Kim Miller

This book is a total delight. It is the second I've read of this author and has what I imagine is her characteristic quirkiness coupled with a deeply optimistic humanity.

The setting is a far post-robot future. The robots did not take over the world but have left to live their own lives and the humans have them only as a distant history.

Sibling Dex is a Tea Monk who travels around nearby towns and sets up shop, listening to people's troubles and blending them soothing tea. Dex has no gender - Sibling replaces Brother or Sister. Dex is restless and decides to travel to a distant pilgrimage shrine that might no longer exist. Somewhere along the abandoned road a robot approaches and says, 'What do you need?'

And so begins an unexpected friendship. The genderless human and the robot who sees itself as an 'it'. Without any socially constructed identities and in an abandoned shrine the troubled Dex learns to listen to himself and find inner peace. The monk learns meaning in life from the robot and the robot's first question, 'What do you need?' is not so strange after all.

A collection of short stories that sit between books #2 and #3 of the Sun Eater series. These stories lack the fire of the novels and this collection is not up to the level of previous novellas, The Lesser Devil (set parallel to book #1) and Queen Amid Ashes (set after book #2).

There is a long time gap between novels #2 and #3 and Ruocchio has set Queen and these short stories into the gap to explain some of the intervening time. I've been reading them before I get into book #4 and they recede too far into the past, but the way they've dealt with piecemeal events has been frustrating when compared to the power of the main series.

This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.

He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.

It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.

The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.

Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.

This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.

About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'

How the complaining hero saved the earth from dissolution. It got a bit too 'deus ex machina' for me. And then it finished with a chapter that should have been called, 'Be careful what you wish for' as they dropped the hero into a life of regret.

A giant space ship leaves Earth to colonise a distant planet. After 250 years and several generations of the community of 18,000 people, the planet is near. Of course, it's all going to go as planned, isn't it? Come on, you all know it isn't. An autocratic Governor of the community, a ship's captain who seems to be nowhere, a security officer trying to climb to power, a dedicated project scientist trying to be heard, and a bunch of misfits who have won the lottery of being alive at the final approach. But what if the planet has other plans? And remember HAL from that other movie? Yeah, don't worry about that.

Bit of a disappointment, really. A bunch of puns spread through it was about the only indication Pratchett was in the room. That, and the thing where the 'stepper' that moves people between different dimensions is powered by a potato. But the scooting between alternate dimensions seemed like a travelogue of 'Tuesday, Must be Belgium'. It finished on an interesting note, but was it interesting enough to send me to the next book in the series? Not so far.

A great read by an author who I really appreciate for his ability to infuse the bleakest scenario with humanity and warmth. Human development sees everyone move to live on Jupiter, leaving the Earth to dogs and ants and robots. The dogs are the authors, and they are in a continuing debate about whether the mythical 'humans' ever really existed.

It was written as a bunch of related stories for a SciFi magazine over several years. Then he added an intro to each story to blend them into a whole as if they were consecutive chapters.

This is book 1 of the Jean Le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Flambeur was the character known as Lupin, The Gentleman Thief, in books from about 1900. His character has been used in movies, even by Japan's Ghibli Studios, and a French miniseries on SBS a few years ago. He's a mysterious master of disguise character who keeps bobbing up and stealing very valuable things, while simultaneously solving crimes for the police. In this series, Rajaniemi has thrown him into the far post-human future where consciousness is uploaded into software and people live in multiple bodies enhanced by nanobots etc. It's very hard SciFi that almost demands a level 11 on the Mohs Scale.

Rajaniemi is relentless in writing a riveting story in a distant and strange setting but all the while giving absolutely no information on what his tech language means. You either keep up or you get left behind. It's reminiscent of Charles Stross but with much better prose. At about the 30% mark of the first book I was starting to get the hang of it and by the end I was charged up enough to go straight into the second one, and then the third.

The first line of the book: "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk." And the mystery of what this means keeps up through the whole book.

The second in Rajaniemi's Flambeau trilogy. I read the three as one story. And my comments about #1, The Quantum Thief, also apply here.

The first line of the book: "That night, Matjek sneaks out of his dream to visit the thief again." Once again it begins with a 'what on earth does that mean?' line, and continues the same throughout.

Book three in Rajaniemi's Flambeau trilogy.

The first line: "Alone on the timeless beach, Joséphine Pellegrini finds herself disappointed by the end of the world." After all her hard work. A bit of a fizzer as it turned out.

In the 1800s a sailing ship named Demeter is among the icebergs up the coast of Norway, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. A steam ship named Demeter is sailing up the coast of Patagonia, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. Early 1900s, a Zeppelin named Demeter is exploring a giant ice rift in Antarctica, something goes very wrong. Dr Silas Coade is the ship's physician each time, and he's the only person who remembers that 'we've been here before'.

Also, when does the scifi start? I didn't sign up for some sea captain shipwreck story. Reynolds is a master at telling a tale that circles a high stakes crisis while keeping the heart of the story hidden as we inch closer to the truth. This one caught my imagination so that I could not put it down. It was finished in less than two days.

This is runaway bonkers stuff. Set in a far distant future (millions of years) as the sun is starting its heat death process. The culture is medieval with swords, witches, guards that close the city gates at night, hand pulled wagons etc. The protagonist grows up in a strange monastic community that lives in a tower, but as the first book progresses there are hints that it's actually the remains of an ancient space ship standing on its end. Severian is being trained to be a torturer / executioner and the whole monastic thing is at odds with the hints of space ships etc.

The book is written as a memoir by the aged Severian and there are references of things to come that sometimes demand a bit of back tracking to sort out context etc.

Wolfe's terminology for weapons etc is often ancient and cryptic. You have been warned.

It's the first of four books (or five if we count the explanatory sequel) that are generally sold in pairs, Books 1 & 2, and then 3 & 4.

Severian continues moving through his mad world, gradually rising in social standing if only he didn't find it so easy to make enemies.

Book 2 of Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series.

The medieval seeming world of Severian starts to open up to a bit of SciFi. In this book there are conversations that mention a time when people flew between the stars, and one (time traveler?) character recognises and disappears in what seems a remnant "beam me up Scotty" device that is kept in a castle as a piece of forgotten history.

It's still a bonkers ride through Wolfe's world and still somewhat of an acquired taste. However, I love bonkers stuff and this series is keeping my mind running happily through his labyrinthine prose.

Book 4 of Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series

What a crazy ride this was. Gene Wolfe started out with a bonkers story and accelerated to the end. It's the same fantasy world all the way through but the SciFi element increases through book 4.

Although the series is split into four novels, and sold as two books, it's one story and these days would probably be edited down a bit and sold as one book.

This is the coda novel of the series, 'Book of the New Sun'.

It is mostly SciFi content but skinned in the fantasy world of the protagonist Severian. In this final book he is doing crazy time jumps back into events set through the first four books, and some of the strange elements of the original story start to find explanation. The whole thing demands concentration as it's easy for important things so slip by. On the other hand, I was sometimes scratching my head to remember the characters that appear in the final book from their original settings. And when I did remember them I realised that much of the story is hidden by Wolfe's technique of hinting at things as if he wants to have the last laugh, "Ha! I knew you would not get that bit." He's an evil genius author.

This is a short story compilation that scatters through his Xeelee Sequence novels and stories. His stuff is always a good read although this one loses its grip at times with characters and story lines not being as sharp as expected. However, covering about five billions years of cosmic history is no mean feat.

I saw the Tarkovsky movie many years ago but his movies are so slow and dreamlike it was difficult getting into the story. I chased up the book but the English translation had come from the French translation and everybody bagged it out. This direct to English translationby Bill Johnston came out in 2011 and this was the one i read. Now I've got to go back to the movie, I'm sure it will make more sense.

It's a book that deals with mankind's inability to handle failure, and with no hero in sight.

A barbarian turns up in a medieval tavern, gets into a fight with the locals, things turn bad etc.

This book has a weird history. It was written in 1970 by 16 year old Jim, who was a member of a zine club in his town. The zine was a stapled together collection of writings from members and produced on those old wax masters that we'd type on. The master was put onto the belt of the duplicator and the machine wound by hand. The technology of the day. The writing was all over the place with Jim using fancy words, often spelled badly and used incorrectly for the context.

The editor of the zine sent a copy to a zine friend in another city, not realising that the back page had come adrift from the staples. That guy read some of it at a zine conference, people fell about laughing, especially as the story had no ending page. So they passed the zine around the circle, each person reading until they started laughing, then the next person etc. Over the years it got copied and copied (still no last page) and became a zine conference comedy thing to read it like this. It got tagged with 'Is this the worst fantasy story ever written?'

Jim heard about it and was upset that he was being mocked for something he'd written as a youngster and said he'd never write anything ever again. Jim died in his forties. Then somebody found an original copy of the zine with the back page intact. Over time the story found its way onto websites for downloading. Taff.org.uk has the full ebook with notes on its history.

I feel for Jim. Had his original story received some simple editing before circulating as it did it would not have been the subject of ridicule that it became. And perhaps Jim could have written more.

I read this as a bit of a break from the SciFi I normally read.

A stoic primer on how to manage a good life. Lots of insight into the mind of a Roman Emperor as he balances the power of his position with being human. It's not a book to read and put down, but to have on hand to dip into in quieter moments of daily life. Of course it contains some good stuff, that's what made it a classic. But I'm not usually much of a reader of self-help books so it didn't hit me as deep as it does others.

I'd seen the movie years ago but it didn't send me to the book. 'Hollywood cute kid' gets manipulated into turning gaming skills into making war. Ends up causing mass genocide of alien race when he thought he was on a practice gaming session. Han Solo / Indian Jones (Harrison Ford) was the bad guy this time. The end.

Somebody recommended the book and it was a much better story than the movie. Instead of the apologist piece for American military and imperialism of the movie it explored the implications of brutalising people to make them into fighting machines. Ender's relationship with his brother (psychopath) and sister (empath) ran through the whole story and formed the foundation of Orson Scott Card blurring the boundaries between compassion and fascism.

This was a one-day stop-for-meals read and carried itself well.