Kim Miller
The Keeling is a top secret spaceship with some kind of alien backstory. Because it goes into the most dangerous battle situations and has massive crew losses, the crew is mostly made up of criminals serving a two year term in place of their original sentence. And somehow some of them survive their mission.
Shakedown is #1 of a series of not yet published books. The first half is the setup with the many characters being introduced and their histories revealed. The second half is their first mission as they settle in to the strange spaceship and their new crewmates. The characters are either ship crew or Raiders, the on-site marines who do the close up fighting. Of course they hate each other, but then most of the individuals hate everybody else anyway.
It's a fast paced story once it gets going and has lots of violence between crew members until they are forced to act together in battle situations. The long introduction component takes concentration to get through as the backstory of certain characters influences their later actions. And with so many characters things can get lost in the narrative. It also suffers somewhat from the descriptive passages of some parts of the spaceship. We don't really need to know the dimensions of the galley area and how seats are only on one side of the table etc. Same with other areas of the ship. We are already familiar with the general layout of a control deck or navigation table.
The book ends the shakedown mission well enough, and also launches us into a major event that signals that the sequel will start on a big moment.
The Keeling is a top secret spaceship with some kind of alien backstory. Because it goes into the most dangerous battle situations and has massive crew losses, the crew is mostly made up of criminals serving a two year term in place of their original sentence. And somehow some of them survive their mission.
Shakedown is #1 of a series of not yet published books. The first half is the setup with the many characters being introduced and their histories revealed. The second half is their first mission as they settle in to the strange spaceship and their new crewmates. The characters are either ship crew or Raiders, the on-site marines who do the close up fighting. Of course they hate each other, but then most of the individuals hate everybody else anyway.
It's a fast paced story once it gets going and has lots of violence between crew members until they are forced to act together in battle situations. The long introduction component takes concentration to get through as the backstory of certain characters influences their later actions. And with so many characters things can get lost in the narrative. It also suffers somewhat from the descriptive passages of some parts of the spaceship. We don't really need to know the dimensions of the galley area and how seats are only on one side of the table etc. Same with other areas of the ship. We are already familiar with the general layout of a control deck or navigation table.
The book ends the shakedown mission well enough, and also launches us into a major event that signals that the sequel will start on a big moment.
This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.
Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.
At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.
The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.
This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.
Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.
At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.
The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a police officer with The Panoply, the organisation patrolling an association of inhabited asteroids called the Glitterband. Somebody has blown up one of the habitats with the loss of hundreds of lives. Dreyfus is sent to investigate.
The story soon turns into more than a murder investigation. The most obvious suspect looks to have been set up. But by who? And what reason made such loss of life worth it? And so the mysterious presence of Aurora slowly emerges. But Aurora is not the normal super-villain trying to take over the whole of civilisation. Aurora was killed decades ago, and this resurrection speaks of a darker threat.
Very soon Dreyfus finds himself pursuing a distributed AI intent on bringing down the Glitterband's governance. And with more investigation it seems there is a second AI that is looming with a totally different threat to them all.
This is a fast paced story with high stakes and an equally high body count. The attack by Aurora is ruthless, and so must be the response against her. Dreyfus sees a possible ally against Aurora but convincing him to join the war puts him in mortal danger.
The book ends at a suitable point but there is much left to be picked up by a sequel.
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a police officer with The Panoply, the organisation patrolling an association of inhabited asteroids called the Glitterband. Somebody has blown up one of the habitats with the loss of hundreds of lives. Dreyfus is sent to investigate.
The story soon turns into more than a murder investigation. The most obvious suspect looks to have been set up. But by who? And what reason made such loss of life worth it? And so the mysterious presence of Aurora slowly emerges. But Aurora is not the normal super-villain trying to take over the whole of civilisation. Aurora was killed decades ago, and this resurrection speaks of a darker threat.
Very soon Dreyfus finds himself pursuing a distributed AI intent on bringing down the Glitterband's governance. And with more investigation it seems there is a second AI that is looming with a totally different threat to them all.
This is a fast paced story with high stakes and an equally high body count. The attack by Aurora is ruthless, and so must be the response against her. Dreyfus sees a possible ally against Aurora but convincing him to join the war puts him in mortal danger.
The book ends at a suitable point but there is much left to be picked up by a sequel.
An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.
Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.
There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.
The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.
As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.
PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."
An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.
Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.
There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.
The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.
As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.
PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."
I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.
Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.
When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.
This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.
There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.
I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.
Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.
When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.
This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.
There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.