2017 First Book Foo
May. 6th, 2017 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Wow, it's been a while. Nothing's really new, the world is still generally awful lately and my life's about the same but with a recent blast of extra blah. But let's do the book foo I've fallen way behind on, maybe if I don't preamble too much I can get it all to fit in one post.
Finished: The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds
In The Prefect, cops who monitor the thousands of independent habitats around a distant planet investigate a pair of seemingly unrelated crimes... but they may be part of a larger pattern that would lead to the takeover of the entire Glitter Band.
While I do like some of Alastair Reynolds' work, his Revelation Space universe (of which this is a part) is somewhat hit or miss. Luckily, this is one of the hits... in fact, it may be my favorite of the novels in that universe.
It's not eye-bogglingly awesome, but it is overall well-paced and fun, and plenty of intriguing ideas about different ways of living, mediated by technology, and I was entertained all the way through.
There are a few flaws, but they're rather minor. There are times when characters act incredibly stupid just to push the plot along a little longer, and I feel like some of the connections to the rest of the universe, outside of the setting itself, seemed a little on the forced side, included more as fanservice than that they were really necessary.
Still, I was quite fond of it on the whole, and as I understand it one of Reynolds' upcoming projects is a sequel to this... I think I'd be looking forward to that.
Finished: Jumper, by Steven Gould
Multiple time reread and wrote about it multiple times here.
Finished: The John Varley Reader, by John Varley
As you might have gathered from the title, this is a collection of stories from author John Varley. I've only read a little of Varley, but I've always been a little intrigued, and a little intimidated by the prospect of reading his novels, the latter largely because they're mostly set in one universe and I'm not sure the best starting point. But I've heard interesting things, and have vaguely positive recollections of the few stories I remember reading in short story collections. So when I saw a collection of just his short stories in a used bookstore for cheap, I had to give it a chance.
And I'm quite glad I did, overall.
Normally, it stands to reason to talk about the stories first and foremost in a collection of short stories. But I want to talk about the introductions first. Each story in this collection comes with a fairly lengthy introduction, often not just briefly mentioning the idea behind the story, but also long rambling asides about his life at the time. This could easily get boring, but instead, it was fascinating, you get an interesting sense of the man, insight into what it's like starting out in SF (or at least, what it was like in the 70s), living in different places in the US, how Hollywood works, the writing process, and other details. While I won't say the introductions were the highlight of the book, they were an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, and I made sure to read them even for stories that I was already familiar enough with that I felt I could skip rereading.
As for the stories, they're somewhat of a mixed bag. Most, though not all of them, are set in one of two (similar in some ways but unrelated) ongoing universes of stories. One is Varley's "Eight Worlds" universe, the setting of many of his novels, in which Mankind has been kicked off Earth by powerful and inscrutable aliens but allowed the run of the rest of the solar system, and technology has significantly advanced enabling people to change gender on a whim and back themselves up in case of death. The other is a set of sci-fi procedurals focused on a police detective living on the moon (where body modifications, including gender alteration, are also relatively easy). Both are pretty interesting, although reading them all in a burst in one collection does become the biggest flaw... it can be a little repetitive.
Yet I still enjoyed most of them, and even the ones that I didn't I could usually find some nugget or image that I liked, and even when I felt certain ideas had been explored again and again, there were interesting takes on it.
In some way he was so ahead of his time that his social ideas still seem cutting edge (particularly with respect to gender). There's also a few eyebrow-raising moments caused by differences from today's values and the values of the past combined with Varley's science fiction author tendencies to explore societies with different moral values. Some of it is certainly shocking and perhaps offputting to certain readers, and maybe even outright offensive, but I never got the impression that his personal character was evil-hearted in the slightest... just that he may have innocently used words that are hurtful, or toyed with concepts that most people don't want explored under any circumstances. There were definite off-notes for me nonetheless. It's perhaps ironic that the last story in the book was one that was supposed to be in the long-delayed collection "The Last Dangerous Visions" (the never-materialized third installment of a series that boldly tried to tell stories that would be banned anywhere else)... and it's almost one of the most tame, by today's standards, a bit on the gruesome side but nothing compared to hit TV shows today.
On the whole, one of the better single-author collections I've read, and it does make me want to check out Varley's novels at some point... although I'm still not entirely sure where I should start.
I'm giving it four stars although I think it's rounded up from the high three-and-a-half-to-four-star range. May not be for everyone though, particularly for those who have trouble separating fiction in which certain acts are not portrayed negatively from active endorsement of those acts.
Finished: Fire With Fire, by Charles E. Gannon
A super-competent writer is put on ice for decades by a secret government agency, and, when he's revived, sent on a mission to investigate rumors of extraterrestrial contact on an alien world, an then a bunch of other stuff happens.
There is a style of book affectionately referred to as competency porn, which often involves a particularly intelligent and skilled main character doing some difficult tasks better than anyone else. It can be enjoyable, if done well and with a certain amount of restraint.
If you put competency porn books on a scale analogous to regular pornography this book would be, well, to even attempt to continue this metaphor with any specificity would turn this review incredibly vulgar. So I'll just say it'd be at the extreme end. I mean, the character is explicitly a genius, cool in a crisis, ladies man, develops a sixth-sense type instinct for trouble, and most of the time figures things out before anyone else in the room. They even have other characters comment on how his major flaw is that he's so good at everything that if he reaches a situation that he can't handle he might not be willing to give up or consider less-than-optimal solutions. Rest assured, this never happens, which makes that conversation the equivalent of a job interview where you say, "My biggest flaw? Well, I tend to put the company's interests ahead of my own." It's not only incredibly self-serving, it's also pretty obvious what you're doing and would make me think less of you for doing it.
Leaving that aside (although the problem attaches to and infects other flaws in the book like one of those sci-fi viruses that turns infectees into muscle-bound monsters), the book isn't too bad, but there still are some flaws. The sexual politics are pretty iffy, with most female characters fawning over the main character for one reason or another, and even when they're professionals with skills of their own, they're often secondary to the hero's super-competence. If they've got a specialty, they can provide a few insights but he has to match them at least, either from his own knowledge on the subject or general knowledge of history. Even the female bodyguard assigned to protect him, the few times they're together in a fight, he's in no real need of protection and if I recall correctly even saves her. I mean, it might have been interesting if he was incredibly smart but a little useless in a fight, but no, he's gotta be awesome at that too. The only reason he even needs a bodyguard, it seems, is for someone to flirt with and have a romance. Sure, there are in-story reasons, but they're not very compelling (nor is the reason he's continually in danger from assassins in the first place).
The book also doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It starts out as a "investigate if there are primitive aliens being exploited," then turns for a while into "superspies dodging assassins", then suddenly morphs into a diplomatic first contact mission with a set of alien races (completely unrelated to the aliens in the first section). Why does he need to be in all of these stories? Because he's just that good at everything that everything would fall apart if he wasn't involved. Even the aliens appreciate his diplomatic instincts about when to raise issues and when to pretend nothing unusual happened. And none of the storylines are entirely satisfying, like they are being set up in advance for a long series. That's also the only thing I can think of to explain the utterly pointless scenes of the olive-eating villain. Seriously, there are like six scenes where a villain watches people while eating olives, or interacts with the waiter and asks for more olives and OH MY GOD I LIKE OLIVES AND FETA CHEESE TOO BUT GET TO THE DAMN POINT ALREADY. Nobody in the main cast even meets him in the first book (but he's given a name in the sections about him so you know he's due to be important).
But, again, other than all this, the book's okay. There are some fun moments, some interesting SF rationales for how the technology like FTL works, and several alien races which are okay. Too many feel like they're just discount versions of Trek or other classic SF aliens, but okay. It doesn't really do anything special, but it's not a chore to read, except for the exercise you occasionally get eyerolling. Several of the books in the series have wound up on the Nebula Award shortlist, and I can't for the life of me understand why, except perhaps that it might really appeal to a certain subset of fandom or people who really like golden age SF, but were craving new examples of it. Two stars is, under Goodreads system "it was okay," and so that's the score it gets. I do not expect to read any more in the series, unless I happen to also get them free (this book was offered as part of Baen's Free Library of ebooks).
Finished: Crisis in Urlia, by Karl Schroeder
In the near future, a Canadian humanitarian response team, part of our military, deals first with a drought-and-famine situation in a new African city-state called Urlia, then with a new, possibly bioengineered sickness, and an attempt by extremist groups to use that chaos to seize power.
This is a follow-up to Crisis in Zefra. Both were projects commissioned by the Canadian military as exercises in attempting to forsee the possible changing tools, strategies, and role of the military in the future (and are available free online). Although it is an interesting idea on its own, I read them mainly because one of my favorite SF authors did the writing portion. Zefra focused more on squad-level tactics, while Urlia is centered more on command-and-control and 'big-picture' thinking.
Although it is told in the format of a story (with regular breaks for discussion questions and copious footnotes linking to the scientific ideas explored in the text), it's still a little light in that respect. There are characters, certainly, but most don't get too much development other than to showcase some science fictional idea of where we may be heading as a society. Deep character studies aren't really the point of the exercise, and so most of the space is devoted to other matters. That's okay, understandable even, but since I am rating this as fiction it is one of the negatives. What it does well is showcase a number of cool ideas, some of which I've been exposed to before from reading the author's other works, but still interest me enough that I'm happy to see more incarnations. For instance, there's an area of land that has been given legal rights and its own 'desires' through a simple AI, and must be negotiated with for water rights. Or people who are citizens of 'virtual' nations that they is considered just as real as Canadian citizenship. And the idea of situations that are so complex that no person can truly understand it all, and yet through collaboration groups of people can understand a part of it enough that if they work together they can solve tricky problems.
Because the ideas were more interesting and explored well, I think I like it more than Zefra, slightly. It's still not the kind of book I'd recommend to people as fiction, unless they have a particular interest in this type of strategic foresight.
Finished: The Courier, by Gerald Brandt
Kris is a young courier delivering packages between corporations in San Angeles, a megacity that in addition to combining several present-day cities, is also several cities on top of each other, with lower levels never seeing a real sun. One of her deliveries soon has her running for her life.
It's a cyberpunk book, and cyberpunk can be really cool, but it can also be full of well-worn tropes without a whole lot distinctive about it that raises it above the crowd. This unfortunately is the problem with the Courier. It's not aggressively bad, it's just okay, and not especially impressive, particularly for my own personal tastes.
Let's start with the good... the action gets moving right away and doesn't let up. That's actually not necessarily a good in my book, but I recognize I'm a little odd in that respect, I like books more when there's quieter, slower moments, but I can see people really getting swept up in the book.
The characters are okay, although the main character has the tired old 'sexual abuse backstory' which doesn't bother me as much as it might some people, when it's a fact that informs the character's story, but I could have done without the scenes describing it in flashback. Also she's a little too passive in this book, which I assume is just setting her up to take more active roles in the future. The villains tend a little towards the cartoony end, too, like black ops assassins who apparently like to have fun torturing their targets instead of simply doing the damn job, and the only one who gets even mildly interesting (and is repeatedly described as one of the most competent) is killed off so swiftly that I thought it must have been some kind of clever deception.
Technology seems to mostly exist to service the particular story. People are constantly tracked in a way that's not-that-hard-to-defeat, but nobody seems to do anything like facial recognition at checkpoints. And honestly, I'm not entirely sure I buy into the basic premise of seven levels of city, only the top of which ever sees any real sun. Seems like an awful lot of building material.
But it's okay. Largely I was able to just go with it and enjoy it like a moderately entertaining action movie. I doubt I'll remember much about it in a year or two, but I didn't hate it.
I will be reading the sequel, but only because I won it in a giveaway (I thought the giveaway was for the first book, but when I won the second I figured I'd buy the first and read it to prepare). Otherwise I don't expect I'd bother.
Finished: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
In the near future, the world largely sucks, and that's why so many people play OASIS, an immersive virtual world that connects everyone. The creator of OASIS died ten years ago, without heirs, so he encoded a massive scavenger hunt into the system, based on the creator's love of pop culture (largely centered around the 1980s of his childhood), with the ultimate winner inheriting billions and control of the company. Even though there's been virtually no progress in a decade, many people still hunt for the clues, seeing it as their only escape... and so does an evil corporation that wants to control the system. But suddenly, one low-level hunter stumbles upon the first key and reignites a new phase of the game.
This is basically the book I've been hearing about for years, the one that virtually everyone I know who's a geek and reads SF has read and raved about. It's even being made into a movie by Spielberg.
And I liked it. Maybe I would even have loved it if I discovered it on my own or after a few recommendations, but after hearing so much hype, it's perhaps only natural that it couldn't live up. Still, I see what those who love it saw in it, it's certainly a lot of fun and hits nostalgia buttons pretty hard, contains tons of references to cool stuff, goes at a quick pace, and has more than a few cool moments.
It also has flaws, though, like being pretty predictable in many ways. Beyond that, though, I thought the romance subplot was somewhat mediocre, with no real meat beyond "she's a cool gamer girl into all the same stuff who also likes me for inexplicable reasons." And some of the challenges were hard to buy into... but then so was some of the setup of the world. Like, I could buy into a massively popular virtual world that the whole world uses, but the specifics of how it all worked sometimes strained credibility. I think the book didn't end as well as it started, with the feel that the author was losing steam and imagination and starting to repeat himself. And there's a disconnect between the stakes and emotional reaction. I don't mean "oh, it's just a game, why's everyone so worried," but rather just the opposite. Some stuff happens that should shake people up, unless they're sociopaths, and yet the main character just sort of reacts like "Oh, yeah, well, I guess that's one more reason I need to win and take these guys down," rather than actually feeling the weight of it... there's maybe a token paragraph where they're shook up or mourn and move past it awfully quick, which made it a little hard to root for him or his romance (since I get the feeling that if there was a sequel she might get fridged just to give him one more motivation to take down some bad guys and then equally roll off his back).
On the whole, though, these concerns were minor, and I had a lot of fun with the book. I think it just barely ranks into the 4 star range.
Finished: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
An attempt at terraforming a distant planet goes awry in the wake of a sudden collapse of human civilization. Instead of a set of monkeys, as planned, spiders grow quickly to sentience and start to develop an intricate society. Meanwhile, survivors of that collapse flee an Earth that can no longer sustain them, following old legends to a green, terraformed world. Their stories are due to collide, and based on humanity's history with disparate cultures interacting, it's a dangerous situation for both parties.
The book trades off between two stories (well, three, if you count the part-AI, part-human pod in orbit that occasionally gets POV sections), and the book is almost a masterpiece when it's exploring a truly alien world and society, built off of insect and arachnid life. It's vivid, compelling, fascinating, and not only do I get the feeling that the author understands insects and spiders to an incredible degree, but that he's created real, believable characters with a non-human point of view.
If only he could have accomplished the same with humans. That sounds harsh, but the truth is it is the book's biggest flaw. It's not horribly written, but there is a lot that feels not quite right about motivations and decisions of the human characters in the book. Sometimes it's people acting extremely irrational (but not in a relateable way), sometimes it's just that it feels a little off, a little cold. I'd almost say these sections of the book feel like they're translated from another language, although the author's lived in England his whole life. It could be from a deliberate effort to show drift and distance to humanity many centuries in the future, but still, it felt stilted at times and it was harder to form connections with some of these characters than the spiders (who often only got one or two sections before a time jump to a new generation).
Still, taken overall, the book is quite impressive, and the merits more than make up for the flaws, and had an ending I didn't see coming but appreciated nonetheless as something different. I'll probably read the sequel if there is one, and certainly will keep an eye on this author's other SF works. I'm torn between a three and a four, but I think it's closer to a four.
Finished: Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson
An alliance of alien worlds contact Earth, promising much benefits for humanity, but also a danger of culture shock. When the general public is allowed to ask questions of them, one man dares to ask the most important questions everybody else has been ignoring: Hey, what are your retro video games like? And can I review some for my retro video game blog? What follows is an entertaining romp exploring alien cultures, human institutions, what video games say about us, and many more things.
I read this on the heels of (partly concurrent with) Ready Player One, and it might be interesting to compare them. Both, to me, fall into the category of books by geeks, written for geeks, and written about geeks, with doses of nostalgia. I think fans of one would probably like the other. But while RPO is probably better crafted as a novel, with a clear storyline that seems to know where it's going at all times, I think I had more fun and genuine delight with this one. I could easily see others disagreeing, and there are certainly some flaws, but I really liked this book.
Side note, this marks the first ebook I specifically bought as such. Normally I get ebooks from free giveaways, or for review purposes, and through other promotional efforts. If I'm going to pay money for a book, generally speaking, I'd like to have a physical copy. But copies of this, for an author I've never tried before, were more expensive than I was willing to take a risk for on a premise that could go either way, so I decided to just try the much-cheaper ebook. And I'm very glad I did, enough that I might consider eventually buying the physical book too.
There's a lot to love in this book. First, the alien races. There are several, of which we spend most of our time with two different races (and humans, of course), but hear of or have brief encounters with many more that seem both inventive, relatable, and alien. It's a tough balance, but mostly the book gets it done spectacularly, and I loved moments where the main character and an alien are just getting along like two gaming buddies and then suddenly there's something that brings home how alien the cultures are. Also fun is that most of the alien cultures are (in human tongues) named after the word for "alien" or "Outsider" in one language or another, and English isn't left out (it would be pretty unfairly Anglocentrist), so there's one race that's just called "Aliens."
The other highlight of the book was the vast numbers of invented games, not just the alien games (which are generally speaking incredibly impressive) but the human ones as well. Unlike RPO, this is not a book that name-checks pop-culture icons (although there are a few, like an alien swarm entity that's delightfully described as sounding like Sarah Vowell)... instead, it gives fictional equivalents that you know are supposed to stand-in for something, like when a show has "Uber-Dude" as the hero everyone knows because they can't actually use "Superman." But the alien games offer fascinating looks into their psychology and history that get expanded upon in the story. The book's also idea-heavy in terms of the technology we see used and explored and the impact of cultural contact, but it never overwhelms the story or characters, it's just enough to seem like a really cool universe to play around in.
Where the book falters, just a little bit (and mostly only occasionally), is integrating everything together into a whole.
The book's written as a collection of blog entries, reviews, IM conversations, interspersed with narrative elements telling parts of the story that weren't blogged about (or, occasionally, that flat-out contradict what was blogged about). It's an entertaining route, overall, although occasionally gets tiresome and there are moments where there's, for example, far too much narrative jammed into a section that doesn't really feel entirely natural. Similarly, the games occasionally stretch the realm of believability for what you would be able to do in a simple game (or even a complex one, there was one description of an Earth game in which getting into a space suit early on basically propelled you into an entirely different game path with different locations and objectives, which seemed like a company deciding to develop two games that they could only sell as one). These are the exception, rather than the rule, though, a case where if you create so many fictional games in one book, just by odds alone some of them are going to not ring entirely true.
I get the feeling the author himself was aware of his flaws, because this section sums up the biggest problem with the book almost like it was inserted as an apology:
"Do you remember my freshman sculpture project?" asked Jenny.
"You showed me at the time," I said. "I don't really remember it."
"Because it was awful," said Jenny. She gave me back my five-year-plan cards. "Crap, as it were. I had no artistic discipline. I tried to say three different things in one piece. Do you see where I'm going with this?"
If the book lacks anything, it's that artistic discipline, it tries to say too many things at once, and they're largely all fascinating things, and said entertainingly, but it doesn't cohere completely. As a result, plotlines seem to swing suddenly, or don't get the payoff they entirely need. The book sometimes meanders. Sometimes it just gets weird, too, and not in an entirely good way.
But, you know what, I loved it despite that, and I can't even point to what elements I'd suggest removing or streamlining, they're all intertwined and I like them all, they just don't fit together as well as other books. I'm still giving it four stars, but with the feeling that it could have been five if he'd just managed a trick I can't see how he'd do, and there's enough to love in this universe that I want more even if I knew it would suffer exactly the same flaws. Definitely want to see more of this author in general, and I'll probably be reading this again.
Finished: The Operative, by Gerald Brandt
Sequel to The Courier so I'll cut everything.After the events of The Courier, Kris is now in training for an anti-corporation group, but old enemies with a grudge still want her dead.
I received this book for free from a giveaway. It did not affect my review, except in that I would not have read this book if I had not. The first one wasn't my thing enough to want to follow it up.
I didn't hate that first book, but it wasn't great, and there were some big flaws. This book contains virtually all of those flaws, only it manages to be worse in other areas. But let's speak of the one flaw that didn't carry over... we didn't have any flashbacks to the main character's previous sexual abuse nor was that (mostly) used as a cheap threat. So, credit where credit is due (though there is a lot of scenes of torture, which might be too much for some people).
Unfortunately the book is now filled to the brim with unrealistic coincidences and characters so driven by revenge (over stupid things) that they lose all reason. The first is a phenomenon you often see in long-running series, like comics, where successive writers, starved for something interesting to do, posit that two characters from previous stories were secretly connected even though narratively they didn't need to be or it didn't make sense, minor characters from the first book suddenly being tied into the main character's backstory, or two seemingly unrelated groups being lead by the same people. It's a troubling flaw to see in the second book in a series. It also play off the second, with some of the coincidences making it even more bizarre that the bad guys didn't simply act the tiniest bit smarter so they could accomplish their goals with minimal difficulty.
Where the book wasn't pulling connections out of nowhere, it was largely predictable.
I guess if you're looking for fun action this series is decent enough, but it just strained plausibility too far without offering enough in return for me.
Finished: The Stars Are Legion, by Kameron Hurley
Around a distant (and possibly artificially) star, world-sized biological ships contain millions of women, some who know the nature of their universe, others who know only the small section of their world they live on. But the worlds are dying, and constantly at war with rival factions, and one world may hold the key to escape or salvation. Zan wakes without memory of who she is and is sent on a mission to capture this world, a mission she's supposedly failed at many times before. But there are deeper games afoot.
When I first heard of this book I saw it described as space opera, and although that label may very roughly fit, it doesn't entirely have a space opera feel. It's difficult for me to pin down what the feel was, but the closest I could come is mythological fantasy. Not because the science is wonky or anything like that, it's well within science fiction territory for that, but just because how the story plays out and how characters interact. The book felt to me like I was reading an ancient long mythological tale that happened to contain biological starships, space travel, heavy biological engineering, etc. Even the characters felt like they were supposed to be grand archetypes... mostly archetypes that I can't immediately point to other examples from history, it must be noted, which adds to a great otherworldly feel, like I'm reading the legends of an alien culture, but still legends all the same, where the heroes confront great trials and their conversations are scripted part of the myths, occasionally dreamlike. To use an example from Hurley's own writing, even though they're all equally fictional, Nyx and the other characters from God's War struck me as normal, relateable (though broken and occasionally unlikable) people in a wild setting, whereas Zan and the other characters felt like characters out of a myth. I might have strongly preferred a more naturalistic vibe myself, a tale of ordinary people in this setting, but there's power with this approach nonetheless, and I did appreciate it, it just wasn't quite what I hoped for. I can understand other people feeling exactly the opposite though.
As archetypes, for me, the characters felt less real and connected to me than I think they could be, but for the most part I found every main character interesting enough to want to see what happened next.
There are two notable 'gimmicks' (I mean the word here with no negative connotation and solely to describe the kind of thing people will instantly think is noteworthy) to this book that seem to always get brought up in reviews. So let's not rock the boat and do so as well. One is that every single character in this book is female. In this universe (or at least, this section of it), men simply don't exist or even seem to be known of. I don't have much to say about that, it's interesting in a "oh hey look at that, it's a space-based science fiction book with all female characters" sort of way, but it fits well within the story and I can't see any particular reason anyone would get offended by it (I mean, I'm sure plenty will, but it seems awfully silly) and except for how it relates to gimmick two, it would seem to be almost something you could ignore or pass by without noticing.
The second "gimmick" is that the book's been described as "wombpunk" in at least one place I read, which IMHO puts it perfectly... most of the technology is based on the womb, biological and grown within the bodies of women... not only other people are born this way, but parts for machines and the ship, monsters that perform maintenance or security tasks, even weapons. When something is needed, one of the women gets pregnant and 'grows' the required piece with no choice in the matter (save abortion). This is the far more interesting gimmick even though everyone always seems to focus on the "no men" part. It provides a good deal of the book's body horror elements, fascinating differences from our own world, and, in the tradition of the best science fiction is used to make a few points about our own society along the way. I wish this element was explored a little more, actually, and although this is supposedly a standalone novel, I'd be interested in more "wombpunk" with a similar setup, but completely different characters and plot.
It's not my favorite of Hurley's works so far, but I liked it. Which makes it hard to score, because for me it's firmly in the cursed Goodreads half-star zone... I want to give it almost exactly 3.5 stars, but I have to give it 3 or 4. I think I'll go with 4 just because I found some of the visuals really cool and the ideas played with are ones I'd like to see more of.
Finished: The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross (Merchant Princes 1 and 2)
A professional journalist recieves some belongings that supposedly belonged to her long-dead birth mother, and one of them includes a locket... that when she stares at it, it sends her to another Earth. She soon learns that she's a lost heir to a family of interdimensional traders with a decidedly medieval mindset and vicious internal politics. If she wants to survive, and better yet, survive with any sort of independence, she needs to think fast, make alliances, and use some 21st century knowledge.
I'm a big fan of Stross, but I've always been hesitant about trying this series, because it seemed like it might edge too much on the fantasy end of things. Luckily, this was offered as a free ebook by the publisher, so I could try it without any risk other than time. And while the "pattern that can send you to another world" might well be considered a fantasy element, everything else is treated more or less logically, no magicians or dragons or anything like that, just a straightforward set of alternate timelines with a means to move back and forth within them. Moreover, it has a science-fictional outlook, with the main character, at first, experimenting with the world-travelling ability in reasonable ways and coming up with interesting plans to make use of it.
In fact, at first, when it seemed like it was just a plot about a woman and her co-worker/friend exploring the ability and the other side with rational experimentation and planning ahead. Unfortunately, it quickly moved into the family politics plot which was okay but didn't quite capture my imagination the same way. The "using your brain to exploit this unique condition" aspect does come into full force later on in the book (or depending on how you view it, the second book, since what I read was a compilation of the first two books), and it does get very entertaining. You might not imagine it's that fun to read about someone using modern economic theories from a post-dot-com world to revolutionize a medieval mercentile business, but it is, at least for me.
In terms of weaknesses, as I said, the family-politics plot didn't engage me as much, and there was a sort of light briskness to all the character interactions that seemed to make them feel on the shallow end... like, that they're there mostly to explore the ideas rather than be compelling in their own right. Oddly enough, I felt much more depth from Stross in his harder SF stories. Another problem is that there's a lot of scenes where people are explaining either their plans or what they have found out about the various conspiracies to other people, sometimes the same thing gets explained several times. In addition to being somewhat redundant to the reader, it leads to this bizarre situation where it was hard to keep track of who knew what. There were several times I was certain someone already knew some aspect of the story, but apparently it was a surprise to them and they only were told some lesser part of the tale. It was also occasionally hard to keep track of all of the interconnected and overlapping schemes by various factions, and at least a few times where characters missed obvious hints towards something, with other characters telling the main character things in conversation that I'd think she would have pounced on and asked follow-up questions, but instead just seemed to ignore until they were later surprised to discover.
On the whole, I liked it, mildly. Enough that I might seek out the later books in the series, because I do want to see how things develop, but it's not enough that I'm rushing out to find them.
Finished: Nexus, by Ramez Naam (reread)
Finished: A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (reread)
Both these rereads I've already talked about before so no need to repeat.
Finished: Hanzai Japan (short story collection)
This is another short story collection of science fiction and fantasy tales either written by Japanese authors or inspired by Japan and Japanese culture. Unlike the previous two collections, The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan. and Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan, this one has a special subtheme, in that all of the stories are connected to crime in some way.
Unfortunately, it's the weakest of the three. Even leaving behind my usual complaints (too much fantasy, not enough science fiction, and that I would have liked the focus to be primarily be on stories written in Japanese and translated for a new audience), the stories just didn't seem to land for me. Some of them had intriguing premises but didn't know what to do with them (like, for example, the story of a gang who decides to stage a heist during a rampage of the creature known to American audiences as Godzilla). Others made very little impression on me at all, and too many just seemed to rely on "here's a serial killer that has a special supernatural quirk." To it's credit, I also think there were less BAD stories, stories that were a complete slog to get through, than the other, but... none of them really stands out in a positive way. I guess if I had to pick, "Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Metropolitan Police Department" by Jyouji Hayashi and "The Long-Rumored Food Crisis" by Setsuko Shinoda stand out most positively in my memory, though it should be noted that I only remembered the first at all when I was looking up the exact title of the second, and though, "Oh yeah, I vaguely remember being into that one," and then not really remembering how it ended. That's about par for this book, they slipped over my consciousness without getting very far into my memory at all.
Finished: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty
A generation ship is on a voyage to another star. The crew, clones, living serial lives with their memories downloaded to a new body every time they die. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. The six crew members awaken to discover their previous selves have been murdered, the ship isn't working, and they've been restored from a backup made decades earlier with no memory of what happened in-between. The group must try to figure out what went wrong and how to move forward.
So, yeah, it's a murder mystery involving clones on a starship. Quite a nifty premise, at least in my mind.
For the most part, I was enjoying the book until the end. The characters were interesting, and I liked the slow revelations of backstories. I did have one problem, in that while some of the worldbuilding was interesting, the precise rules for clones seemed irrationally convenient to the mystery. That is, they seemed too obviously set up to bring about the exact tensions the author wanted, and yet it was hard to buy that they'd choose those particular rules over other ones. For example, a rule that if two versions of the same clone exist, only the newest one has the right to continue. Not the one with the longest memories, or some trial being conducted to determine who has the right to the life, that's the rule and that's that. And perhaps worse, a few times the tensions that should have come up from those rules just seemed to be dropped.
It was an issue, but I was having fun with the book, so I was able to look past it.
Then we got to the end, with both the revelation of the mystery and the solution to various problems that just seemed ridiculous to my mind. It was a slow ramp-up for most of the second half of the book, but then in the climax it just went off the rails.
Unfortunately, these two problems, together, soured the book for me, even if neither alone was fatal. If the resolution to the mystery was handled superbly, ehh, so what if the worldbuilding is a bit wonky and convenient. If I totally bought into the world... ehh, so what if the revelation of the reason behind everything turned out to be over-the-top and hard to take seriously, I had a lot of fun along the way.
"I had fun along the way" still applies, which is why I give it three stars (I'd actually put it in the 2.5-3 range, but rounding brings us closer to three since half-stars aren't allowed), but I wanted to like it more than I did.
I might still read more SF from this author though.
Finished: The Wind Through The Keyhole, by Stephen King (Dark Tower "book 4.5")
During a huge sudden storm, Roland and his companions take shelter, and Roland tells a story from his youth, which contains another story his mother taught him.
This is listed as Dark Tower 4.5, supposedly taking place between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, but it's something of an forced fit. If you were to read it in that sequence, I imagine it would feel even worse, because the story before that was also Roland telling of his youth, so you'd basically be getting two books in a row that are mostly made up of Roland telling stories about himself. It also commits the minor sin of trying to foreshadow elements in the next book, which doesn't work (why does nobody remember somebody the ferry master describes, when they finally meet him, for example?). It doesn't feel essential in any way, it just feels like King wanted to write (or to be less charitable, thought he could cash in by writing) one more story in the Dark Tower universe.
I have zero problem with that, either motivation. I'd happily read more random tales from Mid-world, or small little adventures of the ka-tet that formed. Even if, like this one, they feel like, fundamentally, they add nothing to the greater story. I just raise a bit of an eyebrow at the marketing, insisting that it takes place at this place between two books, or the notion that this was a story that grabbed him and inspired him to jump back into a world he thought he'd left behind. In the end, that's my biggest complaint, that it wasn't somehow more substantive, that if you're going to insert a book in the middle either find a great story worth telling, or just leave it outside the series entirely, or both.
It's really three tales, although in a way, it's really one tale. Not because the stories all meld together seamlessly, but because only one actually satisfies as a story, the innermost story, one which doesn't even involve Roland, it's merely a story he remembered from his youth. Surrounding that story is a story of that youth, just after he became an official Gunslinger, hunting a monster. This almost satisfies, except for the way that we take a huge break out of the action to tell a separate story and then come back to wrap everything up quickly and not that interestingly. And surrounding all that, is a frame story involving Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy, which feels like it was only there to give Roland an excuse to tell the other two stories, and so that they could call this "Book 4.5." It's good to see the characters again, but while Roland telling an old story to pass time during a storm makes some amount of sense, why it's this one feels arbitrary.
Still, I enjoyed the book, mostly due to the central story, although the second layer had its charms and the outer shell appealed to my fannish desire to see these characters again. I still would read a book of random tales from Roland's life, or even tales of Gilead that had nothing to do with him, tales of other Gunslingers before him. Or tales of Roland's ka-tet, without any attempt to fit them into continuity, like how a comic series based on a movie or TV show will tell stories that can't really work their way in if you think about it too hard, so they don't try too hard. The structure of the Dark Tower world itself in fact makes it particularly easy to do these stories without worrying about continuity.
Finished: A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (reread)
Another well-loved reread.
Finished: Lightless, by C.A. Higgins
Two criminals board a secret military vessel and are caught by the crew. One escapes, while the other is interrogated because he may have ties to a terrorist group and also have tampered with the ship's computer in a way that could be dangerous.
I had somewhat mixed reactions to this book. Part of it was setup, it's set in a world where (and I don't think it's too much of a spoiler), the protagonist is working for a government that is totalitarian. And those opposing it aren't portrayed all that sympathetically either. The main character's not really strongly on either side, feeling mild sympathies for both but mostly just trying to keep her head down and do her job. That left me with few people to root for. I found the main character mildly interesting (particularly because she read, to me, as not entirely neurotypical).
Some of the prose also read weird to me. It's hard to put my finger on it, but one line stood out: "It was standard to interrogate a prisoner until a satisfactory explanation of the reason for his presence was obtained." Like, it just reads very stilted for me. There's also a lot of seemingly needless repetition in sentence structure. As I was reading it a part of me though this was deliberate as a way of echoing the society's awkward over-rigid tendencies. Whether it was or not, it was another factor that made it hard for me to get into.
Finally, I'm not sure it even entirely counts as a problem, but the plot felt particularly small. Like, I feel in most books criminals boarding a ship, getting captured and interrogated to find their real plan would take up maybe the first quarter of a book, here it's stretched out over the whole thing, and while there are other big events taking place in the background, I still feel like it wasn't much of a story. At the same time, I think if everything else worked for me, I'd have had zero problems with it.
Mostly, I sailed along through the book thinking it was okay but never particularly engaging. There's a point towards the end that it changes and I did started to get excited about where it was going, but, it never quite delivers, instead the book ends and some of what I liked just seemed to be dropped and some of it intended to explore in the next book in the trilogy.
I'm not ruling out reading that next book at this point, but right now I'm not feeling it enough to rush out and seek it out. I think I'll give it 2 stars because while there were times it rose to the level of a definitive "I liked it", for the most part it never did and "It was okay" feels more accurate overall.
Finished: Toast, and other stories, by Charles Stross
A collection of short stories by Charles Stross, mostly his early work.
This was a fun discovery for me... I vaguely knew the book existed, and that the author made it available to download free on his website, but somehow I had convinced myself I'd already read most of his short stories in another short story collection of his (or spread out among other multi-author anthologies)... but recently somebody mentioned reading a story I'd never heard of, and got me to take a second look. To my pleasant surprise, most were unfamiliar to me, so I downloaded it and started reading immediately.
As usual with this author, I liked it an awful lot. Not everything worked for me, and there were some repeating themes that might irritate some readers (not me!), and yeah, there were a few I was well-familiar with, but for the most part, I enjoyed it (and even some of the rereads I enjoyed going back to).
The stories that I responded to most (rereads aside) were complete surprises, not just ones I had no memory of ever hearing of, but also ones I'd have expected to not like at all. Those are "Big Brother Iron" and "Yellow Snow." The former, in particular, as someone who loves Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was a revelation to discover one of my favorite authors wrote a story that extends that universe, believably, into the information age... even just making a plausible extension in short story form would have been novel enough, but also that he's able to use that to say interesting things about the nature of such societies and how human nature both works for and against them.
I don't know how these would read to people not already fans of Stross... it's just as likely to blow their minds (in a good way) as it is to turn them off him forever (which would be a shame because he writes in many different styles, not entirely showcased in this collection, albeit often with a similar voice). But to fans like me who happened to skip out on this... don't keep making that mistake.
Finished: The Last One, by Alexandra Oliva
It was supposed to be a survival reality show in the Alaskan wilderness, contestants were warned that they might be left alone for long periods with only hidden cameras watching them, that clues might be cryptic... and, of course, every reality show has its twists. So when Zoo, one of the contestants, finds herself alone, wandering, and seeing nothing but signs of a devastating calamity, she assumes that all of it, the abandoned homes, the dead bodies, are just particularly gruesome props. And she's determined not to quit.
I'm not a huge fan of reality shows, nor am I conspicuously against them... I've wasted more time with them than I feel entirely comfortable admitting, but I also haven't really followed any in the last couple years, either. Yet, this premise instantly intrigued me, and I decided to give it a shot.
The book dragged me in right away and held my attention throughout.At times the main character's denial strains credibility, but for me, keeping in mind the sleep and nutrition-deprivation at play was enough to keep it just on the side of convincing, and a later revelation made it even moreso.
The narrative jumps back and forth between Zoo alone, after the plague which is ravaging the country (this isn't really a spoiler as it's revealed in the first few pages, rather being left a mystery, about whether the tragedy is real or a horrific twist thought up by producers), and the early part of the game, which more or less follows how a normal reality show works. There are stylistic differences between them (for example, everybody is referred to not by name, as they are in Zoo's sections, but by what stereotype viewers will associate them with). It's a means to make snarky but incisive comments about how reality television works and what they show and hide from the viewer, and for the most part it works, although it's less compelling than the main story, and a few elements (like a character who believed himself an exorcist) went too far over-the-top without enough payoff later to justify it.
I think that lack-of-payoff problem is at once one of my biggest complaints and yet possibly one of the best moves the author made, because, on the one hand, there was tons of stuff I thought for sure had to happen in this story, and when they didn't, it was a nice surprise, a subversion of my expectations and a refusal to go for the obvious path, that gave me respect for the author... and yet, at the same time, the lack of direct connections between the two narratives made the past story sometimes seem like wasted time.. why were we learning so much about events that don't significantly come up later? I'm honestly not sure which feeling predominates.
I'm similarly mixed on the ending. At one point it pulls away from Zoo and we get some details we didn't know about and one part of me liked what we found out (and what it meant for the characters after the book), another part wanted to be left with the ambiguity or even the more solid certainty of an earlier moment to break on. On a meta-level it does sort of feel a bit manipulative of our expectations, much like a reality show itself.
It's not normally the type of book I go for, so considering how much I enjoyed it despite that (even factoring in my half-complaints above), I think I'm going to give it a four stars. Worth checking out.
Finished: The Year's Best SF 9, (short stories, reread)
It's a reread but I didn't write a Goodreads review for it, so I'll post my thoughts anyway:
As a collection of short stories, it's always a mixed bag, but I tend to like this series in general more than some others, and this in particular was a reread (which doesn't necessarily say anything for the quality of this particular volume because I can't keep track of what stories are in what book).
Still, even as a reread there was plenty to enjoy. I particularly liked Octavia E. Butler's "Amnesty" a tale with a particularly unusual alien race and humanity's relationship after a war that involved atrocities, and "The Hydrogen Wall" by Gregory Benford in which alien contact is done by sending alien artificial intelligences, and one particularly hard-to-relate to is needed to help solve a major problem facing Earth. Most of the others were okay, some I've read a few too many times (having been collected in other places) to really be objective about them anymore. Only a couple stinkers. My guess is you'll probably feel the same way, except choosing different stories for standouts and stinkers (and depending on your own habits may not have the already-read-this-story-too-recently problem), so, worth a look.
Started (or done but not fully reviewed): Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Stugatsky, Bird Box by Josh Malerman, Waking Hell by Al Robertson, Glass Houses by Laura J. Mixon, Borrowed Tides by Paul Levinson, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald
Oh and I may at somepoint ditch LJ for dreamwidth fully due to the new rules, but I'm lazy and slow-moving so it'd probably take me a while to get everything done.
Finished: The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds
In The Prefect, cops who monitor the thousands of independent habitats around a distant planet investigate a pair of seemingly unrelated crimes... but they may be part of a larger pattern that would lead to the takeover of the entire Glitter Band.
While I do like some of Alastair Reynolds' work, his Revelation Space universe (of which this is a part) is somewhat hit or miss. Luckily, this is one of the hits... in fact, it may be my favorite of the novels in that universe.
It's not eye-bogglingly awesome, but it is overall well-paced and fun, and plenty of intriguing ideas about different ways of living, mediated by technology, and I was entertained all the way through.
There are a few flaws, but they're rather minor. There are times when characters act incredibly stupid just to push the plot along a little longer, and I feel like some of the connections to the rest of the universe, outside of the setting itself, seemed a little on the forced side, included more as fanservice than that they were really necessary.
Still, I was quite fond of it on the whole, and as I understand it one of Reynolds' upcoming projects is a sequel to this... I think I'd be looking forward to that.
Finished: Jumper, by Steven Gould
Multiple time reread and wrote about it multiple times here.
Finished: The John Varley Reader, by John Varley
As you might have gathered from the title, this is a collection of stories from author John Varley. I've only read a little of Varley, but I've always been a little intrigued, and a little intimidated by the prospect of reading his novels, the latter largely because they're mostly set in one universe and I'm not sure the best starting point. But I've heard interesting things, and have vaguely positive recollections of the few stories I remember reading in short story collections. So when I saw a collection of just his short stories in a used bookstore for cheap, I had to give it a chance.
And I'm quite glad I did, overall.
Normally, it stands to reason to talk about the stories first and foremost in a collection of short stories. But I want to talk about the introductions first. Each story in this collection comes with a fairly lengthy introduction, often not just briefly mentioning the idea behind the story, but also long rambling asides about his life at the time. This could easily get boring, but instead, it was fascinating, you get an interesting sense of the man, insight into what it's like starting out in SF (or at least, what it was like in the 70s), living in different places in the US, how Hollywood works, the writing process, and other details. While I won't say the introductions were the highlight of the book, they were an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, and I made sure to read them even for stories that I was already familiar enough with that I felt I could skip rereading.
As for the stories, they're somewhat of a mixed bag. Most, though not all of them, are set in one of two (similar in some ways but unrelated) ongoing universes of stories. One is Varley's "Eight Worlds" universe, the setting of many of his novels, in which Mankind has been kicked off Earth by powerful and inscrutable aliens but allowed the run of the rest of the solar system, and technology has significantly advanced enabling people to change gender on a whim and back themselves up in case of death. The other is a set of sci-fi procedurals focused on a police detective living on the moon (where body modifications, including gender alteration, are also relatively easy). Both are pretty interesting, although reading them all in a burst in one collection does become the biggest flaw... it can be a little repetitive.
Yet I still enjoyed most of them, and even the ones that I didn't I could usually find some nugget or image that I liked, and even when I felt certain ideas had been explored again and again, there were interesting takes on it.
In some way he was so ahead of his time that his social ideas still seem cutting edge (particularly with respect to gender). There's also a few eyebrow-raising moments caused by differences from today's values and the values of the past combined with Varley's science fiction author tendencies to explore societies with different moral values. Some of it is certainly shocking and perhaps offputting to certain readers, and maybe even outright offensive, but I never got the impression that his personal character was evil-hearted in the slightest... just that he may have innocently used words that are hurtful, or toyed with concepts that most people don't want explored under any circumstances. There were definite off-notes for me nonetheless. It's perhaps ironic that the last story in the book was one that was supposed to be in the long-delayed collection "The Last Dangerous Visions" (the never-materialized third installment of a series that boldly tried to tell stories that would be banned anywhere else)... and it's almost one of the most tame, by today's standards, a bit on the gruesome side but nothing compared to hit TV shows today.
On the whole, one of the better single-author collections I've read, and it does make me want to check out Varley's novels at some point... although I'm still not entirely sure where I should start.
I'm giving it four stars although I think it's rounded up from the high three-and-a-half-to-four-star range. May not be for everyone though, particularly for those who have trouble separating fiction in which certain acts are not portrayed negatively from active endorsement of those acts.
Finished: Fire With Fire, by Charles E. Gannon
A super-competent writer is put on ice for decades by a secret government agency, and, when he's revived, sent on a mission to investigate rumors of extraterrestrial contact on an alien world, an then a bunch of other stuff happens.
There is a style of book affectionately referred to as competency porn, which often involves a particularly intelligent and skilled main character doing some difficult tasks better than anyone else. It can be enjoyable, if done well and with a certain amount of restraint.
If you put competency porn books on a scale analogous to regular pornography this book would be, well, to even attempt to continue this metaphor with any specificity would turn this review incredibly vulgar. So I'll just say it'd be at the extreme end. I mean, the character is explicitly a genius, cool in a crisis, ladies man, develops a sixth-sense type instinct for trouble, and most of the time figures things out before anyone else in the room. They even have other characters comment on how his major flaw is that he's so good at everything that if he reaches a situation that he can't handle he might not be willing to give up or consider less-than-optimal solutions. Rest assured, this never happens, which makes that conversation the equivalent of a job interview where you say, "My biggest flaw? Well, I tend to put the company's interests ahead of my own." It's not only incredibly self-serving, it's also pretty obvious what you're doing and would make me think less of you for doing it.
Leaving that aside (although the problem attaches to and infects other flaws in the book like one of those sci-fi viruses that turns infectees into muscle-bound monsters), the book isn't too bad, but there still are some flaws. The sexual politics are pretty iffy, with most female characters fawning over the main character for one reason or another, and even when they're professionals with skills of their own, they're often secondary to the hero's super-competence. If they've got a specialty, they can provide a few insights but he has to match them at least, either from his own knowledge on the subject or general knowledge of history. Even the female bodyguard assigned to protect him, the few times they're together in a fight, he's in no real need of protection and if I recall correctly even saves her. I mean, it might have been interesting if he was incredibly smart but a little useless in a fight, but no, he's gotta be awesome at that too. The only reason he even needs a bodyguard, it seems, is for someone to flirt with and have a romance. Sure, there are in-story reasons, but they're not very compelling (nor is the reason he's continually in danger from assassins in the first place).
The book also doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It starts out as a "investigate if there are primitive aliens being exploited," then turns for a while into "superspies dodging assassins", then suddenly morphs into a diplomatic first contact mission with a set of alien races (completely unrelated to the aliens in the first section). Why does he need to be in all of these stories? Because he's just that good at everything that everything would fall apart if he wasn't involved. Even the aliens appreciate his diplomatic instincts about when to raise issues and when to pretend nothing unusual happened. And none of the storylines are entirely satisfying, like they are being set up in advance for a long series. That's also the only thing I can think of to explain the utterly pointless scenes of the olive-eating villain. Seriously, there are like six scenes where a villain watches people while eating olives, or interacts with the waiter and asks for more olives and OH MY GOD I LIKE OLIVES AND FETA CHEESE TOO BUT GET TO THE DAMN POINT ALREADY. Nobody in the main cast even meets him in the first book (but he's given a name in the sections about him so you know he's due to be important).
But, again, other than all this, the book's okay. There are some fun moments, some interesting SF rationales for how the technology like FTL works, and several alien races which are okay. Too many feel like they're just discount versions of Trek or other classic SF aliens, but okay. It doesn't really do anything special, but it's not a chore to read, except for the exercise you occasionally get eyerolling. Several of the books in the series have wound up on the Nebula Award shortlist, and I can't for the life of me understand why, except perhaps that it might really appeal to a certain subset of fandom or people who really like golden age SF, but were craving new examples of it. Two stars is, under Goodreads system "it was okay," and so that's the score it gets. I do not expect to read any more in the series, unless I happen to also get them free (this book was offered as part of Baen's Free Library of ebooks).
Finished: Crisis in Urlia, by Karl Schroeder
In the near future, a Canadian humanitarian response team, part of our military, deals first with a drought-and-famine situation in a new African city-state called Urlia, then with a new, possibly bioengineered sickness, and an attempt by extremist groups to use that chaos to seize power.
This is a follow-up to Crisis in Zefra. Both were projects commissioned by the Canadian military as exercises in attempting to forsee the possible changing tools, strategies, and role of the military in the future (and are available free online). Although it is an interesting idea on its own, I read them mainly because one of my favorite SF authors did the writing portion. Zefra focused more on squad-level tactics, while Urlia is centered more on command-and-control and 'big-picture' thinking.
Although it is told in the format of a story (with regular breaks for discussion questions and copious footnotes linking to the scientific ideas explored in the text), it's still a little light in that respect. There are characters, certainly, but most don't get too much development other than to showcase some science fictional idea of where we may be heading as a society. Deep character studies aren't really the point of the exercise, and so most of the space is devoted to other matters. That's okay, understandable even, but since I am rating this as fiction it is one of the negatives. What it does well is showcase a number of cool ideas, some of which I've been exposed to before from reading the author's other works, but still interest me enough that I'm happy to see more incarnations. For instance, there's an area of land that has been given legal rights and its own 'desires' through a simple AI, and must be negotiated with for water rights. Or people who are citizens of 'virtual' nations that they is considered just as real as Canadian citizenship. And the idea of situations that are so complex that no person can truly understand it all, and yet through collaboration groups of people can understand a part of it enough that if they work together they can solve tricky problems.
Because the ideas were more interesting and explored well, I think I like it more than Zefra, slightly. It's still not the kind of book I'd recommend to people as fiction, unless they have a particular interest in this type of strategic foresight.
Finished: The Courier, by Gerald Brandt
Kris is a young courier delivering packages between corporations in San Angeles, a megacity that in addition to combining several present-day cities, is also several cities on top of each other, with lower levels never seeing a real sun. One of her deliveries soon has her running for her life.
It's a cyberpunk book, and cyberpunk can be really cool, but it can also be full of well-worn tropes without a whole lot distinctive about it that raises it above the crowd. This unfortunately is the problem with the Courier. It's not aggressively bad, it's just okay, and not especially impressive, particularly for my own personal tastes.
Let's start with the good... the action gets moving right away and doesn't let up. That's actually not necessarily a good in my book, but I recognize I'm a little odd in that respect, I like books more when there's quieter, slower moments, but I can see people really getting swept up in the book.
The characters are okay, although the main character has the tired old 'sexual abuse backstory' which doesn't bother me as much as it might some people, when it's a fact that informs the character's story, but I could have done without the scenes describing it in flashback. Also she's a little too passive in this book, which I assume is just setting her up to take more active roles in the future. The villains tend a little towards the cartoony end, too, like black ops assassins who apparently like to have fun torturing their targets instead of simply doing the damn job, and the only one who gets even mildly interesting (and is repeatedly described as one of the most competent) is killed off so swiftly that I thought it must have been some kind of clever deception.
Technology seems to mostly exist to service the particular story. People are constantly tracked in a way that's not-that-hard-to-defeat, but nobody seems to do anything like facial recognition at checkpoints. And honestly, I'm not entirely sure I buy into the basic premise of seven levels of city, only the top of which ever sees any real sun. Seems like an awful lot of building material.
But it's okay. Largely I was able to just go with it and enjoy it like a moderately entertaining action movie. I doubt I'll remember much about it in a year or two, but I didn't hate it.
I will be reading the sequel, but only because I won it in a giveaway (I thought the giveaway was for the first book, but when I won the second I figured I'd buy the first and read it to prepare). Otherwise I don't expect I'd bother.
Finished: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
In the near future, the world largely sucks, and that's why so many people play OASIS, an immersive virtual world that connects everyone. The creator of OASIS died ten years ago, without heirs, so he encoded a massive scavenger hunt into the system, based on the creator's love of pop culture (largely centered around the 1980s of his childhood), with the ultimate winner inheriting billions and control of the company. Even though there's been virtually no progress in a decade, many people still hunt for the clues, seeing it as their only escape... and so does an evil corporation that wants to control the system. But suddenly, one low-level hunter stumbles upon the first key and reignites a new phase of the game.
This is basically the book I've been hearing about for years, the one that virtually everyone I know who's a geek and reads SF has read and raved about. It's even being made into a movie by Spielberg.
And I liked it. Maybe I would even have loved it if I discovered it on my own or after a few recommendations, but after hearing so much hype, it's perhaps only natural that it couldn't live up. Still, I see what those who love it saw in it, it's certainly a lot of fun and hits nostalgia buttons pretty hard, contains tons of references to cool stuff, goes at a quick pace, and has more than a few cool moments.
It also has flaws, though, like being pretty predictable in many ways. Beyond that, though, I thought the romance subplot was somewhat mediocre, with no real meat beyond "she's a cool gamer girl into all the same stuff who also likes me for inexplicable reasons." And some of the challenges were hard to buy into... but then so was some of the setup of the world. Like, I could buy into a massively popular virtual world that the whole world uses, but the specifics of how it all worked sometimes strained credibility. I think the book didn't end as well as it started, with the feel that the author was losing steam and imagination and starting to repeat himself. And there's a disconnect between the stakes and emotional reaction. I don't mean "oh, it's just a game, why's everyone so worried," but rather just the opposite. Some stuff happens that should shake people up, unless they're sociopaths, and yet the main character just sort of reacts like "Oh, yeah, well, I guess that's one more reason I need to win and take these guys down," rather than actually feeling the weight of it... there's maybe a token paragraph where they're shook up or mourn and move past it awfully quick, which made it a little hard to root for him or his romance (since I get the feeling that if there was a sequel she might get fridged just to give him one more motivation to take down some bad guys and then equally roll off his back).
On the whole, though, these concerns were minor, and I had a lot of fun with the book. I think it just barely ranks into the 4 star range.
Finished: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
An attempt at terraforming a distant planet goes awry in the wake of a sudden collapse of human civilization. Instead of a set of monkeys, as planned, spiders grow quickly to sentience and start to develop an intricate society. Meanwhile, survivors of that collapse flee an Earth that can no longer sustain them, following old legends to a green, terraformed world. Their stories are due to collide, and based on humanity's history with disparate cultures interacting, it's a dangerous situation for both parties.
The book trades off between two stories (well, three, if you count the part-AI, part-human pod in orbit that occasionally gets POV sections), and the book is almost a masterpiece when it's exploring a truly alien world and society, built off of insect and arachnid life. It's vivid, compelling, fascinating, and not only do I get the feeling that the author understands insects and spiders to an incredible degree, but that he's created real, believable characters with a non-human point of view.
If only he could have accomplished the same with humans. That sounds harsh, but the truth is it is the book's biggest flaw. It's not horribly written, but there is a lot that feels not quite right about motivations and decisions of the human characters in the book. Sometimes it's people acting extremely irrational (but not in a relateable way), sometimes it's just that it feels a little off, a little cold. I'd almost say these sections of the book feel like they're translated from another language, although the author's lived in England his whole life. It could be from a deliberate effort to show drift and distance to humanity many centuries in the future, but still, it felt stilted at times and it was harder to form connections with some of these characters than the spiders (who often only got one or two sections before a time jump to a new generation).
Still, taken overall, the book is quite impressive, and the merits more than make up for the flaws, and had an ending I didn't see coming but appreciated nonetheless as something different. I'll probably read the sequel if there is one, and certainly will keep an eye on this author's other SF works. I'm torn between a three and a four, but I think it's closer to a four.
Finished: Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson
An alliance of alien worlds contact Earth, promising much benefits for humanity, but also a danger of culture shock. When the general public is allowed to ask questions of them, one man dares to ask the most important questions everybody else has been ignoring: Hey, what are your retro video games like? And can I review some for my retro video game blog? What follows is an entertaining romp exploring alien cultures, human institutions, what video games say about us, and many more things.
I read this on the heels of (partly concurrent with) Ready Player One, and it might be interesting to compare them. Both, to me, fall into the category of books by geeks, written for geeks, and written about geeks, with doses of nostalgia. I think fans of one would probably like the other. But while RPO is probably better crafted as a novel, with a clear storyline that seems to know where it's going at all times, I think I had more fun and genuine delight with this one. I could easily see others disagreeing, and there are certainly some flaws, but I really liked this book.
Side note, this marks the first ebook I specifically bought as such. Normally I get ebooks from free giveaways, or for review purposes, and through other promotional efforts. If I'm going to pay money for a book, generally speaking, I'd like to have a physical copy. But copies of this, for an author I've never tried before, were more expensive than I was willing to take a risk for on a premise that could go either way, so I decided to just try the much-cheaper ebook. And I'm very glad I did, enough that I might consider eventually buying the physical book too.
There's a lot to love in this book. First, the alien races. There are several, of which we spend most of our time with two different races (and humans, of course), but hear of or have brief encounters with many more that seem both inventive, relatable, and alien. It's a tough balance, but mostly the book gets it done spectacularly, and I loved moments where the main character and an alien are just getting along like two gaming buddies and then suddenly there's something that brings home how alien the cultures are. Also fun is that most of the alien cultures are (in human tongues) named after the word for "alien" or "Outsider" in one language or another, and English isn't left out (it would be pretty unfairly Anglocentrist), so there's one race that's just called "Aliens."
The other highlight of the book was the vast numbers of invented games, not just the alien games (which are generally speaking incredibly impressive) but the human ones as well. Unlike RPO, this is not a book that name-checks pop-culture icons (although there are a few, like an alien swarm entity that's delightfully described as sounding like Sarah Vowell)... instead, it gives fictional equivalents that you know are supposed to stand-in for something, like when a show has "Uber-Dude" as the hero everyone knows because they can't actually use "Superman." But the alien games offer fascinating looks into their psychology and history that get expanded upon in the story. The book's also idea-heavy in terms of the technology we see used and explored and the impact of cultural contact, but it never overwhelms the story or characters, it's just enough to seem like a really cool universe to play around in.
Where the book falters, just a little bit (and mostly only occasionally), is integrating everything together into a whole.
The book's written as a collection of blog entries, reviews, IM conversations, interspersed with narrative elements telling parts of the story that weren't blogged about (or, occasionally, that flat-out contradict what was blogged about). It's an entertaining route, overall, although occasionally gets tiresome and there are moments where there's, for example, far too much narrative jammed into a section that doesn't really feel entirely natural. Similarly, the games occasionally stretch the realm of believability for what you would be able to do in a simple game (or even a complex one, there was one description of an Earth game in which getting into a space suit early on basically propelled you into an entirely different game path with different locations and objectives, which seemed like a company deciding to develop two games that they could only sell as one). These are the exception, rather than the rule, though, a case where if you create so many fictional games in one book, just by odds alone some of them are going to not ring entirely true.
I get the feeling the author himself was aware of his flaws, because this section sums up the biggest problem with the book almost like it was inserted as an apology:
"Do you remember my freshman sculpture project?" asked Jenny.
"You showed me at the time," I said. "I don't really remember it."
"Because it was awful," said Jenny. She gave me back my five-year-plan cards. "Crap, as it were. I had no artistic discipline. I tried to say three different things in one piece. Do you see where I'm going with this?"
If the book lacks anything, it's that artistic discipline, it tries to say too many things at once, and they're largely all fascinating things, and said entertainingly, but it doesn't cohere completely. As a result, plotlines seem to swing suddenly, or don't get the payoff they entirely need. The book sometimes meanders. Sometimes it just gets weird, too, and not in an entirely good way.
But, you know what, I loved it despite that, and I can't even point to what elements I'd suggest removing or streamlining, they're all intertwined and I like them all, they just don't fit together as well as other books. I'm still giving it four stars, but with the feeling that it could have been five if he'd just managed a trick I can't see how he'd do, and there's enough to love in this universe that I want more even if I knew it would suffer exactly the same flaws. Definitely want to see more of this author in general, and I'll probably be reading this again.
Finished: The Operative, by Gerald Brandt
Sequel to The Courier so I'll cut everything.After the events of The Courier, Kris is now in training for an anti-corporation group, but old enemies with a grudge still want her dead.
I received this book for free from a giveaway. It did not affect my review, except in that I would not have read this book if I had not. The first one wasn't my thing enough to want to follow it up.
I didn't hate that first book, but it wasn't great, and there were some big flaws. This book contains virtually all of those flaws, only it manages to be worse in other areas. But let's speak of the one flaw that didn't carry over... we didn't have any flashbacks to the main character's previous sexual abuse nor was that (mostly) used as a cheap threat. So, credit where credit is due (though there is a lot of scenes of torture, which might be too much for some people).
Unfortunately the book is now filled to the brim with unrealistic coincidences and characters so driven by revenge (over stupid things) that they lose all reason. The first is a phenomenon you often see in long-running series, like comics, where successive writers, starved for something interesting to do, posit that two characters from previous stories were secretly connected even though narratively they didn't need to be or it didn't make sense, minor characters from the first book suddenly being tied into the main character's backstory, or two seemingly unrelated groups being lead by the same people. It's a troubling flaw to see in the second book in a series. It also play off the second, with some of the coincidences making it even more bizarre that the bad guys didn't simply act the tiniest bit smarter so they could accomplish their goals with minimal difficulty.
Where the book wasn't pulling connections out of nowhere, it was largely predictable.
I guess if you're looking for fun action this series is decent enough, but it just strained plausibility too far without offering enough in return for me.
Finished: The Stars Are Legion, by Kameron Hurley
Around a distant (and possibly artificially) star, world-sized biological ships contain millions of women, some who know the nature of their universe, others who know only the small section of their world they live on. But the worlds are dying, and constantly at war with rival factions, and one world may hold the key to escape or salvation. Zan wakes without memory of who she is and is sent on a mission to capture this world, a mission she's supposedly failed at many times before. But there are deeper games afoot.
When I first heard of this book I saw it described as space opera, and although that label may very roughly fit, it doesn't entirely have a space opera feel. It's difficult for me to pin down what the feel was, but the closest I could come is mythological fantasy. Not because the science is wonky or anything like that, it's well within science fiction territory for that, but just because how the story plays out and how characters interact. The book felt to me like I was reading an ancient long mythological tale that happened to contain biological starships, space travel, heavy biological engineering, etc. Even the characters felt like they were supposed to be grand archetypes... mostly archetypes that I can't immediately point to other examples from history, it must be noted, which adds to a great otherworldly feel, like I'm reading the legends of an alien culture, but still legends all the same, where the heroes confront great trials and their conversations are scripted part of the myths, occasionally dreamlike. To use an example from Hurley's own writing, even though they're all equally fictional, Nyx and the other characters from God's War struck me as normal, relateable (though broken and occasionally unlikable) people in a wild setting, whereas Zan and the other characters felt like characters out of a myth. I might have strongly preferred a more naturalistic vibe myself, a tale of ordinary people in this setting, but there's power with this approach nonetheless, and I did appreciate it, it just wasn't quite what I hoped for. I can understand other people feeling exactly the opposite though.
As archetypes, for me, the characters felt less real and connected to me than I think they could be, but for the most part I found every main character interesting enough to want to see what happened next.
There are two notable 'gimmicks' (I mean the word here with no negative connotation and solely to describe the kind of thing people will instantly think is noteworthy) to this book that seem to always get brought up in reviews. So let's not rock the boat and do so as well. One is that every single character in this book is female. In this universe (or at least, this section of it), men simply don't exist or even seem to be known of. I don't have much to say about that, it's interesting in a "oh hey look at that, it's a space-based science fiction book with all female characters" sort of way, but it fits well within the story and I can't see any particular reason anyone would get offended by it (I mean, I'm sure plenty will, but it seems awfully silly) and except for how it relates to gimmick two, it would seem to be almost something you could ignore or pass by without noticing.
The second "gimmick" is that the book's been described as "wombpunk" in at least one place I read, which IMHO puts it perfectly... most of the technology is based on the womb, biological and grown within the bodies of women... not only other people are born this way, but parts for machines and the ship, monsters that perform maintenance or security tasks, even weapons. When something is needed, one of the women gets pregnant and 'grows' the required piece with no choice in the matter (save abortion). This is the far more interesting gimmick even though everyone always seems to focus on the "no men" part. It provides a good deal of the book's body horror elements, fascinating differences from our own world, and, in the tradition of the best science fiction is used to make a few points about our own society along the way. I wish this element was explored a little more, actually, and although this is supposedly a standalone novel, I'd be interested in more "wombpunk" with a similar setup, but completely different characters and plot.
It's not my favorite of Hurley's works so far, but I liked it. Which makes it hard to score, because for me it's firmly in the cursed Goodreads half-star zone... I want to give it almost exactly 3.5 stars, but I have to give it 3 or 4. I think I'll go with 4 just because I found some of the visuals really cool and the ideas played with are ones I'd like to see more of.
Finished: The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross (Merchant Princes 1 and 2)
A professional journalist recieves some belongings that supposedly belonged to her long-dead birth mother, and one of them includes a locket... that when she stares at it, it sends her to another Earth. She soon learns that she's a lost heir to a family of interdimensional traders with a decidedly medieval mindset and vicious internal politics. If she wants to survive, and better yet, survive with any sort of independence, she needs to think fast, make alliances, and use some 21st century knowledge.
I'm a big fan of Stross, but I've always been hesitant about trying this series, because it seemed like it might edge too much on the fantasy end of things. Luckily, this was offered as a free ebook by the publisher, so I could try it without any risk other than time. And while the "pattern that can send you to another world" might well be considered a fantasy element, everything else is treated more or less logically, no magicians or dragons or anything like that, just a straightforward set of alternate timelines with a means to move back and forth within them. Moreover, it has a science-fictional outlook, with the main character, at first, experimenting with the world-travelling ability in reasonable ways and coming up with interesting plans to make use of it.
In fact, at first, when it seemed like it was just a plot about a woman and her co-worker/friend exploring the ability and the other side with rational experimentation and planning ahead. Unfortunately, it quickly moved into the family politics plot which was okay but didn't quite capture my imagination the same way. The "using your brain to exploit this unique condition" aspect does come into full force later on in the book (or depending on how you view it, the second book, since what I read was a compilation of the first two books), and it does get very entertaining. You might not imagine it's that fun to read about someone using modern economic theories from a post-dot-com world to revolutionize a medieval mercentile business, but it is, at least for me.
In terms of weaknesses, as I said, the family-politics plot didn't engage me as much, and there was a sort of light briskness to all the character interactions that seemed to make them feel on the shallow end... like, that they're there mostly to explore the ideas rather than be compelling in their own right. Oddly enough, I felt much more depth from Stross in his harder SF stories. Another problem is that there's a lot of scenes where people are explaining either their plans or what they have found out about the various conspiracies to other people, sometimes the same thing gets explained several times. In addition to being somewhat redundant to the reader, it leads to this bizarre situation where it was hard to keep track of who knew what. There were several times I was certain someone already knew some aspect of the story, but apparently it was a surprise to them and they only were told some lesser part of the tale. It was also occasionally hard to keep track of all of the interconnected and overlapping schemes by various factions, and at least a few times where characters missed obvious hints towards something, with other characters telling the main character things in conversation that I'd think she would have pounced on and asked follow-up questions, but instead just seemed to ignore until they were later surprised to discover.
On the whole, I liked it, mildly. Enough that I might seek out the later books in the series, because I do want to see how things develop, but it's not enough that I'm rushing out to find them.
Finished: Nexus, by Ramez Naam (reread)
Finished: A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (reread)
Both these rereads I've already talked about before so no need to repeat.
Finished: Hanzai Japan (short story collection)
This is another short story collection of science fiction and fantasy tales either written by Japanese authors or inspired by Japan and Japanese culture. Unlike the previous two collections, The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan. and Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan, this one has a special subtheme, in that all of the stories are connected to crime in some way.
Unfortunately, it's the weakest of the three. Even leaving behind my usual complaints (too much fantasy, not enough science fiction, and that I would have liked the focus to be primarily be on stories written in Japanese and translated for a new audience), the stories just didn't seem to land for me. Some of them had intriguing premises but didn't know what to do with them (like, for example, the story of a gang who decides to stage a heist during a rampage of the creature known to American audiences as Godzilla). Others made very little impression on me at all, and too many just seemed to rely on "here's a serial killer that has a special supernatural quirk." To it's credit, I also think there were less BAD stories, stories that were a complete slog to get through, than the other, but... none of them really stands out in a positive way. I guess if I had to pick, "Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Metropolitan Police Department" by Jyouji Hayashi and "The Long-Rumored Food Crisis" by Setsuko Shinoda stand out most positively in my memory, though it should be noted that I only remembered the first at all when I was looking up the exact title of the second, and though, "Oh yeah, I vaguely remember being into that one," and then not really remembering how it ended. That's about par for this book, they slipped over my consciousness without getting very far into my memory at all.
Finished: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty
A generation ship is on a voyage to another star. The crew, clones, living serial lives with their memories downloaded to a new body every time they die. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. The six crew members awaken to discover their previous selves have been murdered, the ship isn't working, and they've been restored from a backup made decades earlier with no memory of what happened in-between. The group must try to figure out what went wrong and how to move forward.
So, yeah, it's a murder mystery involving clones on a starship. Quite a nifty premise, at least in my mind.
For the most part, I was enjoying the book until the end. The characters were interesting, and I liked the slow revelations of backstories. I did have one problem, in that while some of the worldbuilding was interesting, the precise rules for clones seemed irrationally convenient to the mystery. That is, they seemed too obviously set up to bring about the exact tensions the author wanted, and yet it was hard to buy that they'd choose those particular rules over other ones. For example, a rule that if two versions of the same clone exist, only the newest one has the right to continue. Not the one with the longest memories, or some trial being conducted to determine who has the right to the life, that's the rule and that's that. And perhaps worse, a few times the tensions that should have come up from those rules just seemed to be dropped.
It was an issue, but I was having fun with the book, so I was able to look past it.
Then we got to the end, with both the revelation of the mystery and the solution to various problems that just seemed ridiculous to my mind. It was a slow ramp-up for most of the second half of the book, but then in the climax it just went off the rails.
Unfortunately, these two problems, together, soured the book for me, even if neither alone was fatal. If the resolution to the mystery was handled superbly, ehh, so what if the worldbuilding is a bit wonky and convenient. If I totally bought into the world... ehh, so what if the revelation of the reason behind everything turned out to be over-the-top and hard to take seriously, I had a lot of fun along the way.
"I had fun along the way" still applies, which is why I give it three stars (I'd actually put it in the 2.5-3 range, but rounding brings us closer to three since half-stars aren't allowed), but I wanted to like it more than I did.
I might still read more SF from this author though.
Finished: The Wind Through The Keyhole, by Stephen King (Dark Tower "book 4.5")
During a huge sudden storm, Roland and his companions take shelter, and Roland tells a story from his youth, which contains another story his mother taught him.
This is listed as Dark Tower 4.5, supposedly taking place between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, but it's something of an forced fit. If you were to read it in that sequence, I imagine it would feel even worse, because the story before that was also Roland telling of his youth, so you'd basically be getting two books in a row that are mostly made up of Roland telling stories about himself. It also commits the minor sin of trying to foreshadow elements in the next book, which doesn't work (why does nobody remember somebody the ferry master describes, when they finally meet him, for example?). It doesn't feel essential in any way, it just feels like King wanted to write (or to be less charitable, thought he could cash in by writing) one more story in the Dark Tower universe.
I have zero problem with that, either motivation. I'd happily read more random tales from Mid-world, or small little adventures of the ka-tet that formed. Even if, like this one, they feel like, fundamentally, they add nothing to the greater story. I just raise a bit of an eyebrow at the marketing, insisting that it takes place at this place between two books, or the notion that this was a story that grabbed him and inspired him to jump back into a world he thought he'd left behind. In the end, that's my biggest complaint, that it wasn't somehow more substantive, that if you're going to insert a book in the middle either find a great story worth telling, or just leave it outside the series entirely, or both.
It's really three tales, although in a way, it's really one tale. Not because the stories all meld together seamlessly, but because only one actually satisfies as a story, the innermost story, one which doesn't even involve Roland, it's merely a story he remembered from his youth. Surrounding that story is a story of that youth, just after he became an official Gunslinger, hunting a monster. This almost satisfies, except for the way that we take a huge break out of the action to tell a separate story and then come back to wrap everything up quickly and not that interestingly. And surrounding all that, is a frame story involving Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy, which feels like it was only there to give Roland an excuse to tell the other two stories, and so that they could call this "Book 4.5." It's good to see the characters again, but while Roland telling an old story to pass time during a storm makes some amount of sense, why it's this one feels arbitrary.
Still, I enjoyed the book, mostly due to the central story, although the second layer had its charms and the outer shell appealed to my fannish desire to see these characters again. I still would read a book of random tales from Roland's life, or even tales of Gilead that had nothing to do with him, tales of other Gunslingers before him. Or tales of Roland's ka-tet, without any attempt to fit them into continuity, like how a comic series based on a movie or TV show will tell stories that can't really work their way in if you think about it too hard, so they don't try too hard. The structure of the Dark Tower world itself in fact makes it particularly easy to do these stories without worrying about continuity.
Finished: A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (reread)
Another well-loved reread.
Finished: Lightless, by C.A. Higgins
Two criminals board a secret military vessel and are caught by the crew. One escapes, while the other is interrogated because he may have ties to a terrorist group and also have tampered with the ship's computer in a way that could be dangerous.
I had somewhat mixed reactions to this book. Part of it was setup, it's set in a world where (and I don't think it's too much of a spoiler), the protagonist is working for a government that is totalitarian. And those opposing it aren't portrayed all that sympathetically either. The main character's not really strongly on either side, feeling mild sympathies for both but mostly just trying to keep her head down and do her job. That left me with few people to root for. I found the main character mildly interesting (particularly because she read, to me, as not entirely neurotypical).
Some of the prose also read weird to me. It's hard to put my finger on it, but one line stood out: "It was standard to interrogate a prisoner until a satisfactory explanation of the reason for his presence was obtained." Like, it just reads very stilted for me. There's also a lot of seemingly needless repetition in sentence structure. As I was reading it a part of me though this was deliberate as a way of echoing the society's awkward over-rigid tendencies. Whether it was or not, it was another factor that made it hard for me to get into.
Finally, I'm not sure it even entirely counts as a problem, but the plot felt particularly small. Like, I feel in most books criminals boarding a ship, getting captured and interrogated to find their real plan would take up maybe the first quarter of a book, here it's stretched out over the whole thing, and while there are other big events taking place in the background, I still feel like it wasn't much of a story. At the same time, I think if everything else worked for me, I'd have had zero problems with it.
Mostly, I sailed along through the book thinking it was okay but never particularly engaging. There's a point towards the end that it changes and I did started to get excited about where it was going, but, it never quite delivers, instead the book ends and some of what I liked just seemed to be dropped and some of it intended to explore in the next book in the trilogy.
I'm not ruling out reading that next book at this point, but right now I'm not feeling it enough to rush out and seek it out. I think I'll give it 2 stars because while there were times it rose to the level of a definitive "I liked it", for the most part it never did and "It was okay" feels more accurate overall.
Finished: Toast, and other stories, by Charles Stross
A collection of short stories by Charles Stross, mostly his early work.
This was a fun discovery for me... I vaguely knew the book existed, and that the author made it available to download free on his website, but somehow I had convinced myself I'd already read most of his short stories in another short story collection of his (or spread out among other multi-author anthologies)... but recently somebody mentioned reading a story I'd never heard of, and got me to take a second look. To my pleasant surprise, most were unfamiliar to me, so I downloaded it and started reading immediately.
As usual with this author, I liked it an awful lot. Not everything worked for me, and there were some repeating themes that might irritate some readers (not me!), and yeah, there were a few I was well-familiar with, but for the most part, I enjoyed it (and even some of the rereads I enjoyed going back to).
The stories that I responded to most (rereads aside) were complete surprises, not just ones I had no memory of ever hearing of, but also ones I'd have expected to not like at all. Those are "Big Brother Iron" and "Yellow Snow." The former, in particular, as someone who loves Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was a revelation to discover one of my favorite authors wrote a story that extends that universe, believably, into the information age... even just making a plausible extension in short story form would have been novel enough, but also that he's able to use that to say interesting things about the nature of such societies and how human nature both works for and against them.
I don't know how these would read to people not already fans of Stross... it's just as likely to blow their minds (in a good way) as it is to turn them off him forever (which would be a shame because he writes in many different styles, not entirely showcased in this collection, albeit often with a similar voice). But to fans like me who happened to skip out on this... don't keep making that mistake.
Finished: The Last One, by Alexandra Oliva
It was supposed to be a survival reality show in the Alaskan wilderness, contestants were warned that they might be left alone for long periods with only hidden cameras watching them, that clues might be cryptic... and, of course, every reality show has its twists. So when Zoo, one of the contestants, finds herself alone, wandering, and seeing nothing but signs of a devastating calamity, she assumes that all of it, the abandoned homes, the dead bodies, are just particularly gruesome props. And she's determined not to quit.
I'm not a huge fan of reality shows, nor am I conspicuously against them... I've wasted more time with them than I feel entirely comfortable admitting, but I also haven't really followed any in the last couple years, either. Yet, this premise instantly intrigued me, and I decided to give it a shot.
The book dragged me in right away and held my attention throughout.At times the main character's denial strains credibility, but for me, keeping in mind the sleep and nutrition-deprivation at play was enough to keep it just on the side of convincing, and a later revelation made it even moreso.
The narrative jumps back and forth between Zoo alone, after the plague which is ravaging the country (this isn't really a spoiler as it's revealed in the first few pages, rather being left a mystery, about whether the tragedy is real or a horrific twist thought up by producers), and the early part of the game, which more or less follows how a normal reality show works. There are stylistic differences between them (for example, everybody is referred to not by name, as they are in Zoo's sections, but by what stereotype viewers will associate them with). It's a means to make snarky but incisive comments about how reality television works and what they show and hide from the viewer, and for the most part it works, although it's less compelling than the main story, and a few elements (like a character who believed himself an exorcist) went too far over-the-top without enough payoff later to justify it.
I think that lack-of-payoff problem is at once one of my biggest complaints and yet possibly one of the best moves the author made, because, on the one hand, there was tons of stuff I thought for sure had to happen in this story, and when they didn't, it was a nice surprise, a subversion of my expectations and a refusal to go for the obvious path, that gave me respect for the author... and yet, at the same time, the lack of direct connections between the two narratives made the past story sometimes seem like wasted time.. why were we learning so much about events that don't significantly come up later? I'm honestly not sure which feeling predominates.
I'm similarly mixed on the ending. At one point it pulls away from Zoo and we get some details we didn't know about and one part of me liked what we found out (and what it meant for the characters after the book), another part wanted to be left with the ambiguity or even the more solid certainty of an earlier moment to break on. On a meta-level it does sort of feel a bit manipulative of our expectations, much like a reality show itself.
It's not normally the type of book I go for, so considering how much I enjoyed it despite that (even factoring in my half-complaints above), I think I'm going to give it a four stars. Worth checking out.
Finished: The Year's Best SF 9, (short stories, reread)
It's a reread but I didn't write a Goodreads review for it, so I'll post my thoughts anyway:
As a collection of short stories, it's always a mixed bag, but I tend to like this series in general more than some others, and this in particular was a reread (which doesn't necessarily say anything for the quality of this particular volume because I can't keep track of what stories are in what book).
Still, even as a reread there was plenty to enjoy. I particularly liked Octavia E. Butler's "Amnesty" a tale with a particularly unusual alien race and humanity's relationship after a war that involved atrocities, and "The Hydrogen Wall" by Gregory Benford in which alien contact is done by sending alien artificial intelligences, and one particularly hard-to-relate to is needed to help solve a major problem facing Earth. Most of the others were okay, some I've read a few too many times (having been collected in other places) to really be objective about them anymore. Only a couple stinkers. My guess is you'll probably feel the same way, except choosing different stories for standouts and stinkers (and depending on your own habits may not have the already-read-this-story-too-recently problem), so, worth a look.
Started (or done but not fully reviewed): Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Stugatsky, Bird Box by Josh Malerman, Waking Hell by Al Robertson, Glass Houses by Laura J. Mixon, Borrowed Tides by Paul Levinson, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald
Oh and I may at somepoint ditch LJ for dreamwidth fully due to the new rules, but I'm lazy and slow-moving so it'd probably take me a while to get everything done.
