Kim Miller

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.

This is the second book I choose from among the many books being banned in US schools. I'm Australian and have limited understanding of how the US school system works. But I don't like what I see when any person can have books banned from school libraries even though they have no children in that school, and even from out of state.

Flamer is based on the author's own experience. Aiden is fourteen, part Asian and a bit chubby, and he's at Scout camp for the summer. He's about to move from middle school to high school and is scared that the bullying he's already receiving will get worse.

SPOILERS from here.

Even worse than the bullying is that living for weeks in close proximity to other boys he's starting to have new feelings for his best friend with whom he shares a tent. The conversations and repartee between this bunch of teen boys is already packed with sexual innuendo and open comments about various girls at school etc, and in this highly charged environment Aiden's thoughts are running wild.

One of the leaders is gone from the campsite and conversations focus on the possibility that he was gay and therefore evil. Aiden sinks into depression under all the assumptions that flood the meal table. He writes a goodbye letter, takes a pocket knife and heads for the lonely chapel on the hill. His favourite Marvel character appears in his mind and reveals inner strength that he didn't know he had.

This is an extraordinary book. I have gay friends who have spoken of how hard they found their life when all they hear is accusations and threats. It can be a teenager's nightmare. Rather than ban this book I would suggest schools promote it. I found it very moving and see the very real possibility that it might save some teen's life.

Book 3 of The Sun Easter series.

Ruocchio continues with the hard hitting tale of Hadrian Marlowe. In Book 2 Hadrian was spoken to by some mystical being and given insight into what he'd been called to. Then he was hijacked to the Emperor's court.

In Book 3 he goes looking for the higher ones behind that previous prophetic voice but leaving the city of empire is not as straightforward as he hoped. When at last he's able to continue with his search it's under the pressure of a looming war with the enemies of people everywhere. The book closes with another revelation that Hadrian is more than he knows.

Ruocchio has total mastery of his craft in this series. His prose is tight and engaging, even as his vocabulary is enough to bedazzle the reader. It would be good to have an author's lexicon sitting beside you for this work. I read ebooks and it's not easy to swap between the text and the lexicography at the end of the book to check stuff on the fly. For the rest of the series I'm considering printing out the end notes to have as a reference as I read.

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.

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.

Three novellas that tie together as one story.

1. Distant twin worlds are colonised by humans. The narrator is a boy growing up on one world in a strange house that turns out to be a high-end brothel run by his scientist father. They are visited by an anthropologist from Earth named Marsh who is researching the view that one of the worlds was populated by shape shifters who killed the colonisers and took their identities.

2. A dreamlike hypnotic tale of the original inhabitants told by Marsh as if by a shaman. There are conflicts between marsh-people, hill-people, and shadow-people who may or may not even be corporeal beings. Hidden in the story is the coming of the colonisers.

3. A Kafkaesque story of Marsh being arrested, imprisoned, and questioned by an unidentified bureaucrat. The story switches without notice between direct narration, transcripts of recorded interrogations, and Marsh's notes from his journey to find the original inhabitants. His notes, by the way, have fallen apart and are picked up and read by the interrogator in any order. Luckily for us, there is one notebook intact.

The book ends abruptly and without explanation. Wolfe has scattered bits of information throughout the whole but the reader won't even see them until realising the meaning of the final few paragraphs. It's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where all the hidden stuff is on the wrong side of each piece. A bit like Kafka's The Trial, you could read the stories in any order and be just as mystified until you sit and piece it all together afterwards.

George Orr (try to say that without thinking of George Orwell) is having dreams. Trouble is, they are coming true and retro-actively changing reality and history. Only George remembers the previous history and knows that it has been radically changed. He tries to drug himself into dreamlessness but ends up in drug therapy with a psychiatrist dream researcher who sees an opportunity to gain power. But as the power hungry psychiatrist hypnotises George into dreaming certain events, the dreams are not so controllable and become increasingly dangerous in a 'be careful what you wish for' kind of way.

The book is a rush of alternate histories that leave George scrambling to remember what is the current reality and what has changed. It's like 'The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August' except that Harry has some control over his various histories. And in each book they meet the woman to whom they were married in a different stream/life and have to decide how to relate to her.

What a standout book. I loved it.

Harry August was born on 1st of January 1919 in the women's rest room of a railway station in the north of England. He lived an unremarkable life and died age 70. Whereupon he was born on 1st of January 1919 in the same women's rest room. Three years later he started to get memories of his first life and by age 6 he remembered everything. Speaking of such things won him no friends and he was 'put away' in an asylum where he died, whereupon he was born on 1st of January 1919 in the women's rest room of a railway station in the north of England. But this time young Harry knew not to speak of remembering each of his earlier lives.

So what would you do if you kept on being born into the same place and remembered everything from all your past lives with the foreknowledge to make better/different decisions? Kill Hitler before you turned 20? (spoiler: he didn't) It's a time travel story with a difference. And a totally captivating read of friendship, deception and betrayal.

The basis for the Blade Runner movie. I saw the first movie ages ago and the second movie not so long ago, but hadn't read the book. One thing I missed from the book was the atmosphere of the movies. PKD says very little about the visual state of the world, being content to say nuclear war and fallout has seen people move to Mars and lots of animals go extinct. Radioactive dust is everywhere but we are left to ourselves to put together an inner image. The movies are both visual masterpieces, as if a minor character has been elevated to star status. The Android replicant characters are also much more developed in the movie. In the book Deckard mostly just turns up and shoots them, with only one of them getting under his skin, and she's not even on his target list. Baty's hostility and the 'tears in rain' piece are movie only.

For me the movie fell into what my son and I call, the 'needs more exploding helicopters' genre and comes out at the head of the pack. The book stands in the line of PKD's exploration of what it means to be a thinking human vs an AI. The movie invents the android's goal of extending their life span to that of humans. The book emphasises the contest for the popular mind between the religion of Mercerism and the media saturation by an AI TV personality named Buster Friendly.

Finally, concerning the title. In the book Deckard and his wife have an electric sheep. Living animals are too expensive. Ridley Scott thought the title was too cumbersome for a movie and an associate said 'I've just read this dystopian book called Blade Runner about a guy smuggling medical supplies to poor people. That title sounds pretty good." And so we have a movie based on one book and named after a different book entirely. :)

I've read the book Blade Runner and will put up a review.

This is the book from which Ridley Scott pinched the movie title instead of using 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.

In a future dystopian society (imagine the same world as the Blade Runner movie - rich/poor divide, flying taxis etc) health care is only granted to people with little illness impact. If you get sick too often, or if your illness has a genetic link you only get health care by agreeing to sterilization. After all, if we manage your diabetes you'll then pass on the genes to your kids and then we manage their illness and the genes pass into a widening pool of people until everyone is diabetic.

Of course there is resistance to this by the population and medical personnel, and underground medical practices spread through the under parts of the city. Regular doctors work nights doing surgeries on kitchen tables in patient's homes. But where do they get instruments etc for that work? Bladerunners are couriers between black market suppliers and the doctors. Billy Gimp is a bladerunner.

Throw into the mix a community of hotheads called the Naturists who deny all medical intervention, either legal or underground, "as God intended". And those guys can get violent. Then imagine a potentially fatal air-borne respiratory virus that reaches epidemic proportions and something has to give.

Reading this 1974 story so soon after covid and all the 'stuff' that hit the fan in those years was more than a little ironic.

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 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.

This is a bit of a romp as Dennis Taylor serves up some serious fun.

Bob is a successful software and systems engineer. He sells his company for a gazillion bucks, signs into a cryo company to have his body frozen for future revival in the case of his death, and looks forward to a life of luxury and leisure. That afternoon he gets fatally run over at a pedestrian crossing.

Spoiler-free gap here.

Much much later Bob's mind has been uploaded into the control system of a space ship exploring the universe. The ship has replicator machines and can duplicate itself, including Bob. So he makes a bunch more spaceships, each of them controlled by another Bob. It's the interaction of the Bobs where things become funny. Imagine identical twins in a pub, except more of them.

I saw an interview with Taylor recently and it prompted me to get this book.

Taylor was a Congressional Page at age 16, the kids who run papers back and forth between congress members. He completed post graduate study at Oxford and joined the Dept of Homeland Security as Chief of Staff when it was established after 9/11. He was still there when Trump came to power, something he resisted from the beginning.

The book tells of the 'Axis of Adults' who tried to keep the guardrails up around Trump for the following years. Through that time he'd written a revealing OpEd for the New York Times under the name Anonymous and after that a book called Warning, also as Anonymous. This book is the story of his time in the administration as one of the officials trying to contain Trump's erratic decisions and self-serving excesses, how he made the decision to leave, and the consequences of going public. It's a whole lot more scary than I had imagined.

By the author of "The Martian". I saw the Martian movie and thought it was rather dull. Apparently I'm alone in that. Project Hail Mary was the total opposite so I imagine the Martian novel would be better than the movie. This is a great read.

A man wakes up. He can't see, can't even open his eyes. He forces them open but the light is blinding. He squints until his eyes adjust. There are things all over him. He can see sensors taped to his arms, chest and legs, an intravenous line, a catheter. He's naked on a bed. He doesn't know where he is, and he can't remember who he is. He sits up halfway and looks around. There are two other beds in the small circular room. The occupants are dead and their bodies are desiccated. He falls from the bed and two robot arms descend from the ceiling and lift him gently back again. He's in a space ship, but why? And where is it going to? And who is he?

The story is a race to a distant star system on a mission to save the Earth. He doesn't know what he's looking for or how he's going to fulfill the mission. The lone astronaut suddenly finds he has an unexpected companion and together they form a strange partnership and a common goal. The pace is rapid and Weir alternates between life on board the ship and the lead up to the mission as the back story slowly fills in, mirroring the steady return of his memory. And he doesn't like it.

I've read Le Guin before and love her stuff. This one is a standout for the multi-dimensional themes she explores.

A far future human visits a planet where the people are ambigendered, and being both (and interchangeably) male and female, reproduction means that either one of a couple can become pregnant each time. Added to the mix are the two main countries where one is a monarchy with a paranoid king and psychopath regent and the other is a totalitarian bureaucracy where various factions fight for power. Le Guin explores a slew of binary issues, political intrigue, sexuality and social relationships, religious enlightenment vs taoist philosophy, and what does 'alien' mean?

Book 1 in the Firefall series. A far future spaceship ride with rollercoaster energy.

Siri Keeting has severe epilepsy as a child. He undergoes surgery that removes one hemisphere of his brain to control the seizures. Many years later he crews on a spaceship as an observer/reporter because his unique brain function means he can stay emotionally distant from unexpected strange events. And those unexpected events keep piling up. The crew are all augmented in some way, as Siri has also been (after all he's got half a skull they can put stuff into), The ship's captain is inbuilt AI, the nominal commander is a resurrected vampire (so able to make harsh decisions), the linguist has four people's swapable intelligences in her brain, another crew member is in love with one of her personalities, and then there's some rather dangerous aliens. Perhaps I should have mentioned them earlier. Watts increasingly focuses in on what it means to have intelligence vs self awareness. The pace of the action speeds up as the story progresses into a frightening conflict, as does Watts' demands on the reader as his arguments deepen.

One caution. I got about fifty pages into the book and had to look up the Wiki page to sort out who these characters were. The writing is very dense and the people tend to get a bit submerged.

The Wayfarer is a worm-hole building spaceship. That's right, they build those things. And there's a crew. So next time you are driving past a road building team with stop/go guy, leaning on shovel guy, digger driver guy, roller driver guy, think your way into the future about traveling through a worm hole to a distant planet. Somebody made that super fast interplanetary motorway called a worm hole.

The Wayfarer crew has a captain, a pilot, a navigator, a repair/techie, a computer guy, an office manager, a doctor/cook, a fuel guy, and a sentient AI that controls the ship. Three of them are human, the others are aliens of different species, and they have different levels of affection or antipathy to each other. It's a small operation doing mainly 'local roads', until a major job appears. Along the way various crises occur, each impacting one or other of the characters and causing shifts in their relationships.

The book is strong on character development and world building but Chambers' prose doesn't get the most from those strengths. I'd just come from reading Christopher Ruocchio whose prose is extraordinary, so Chambers had a challenge from the start. However, the book was short listed for the Arthur C Clarke award, so maybe I'm being a bit tough on her.

The bulk of the story is about 'the long way' but towards the end of the book we find out where this worm hole is taking them. And that's where everything hits the fan.

A darkly comic view of free will and purpose in life.

Malachi Constant has extraordinary luck in getting rich. In truth, he buys shares and stock by reading the Bible from the beginning and finding companies that match words as he progresses. His reasoning is that God is making him rich. Winston Rumfoord is already super rich and has his own space ship. Malachi loses his fortune and Winston manipulates him from that moment.

There is a prediction linking Malachi and Winston's wife, a war with Mars, a trip to Mercury, and time on Saturn's moon Titan. And it's all because of Winston. Oh yeah, there's also a sentient alien robot with his own space ship.

Remember when a steak and salad at a pub meant iceberg lettuce and beetroot but now it's three different varieties of rocket and some weird stuff called quinoa and we ask, "What is all this stuff doing here?" That's what this book is like. Vonnegut chucks together so many bits and pieces and expects it all to hold together with meaning. OK, he's good at that sort of thing. He just keeps chucking new things in and I could imagine him saying "You think I can't do this? Just watch me. And you will keep reading anyway." Smug bastard.

He ends the book with the thought that "the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

I picked this up because the book I'd just read (Ruoochio's Howling Dark) was such a heavy hitter and I wanted some relief. Sirens of Titan is weird comedy until it's not. Things got rather dark towards the end.