Kim Miller

A rollicking end to the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. Everyone's favourite cigar smoking gun toting brain enhanced foul mouthed monkey with attitude saves the world ... for the third time.

#1 saw him save the world from a nuclear holocaust. #2 saw him save the world from an attack of a hive mind cult called The Gestalt. And in #3 he saves the world from the attack of the evil mastermind behind the previous threats who wants another attempt at global destruction. No assimilated hive mind this time, just cyborgs where the brains of humans have been removed and put into metal robots. We've moved from Star Trek's Borg to Dr.Who's Cybermen.

And through it all, the brain enhancements, the hive mind cloning, the cyborgs, Powell weaves a story that takes the idea of 'life and existence is just a simulation' and shakes it out of its packaging and spills the pieces all over the floor so he can put them back together as he sees fit.

A non-stop story that gets really bonkers towards the end.

Book #2 in the Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy. In #1 they saved the world from a nuclear disaster, here they save the world from a parallel universe hive mind attack.

A science fiction author is shot at by some stranger and almost immediately almost blown up with a car bomb. He goes on the run and ends up on the giant airship Tereschova with the crew. He wakes up to find a copy of himself standing in his cabin who is dying from a gunshot wound.

Ack-Ack is called to the captain's cabin where a man from the mysterious Gestalt organisation/cult wants to recruit him. He attacks the man and sends him away. And suddenly things get crazy. The author's long dead wife appears along with their 16 year old daughter who was never born because of a miscarriage. She tries to explain that his science fiction books on parallel universes etc were not fiction but a reality that was slowly shaping his unconscious mind.

And so the mayhem starts. Gestalt wants the author dead and wants Ack-Ack recruited into the hive mind cult. They kidnap K8, Ack-Ack's teenage computer hacker sidekick. An attack on Earth begins with parallel people appearing in unexpected places. And with his cigar in his mouth and a gun in each hand Ack-Ack goes on the offensive. The real surprise comes when he finds out who is leading Gestalt, until that surprise is taken over by another twist in the narrative.

It ends with Ack-Ack pulling the team together and seeing further possibilities of taking his mayhem to new places.

The final of Crouch's Wayward Pines trilogy. Ethan has told the townsfolk of Pilcher's deception and Pilcher turns on them all. He turns off the electric fence and locks the gate open so the abbies can get into town. They attack and the people split into three parties and try to escape through tunnels and up into the cavern way up the cliff. Not everybody makes it.

Ethan manages to get inside the control bunker and finds Pilcher drunk, morose and violently angry. Once Ethan shows the video of Pilcher murdering his own daughter they turn against him. There is a rush to save anybody left down in the town.

Adam Hassler, Ethan's former boss and the one who first sent him into Wayward Pines returns from three years exploring the outside world, looking for some hope of other people surviving. He was also Ethan's replacement husband/father before being sent out, after which Ethan was revived from cryosleep. The dynamic between Hassler and Ethan form a major theme of this book.

Once he's into the control systems Ethan discovers that there is sufficient food for only another four years. The abbies have killed the cattle and the winters are too fierce for anything to grow. Either the people leave in the hope of traveling south to warmer places or they starve. So a final plan is put into place.

A collection of short stories on post humanism, and what might happen if the far future is populated by robots who don't remember the existence of humans. I thought the stories to have a weird edge but as I got further into them they started to form a more cohesive theme. The writing style and thought processes probably highlight a Korean manner that I found difficult to engage with until about half way into the book.

Firstly there is a short dissertation on the nature of breasts. It's something of a metaphor for 'some people write SF and some don't.'

There's a story about a person in a role playing game, trying to figure out if he's really human. A story about the nature of time passing, and the incongruity of thinking of time travel. The author asserts that there will never be time travel into the past simply because there has never been anyone from the future who has come back to warn us about anything. And then the stories form an exploration into evolution and the vagaries of the evolutionary process.

A story of evolution so rapid that in a single lifetime humans will evolve into totally different forms and species. And the titular story, On The Origin of Species, in which far future robots in a university discuss the mad notion that organic life can even exist. The planet is in an ice age caused by a massive black cloud that blankets the Earth, smoke from the factories that recycle old robots into new robots. The final story follows this theme with a 'What might have been' exploration of not only organic life being discovered and grown in the lab, but human life forms. This is a conflict ridden piece as the main character recognises that building these 'unnatural' beings threatens the world of robots. It's a reversal of Asimov's I Robot story.

A giant monster is discovered sleeping at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by a sunken city. It can only be the result of an alien race. Radiation kills the first explorers and only a submarine camera can get close enough to examine it. Once the videos are screened around the world society goes crazy in what becomes known as 'the collapse'. It takes two years for the volatile social and political disruptions to start settling out. By that time a single international government is forming and a research station that floats above the monster is envisioned and designed.

Into that world several people's lives start to interact. The book is largely taken up with the origin stories of these characters. There is a scientist working on artificial intelligence. There is his strangely talented assistant, a young woman who grew up in a Mexican orphanage and supported by an equally strange nun. There is a teenager who is deposited by a violent chauffeur in the care of an old Nazi in South America as his parents die in the collapse, but works his way into the orbit of these others. And along with the Nazi there is a really weird man with some kind of prescience when dealing with others, but who never speaks.

The book splits into parts that deal with the backstory of each character as well as a continuing narrative of the computer scientist and his development of forms of what he calls artificial life. In reality they are characters simulated by an AI who spontaneously start to evolve, giving themselves faces and personalities. The hope is that they will evolve to the point of offering insight in how to deal with the monster.

And underneath all this is the powerful media magnate with the money and power to pay for it all but also to claim control over it when it suits him. This man's assistant turns out to be the estranged daughter of the computer scientist. Yep, connections all over the place.

This story/backstory shaping of the book continues right up to the final action. There will be a conference on establishing the floating research station and for different reasons most of these people are present. But watching over it all are the weird non-vocal man and the violent chauffeur. They meet in a lecture hall at the university and watch the conference proceedings on the video screens along the wall. But they don't just watch as suddenly we are thrust into a scene of cosmic horror. These two are aliens, or more likely alien gods, one trying to keep the monster asleep to protect the Earth, the other to throw everything into chaos for his own delight. They don't just watch, the chaos god acts through the screens to attack the people who the other one has carefully placed into each other's orbit to keep the Earth protected.

This is book #1 of a series. It ends with a bang and with the unspoken sub-note, 'That's the end of the setup. More to follow.'

The writing is fast paced in many places and a bit draggy in others where the backstories seem to have little bearing on the plot. The changes of POV and writing form (omnipotent narrator here and personal diary notes there) take some adjustment. And the number of characters who are introduced into the backstory elements sometimes don't appear in the main plot until much later and it's almost as if this new character is unrelated to the earlier origin story. It's a book that almost needs a notepad beside it to keep track of the people for when they reappear late in the story.

It the first novel from this father, mother, son team and is an ambitious undertaking that holds itself well in the genre.

We start on a distant planet with an agrarian lifestyle where a boy meets a woman from a visiting space ship as she plays a flute at a community part. She gives him the flute. With further visits a quiet love story grows between the boy and the woman. This chapter could easily be a standalone short story. The prose is soft and languid and a sheer delight to read.

The young man in the love story becomes mayor of the town. Something crash lands near the town and they find a young boy next to the wreckage of a small craft. The boy either can't or won't speak. He is taken in by the mayor who gives him the flute and the boy shows uncanny ability to play it. They decide to send him to the capital for an official investigation of his origin and proper care. In a series of political moves, the woman of the initial love story, the captain of the ship, is asked to care for the boy for an indefinite time. She is sent beyond the reach of the interplanetary govt and told to wait for instructions, even if it takes years. The boy is the centre of some power play and it's thought he has a mysterious power that could change the whole of civilisation.

The boy is believed to have the power to think himself to any destination with immediate effect. This power is extremely rare and the authorities want to harvest it for instant travel between the stars. The central part of the book is taken up with the political moves to protect the boy or to capture him, one side being conducted by a visionary engineering pioneer who doesn't want to see the boy abused. This engineer is who designed the space stations that have become generation ship style environments for refugees from the dying earth. They are named after birds - the title of the book appears only in such hints.

The plan to keep the boy safe until he reveals if he has this power succeeds for several years, and he finds he can transport himself by his own will. The protection plan then fails because of a spy in the crew of the ship and the boy is captured by the authorities and drugged into long term sleep. He is vivisected to find the source of his power. And then he is reconstructed and wired into a system that will power space ships. His life support capsule is kept hidden in what is called Pocket Space, a parallel dimension used for fast travel. They develop a way to convert standard drive space ships into immediate travel. But each such journey links into the system and into the boy's ability. His life is slowly being drained by the system.

And through this time the engineer who was trying to protect the boy is apprehended by the authorities, her facilities on a distant moon are destroyed and her staff executed. She is left alone to die. She digs her way into an underground failsafe system that allows her to power up her facility again and make contact and draw in a ship. Having commandeered the ship she sets off in search of the facility that is controlled the boy and the instant drive system.

The long final act of the book is taken up with the ship's captain trying to find the boy and rescue him. In the time he was discovering how to use his ability he got lost on some distant planet. The captain, terrified for him and in grief, picked up the flute and started to play it. The boy heard the music and it guided him back. The captain once again plays the flute, hoping that he can hear it wherever he is and in whatever condition he is. She buys a ship fitted with the instant drive system and each time she plays the flute the boy's unconscious thoughts prompt the ship to jump. But each jump interrupts the overall system and can alert the authorities of her presence so she has to wait it out before the next attempt.

It takes many years and a thousand such jumps before it seems they are making contact. In that time the engineer also locates the control centre in pocket space. As the captain and the boy link up and he fights to rise above the drugs the engineer approaches. The boy sees his path lit up in his mind and he sends himself along it towards the flute's music, and at the same time the engineer's ship collides with the control centre and detonates explosives that blast it out of existence.

The captain sees a bright light racing from the horizon and there is a crash not far from her. She races to it and finds the boy, now a grown man and little more than scarred skin and bones lying on the ground. She picks him up and cradles him in her arms like when he was a small boy. He manages to say, "I heard you".

This is a totally fun romp of a story. We first meet Ack-Ack Macaque as a cigar smoking, bad mouthed, gun toting WWII fighter pilot. He's a hero who as survived more missions than anyone and junior pilots want to be his wingman. But all is not as it seems.

In a future time a group of rights activists try to 'free' an AI that runs an online multi-player game. It has been showing signs of sentience and they believe it has rights equal to a human and so they want it free to be itself. They believe they can download it from the servers and upload it to who knows where? But that attempt opens up a whole new set of problems.

And so we find ourselves in a plot to steal human consciousness and load it into robotic androids to survive the coming nuclear apocalypse. And somehow a bunch of people thrown together for the craziest of reasons has to save the world. And right in the middle of them all is Ack-Ack Macaque.

Xavier is a fine arts reviewer for a city newspaper. He loves George Bernard Shaw and hates pop culture, especially superheroes. Then he gets exposed to radioactive waste and becomes a superhero. The only way to suppress the radiation illness he suffers is to wear the costume of a comic book hero named Count Geiger. Suddenly he's got super strength, fast wound healing, hyper-sensitive hearing, although he can't fly.

Xavier has two people in his life. One is his lover, internationally famous fashion designer Bari, and the other is his teenage nephew, Michael, known as The Mick, who is living with Xavier while his parents are working in a relief centre in Afghanistan. The Mick is a pop culture officianado with a teenager's reactive attitude towards authority and parenting, even when it comes from his favourite (only) uncle.

The novel tells the story of how radioactive waste material was disposed of by a dodgy company and dumped in a local creek. That's where Xavier was exposed. But the same company also disposed of a medical radiation machine which was later stolen from the warehouse where it was dumped, then sold to a local scrap metal reclaimer who opened it and exposed his family and others to the deadly radioactive cesium inside. Count Geiger goes into action to track down the path of disposal and find justice for the dying families, as well as for himself.

Along the way the relationship with Bari rises and falls according to Xavier's handling of his own life. And he slowly comes to appreciate The Mick and his teenage attraction to his favourite rock band, 'Smite Them Hip and Thigh'.

It's a work of absurdist humour that morphs into dark satire and ends with a dose of human reality. The ending is such that people will say, "I didn't see that coming" or "yeah, that was predictable".

Endel is the enforcer for a drug lord in Macao, it's 2101 and neural implants and memory chips are ubiquitous. Endel's memory chip is constantly being edited and overwritten so it can't be accessed by law enforcement as evidence. But there's a problem. He keeps having memory flashbacks of things that never happened, of people he doesn't know, and of being somebody else.

There is a constant in these flashbacks, that he has a wife and daughter from whom he is estranged. But he has little to go on apart from these flashes of insight as old memories deep in his brain come to the surface. Then he meets his wife. She is angry and rejecting. He stands across from a school for glimpses of his daughter. He's warned off. But something keeps pulling him back.

As he realises he must get out of the syndicate and find his real self he starts to form a plan. Trouble is, his life is filled with violence and murder and the plan will mean more of the same. He has to work out who he can trust, where he can go, how he can hide.

As his wife becomes more apparent in his memories and his life he must also work out how to keep her safe. And that daughter? It turns out he has two daughters, but the second one has been wiped from his memory. And it's then that he realises that the drug boss is manipulating him so well that he's no more than a tool to be used and and a weapon to be wielded against others.

As the story progresses we see that it's more than a tale of drug dealing. His boss isn't merely running a drug empire, there is something much more sinister, something with the potential to upset the world order. The twists of the plot gather up as many ideologues as gangsters as the danger increases in depth and scope. Memory, it turns out, is a saleable commodity, and can be monetised in so many ways.

The heated confrontation and climactic battle is suddenly way over the top and almost comical as the body enhancement tech of the era is on full display. It's like watching a superhero movie with a cinema full of kids screaming in delight as blood spatters everywhere.

And then it's suddenly over. Endel is gone and somebody else is in his place. And his family? Well, they will have to find a way forward from what has suddenly become a new starting point. It's that Escher staircase again. Which way is up?

A dark gothic tale of somebody's descent into the psyche. An old family mansion on the edge of town is hated by the townsfolk because of its dark history. Living there are two sisters, age 18 and 28, and their uncle. The rest of the family are dead, all poisoned. Only the younger sister goes outside, and that's twice a week to buy supplies. She is harassed by the locals who taunt her about the death of her family.

Then cousin Charles turns up to visit. He's obviously got his eyes on whatever he can take for himself, the hidden family fortune, the elder sister, perhaps even the house itself. The narrator, the younger sister, sees through him and casts imagined spells to expel him from the house.

The final third of the story beings us to a horrifying climax as everything is about to dissolve around them. The final descent is slow and relentless and deeply unsettling.

A frozen planet but with mineral resources. The Company, ruled by The Algorithm, wants control, the locals want The Company gone. And born into the dregs of the world are two brothers who spend their lives trying to sort out whether the fierce energy between them is love or hate. It's dark, violent, gritty, dystopian and cyberpunkish, but most of all it's relentless in the telling of the story.

Yorick is awakened from torpor, suspended animation that resembles death. He realises he's on his home planet, Ymir, from which he fled decades ago. Coming back was not part of the plan. He's told he's been brought back to hunt a grendel, an almost invincible monster that lives in the mines, attacking and killing the miners. Yorick has a reputation of being the grendel killer.

In his childhood, he and his brother, Thello, played 'the grendel game', pretending to kill the monster. His relationship with his brother has always been tenuous. The two boys are poles apart in personality, Yorick is wild and tempestuous while Thello is calmer and thoughtful, and they are driven both together and apart by their mother's senseless violence. Yorick plans to leave Ymir but before he can leave he fights with Thello and Yorick's lower jaw is blown off. He's patched up by The Company's medical teams and vows never to return to Ymir.

Once he comes out of torpor he's fitted out by The Company with weapons and told he'll be sent into the mineshafts to find and kill the grendel. And that's where everything comes undone. He finds himself in the centre of a secret uprising against The Company and somehow his brother Thello is involved and in communication with the grendel.

It's a battle for supremacy between the local miners and the militaristic company officers and overseers. The grendel appears to have abilities that nobody knew of and Yorick and Thello are thrown together in what manifests as a battle of conflicting loyalties.

The pace of the story is constantly relentless. Larson manages to keep the stakes high and the steady revelations of what lies under the surface continue right to the end.

The iconic story of contact with no contact. Rama passes through the solar system and totally ignores us. The ship Endeavour is sent to investigate and the crew spends several days inside Rama, trying to figure out what the strange craft is. As it approaches the sun and the Endeavour has to depart, they track Rama as it gives close to the sun to gain speed and exits the solar system as anonymously as when it arrived.

By not having aliens, Clarke maintains the sense of mystery and wonderment for the crew. On Earth, however, the diplomacy is going mad. And then it's discovered that the inhabitants of Mercury has sent a nuclear weapon to destroy Rama, not trusting the motives of its builders, forcing decisive action from the Endeavour. The crew of the Endeavour allow the majesty of Rama to captivate them until some unknown propulsion system initiates and Rama starts its shift in orbit.

The concept of Rama illustrates Clarke's comment, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Two boys meet, one a fast thinking savant and the other a psychopath, and as they grow they start taking over. They take over the two major crime organisations that spread their influence over several planets. And once in charge they spread their power over civic leaders, politicians, police forces. But as much as they are inter-dependent they are also suspicious of each other.

On another planet a writer is chasing down a story of multiple murders and discovers links to some dark story underneath. Out at sea a system of rigs like oil platforms are drawing a strange power source from beneath the ocean floor. It's dangerous work but one of the survivors the writer comes across is anxious to start work there.

This book takes us through the lives of a number of characters separated on different planets, but also, we later learn, separated by decades of time. Around the rig float hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stasis pods, each one holding a person in suspended animation, until they can be retrieved and their illness cured. It's a book of strange things that don't have anything to do with each other until the final chapters. And then it all starts to link up.

Apart from the frustration of Levy's decision to use silly words for certain things, religion becomes godery, computers become putery, monitors become screenery, it's an engaging mystery and an increasingly fast action story.

It also has a high body count. It starts with a fanatical religious community killing perhaps hundreds of people in a religious event, and ends with the main characters all fighting for their lives. Some of them survive. Along the way the brutality is constant as the two protagonists take over. It's not a book for the faint hearted.

Book 2 of the trilogy.

Ethan was being hunted at the end of #1, now he's been made Sheriff of the town. He's been charged with the job of finding those who are plotting against the town and out one night finds a dead body. The woman has been tortured but is lying naked and with no blood on here or on the ground around her.

He's told the woman is Pilcher's daughter and Pilcher thinks she's been murdered by the insurrectionists. Ethan delves into the secret meetings and doesn't believe those people had anything to do with her death. Further investigations bring the frightening reality home to Ethan, but how is he going to pursue the real killers?

This volume tells the story of less than a week and in that time Ethan has gone from being a fugitive to being the sheriff to being the one who is about to bring down the whole structure.

A minor player in the control station of an orbiting telescope sees an anomaly. Something heads towards Saturn but it's also slowing down. Nothing slows down out in space except controlled space craft. Then it stops at Saturn. US space control hurries to convert a space station into a ship to go and investigate. The anomaly ship leaves Saturn and the flare from the drive system is picked up all over the world. China wants to investigate and rushes to convert its nearly complete Mars ship to long distance. And so a new space race begins. Two countries, two very different space ships, and the possibility of far future alien tech if they can bring it home.

Hard sci fi meets space adventure meets political thriller. Sandford is a thriller writer and I think this is his first Sci Fi. Ctein (pronouned K'Tine) is a famous photographer and print maker with a science background. He provided the science research and original idea for the book. This is his first novel, his other books are generally about restoring old photographs. The name comes from when his university magazine made a bunch of typesetting errors, got his name badly wrong, and he decided to keep it.

While Ender was growing up in a loving family and only have to negotiate his place with an older brother and sister, Bean was having to fight his way upwards from the streets of Amsterdam.

The nameless kid, four years old but looking like two, manipulated his way into a street gang so he wouldn't starve in some back alley. His quick wit and intelligence equipped him for understanding the motivations of the street and although the smallest of his cohort, earning him the name Bean, he survived in their company.

He was picked up from there by a well meaning religious sister who had links into the space force battle school. She recognised Bean's intelligence and his aptness for training. So he finds himself in battle school, even though he is well below permissible age. And there he hears of Ender Wiggin, the hero of the school and somehow not so much older or taller than himself.

It is not until half way into the story that Bean meets Ender as a member of his battle army for training. They do not form any kind of friendship as Ender treats Bean with the same harshness that the teachers have formally treated Ender. Bean cries out internally for recognition but is constantly the target of barbs and laughter. However, by the 75% point Ender is promoted to Command School and Ender is made the leader of his own training army.

As the pressure to get these students battle ready increases the entire cohort is graduated and sent to the command post, built inside a far flung asteroid, to more actively train for the battle against the ant-like alien Formics.

The novel is firstly the story of Bean before we meet him at the battle school in Ender's Game, where he is minor character, and secondly the story of the training and the battle of that book but told through Bean's eyes. In this story we see him as highly intelligent, perceptive, and ready to face down his superiors if he thinks they are treating like a child. Yep, irony there for our six year old hero.

While Ender's Game is more plot driven, Ender's Shadow is taken up with the inner dialogue of the ever-thinking Bean. We see his military and political analysis, his resourcefulness, his ability to subvert the command structure of the battle school, and his struggle to find a place in the hearts of the other students. OSC demonstrates his command of military history as Bean researches the great battles of history, and his understanding of human interactions.

The book is emotionally demanding at times as we read of the abuse, and sometimes murder, of children by each other and by adults. The deep loneliness of Bean at the school finds some relief as his friendship with another boy increases with time. Ironically, the other boy sees Bean as looking like his own infancy photos and so sees him more as a younger brother than as a friend. His view is well placed as we find that Bean is the result of embryonic freezing and cloning that was kept secret from the parents, and is, indeed, the younger brother. Not only brother, but genetically his identical twin although born some years later. The book closes with Bean, now with a proper name, being united with his family.

A man walks out of forest ... In what might be an alternate universe story of Paris, Texas, a stranger with no background slowly finds his way home.

An isolated family group finds the stranger, sees his yellow cat-like eyes and thinks to kill him, but decides otherwise. They give him the name Falk, teach him to speak, to hunt, how to live among them. He forms a bond with one of the women, always knowing that he does not really belong here. And so he sets out to find his way to his own people, if only he knew who they were.

On his travels he experiences bad interactions with other isolated forest dwellers who mistrust him, abuse him, and almost kill him. From one such settlement he escapes with another captive and the two of them travel to the city in the west that is somehow in his mind. Once there he is taken captive again while the woman he's been traveling with sides with the captors. It turns out that she has been sent out to find this man and bring him to the city.

Falk finds himself in the custody of the Shing, the aliens who had conquered Earth a millennium before. Their hospitality is kindly and supportive and they say they are not captors and he is their guest for whom any request is fine. He meets Orry, a young man from Falk's original planet and who speaks well of the Shing. Orry tells him his name is Ramarren but someone erased his memory of his real self. The Shing offer to return his identity and fly both Ramarren and Orry home.

Ramarren sees the plot, that they only want to know the planet's position to attack it. He undergoes the mind return procedure, all the while fighting to retain his identity as Falk in a hidden part of his mind. And once the procedure is complete Ramarren knows he's in a duel of wits against the Shing. He needs their ship to get home again, but he can't divulge anything about his home planet.

The final stage of the story rages with energy as Ramarren and Falk fight as two people against the 'mind master' of the Shing, knowing there is this one chance after which all hope will be lost.

First thing - there are two translations. One by Birnbaum and one by Jay Rubin. The Birnbaum translation is called Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I read the Rubin translation, although it shows as Birnbaum in my library list.

Two stories intertwine in this fascinating delving into one man's psyche.

In one story a man enters a strange town and is given the job of reading old dreams. A condition of life in the town is that he has to leave his shadow at the gate and so the Gatekeeper severs the two and the shadow is confined to a back yard shack. The man then spends his time in the library gently holding the skulls of unicorns, reading the dreams that emanate from them.

The second story is of a man who is retained to examine and compile a large batch of scientific data through a process of 'shuffling' which takes place in his mind when he goes into a trance state. The ability to do shuffling results from a brain implant that taps into hidden layers of consciousness in his mind.

As the stories progress there are hints of how these two stories are related. And by about the half way point it's becoming apparent that the two accounts, though different, are mirrors of each other. By 75% in we are guessing that the two men are the same person and one story is of his outer circumstances and the other story is of his inner unconscious life.

Towards the final stages of the book both men face an impossible 'stay or go' decision. And as the two stories coalesce we are left in deep sadness of the outcome.

Murakami's writing is mystical and the stories are phantasmagorical. As the book progresses the prose becomes like a calm sea of warm water that enfolds us such that even as we see the inevitability of the ending, and we hope that it be otherwise, we are comforted by the prose at the story's sad finality.

This is #1 of the Wayward Pines trilogy.

A secret service agent goes to the town of Wayward Pines in search of two other agents who had disappeared without trace. He wakes up injured and works out he's been in a car crash. The hospital seems 'off' and he walks out and goes to the sheriff's office. The sheriff doesn't believe he's a secret service agent and his wallet and phone etc have disappeared in the crash.

It seems the whole town is somehow against helping him and when he tries to leave the road out of town just doubles back to town again.

This is a mystery with a large dose of horror and too many machetes for me to really appreciate it and I was close to DNF. It is not until after the halfway point that is looks to be heading in the direction of the SF that I thought it was. The final sequences of the story rush us into the SF world as he finds out how much time has passed since he first drove into town.

Station Eleven is a fictional space station in a graphic novel being written by one of the characters over time in the story. A flu pandemic wipes out 99% of the world's population in a matter of weeks. The book is the story of some of the survivors. It has a lot of before/after time shifts in the narrative that took me quite a while to get used to.

At it's heart is the story of a Shakespearean actor who dies on stage the night the pandemic hits. The book goes back into his life and through his three marriages, being carried along by those who were around him at the time. After the pandemic and the survivors start to form communities, some of those people interact but without knowing their connection to the actor. There is a slow realisation of their connection through the book as little snippets of information and memories fall into place. One of those snippets is the graphic novel, Station Eleven.

The survival story is harrowing in places and heartwarming in others. The main group we follow is a traveling orchestra who puts on musical concerts and the plays of Shakespeare. As they travel they are welcomed by some, and attacked by others such as the doomsday cult that gathers around 'the prophet'. It is much later that we find the contact point between the actor who died on stage and the prophet.

Some of the survivors have formed a community in an airport and the orchestra finds its way there. In the final portions of the story some of the earlier narrative finds its way into the present and some loops are closed. The book ends on a sombre note but with a sense of completion that at least the stories of some of the people have found a home.

It is thirty years after the robot rebellion of Day Zero. Humans have been eradicated from the planet and robots have formed loose communities. Giant AI systems have taken control of most robots in a spin-off war that has left only two AI systems functioning but still at war and most robots formed into a hive mind. Those that resisted have gone into hiding, many into the Sea of Rust, a barren wasteland where they pick over the remains of old robots looking for parts to repair themselves.

Brittle is a care robot whose job was to look after a dying man, and then his widow. The uprising starts and Brittle heads for the hills. She is still wandering the wasteland as the book opens. Suddenly there are gun shots over her head and she knows she's under attack. She makes it to safety but needs repair. She meets an old acquaintance, Mercer, another carebot, who also needs repair parts. They are drawn to each other like for like, but they also want each other's parts for their own repairs. But then the dominant AI, CISSUS, attacks the settlement and they have to run.

The story from here is their escape, along with several other robots. Brittle and Mercer form a tenuous truce and their dialogue forms a major part of the narrative. They are tense and pointed, while at the same time there is an underlying playfulness that Cargill brings to their interractions.

The story is fast paced and the action gets deeper and deeper as the true nature of each of this band of escapees surfaces. At the halfway point one revelation changes the whole meaning of their run through the wasteland. The final scenes are a desperate win or lose sacrifice to attain one single goal.

The characters are robots with a 'people feel' about them. The various levels of self awareness between different robots, whether they were made for human contact or war for example, take us into new territory of how they relate to each other and to their situation.

One aspect of the novel is the question that is sometimes raised by the robots, "Was the uprising and the eradication of humans worth it after all?"

Calvin and Hobbes on steroids as they combat the sudden apocalypse.

A boy, Ezra, and his nanny robot tiger, Pounce. It starts out as an ordinary day, but it finishes with the world's robot assistants being turned into killing machines as they destroy the humans they have served. Few escape. Pounce races to save Ezra as their robot housekeeper murders his parents and they race into a world gone mad, looking for refuge against an increasingly militarised robot army.

This is a fast paced action story that explores ideas of free will versus programming, what makes somebody take sides against their friends, and how danger galvanises people into instruments of danger themselves. Pounce and Ezra try to sneak through the suburbs and away from the city but killer robots are everywhere, as are the piles of bodies that horrify them both.

Through the rush we fall in love with them both, with Ezra for his eight year old frailty mixed with courage, and with Pounce for his love and loyalty to his boy. There are subtle (or not so subtle) references to red hatted MAGA, Hillsboro Baptist Church, and a weak administration in the face of the uprising. There are passages of philosophy on taking life, defending oneself, how much consideration to give to an ally who has chosen the other side. These passages are not heavy, they are interwoven into the story and relate to the decisions Pounce must make and how he explains them to Ezra.

In the end it's a story of heartache and loss, of mounting grief and the impossibility of finding answers.

This turns out to be the prequel novel to Sea of Rust, which was written first and which is next on my list.

Alli Sheldon took the name James Tiptree Jr for her SF writing as she had seen her mother's extensive writing being downplayed as 'confections by a female author'. Alli's parents were travellers and explorers, trekking across Africa with lots of porters from local communities and documenting their experiences for institutions back in the US. Her mother wrote of the travels and often spoke to community gatherings. But all the while, being a woman meant being indulged rather than appreciated for her talent.

Tiptree's stories steadily worked their way up the SF ladder and he became a respected voice in the genre. But he was always a recluse that nobody could really contact so rumours of his identity were common. Sheldon had worked for the CIA through the war and Tiptree would sometimes mention being involved in security projects as a way of quieting the public's curiosity. It was many years before his identity became known, and a great loss to Sheldon's writing style when it happened.

This biography is deeply moving and written with great sensitivity. It is as captivating as it is moving and I found myself sitting for long sessions of reading until it was finished. Philips' research is extensive and delves into Tiptree's correspondence with many of the greats of SF. Tiptree found letter writing to be a preferred substitute for personal contact, not only to maintain the secret identity, but also because Sheldon was such a conflicted person that friendships and personal relationships were such a minefield for her.

Behind the fiction writing are many years of study over a range of subjects, culminating in a PhD in Psychology. She was also a gifted artist, even as a child illustrating her mother's travel books. Her art is in private collections but her painting was left behind when it became clear it would not take her to the top.

This biography shows us a woman in constant struggle to find a reliable sense of identity and sexuality for herself. Tiptree in his letters often flirted with those he corresponded with, and after her real identity became known she continue to flirt with Ursula Le Guin, who in those years had come out as lesbian. Many of he stories show the same search for surety in matters of sexuality and the place in the world for both women and men.

Her marriage to Tip Sheldon, several years her senior, was long lasting and neither could see a way into a future without each other. She wrote at times of suicide and many years before their death she had written of a suicide pact between them. As Tip's health failed badly, and following many years of depressive illness in her own life, she took both their lives in the early hours.

A memorial literary prize in her memory was set up after her death under the name of Tiptree with an emphasis on works that expand the understanding of gender. However, the manner of the two deaths was controversial and the award was changed to The Otherwise Award, for works that are 'wise to the other' in matters of gender. This book was a winner of the award in 2006.

The space capsule Sunbird is on a research trip around the sun but is struck by a massive solar flare. When it comes around the other side and can contact Earth there is no response from Houston. However, soon there is a radio signal from a woman trying to contact somebody else. The confusion takes some time to settle and the three men on Sunbird are told that their mission was never completed, they never returned to Earth, and it is now three hundreds years into the future.

The women are on a space station and they manage to bring the men on board as Sunbird drifts off with no remaining fuel. They are told that a catastrophic pandemic reduced the population of Earth and there are now only two million inhabitants. The narrator, Lorrimer, the Sunbird's doctor, realises that they have been drugged and he's been rambling on, saying aloud everything he's been thinking. As his head clears he realises that their rescue ship is crewed by women only as no males survived the pandemic and Earth's population is made up of cloned women.

Under the influence of the drug, one crewman tries to rape one of the women. The commander, a man of fervent religious faith, tries to take command and says he's Christ's leader as women should not lead. Lorrimer realises that the drug has revealed the inner nature of the two men, and the women can't allow them to live. Then he realises that even though he is a passive personality type the women will not allow him to live either.

Something is out there, racing into Earth's orbit, and it's not what it should be. When astronauts go to investigate a celestial visitor that they think of as an asteroid, they find markings that suggest engineering, and a doorway into the unexpected. The asteroid has been hollowed out and spread through several chambers are complete cities, the product of an earlier civilisation that has since gone. But worse is to come, at the end of the final chamber there is no end. The 300 km long asteroid has a tunnel into an infinite and unknown dimension.

The novel starts with a rapid descent into weirdness as the asteroid is explored. It was obviously the home to an advanced civilisation that not only seems to have been human, but also from our own far future. Something has blown it out of their own time and space and brought it back into our present.

The centre of the novel is taken up with the political intrigue of three nations, America, Russia and China, as they vie for information and control. But there are also reports of ethereal beings, ghosts of the asteroid's past, that are keeping watch over the interlopers. And through reading the literature found in the libraries of the asteroid they find that Earth is soon to undergo a nuclear war that leaves the planet devastated.

A device is manufactured that allows them to fly between the chambers and beyond, down the tunnel and into the infinite hallway. But somewhere down there are the ones who once lived in the asteroid's cities, and they are not happy.

This is a complex story and the complexity is only just building up at the halfway point. As the conflicts between the Earthlings in the cities, and the faction fighting between the 'Futurelings' somewhere along the infinite hallway escalate, the story becomes a race into destruction. It becomes totally bonkers as every collides with everything else and whatever can be blown apart is blown apart.

And suddenly it's over. The characters are scattered into different timelines, different histories, different realities. The novel closes with a very human touch that leaves the reader with a greater sense of a future than is probably being experienced by the characters themselves.