Kim Miller
It starts with a depiction of a bleak and abusive dystopia ruled by mindless and relentless bureaucracy. By the time we reach the 25% mark it has been increasingly depressing and the characters increasingly repressed. And then something happens, something very bad. People start dying. The deaths seem random and often violent but without reason. By the halfway point they are being linked to the main character, not as the perpetrator, but by the fact that none of this happened until he arrived in the city, and he's ha some sort of contact with all the victims.
By the 75% point the city is in an uproar. The character is held for forensic examination to see why his simple presence brings about the sudden death of a person soon after. People evacuate the city to avoid him. The death toll increases. This is the heart of the book and it gets increasingly chaotic as everybody tries to deal with the situation.
At about the 75% point the whole tone changes. There is a book that people have been reading that might shed some light on what is happening. The author takes us into the book, where we find people reading a book by the same name, 'A Nest of Worlds'. The story becomes something like a Russian doll with one story inside another that is inside another. It becomes tricky, a mind game, as we try to keep track of how deep we are in nested stories.
And then we are suddenly out of that world and back with our main character. He's beginning to sort out the reality of his own life, and the reality of his city and world. And for us readers out here, we realise we didn't pay enough attention to the Mandelbrot Set and Fibonacci Series in high school.
It starts with a depiction of a bleak and abusive dystopia ruled by mindless and relentless bureaucracy. By the time we reach the 25% mark it has been increasingly depressing and the characters increasingly repressed. And then something happens, something very bad. People start dying. The deaths seem random and often violent but without reason. By the halfway point they are being linked to the main character, not as the perpetrator, but by the fact that none of this happened until he arrived in the city, and he's ha some sort of contact with all the victims.
By the 75% point the city is in an uproar. The character is held for forensic examination to see why his simple presence brings about the sudden death of a person soon after. People evacuate the city to avoid him. The death toll increases. This is the heart of the book and it gets increasingly chaotic as everybody tries to deal with the situation.
At about the 75% point the whole tone changes. There is a book that people have been reading that might shed some light on what is happening. The author takes us into the book, where we find people reading a book by the same name, 'A Nest of Worlds'. The story becomes something like a Russian doll with one story inside another that is inside another. It becomes tricky, a mind game, as we try to keep track of how deep we are in nested stories.
And then we are suddenly out of that world and back with our main character. He's beginning to sort out the reality of his own life, and the reality of his city and world. And for us readers out here, we realise we didn't pay enough attention to the Mandelbrot Set and Fibonacci Series in high school.
I think this book jumps into my #1 spot for time travel stories.
Asher Sutton lives in a far future, 8,000 years off. The book opens with someone struggling to land a damaged space ship, we don't find out until later that it's Asher. Neither do we find out what has happened to him until later.
A few days before this another man sits on his front porch looking out into the evening. A stranger appears, tells him that Sutton is coming back, and he must be killed. As the story progresses we find out that the stranger is from the future, and is the porch man's successor in his job of some sort of Galactic cop.
The book follows several time traveling actors, each one set on either protecting Sutton or killing him. We find that he's had a life=changing experience on another planet, he's been gone for twenty years, and on his return he's written a book of philosophy that has changed the course of human history over the millennia. A war has broken out between or 'originalists' and the 'revisionists', those who are committed to Sutton's original thought and those who have narrowed and footnoted his work to give themselves an advantage. The visiting stranger wants Sutton killed before he has a chance to write his book.
Sutton slowly comes to understand his place in the future and tries to protect his work. Simak gives us a deep dive into what it takes to change a future, and how to be the last man standing when people can travel back to preempt the efforts of the opposition. Considering the book was published in 1951, Simak's thinking is deep and wide ranging. Chapters swing between time settings as he builds a complex story of people going back and forth in time to leave clues or to prevent an unexpected event from messing everything up.
Also of interest is how the future seemed to a 1951 author. 8,000 years into the future people still have ink wells on the desk, alongside a 'Visor', an iPad sounding device for video calls. There is also the anomaly whereby Sutton hides a time travel ship at the bottom of a river in 1977, only to find the strong currents have covered it with sand when he tries to get away and back to his own time. It's still there, waiting for somebody to find it.
I think this book jumps into my #1 spot for time travel stories.
Asher Sutton lives in a far future, 8,000 years off. The book opens with someone struggling to land a damaged space ship, we don't find out until later that it's Asher. Neither do we find out what has happened to him until later.
A few days before this another man sits on his front porch looking out into the evening. A stranger appears, tells him that Sutton is coming back, and he must be killed. As the story progresses we find out that the stranger is from the future, and is the porch man's successor in his job of some sort of Galactic cop.
The book follows several time traveling actors, each one set on either protecting Sutton or killing him. We find that he's had a life=changing experience on another planet, he's been gone for twenty years, and on his return he's written a book of philosophy that has changed the course of human history over the millennia. A war has broken out between or 'originalists' and the 'revisionists', those who are committed to Sutton's original thought and those who have narrowed and footnoted his work to give themselves an advantage. The visiting stranger wants Sutton killed before he has a chance to write his book.
Sutton slowly comes to understand his place in the future and tries to protect his work. Simak gives us a deep dive into what it takes to change a future, and how to be the last man standing when people can travel back to preempt the efforts of the opposition. Considering the book was published in 1951, Simak's thinking is deep and wide ranging. Chapters swing between time settings as he builds a complex story of people going back and forth in time to leave clues or to prevent an unexpected event from messing everything up.
Also of interest is how the future seemed to a 1951 author. 8,000 years into the future people still have ink wells on the desk, alongside a 'Visor', an iPad sounding device for video calls. There is also the anomaly whereby Sutton hides a time travel ship at the bottom of a river in 1977, only to find the strong currents have covered it with sand when he tries to get away and back to his own time. It's still there, waiting for somebody to find it.
A primitive subsistence agrarian tribe fights against neighbouring tribes. Their environment is a strange combination of rapidly growing plants and long corridors with rooms each side. An activist preacher takes three others on an exploration, saying they are on a ship and not in a jungle. It is soon apparent that he is correct. They don't understand space or space ships as their whole world has been inside.
They meet other inhabitants, some hostile and some seemingly neutral to them. These others know more of the reality of the ship but still have no knowledge of what is outside. With ancient and scarce weapons and tools they get into fights until the point where everyone is at war with everyone else and the integrity of the ship itself is threatened.
The ship's captain's diary from generations ago is found and reveals what happened to the original crew of this colony ship, which has been on it's way back to Earth for so many years from the planet they were colonising. As the story closes we find that the ship has been infected by that other planet's biology and has been held in quarantine in orbit around Earth for generations.
A primitive subsistence agrarian tribe fights against neighbouring tribes. Their environment is a strange combination of rapidly growing plants and long corridors with rooms each side. An activist preacher takes three others on an exploration, saying they are on a ship and not in a jungle. It is soon apparent that he is correct. They don't understand space or space ships as their whole world has been inside.
They meet other inhabitants, some hostile and some seemingly neutral to them. These others know more of the reality of the ship but still have no knowledge of what is outside. With ancient and scarce weapons and tools they get into fights until the point where everyone is at war with everyone else and the integrity of the ship itself is threatened.
The ship's captain's diary from generations ago is found and reveals what happened to the original crew of this colony ship, which has been on it's way back to Earth for so many years from the planet they were colonising. As the story closes we find that the ship has been infected by that other planet's biology and has been held in quarantine in orbit around Earth for generations.
Some big ideas but it got tedious for me. And the silliest aliens - talking dogs with pack identities and overall hive mind. No opposable thumbs so they do everything with their teeth, even crossbows and garden tools.
Some researchers in the far future unearth an ancient AI on a distant planet. (Is it 'unearth if it's not on Earth?) It gets loose and takes over all tech installations, planet systems, space ship controls, everything. It spreads rapidly through that section of the galaxy and earns the name, The Blight. The scientists try to escape it in a couple of ships and one has to emergency land on another planet in The Deep - a portion of the galaxy where all tech runs super slowly or not at all. They are attacked by a faction of the locals, the hive mind dogs.
The adults are killed, two kids survive, along with hundreds of other children in stasis pods. a war erupts between dog factions, each one capturing one of the surviving children. Meanwhile, another scientist tries to rescue them from light years away.
However, the Blight knows that there is something vital to it on the downed spaceship and chases the rescuers. This is when the story takes off with a bit of excitement and movement. The dog war continues, the kids each think they are the only survivor, the Blight looks like catching up. The rescuers gets there first, things get to a climax, a lot of people die, the 'important' ones survive but seem to be marooned on this primitive planet.
Some big ideas but it got tedious for me. And the silliest aliens - talking dogs with pack identities and overall hive mind. No opposable thumbs so they do everything with their teeth, even crossbows and garden tools.
Some researchers in the far future unearth an ancient AI on a distant planet. (Is it 'unearth if it's not on Earth?) It gets loose and takes over all tech installations, planet systems, space ship controls, everything. It spreads rapidly through that section of the galaxy and earns the name, The Blight. The scientists try to escape it in a couple of ships and one has to emergency land on another planet in The Deep - a portion of the galaxy where all tech runs super slowly or not at all. They are attacked by a faction of the locals, the hive mind dogs.
The adults are killed, two kids survive, along with hundreds of other children in stasis pods. a war erupts between dog factions, each one capturing one of the surviving children. Meanwhile, another scientist tries to rescue them from light years away.
However, the Blight knows that there is something vital to it on the downed spaceship and chases the rescuers. This is when the story takes off with a bit of excitement and movement. The dog war continues, the kids each think they are the only survivor, the Blight looks like catching up. The rescuers gets there first, things get to a climax, a lot of people die, the 'important' ones survive but seem to be marooned on this primitive planet.
This Machine Kills Billionaires
The world of the future sees billionaires with android butlers, android sexbots, neural implants, retinal implants, and AI running things in the background. Suddenly a rich guy is 'extinguished' on his yacht, an industrialist is thrown over his penthouse balcony by his butler, a public speaker and philosopher who has filled his neural implant with the wisdom of the ages glitches badly in a public forum and is cancelled in minutes. And a journalist finds herself in conversation with an AI about morality - "Is it moral to kill somebody who has been responsible for the death of millions?" We might have found an AI with a conscience.
The world of the future sees billionaires with android butlers, android sexbots, neural implants, retinal implants, and AI running things in the background. Suddenly a rich guy is 'extinguished' on his yacht, an industrialist is thrown over his penthouse balcony by his butler, a public speaker and philosopher who has filled his neural implant with the wisdom of the ages glitches badly in a public forum and is cancelled in minutes. And a journalist finds herself in conversation with an AI about morality - "Is it moral to kill somebody who has been responsible for the death of millions?" We might have found an AI with a conscience.
The final book of the Suneater series. Hadrian gathers as many allies as he can muster. He know the Cielcin are gathering for a major assault on the Empire. His goal is to draw them off to a far away planet and set off the astrophage weapon that has been spoken of in previous books. Things to not go to plan - because of course they don't.
Ruocchio shows himself, once again, to be a master of political intrigue and barely suppressed conflict. Allies though they are, fierce rivalries and old hatreds are always close beneath the surface and sometimes they break through. We already know he blows up a sun as he's spoken of it since book #1, and at last he does it. But not before the most serious threats to his life nearly bring him undone.
And after it is done, what then. Does a person who has annihilated so many, humans and aliens, just fly away home? Does he even have a home to go to? The series ends, that is all I need to say.
I have enjoyed the whole series and all previous books have been five star reads for me, but this one gets a lesser score. The first ten to fifteen percent of the book drags on and on. It has all the charisma of a weekly staff meeting and brings down the experience and enjoyment of Ruocchio's prose. There is a point at which, just by turning a page, the story heats up and we know that we are back in the battle.
The final book of the Suneater series. Hadrian gathers as many allies as he can muster. He know the Cielcin are gathering for a major assault on the Empire. His goal is to draw them off to a far away planet and set off the astrophage weapon that has been spoken of in previous books. Things to not go to plan - because of course they don't.
Ruocchio shows himself, once again, to be a master of political intrigue and barely suppressed conflict. Allies though they are, fierce rivalries and old hatreds are always close beneath the surface and sometimes they break through. We already know he blows up a sun as he's spoken of it since book #1, and at last he does it. But not before the most serious threats to his life nearly bring him undone.
And after it is done, what then. Does a person who has annihilated so many, humans and aliens, just fly away home? Does he even have a home to go to? The series ends, that is all I need to say.
I have enjoyed the whole series and all previous books have been five star reads for me, but this one gets a lesser score. The first ten to fifteen percent of the book drags on and on. It has all the charisma of a weekly staff meeting and brings down the experience and enjoyment of Ruocchio's prose. There is a point at which, just by turning a page, the story heats up and we know that we are back in the battle.
