Kim Miller

This is the best so far of the short story fill-ins of Sun Eater. The stories are sharper and add more into the overall drama of the main novels. Each story builds into some aspect of the whole.

Whether the story of a main character who was left behind, the story of a soldier who is confronted and transformed by an age-old god of the Cielcin, the story of a knight of the Empire who confronts the extrasollarians who build clones so that they can later use their body parts, or the story of a young woman who is growing into the true daughter of her exiled father, these stories merge into the Sun Eater series more perfectly than the stories in the other collections.

This is the final book in Baxter's Zelee Sequence but was recommended to me as a worthwhile stand alone book.

As the sun approaches heat death Earth's scientists work out that it's happening much too soon and something must be happening to it. The Zelee series deals with alien wars etc and space travelers also work out that other stars are also degenerating too quickly.

By sending a probe into the sun they find the problem and realise that it's non-repairable and it looks like the whole galaxy is threatened by the same thing.

As the book approaches the end they work out that the aliens with whom they were at war for so long are really the solution to a galaxy wide problem.

I went looking for something funny to read and this popped up. It started out wacky crazy insanity with lots of laughs. Then it turned to blood and guts everywhere comedic horror, although it felt like the author was trying for something higher. It hit a bit of a turning point at the 75% mark with a remembered tale of high school violence and I was close to DNF at that point. However, it improved in style and became a bit more cohesive as the protagonists realised they were about to save the universe. The closing sequence was very clever - the bit on the basketball court - where they (and us) realise that somebody else could have done a much better job.

This is my first DNF for longer than I can remember. I bought what I thought was SciFi but was what started out a Victorian London era horror story. Very soon the protagonist was heading towards taking the life of a newborn baby so he could reanimate his recently deceased wife. That was enough for me to stop.

Young Kathreen has been captured in an interplanetary invasion and taken to another planet by her captors. Here, with other victims, she will work in the mines, digging out a dangerous and mysterious substance. Suddenly a chance opens up for her to assume the identity of the child of a noble. She takes it. Thus starts her journey of revenge.

The book suffers, in my estimation, from several graphic depictions of child abuse and torture. It is part of the plot structure in that we need to know what drives Kathreen's thirst for revenge and justice, but graphic violence towards children is a tricky subject to navigate.

The story arc of Kathreen is well thought out and developed and we see her rise in power to the point where she faces for herself the difficulty of maintaining power without becoming the next tyrant.

Book 5 of Sun Eater. What a wild ride. #4 was a heavy hitter with Hadrian being captured by the Cielcin and tortured for years. In this book we see him trying to come to grips with what happened to him while still maintaining focus on the war.

If #3 showed him in shining glory and #4 shows him being crushed to nothing, #5 starts out like lush velvet depression before raising the stakes as he is sent headlong into another confrontation with the Cielcin prophet.

His 'gift' from The Quiet is apparently gone until one event sparks an intensity of rage in him and he reaches deeper into himself for an extraordinary outcome.

I'm continually impressed with Ruoccio's ability to weave a complex story over such a wide ranging galaxy. Each new novel reaches back into previous parts of the story, and in this one we find conversations and characters in the first book come home.

Vonnegut here is like a shaman who throws a bunch of knuckle bones in the air, sees how they land, and tells the client what they mean. The novel is a crazy ramble through whatever Vonnegut had tucked away in the absurdist corner of his mind. It's dark and dangerous, reaching past satire to the edges of savagery.

SciFi author Kilgore Trout appears again alongside other Vonnegut regulars. He's been invited to an arts festival where one of his books about a lone human on a planet of robots sparks a psychotic episode in a paticipant. The narrator has made many references to 'bad chemicals' effecting human behaviour, but the assumption has been drug references. As the story progresses we see that he means the chemicals our brain makes for itself. Humanity is little more than a bunch of robots being controlled by our own chemistry.

To add to his theme, the narrator becomes a character in the book towards the end, demonstrating how he can make any character in the story do whatever he wants them to do. It's a weird flex that adds to the feeling of insanity that threads its way through the whole story.

Vonnegut here is like a shaman who throws a bunch of knuckle bones in the air, sees how they land, and tells the client what they mean. The novel is a crazy ramble through whatever Vonnegut had tucked away in the absurdist corner of his mind. It's dark and dangerous, reaching past satire to the edges of savagery.

SciFi author Kilgore Trout appears again alongside other Vonnegut regulars. He's been invited to an arts festival where one of his books about a lone human on a planet of robots sparks a psychotic episode in a paticipant. The narrator has made many references to 'bad chemicals' effecting human behaviour, but the assumption has been drug references. As the story progresses we see that he means the chemicals our brain makes for itself. Humanity is little more than a bunch of robots being controlled by our own chemistry.

To add to his theme, the narrator becomes a character in the book towards the end, demonstrating how he can make any character in the story do whatever he wants them to do. It's a weird flex that adds to the feeling of insanity that threads its way through the whole story.

Following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where the Wayfarer has been almost destroyed in an alien attack. The AI that runs the ship has been blitzed and when it was rebooted it reverted to a brand new install, having lost all it's memories and relationships with the crew.

In this book the AI has been transferred to a body kit and the story from here explores the difficulty of the transfer from ship to body. Running parallel is the story of Jane, a ten year old girl who was artificially bred to be a factory worker. Chapters alternate between the cloned human working out her life and the AI in an artificial body working out her life. Their respective struggles are intermingled with the strange relationships between various aliens that populate the planet.

It's the cozy scifi of Becky Chambers with the same sense of optimism of the Angry Planet story. This time she deals with themes of identity and acceptance in a deeper way. It got a bit bogged down in the expository stuff in the middle but suddenly sparked up again once we got back to characters instead of concepts.

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.