Kim Miller
A tale of increasing unpleasantness. I picked this up as I loved Noon's Vurt. Had I read this first I would probably have not read Vurt at all.
This starts out as a bit of a mystery story with a weird underlying theme of people being either a writer of their own life or a character in somebody else's writing. It seems to be developing into a metaphor for the Thought Police of 1984. However, half way through it turns towards being body horror and after that a strange and ancient magic works its way into the foundation of whatever has been happening. It ends with a bunch of people out in a field with all the magic stuff rising off them as if they are in medieval England on 'witching day' or something.
The prose is thick with over-described thought processes that left me wondering when I was going to feel some emotional attachment to any of the characters. In the 'show, don't tell' arena, this had many losing moments. It was as if Noon was forcing his narrative to drag me along, knowing it wasn't succeeding very often.
The detective, Nyquist, is a pretty normal noir investigator. He's dogged in his determination to follow his nose no matter the cost, and his nose never seems to get it wrong. There's a woman, there's the police, although in this setting they are The Narrative Police making sure people are writing their story properly (i.e. spying on everyone), and there are lots of dark corridors in tall buildings. If Nyquist's gonzo side had been let loose we might have had a taste of Dark City or Gilliam's Brazil.
The theme of 'everything depends on the words' that underlies the story tries to take it into an hallucinogenic direction that it just doesn't want to go.
A tale of increasing unpleasantness. I picked this up as I loved Noon's Vurt. Had I read this first I would probably have not read Vurt at all.
This starts out as a bit of a mystery story with a weird underlying theme of people being either a writer of their own life or a character in somebody else's writing. It seems to be developing into a metaphor for the Thought Police of 1984. However, half way through it turns towards being body horror and after that a strange and ancient magic works its way into the foundation of whatever has been happening. It ends with a bunch of people out in a field with all the magic stuff rising off them as if they are in medieval England on 'witching day' or something.
The prose is thick with over-described thought processes that left me wondering when I was going to feel some emotional attachment to any of the characters. In the 'show, don't tell' arena, this had many losing moments. It was as if Noon was forcing his narrative to drag me along, knowing it wasn't succeeding very often.
The detective, Nyquist, is a pretty normal noir investigator. He's dogged in his determination to follow his nose no matter the cost, and his nose never seems to get it wrong. There's a woman, there's the police, although in this setting they are The Narrative Police making sure people are writing their story properly (i.e. spying on everyone), and there are lots of dark corridors in tall buildings. If Nyquist's gonzo side had been let loose we might have had a taste of Dark City or Gilliam's Brazil.
The theme of 'everything depends on the words' that underlies the story tries to take it into an hallucinogenic direction that it just doesn't want to go.
Updated a reading goal:
Read 75 books in 2025
Progress so far: 25 / 75 33%
A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.
Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.
There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.
It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.
A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.
Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.
There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.
It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.
Jason considers himself fortunate. He has a beautiful wife and teenage son and life generally is good to him. One night walking home from drinks with friends a man pushes a gun into the back of his head. He's abducted, stripped, injected with something and blacks out. He wakes up strapped to a gurney with people he's never met greeting him like an old friend. This is no longer his world.
He finds himself in a lab with strange things happening. He recovers some semblance of normal and goes home but his house is empty, and there is no sign that his wife or son ever lived there. The lab people bring him back and he finds that he's a celebrated nuclear physicist who has managed to understand and control quantum superposition. And that's when the real trouble starts.
Jason goes on a wild ride through alternative parallel worlds, trying to get back to his own home. It's here that the novel threatens to break down into a travelogue of landscapes, each with its own catastrophe. Crouch pulls it back from the brink and Jason figures our how to 'drive' the system some other version of himself has created.
The final part of the book is getting back to his wife and son and trying to escape a multitude of parallel Jasons, each one desperate to be the one 'real' husband and father.
The book is let down by the constant exposition of quantum theory, superposition, parallel worlds, parallel lives, and parallel people. There is a lot of 'Jason-splaining' going on. The characters are up to the task although some of the dialogue gets a bit cheesy. I suppose telling one version of your husband why another version of him is better or worse than the one in front of her is a bit tricky. The final resolution, their escape, opens up the possibility of a further novel but I hope Crouch does not take that bait. The would be too much what Netflix would do.
Jason considers himself fortunate. He has a beautiful wife and teenage son and life generally is good to him. One night walking home from drinks with friends a man pushes a gun into the back of his head. He's abducted, stripped, injected with something and blacks out. He wakes up strapped to a gurney with people he's never met greeting him like an old friend. This is no longer his world.
He finds himself in a lab with strange things happening. He recovers some semblance of normal and goes home but his house is empty, and there is no sign that his wife or son ever lived there. The lab people bring him back and he finds that he's a celebrated nuclear physicist who has managed to understand and control quantum superposition. And that's when the real trouble starts.
Jason goes on a wild ride through alternative parallel worlds, trying to get back to his own home. It's here that the novel threatens to break down into a travelogue of landscapes, each with its own catastrophe. Crouch pulls it back from the brink and Jason figures our how to 'drive' the system some other version of himself has created.
The final part of the book is getting back to his wife and son and trying to escape a multitude of parallel Jasons, each one desperate to be the one 'real' husband and father.
The book is let down by the constant exposition of quantum theory, superposition, parallel worlds, parallel lives, and parallel people. There is a lot of 'Jason-splaining' going on. The characters are up to the task although some of the dialogue gets a bit cheesy. I suppose telling one version of your husband why another version of him is better or worse than the one in front of her is a bit tricky. The final resolution, their escape, opens up the possibility of a further novel but I hope Crouch does not take that bait. The would be too much what Netflix would do.
A very fitting end to the story started in Daemon. Suarez serves us up a non-stop assault on our senses and imagination of a 'three front war'. One one front is the Daemon, the AI that is disrupting end-stage capitalism. The second front is the emerging social movement as ordinary people start to join it and force a new egalitarian society. And the third front is the combined might of the oligarchs and moneyed class alongside a secretly complicit government.
The action starts on the first few pages and is relentless through the novel. It's seductive and almost magnetic in how it holds the reader's attention. My son and I have a rating system for action movies. It either gets a pass or a "Not enough exploding helicopters." This book has not only exploding helicopters but robotically controlled killer cars, riderless motorcycles swinging murderous rotating blades, avatars that can walk out of an online game and into real life, and lots of high tech stuff for those wondering how imaginative Suarez can get in one book. Very definitely a pass.
There are lots of scenes of over the top violence that leave scattered body parts, but lets face it, noone takes over the world without a trail of dismembered arms and legs. His VR headsets and the accompanying online world of the followers of the Daemon are way beyond their day when this book appeared. And there will be those who consider the political conversations and viewpoints scattered throughout are preachy, but they sit well in the overall story, especially considering that state of federal politics of the US in 2025.
All that remains is for somebody to pick up a bunch of funding and turn these two books into a top tier movie.
A very fitting end to the story started in Daemon. Suarez serves us up a non-stop assault on our senses and imagination of a 'three front war'. One one front is the Daemon, the AI that is disrupting end-stage capitalism. The second front is the emerging social movement as ordinary people start to join it and force a new egalitarian society. And the third front is the combined might of the oligarchs and moneyed class alongside a secretly complicit government.
The action starts on the first few pages and is relentless through the novel. It's seductive and almost magnetic in how it holds the reader's attention. My son and I have a rating system for action movies. It either gets a pass or a "Not enough exploding helicopters." This book has not only exploding helicopters but robotically controlled killer cars, riderless motorcycles swinging murderous rotating blades, avatars that can walk out of an online game and into real life, and lots of high tech stuff for those wondering how imaginative Suarez can get in one book. Very definitely a pass.
There are lots of scenes of over the top violence that leave scattered body parts, but lets face it, noone takes over the world without a trail of dismembered arms and legs. His VR headsets and the accompanying online world of the followers of the Daemon are way beyond their day when this book appeared. And there will be those who consider the political conversations and viewpoints scattered throughout are preachy, but they sit well in the overall story, especially considering that state of federal politics of the US in 2025.
All that remains is for somebody to pick up a bunch of funding and turn these two books into a top tier movie.
The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.
Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.
There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.
Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.
The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.
Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.
There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.
Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.