the only source close enough has ties to organized crime and might have been responsible for the initial disaster. Also, there may be a feral AI loose in the system which only adds to the chaos.
There are two main protagonists and point of view characters in this book. One is a traditional SF teenage male hero who's smart and resourceful. The other is a middle-aged woman who's the resource manager... administration, more or less. What's somewhat fascinating is that although the teenage hero gets the most exciting stuff to do, the far more interesting story is the resource manager, who has to make tough decisions and deals and investigate people, as well as deal with the needs of her family. I almost get the feeling that the writer wanted to tell her story, and the teenage hero plotline was added for marketability and to add a few action scenes, fighting pirates. The mix of the two isn't bad, but it is a little awkward.
A little awkward might be my major complaint about the book as a whole, although in a way it's hard to put your finger on, and maybe it's just a collection of tiny off notes that leave me with a slightly less enthusiastic about the book as a whole. I'll get to those in a moment, but first, let's talk about the things I really liked. First, this is hard SF (which I define as "science fiction that tries it's best to authentically play with science or technology and doesn't contain in anything that I personally can call out as impossible."), and more, it's not one of those that explores one idea... there's a huge array of neat stuff here, from playing with gravity and orbital mechanics (not subverting them with a made up technology), to exploring nanotechnology, to considering ubiquitous observation (part of how the colony is self-sufficient is that people on Earth can watch almost everything they do, like a reality show), and there's also AI and transhuman groups who use genetic engineering to change themselves. As mentioned before, I like the resource manager main character plot a lot more, it's something that sounds boring but worked out well (the teenage guy is okay, just a little more bland). Mostly the characters are believable and trying to do their best in a tricky situation, along with a few people trying to take advantage for their own ends, and there's also a good amount of diversity in the types of people you see. The story moves along at a brisk pace and there's always something going on so I never felt bored.
The slightly off notes? Well, although the pace is generally good, it might be a little too fast... the book practically starts with the disaster, and most of the rest of the book is solely consumed with dealing with it, which obviously constrains some of the possible interactions. I would have liked to see more about how the society functions when it wasn't under threat. Also, the crisis goes from all-consuming to "well, we'll probably go all right if things don't suddenly get worse" rather suddenly, not quite at the end, and then they focus on a few dangling plots and threats that just feels like too big a change. The big developments that change things in the actual ending also felt a little too convenient, and, for that matter, the "accident" that kicked everything else. Rather, the event itself seemed a kind of plausible SF coolness that could happen, but in a way where you'd think that it could all have been prevented with a few simple safety protocols (like painting the OUTSIDE of a tank with the material that's resistant to the stuff being kept inside). I liked the AI plot as a whole, but the author created a language for communicating with them that, although certainly more plausible than an English conversation, did not make for easy reading, and it made some of the climax of that plot into something like a chore. And, some of the interactions on the teenage hero plot didn't ring true to me, but rather like what a stereotypical teenager in TV might be like.
I still enjoyed the book, and I'll probably check out more by the author, I just thought that it was dancing on the edge of being really really good, but because of a few stumbles, it landed on the wrong side.
Finished: Linesman by S.K. Dunstall
I got an eARC of this free through Netgalley. I don't think it affected my review.
Spaceships travel through the galaxy using the Lines, mysterious things that some people have a psychic attunement to and ability to repair and influence. These are called Linesmen, ranked in ability from one (lowest) to ten (highest). Ean Lambert is level ten, the only level ten left who hasn't been sent to the Confluence, an alien collection of lines. Which has made him in demand, and particularly valuable, particularly to a new mission to try to seize an abandoned alien ship located in deep space. Of course, Ean's connection to the lines isn't quite the same as other Linesmen, and his unique point of view may lead to a new understanding of the lines.
Linesman has a certain amount of old-school feel to it, like a pulp adventure but brought to the modern age with a decent smattering of political intrigue. The central character plot is a familiar one, but also a classic in it's way... the character with special abilities, not the only one, but who has been self-taught, relying more on feel and instinct than formal training, and disdained for it... and yet might be better than anyone because of it. Ean's particular quirk is that he sings to get the lines repaired, rather than using a mental pushing or pulling, which is a fairly effective decision, since it not only makes him being faintly ridiculous in the eyes of the other Linesman believable, but also gives constraints to his abilities that others lack (since his voice can give out). And largely, his adventures are appealing to read about, as are those of the other characters he works with.
It doesn't blow me away, but there's not a lot to complain about, either... except for one thing that winds up being fairly significant to me, hampering my enjoyment more than anything else.
The book's premise centers around the existence of things called Lines, something every ship has ten different ones of, even though they only know what a few of them do. Why are they called Lines? Aside from some vague language of them being needed to be 'straightened' when they're not working right (but it's not a physical straightening), I can't really see a reason. There's very little sense of what they actually are, either in the grander scientific sense (which is forgivable for something that enables FTL travel) or in the gross mechanical sense (which is less forgivable). We're told there are ten of them, they're produced in factories, I don't recall ever seeing what the physical components look like being described, or mattering, and their construction and initial handling is more or less handwaved away. They might as well be called Flurbs. Except Flurbsman isn't as appealing a title, I'd imagine.
I'm willing to give them the name, of course, but the obscurity surrounding how it all works, as well as the things that didn't seem to make sense from what we did know, began to rankle the deeper I got in the book. Lines controlling FTL travel, great, I'm with the author there. That lines control communication... okay, so how does that work, and more importantly, why does it work? They say on occasion that if the line involving communications is broken, then communications don't work, but they can still go FTL because THAT line is operational. In that case, why use one of these lines for communications at all? Or especially life support, what another line controls, when the lines can go out of whack for no reason and need one of the special few with the magical ability to influence lines to come in and fix it. Taken as a granted that you need all ten lines installed in a ship (and presumably hooked up to key systems) in order for it to start work, something I only recall being mentioned towards the end of the book, why not, for safety's sake, break the Life Support line and install an independent life support system? Because as we've seen, a broken line doesn't stop the rest of the ship from working. And if the lines somehow control these systems without being connected to them, how can anyone in that society make the repeated claim that they're just tools with no intelligence? Actually, considering one of the lines interacts with the crew directly and is good if they're all working smoothly together, and out of tune if they're not... how can they believe it's just a dumb mindless tool? For that matter, how is life support, or security, or some of the other lines, fundamentally speaking, different from communications anyway? From a human perspective, sure, it makes sense to make distinctions, but humans aren't the ones making the distinctions, they just installed the lines as is, and some of them turned out to control life support and others they don't know what they do. And from an objective perspective, for example, security in particular is mostly a matter of communicating information (like, "Intruder in Sector 7-G") to somebody who can do something about it. This complaint may seem unnecessarily picky, but to certain types of minds, like mine, this will literally annoy, that the fundamental science behind the world doesn't feel terribly thought out, or at least explained to the reader (maybe the authors do indeed have a sense in which it all works)... I don't feel immersed in a story, I feel like I'm being handed a mess of mutually inconsistent rules so that the authors can make exactly the plot they wanted, with the character having the abilities to do what they wanted.
While I think my complaint is a valid one... I'm almost making it sound worse than it is. Is the book ruined because of it? No. I think it's a solid effort, on the whole, and the characters and the rest of the worldbuilding is interesting enough that I can look past it, it's just a flaw.
There are other minor complaints... one of the POV characters, another linesman... I never felt like his chapters added much to the story. Usually he just seemed to be there to insult the main character's abilities and make us feel more sympathetic towards him, a trick that works great when used judiciously, but he took it too far. And regularly referring to people as "sweetheart" was pretty annoying too. And there were a few times when I thought the pacing felt a little off in a way I couldn't put my finger on (although one thing is, when I was about halfway through the book, I thought we were nearing the end until I activated the page number display), but none of them are all that serious.
I didn't love it. Allowing for a bit of a bump for a first time novel (it's a rare novelist who turns out something great their first time), I'll give it a three. I personally probably wouldn't read another book in the setting, just because the things that annoyed me are unlikely to change, but I might read something else by these authors, and I can see how others might like the universe enough to continue.
Finished: The Starry Rift by James Tiptree Jr.
After the extinction of humanity, aliens visiting a galactic library study three tales from humanity's history.
This is a fix-up novel, that is, short stories wrapped up by a framing device to turn it into a novel.The stories are all set in the same universe, and sometimes reference the same locations and aliens, but the time is different enough that the same technological rules don't apply (although they're always at a spacefaring level).
Tiptree herself (James Tiptree Jr. being a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon) has been an author I've enjoyed several short stories of in the past, but at the same time, I felt like I haven't read enough. Moreover, she had quite a fascinating life. And, since we were coming up on what would have been her 100th birthday, when I saw this collection in a used book bin, I figured I'd give it a try.
It's not her best work, unfortunately. It showcases some of the same characteristics she's known for, explorations of gender and sexuality, power, and death, but none have the power of the few classic works, and, to a degree, they seem more like average pulp stories with, occasionally, a little extra.
Since there's only three, it's easy enough to discuss them individually, and then I'll discuss some of the things that apply to all of them.
In "The Only Neat Thing To Do" a teenage girl who wants nothing more to explore space is given a spacecraft by her parents, for local use, and promptly runs away to uncharted territories. There she encounters an alien being unknown to her and uncovers a potential threat to local humanity. This was the best story of the bunch, all told. The alien, although maybe requiring a bit of suspension of disbelief, was a lot of fun to imagine, and the growing horror of what might potentially happen was well-played, as well as the tragedy surrounding the whole situation, that it's not because of any particular maliciousness, but that like physics, biology can also be unforgiving.
"Good Night, Sweet Hearts," tells the story of a man who is out of time due to a large amount of traveling under cryogenic suspension. As part of a series of coincidences, he encounters the great lost love of his college years, now much older and changed in many ways beyond that... and later, encounters the descendant of a clone of hers that's the age that he knew her. Also, there are space pirates. The weakest of the bunch, I get the idea that the author was playing with (a choice between a second chance with a person you have history with that you still hold a torch for, but isn't how you remember her, or one who looks virtually the same but doesn't remember you), and I like how it was eventually dealt with, but too much about it seemed like a false choice and, perhaps oddly, it didn't seem to give enough agency or respect to the women themselves. The fact that the clone was rescued from being a slave (and endured some horrific things) kind of makes her not much like the woman he left behind, except in looks, which makes him shallow for even considering it. And, all in all, the story just didn't have a lot of what I was interested in, it ran more along the lines of a pulp style adventure.
The third story, "Collision", ranks somewhere in between. The alien race was actually quite well-conceived, with an interesting life cycle involving three genders, and the conflict between them and the humans made sense and was resolved more or less in a satisfying way... but there was just a bizarre subplot (involving people of any race, in certain regions of space, thinking that they should look like the primary inhabitants of that area) that was just... frankly, too silly for me. The worst part was, it had only the smallest consequences on the plot and could easily have been removed. It felt like an interesting idea the author wanted to explore, but didn't have a proper story, so she just shoved it into this one, and made it much worse in the process. But, I still have to give her credit for the alien race itself.
As for the framing story, it's not substantial enough to really enjoy, but there is one quality that takes it from being a neutral factor in the book to being a minor negative: too often, the author uses the alien's reactions to comment on her own writing, in a way that feels smarmy (even were she criticizing them, but there's some praise too).
Overall, there are some trends, mostly, unfortunately, to the negative. Not in a "I hate this book" sense, but simply that I might have enjoyed it more if they were improved. Some, you can't really blame Tiptree for... that is, the technology in these seems very dated. Particularly, storage capacities and the fact that tapes are regularly referred to, not as archaic language but as physical things that need to get respooled, threaded, and such, giving the impression that in the far future humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and discovered faster-than-light travel but still uses magnetic tape based cassettes. Of course, any fiction of a certain time period is going to have big gaps like this, and you sort of have to forgive them, but they can still have their effect on your enjoyment. Somewhat more distancing is some occasional language abnormalities. I'm not sure if these are meant to indicate linguistic drift, were particular dialogue quirks of the era or location Tiptree wrote, or some combination (her use of the word "minim" to denote a specific but undefined time period certainly seems to be some element of world-building, but it felt out of place), but it often felt not quite right, not quite natural. Some of the dialogue had the clipped rhythm you sometimes hear in military or pilot speak, where words that are not strictly necessary, but make your sentences feel more natural, get omitted. It's not a huge problem, but it made it harder to get into than I'd hoped.
I didn't dislike it, I just thought it was okay. Despite the weak review, it's not turning me off Alice Sheldon's work in general, it just might not be the best place for someone to get a deeper exposure to her.
Finished: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Harry August leads a relatively normal life in the 20th Century. And when it ends, he's reborn, as a child, in his own past, with full memory of all that's about to happen. After a few lifetimes, he learns that he's part of a small minority, throughout history, who exist like this, living life over again. But in one life, on his deathbed, he receives a visit from a little girl who gives him a warning to send back through time... the end of the world is coming... and in each cycle, it's happening earlier and earlier.
The concept of a person living their life over again, even several times, is not a terribly new one. But it's not yet been so used that a good example of it doesn't feel fresh and original. And this is a very good example of it. It has a perfect mix of historical speculation, alternate history (for, after all, sometimes things change in these lives), crazy sci-fi ideas, and that slight flavoring of wish fulfillment for those who wish they could get a do-over of their own lives (although the book also makes it clear the drawbacks to this).
While it might also not also be unique in the field, the biggest thing that makes it stand out is that Harry isn't the only one like him, that there are others before and after him, and they interact. Usually in a book where time travel is involved, the only "worldbuilding" is history and alternate history, but in this one, there's a whole other layer, of how timelines interact when there's not just one person, there's potentially hundreds, and they can pass messages back and forth through time (although it's a long process, requiring several lives). And, because it involves time travel, it's mind-bending and dizzying and you can't shake the sense that it might not really stand up to logical scrutiny... and yet, it's good enough that you go along for the ride nonetheless. And even if there are errors, it's like seeing a bear playing Mozart on the piano... you're so wowed that the feat was achieved at all, that you can forgive the occasional off-note. And as for the regular time-travel worldbuilding? That's also done very well, both convincingly taking us into a 20th century life, but also the changes that start to develop as books go on are, perhaps not extraordinary, at least very well done.
The story takes a little while to get going, and part of that is because the narrator jumps around in time, telling stories from one life or another, that all build towards the greater tale, but it's enjoyable getting to know his world, and, there's a certain point where the book takes on a different dimension and new elements appear and it starts moving from solidly enjoyable to really exciting.
I'd love to read other books set in this universe, different people, different eras, different stories. We could explore what it's like for one of these to live through a shift in history that's come from up from the actions of a past (perhaps even some of the ones in the book itself), and deal with having to live life over against when you DON'T know what's going to happen (and maybe it's only their second time through). This is, by the way, one of the few technical issues I had with the worldbuilding surrounding the ourobourans and how everything works. I'm not sure I'd even call it a glitch, but considering all the ourobourans of the past, even not trying to cause a change, it makes sense that a few changes would propagate up anyway just from them living different lives than they did the first time, and that we should have seen some evidence of this, some of Harry's first few lives. Yet, once again, I was so enjoying the bear playing, and it was only after being wowed that I stop to notice that this particular note was off.
The only other minor issues is that the pace, although I enjoyed it all the way through, feels a little uneven (in particular, it seems very slow at first and then the end seems to get resolved rather suddenly) and that might bother some people, and one minor stylistic thing that bothered me. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, when Harry relates a conversation, he leaves out the quotation marks for his side of the conversation. Sort of giving the impression, I suppose, that the conversation exists within the context of Harry telling the story of it to someone else, and at these points he's more illustrating his thought process rather than trying to repeat his exact words. Regardless of the reason, I found it distracting and annoying when it happened, but only to a tiny degree... if I had more significant flaws with the book, it probably wouldn't be worth mentioning, but as it is, it was the thing that bothered me the most.
I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it, even to people who aren't big SF readers, and I'm sure I'm going to read it again. If I'd read it in time, it probably would have made my list of Hugo nominees (not that it would have affected the final ballot any, but just to give you an idea of how much I enjoyed it).
Finished: Arslan by M.J. Engh
Warning, there are a few significant spoilers about the book behind the cut, I just couldn't talk about some of my problems without discussing parts of the ending. Also, there's a plot involving sexual abuse of children in the book that is discussed and some people might want to avoid it.
Somehow, a dictator from a small middle eastern country has taken over the world. And, while traveling through America, he decides to make a small town in Illinois his base of operations. There, he makes his first introduction with shocking, abhorrent acts, but over the course of the years and decades, many sides of Arslan are seen.
This is a strange book, and difficult to review. On the whole, it's not especially believable... but there are parts that ring incredibly true, and the majority of the rest of it are told in a matter-of-fact way that lets you suspend your disbelief, mostly. It's not an especially enjoyable read, considering some of what happens, but it's strangely compelling. I'm not sure I liked it, and at times I violently disagreed with it, but I think it was worth reading.
Let's move on to the premise. I mentioned that the book's not especially believable, and this is part of the why. When they finally get around to explaining how Arslan took power, it sounds almost silly. But I think the author realizes that, and that's why she keeps it off-screen and only mentioned by second- or third-hand stories which might be wrong. It matters less about how Arslan did it than that his control is almost total. This isn't a story in which a town resists a Dictator until they're rescued, although to be sure, there are some efforts at resistance. Moreover, though, it's of a town conquered, and doing it's best to survive while conquered, because to resist too much means certain death. And moreover, it's an examination of power, the types of people who can command respect even without being entirely worthy of it, and how power can warp the victims it is used against into strange, sometimes co-dependent relationships.
Before I go any further, I think it should be point out that this book deals fairly extensively with ongoing and repeated sexual assault, often against children. In fact, one of the first acts in the book, after Arslan secures the school, is to rape two students, a boy and a girl... the boy is one of the two viewpoint characters (the girl is, as far as I could tell, never mentioned again, which seemed a somewhat bizarre omission). And it doesn't end there. The event is not told in lurid detail, but it doesn't shy away and be cagey about what is happening, either.
And moreover, part of the story involves one of the characters coming to feel love for his rapist. Either of these might cause people not to want to touch this book, and I won't argue with that reaction, although I should point out that I think it's pretty clear that the "love" was not a romantic ending the author was building towards, but rather treated as an additional horror, that a character has become so completely reshaped by such a violation, not just by the act but by society's reactions, that their feelings turn this way is a tragedy. In some ways this is the most powerful part of the book.
Less successful is the transformation of the rest of the town, although the early parts of that were much more interesting to read.
The story is told from two major points of view. There is Franklin Bond, the principal of the school who is forced to share his house with Arslan, and becomes something of the local leader of government... not quite a collaborator, because everybody must collaborate, but over the years seems to do more to protect Arslan than he needs to, for reasons even he doesn't seem to be entirely sure of. The other POV is Hunt Morgan, the young boy Arslan raped the first day, who Arslan keeps with him and trains and educates. I have to give the author credit here, both POVs read very differently, they have completely different styles of expressing themselves, with Bond being more matter-of-fact and Morgan using a lot more literary references and poetic language, as well as drifting back and forth in time. However, Bond's POV was more interesting.
As for Arslan himself? He's a strange character, with the megalomaniac goals of a supervillain, the willingness to be cruel but at the same time a bizarre sense of honor, and a strange charisma despite knowing what he's done. The boldest thing Engh does is attempt to make you sympathize with him, at times, not so much to make him a hero but to raise the question of whether a monster might, in certain circumstances, become redeemable, or at least make us to acknowledge that there is honor and humanity in monsters, and perhaps aspects of monsters in the most honorable among us. I think she goes too far with this, myself, but until she does it's interesting to walk that tightrope.
The book begins to fail towards the end when the book has Arslan return to town, much diminished in power, but, now reasonably free of the fear of retribution, the town doesn't take revenge on him, because... I don't know. One character advances the bizarre argument that everything he did to the town qualifies as War Crimes, for which they don't have the authority to try him, and he hasn't committed any crimes they can. But that doesn't ring true because with crimes against humanity, any community could declare itself with the authority. I can understand a few individual characters, like Bond, being unwilling to kill a man, even a monster, or turn him over to a group that would, but it goes way beyond that apparently because the author wants to give Arslan another heroic turn.
Still, even then, taking it as some weird given like you might allow some other book the appearance of a talking dog, you can enjoy the conclusion to a degree, the continuation of the themes and revelation of character motivations started earlier... it's just not as effective as the rest of the book.
As I said, it's hard to rate. Three stars is usually "liked", but I can't say I liked it. Yet I think it's a little better than "okay." So I'll stick with three stars.
Finished: Harmony by Project Itoh
In the future, life is precious. Maybe too precious. Virtually everyone has medical nanotechnology that monitors their status, and anything that is potentially harmful is banned or at least heavily socially discouraged. Privacy is a word from the past, your medical records are open. The dominant philosophy is that your life does not belong to you, it belongs to society. Three teenage girls, still too young to get the nanotech, and social misfits, form a bond and as an act of rebellion, a suicide pact. Years later, Tuan Kirie, one of the survivors of that pact, has fit herself back with society, although somewhat uneasily, even working for the World Health Organization. But a shocking new crisis develops that she must investigate, and she believes that it may have some ties back to her own past, and her decisions may shape the future of humanity.
This is a novel written in Japanese and translated into English. I've read a number of these put out by the Haikasoru imprint of Viz Media, and while this isn't my favorite, it's right up there at the top of them.
Harmony is obviously in the classic mold of the ambiguous, perhaps even horrific from a certain perspective, utopia, like Brave New World, used to warn against certain trends that presumably the author worried about going too far. But it also goes beyond that, too, and tackles questions like the nature of consciousness and arguably morphs from "warning social commentary" to "full on science fiction" by the end.
It may be tempting to look at this as a book warning of the dangers of political correctness. Indeed, the words "publicly correct" appear quite a few times to refer to the sort of capitulation to the groupthink that is required, by the society. Usually, when somebody attacks political correctness, I'm not all that sympathetic, as I find it a desire to want to keep not caring about whether they're hurting other people. In this case, I think it's not so much against political correctness (and in fact virtually every time "publicly correct" is invoked, it has nothing to do with racist or sexist jokes or even actions towards others, and everything to do with keeping yourself healthy and at a minimum of risk), but rather against the tools being used to extend too far. It is, it seems, more of a reminder of the virtue of moderation than anything else. After all, the main character get into a suicide pact early on, and some of her friends fantasize about murder and terrorism... it's hard to imagine that the author is wholly endorsing their worldview, but rather painting them as an opposite extreme, an over-reaction to the over-reaction the rest of the world has imposed, and the ideal truth being somewhere in the middle. So at times you root for the main characters even when they're advocating extreme actions, and other times you hate them, and really, it's a nice balancing act that may go a bit too far in one direction or another, but keeps you questioning things, which is good. Still, the overall message isn't about the right to hurt other people, but rather the right to choose things for yourself that may not be the best for you.
And, as I said, it's more than just a book to promote a social message, it gets genuinely exciting when the plot kicks off, with moments of extreme creepiness and dramatic choices foisted upon the world, all leading to a conclusion that doesn't look like it was made to fit a message, but rather because the author thought it was a really cool idea. And in a way, it is. It's not necessarily an upbeat ending, either, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless (and, in these kind of books, endings that are too upbeat often feel like cheats anyway).
The book's very good, but it's not perfect. One of the conceits of the novel is that certain parts of it are highlighted in an "emotion-markup language" that looks like HTML, where certain passages might be enclosed in tags, like, say, "I'm fine." The idea of it, at least once the book gets to the ending and the point of them is revealed, might be interesting enough to keep, but in execution in fails, particularly because most of the time it's used to make lists of statements, lists that don't actually really have emotional content, just look ugly. And it's used just frequently enough to be annoying, and yet not frequently that you think it's legitimately used to tag all the emotional text. It's more like the author occasionally remembered to use it, and uses it then, but doesn't go back to make it a completely consistent motif.
There's also a little bit of unfortunate skeeviness, where teenage girls wax nostalgically about the past where men would pay to have sex with teenage girls, and seem to complain that the option is no longer open to them. And when, early on, they make a declaration of their own bodily independence but refer mostly to their sexual characteristics as they do so (when the society controls far more than that, and there's not even that much evidence that sexual freedoms themselves are particularly restricted). I can see valid arguments for these choices that make sense within the plot, and I think trying to read into it any particular opinions on the part of the author would be a mistake, but it is somewhat off-putting. It's actually not a lot, it's not a huge part of the book, but it happens early on and may turn people off, which is a shame. There is something of a revelation towards the end that both potentially explains some of this earlier part, and yet is also potentially a problematic trope of it's own, but on the whole I think it's small enough that the book might have been better off without it.
The only other negative thing I have to say is that sometimes character motivations seem to change abruptly and I'm not entirely sure if I missed some subtle clues or if they just changed their mind, but particularly towards the conclusion it made for a minor off-note.
Still, the book kept me both entertained and thinking all the way through, which is what I want out of books like this.
Finished: Near + Far by Cat Rambo
This is a collection of short fiction by Cat Rambo. The stories are divided into two categories, the "Near" ones are set, as you might expect, in the Near Future, on Earth. The "Far" ones are set either in the more distant future or on other planets. In paperback, from what I understand, this is done in a novel way, where the book has a front cover on each side, and you turn the book over and turn it upside down to read the other story's collection, and either one could legitimately be considered the "first" batch. Unfortunately, I read it in ebook form, where it's merely one collection followed by another.
I've read a few Cat Rambo stories in the past and enjoyed them, and one of hers, I believe made my personal Hugo nomination ballot last year (or, if not, it was very close, I can't remember for sure). I also had the mistaken impression she'd been writing a lot longer than is apparently the case... perhaps because of the resonance of her last name in the public consciousness, I thought she'd been a staple of SF for decades. And while she's had a few pieces of fiction published dating back to the 90s, she actually seems to have burst onto the SF scene in full around 2004-5, and most, if not all of the stories in this book are from the last ten years, which means none of them feels dated.
I was prepared for the usual mixed bag in a short story collection, but, when I started on the "Near" half, I found myself enjoying most of the stories in them. Firstly, almost all of the stories are SF, as opposed to Fantasy, which is not as much to my tastes. There are a few where the science is somewhat soft, or there are some more magical elements, but only one that I'd describe as outright fantasy (set in the modern day, though, it should be noted), and even that wasn't bad, just not my thing. The rest gave me a great variety, some small character pieces, some built off an interesting idea, a superhero tale, a cyberpunk tale, and a few takes on typical SF themes, but not really a disappointment. I'd thought, then, if it kept up that quality, I might consider it one of the best single-author anthologies I'd yet read.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite keep up. The "Far" stories, while not bad, and, indeed, still containing a few excellent examples, didn't seem to quite match, for me, the enjoyment I had for the first. Party of this was perhaps high expectations from the variety of the first... I was expecting, hoping, to see dozens of different futures or alien worlds that were as believable as her near future stories, but far more divergent, as, the farther you go in the future, the more you can speculate about what might be out there. Unfortunately, several of the "Far" stories seemed to take place in the SAME future, with, occasionally, the same setting and a few shared characters, a rather conventional space opera dynamic, and although they explored different themes and some of the aliens were quite interesting, the overall effect was narrow... for every story set in that typical space opera setting, I lamented about how there could have been one set in a completely different universe with no aliens at all, or where humanity met only one alien race and had a unique relationship with them, or maybe a mind-bending post-singularity tale. There were a few exceptions (or, perhaps, the space opera setting had a lot of varied elements added to it, and all of them were actually intended to take place within it), but on the whole the stories felt like different looks at a single future. There was some experimentalism, but much of it seemed to be of the more style experimentalism or deliberately modeling works of classic literature, techniques that leave me somewhat cold.
Still, even though it didn't quite live up to my highest hopes, it's quite good, and moreover, they tread a nice line where they can be enjoyable both to a long-time SF reader and someone who's a bit newer, because the science and speculation usually play second fiddle to character and clarity. My favorite stories of the collection, I think, were "The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each", "Peaches of Immortality" (the two stories that opened the "Near" batch), "Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut", "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars", and from the "Far" section, "Amid the Words of War", "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain" (which was a surprise as when I started I felt like it was going to be the kind of thing I disliked). Those are just the ones I really enjoyed. There are others that I liked, just, somewhat mildly, and only a few I didn't like at all (and only one that was a struggle to get through without just skipping ahead to the next story).
Rating-wise... I'll give it 4, which I might have given it anyway if I had liked the second batch as much as the first, but it would be a much higher four. This is a four just on the edge, but still worth the score. A very good collection, worth a look.
Finished: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
In near future Cape Town, South Africa, smartphones are more in our lives than ever. They're used to pay for everything, they work as keys, and they can even be used as a police to remotely administer an electrical shock if you're getting out of hand. Moreover, disconnection is a legal punishment to be feared, for it often means you can't get work or participate in many other parts of life. Meanwhile, corporations continue to do what they can to control the lives of their employees and customers. But for most people, life is just life, some people trying to rebel, some trying to get ahead, and some just trying to get by. We follow the stories of several people as their lives and stories intertwine and sometimes they end up in situations they never planned on.
Moxyland is the debut author of South African writer Lauren Beukes, and set in her native city, which lends it a certain authenticity (even though I have no personal experience to verify how well she captured the spirit and details). From an outsider (that is, North American) perspective such as my own, though, the setting is perhaps a little peculiar at times, but the country has enough European influence in its history that it doesn't feel particularly alien, either, a little like being set in England or Australia, there's an accent on everything, and a few things seem out of place, but it's easy enough to adapt. You could even read it without paying much attention to or being especially aware of the setting at all, although you'd obviously miss some of the texture. In fact it may be the science fictional elements that contribute to most of the feeling of dislocation that the book engenders (although certain elements, like slang, it's hard for me to be sure which category it belongs in). It's also set in the very near future, published in 2008 and only looking about ten years ahead then, it's nearly obsolete now. Still, it's one of those books that I think will be worth reading even after our date passes theirs.
The book is firmly in the subgenre of cyberpunk (although some might quibble and call it post-cyberpunk or some other term based on believing that we are in an era where the influences that gave birth to real cyberpunk are different and so this book must be categorized differently even if the tropes are the same, but to me, it's all the same beast), characterized by techological enhancement of people, corporate overreach, a gritty, pessimistic tone, and often street-level characters trying, in small ways, to rebel. High Tech and Low Lives, as some have described it, and that describes the type of book it is. One of the reasons that the genre isn't common anymore is that it can too easily fall into cliche, another is that it's easy to get sick of. Still, I think that this is a worthy piece of the genre, with well-developed characters, a good writing style, and some interesting ideas. Of course, in cyberpunk, those ideas are often about ways that those in power may find to screw the common people over in novel ways, and this is, I think, part of it's importance, an early-warning system of things to be watchful for before they enslave us. And in this respect, the novel also does a very good job, as I can see many of these ideas actually being tried in the near future. The ability to turn people's own phones into tasers is perhaps the least believable element, but as a reader you can still have fun with it.
The characters are strong, vivid, believable, and the book bounces between several of them as viewpoint characters, and I didn't find, as I often do, that one or multiple storylines were a drag that I was wading through to get to the ones I enjoyed. Sure, there were ones that I liked more than others, but I was interested in all of them. It is important to note though that the characters are interesting... but not particularly likable. Of them, there was maybe one that I genuinely liked. Others I thought were jerks, or the type of people I would be annoyed at having to associate with. It's a tricky thing, making unlikeable characters compelling, but I think the author mostly succeeds, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.
The prose is strong in a way it's hard to describe. Except, occasionally, with the slang, it was an easy read, but and it felt like it had depth where even when I was reading a fairly average description without much consequence, I was enjoying it more than I should have been... even though I can't later remember why.
If there's a weakness, it's in plot and pacing. It's not a huge negative, but I found myself more interested in the characters and the world than in what specifically they were doing, and what storylines I did find seemed to not get as successful a payoff as I'd hoped for. The overall effect was just of following certain characters through a particularly turbulent time period, but little to no sense of closure, why the events happened, or of why any of it mattered. Perhaps that was part of the point, but I wanted it to feel a little more like a story.
Still, as a first outing, it's quite well done, and as my first experience with this author, it's a very good one. I'd put it at a high three, it was very close to a four, and I think if it had just hung together a little better, it would have gotten it easily. But I was impressed in the quality of the writing enough that I'm going to make it a point to try another of the author's work.
Finished: Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee
Disclaimer: I received this book for free through a giveaway on Twitter. I don't think it affected my review.
Zeroboxer tells the tale of Carr Luka, an eager young athlete in the new sport of Zeroboxing... a kind of mixed martial arts match in the zero-gravity environment of a space station. He works his way up the ranks and becomes a rising star, but it's not just his opponents he has to worry about. He's got secrets, some that happened years ago and he didn't even know about, but which might threaten his career... or even his life.
Obviously this is a mix between a "boxer seeking the championship belt" type story, and a science fiction. I should point out up front that I may be predisposed against this type of book. I generally don't watch sports at all, and, in particular, I have, if possible, even less interest in the sports that involve two people fighting. So in particular I'm not the best person to judge the sports-side of things.
I will note that there are a lot of familiar tropes that even someone like me who doesn't have a particular interest in the genre can pick out. The friend turned rival, the crusty mentor/coach who is hard on the fighter but deep down cares, the inspiring love interest, the eager young fan who never gives up hope, the point where the character has to make a choice between doing something unethical or having some kind of negative consequence. You might call them cliches but I think that would be a little unfair, particularly when it's a hybrid story like this one, the familiar tropes help anchor the "sports" part of the plot and let you add the sci-fi elements.
The sci-fi elements are, honestly, decent, but nothing that really blew me away. I might have raised an eyebrow at the apparent casualness of a trip to Mars, but otherwise the science seemed solid, serving the story and adding some texture to the world, and raising a few questions. I was certainly more interested in this part of things than the sports side, and it had a it more depth than I was expecting.
The intersection of the two sides comes most strongly in the sport of Zeroboxing itself, and here I think the book shines most. The sport is believable and told in an engaging way, probably even exciting to the type of person who's excited about sports. The author did seem to have put a good deal of thought into how it worked at least, and the terminology surrounding it (even when adapted from boxing lingo) sounded believable.
I've seen the book marketed as YA, and although I think it's suitable to that audience, I also feel the label does a bit of a disservice to the book by suggesting that it's the type of thing that's mostly of interest to teens. Aside from the main character starting at a typical-YA age of seventeen, it doesn't tackle teen issues or harp on melodramatic love triangles, it's just a fairly straightforward rising star sports story with some reasonably well-done SF elements, and anyone who particularly likes both sports and SF, regardless of age, could probably get a lot out of the book. If you only really like one, it depends a lot more on how much enthusiasm you can drum up for the other part.
The story's a fairly brisk read, and the plot does what it needs to do but on many levels, just by the nature of the genre, it's predictable: if the main character has to win a fight to move on to the next stage, he obviously wins. The ending also fell a little flatter than I'd hoped, not the fight intself but more particularly with the protagonist's non-fight problem, which seemed to sort of fizzle. Still, overall, I think it's a decent book, and probably to people who's tastes run more towards boxing in general, it might even be a very good book. For me, I'd put it in the low three range, I enjoyed it, wasn't ever bored even in the action-heavy parts, but I doubt I'd read it again or follow on to a potential sequel, though I might give the author a try on another work.
Finished: Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey (Expanse #2)
(Since it's the second book in a series, synopsis behind the cut to avoid potentially spoiling anyone who hasn't read the first)Jim Holden and his crew now work for the Outer Planets Alliance, capturing pirates prowling the outer solar system and occasionally going on intelligence missions, and they're about to get a doozy. Because war has broken out between the UN and Mars on Ganymede, threatening untold lives. But the spark point is a genetically engineered super-soldier built using alien technology Earth can barely understand, much less control, the same technology that is currently doing inexplicable things to Venus. And while all of this is going on, a scientist searches for his kidnapped daughter, and Holden and his crew may be the only ones who can help...
I liked the first book in the series, Leviathan's Wake, but I was a little bit let down. Part of this was because I'd heard so many good things about the series, and although it was good, the hype was naturally hard to live up to.
This one, though, I enjoyed a lot more. It's still a sort of a highbrow version of big-budget movie or TV series SF (which is appropriate, considering it's being adapted), action heavy and fun but not particularly deep... but it's a very GOOD example of that kind of book. And this one, everything seemed a step above. The characters we knew about before gelled together more and felt more real, lived in, and the newer viewpoint characters were a lot more compelling. To be honest, there was something a little bit creepy about Miller's obsession with a teenage girl he'd never met, but Prax's quest for his daughter is a lot more relateable, as is the Martian Marine's struggle to cope with being the lone survivor of her squad, and the UN functionary was so fun to read it's easy to understand why she's apparently part of the cast of the TV series from the beginning, rather than the second season. And jumping back to the returning characters, in many ways they're stock archetypes, the tight-knit crew, but in other ways, they're refreshingly novel. It just feels so satisfying to find a character in a book who's first instinct when uncovering a massive conspiracy is "Okay I'm just going to tell everybody." Even if the book tries to point out that's not necessarily the right move at all times, it feels so rare in genre fiction that I root for him nonetheless.
The plot moves at a good pace, never dragging, and always promising a little more to come in the future. It may be a bit predictable or cliche at times, but the sheer enjoyment more than makes up for it.
When I read the first book, it took me months to get around to buying the second. When I finished this one, I ordered the third immediately. That alone should say something.
Finished: Crossfire by Nancy Kress
A privately held spaceship leaves Earth, full of thousands of rich eccentrics, scientists, members of religious and ethnic groups and others who have all paid for a chance to start again on another planet. But just as they're setting up, they find a complication... there are aliens already on the planet. And soon they discover they've stumbled upon a war between two races and forced to make moral choices that no one should be forced to make.
This book left me with mixed feelings, because there were some things that I really liked, some that left me somewhat cold, and some that I thought were below par.
Let's start with what the book did right. Firstly, it created some particularly cool aliens. Well, one of them was about average, but I really liked what Kress did with the second one, a different mindset and biology that I was really interested by, and it led smoothly into the moral dilemmas faced by the protagonists without feeling artificial. Sometimes the science veered into the science-magic type, but mostly I really enjoyed this side of things.
This is a science fiction novel, and for some fans, a good SFnal concept, or a familiar one handled well with a few twists, can excuse a lot of other flaws. This is mostly true for me, and why I'd say I didn't feel like the book was a waste of time. But that doesn't mean we don't notice the other flaws.
I normally like Kress' character work, but here not many spoke to me. The only character I consistently liked was the New Quaker doctor. His daughter came close but was too erratic, to the point that it felt like not a nuanced character, but rather an almost cartoonishly irrational one. The rest? A few I got invested in for brief periods, but mainly they just slid off me. The novel did have a built-in excuse for why a bunch of characters who probably aren't well-suited to this type of operation are there, and it serves well for that, but it feels too transparently an excuse.
Slightly related to the character work was some of the plot developments that just rubbed me as poorly handled or not well-thought out. For example, two characters dislike each other, and then realize they're attracted to each other. This is a classic trope, and it in itself isn't a bad thing, but to read these characters who were mildly in conflict through the rest of the book suddenly look into each other's eyes and, essentially, hold hands and agree that they're dating did not ring true to me. Similarly, one of the characters had a backstory where he committed a crime on Earth. This is revealed right at the beginning, but the nature of the crime is only hinted at until finally they reveal the truth... and it just lost all it's power for me because I could not believe the world worked in such a way that that particular crime would have been possible (at least, that he would have gotten away with it). As such, instead of working as part of a satisfying character arc, it made me roll my eyes. There are a few other times where characters seemed to make decisions because that was what the plot required, rather than it being what a real person would do in that situation.
The tone seemed to jump around a little, and it took a while before I had a good idea what kind of story the book was going to be, not in terms of plot, but in terms of feel. But it didn't take too long, so it's one of the more minor problems.
All in all, the book was okay. But it could have been much better.
Still Reading (or finished but haven't done my review): Artemis Awakening by Jane Lindskold, The Trials, by Linda Nagata (The Red #2), Alien Contact (themed short story collection), My Real Children, by Jo Walton, Rapture, by Kameron Hurley (The Bel Dame Apocrypha #3)
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Date: 2015-10-07 12:00 am (UTC)I thought the ending was a little too convenient. Prax doesn't encounter a huge amount of resistance rescuing Mei and they get back to the ship without any trouble. Bobbie squares off against one proto-molecule alien zombie thing and that's it. I kept expecting to find out that Mei is infected. Or maybe she is and we'll see the consequences in another book.
Still, it's a damn fine book and I want to keep reading. These books are just so long though, so I need a gap in my book club reading cycle to accommodate them.
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Date: 2015-10-08 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-07 08:26 pm (UTC)Moxyland I liked a lot as well. I've read the Shining Girls and have Zoo City somewhere waiting, but so far I've been pretty pleased with everything I've encountered from Beukes, and I recommend Moxyland to people who ask for cyberpunk.
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Date: 2015-10-08 03:30 pm (UTC)As for Crossfire, I suspect that at least 90% of my issues with the "love at first sight" thing would have been resolved if we actually saw them interact at the moment their relationship formed, rather than "walking towards each other staring at each other" followed to a time jump where they're dating and it's just a fact of life. Even if you rush up to somebody you normally hate and fall into each other's arms, eventually there's some negotiation of "hey, are we just having a hate-fueled fling in the sack or do we actually want to date here and maybe we should find out if we even like spending a few minutes just being friendly and getting to know each other before we decide?" that I'd have liked to see (there was a tiny bit of that, but it was too late in the game for it to satisfy me on that level). And yeah, Nan was kind of aggressively annoying... I actually liked her at some parts, and thought there were moments where her relationship with her father (like suddenly being supportive when he needed her and then turning it off when the crisis was over or started interacting too much in the pattern that drove her away in the first place) rang very genuine... but too often she was just unpleasant to read about.
The crime... well, my main problem is that if it was that easy to steal literally billions and get away with it... this would be something that anyone who's got a few brain cells together who interacts with them in even a limited way would at least consider, and plenty would try to do it... including people like their own security team. Why follow the bosses' orders when you can choose your moment you can get them alone, take their retinal access to their bank accounts and transfer their entire fortune to you UNTRACEABLEY. Yes, Billionaires might cheat each other and screw over the world or lesser people and even screw up and lose everything in a few bad deals... but if there's one thing they will be counted on to do right it's set up systems to protect their fortune from just being randomly and irretrievably stolen by commoners (who, it should be pointed out, came up with the scheme more or less on the fly).
Of Beukes' other work, so far The Shining Girls is the one that seems most interesting to me and I'll probably try next. I don't know, Zoo City has a kind of cool premise but the animal thing twigs my "but I like SF, not fantasy" instinctual distaste (Shining Girls quite possibly has a bit of that, but it's at least couched in a way that doesn't trigger it so badly)
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Date: 2015-10-08 04:05 pm (UTC)I've been reading Karl Schroder's Virga lately and it has sort of a similar SFnal feel, where if it didn't spend so much time talking about gravity and wind shear it'd totally be a book about steampunk airship people having saber duels which is fantasy. It's otherwise a very, very different thing though, in all kinds of ways.
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Date: 2015-10-21 12:19 pm (UTC)Virga's another example, yeah it has fantasy tropes (well, steampunky ones) but it seems thoroughly embedded in within a SF context, and although the science behind the "high technology doesn't work here" field is probably just as fantasy as, in another book, some people being wizards, it's simple enough that I don't care and can by the justification of "under certain cicumstances the universe can just be made to do that." It doesn't hurt that in addition to the rigorously thought-out setting with the gravity and everything, there's also a lot of big SF ideas being played with (and more as it goes on). I really enjoyed the Virga series for a number of reasons though, including sense of wonder, and enjoyment's always a big factor. These personal bugbears sometimes make me enjoy certain books less or more, and more often they'll make me decide to check out or put off reading a book in the first place, but like anybody I'll care a lot less about the peeves if I'm enjoying the book a lot anyway.
Anyway, was reminded that I never actually replied to this because I happened to see Lauren Beukes on a live Geek and Sundry twitch show, "The Pull", promoting her new comic "Survivor Club." Managed to get my comment praising Moxyland read on air, too. :). And, finally found out how to pronounce the last name (according to her, rhymes with "mucus", or her second choice, "Lucas"). If you have any interest I think the interview part shows up on G&S's Youtube channel about a week later.