Kim Miller

The world of the future sees billionaires with android butlers, android sexbots, neural implants, retinal implants, and AI running things in the background. Suddenly a rich guy is 'extinguished' on his yacht, an industrialist is thrown over his penthouse balcony by his butler, a public speaker and philosopher who has filled his neural implant with the wisdom of the ages glitches badly in a public forum and is cancelled in minutes. And a journalist finds herself in conversation with an AI about morality - "Is it moral to kill somebody who has been responsible for the death of millions?" We might have found an AI with a conscience.

The final book of the Suneater series. Hadrian gathers as many allies as he can muster. He know the Cielcin are gathering for a major assault on the Empire. His goal is to draw them off to a far away planet and set off the astrophage weapon that has been spoken of in previous books. Things to not go to plan - because of course they don't.

Ruocchio shows himself, once again, to be a master of political intrigue and barely suppressed conflict. Allies though they are, fierce rivalries and old hatreds are always close beneath the surface and sometimes they break through. We already know he blows up a sun as he's spoken of it since book #1, and at last he does it. But not before the most serious threats to his life nearly bring him undone.

And after it is done, what then. Does a person who has annihilated so many, humans and aliens, just fly away home? Does he even have a home to go to? The series ends, that is all I need to say.

I have enjoyed the whole series and all previous books have been five star reads for me, but this one gets a lesser score. The first ten to fifteen percent of the book drags on and on. It has all the charisma of a weekly staff meeting and brings down the experience and enjoyment of Ruocchio's prose. There is a point at which, just by turning a page, the story heats up and we know that we are back in the battle.

An early PKD work where he's exploring the mind swapping theme that appears in some later books. A few visitors go to witness the turning on of a particle accelerator. There is a malfunction and the particle beam sprays over them, burning them with radiation. They wake to find the world changed into a religious fundamentalist state where mere belief is the only currency of value.

Hamilton, the main man, realises they have been cast inside the mind of one of the other visitors and are living out his deep desires. They manage to break free, only to find they are now in a world of puritanical whim - once again inside the mind of one of the visitors. She turns things off that she doesn't like, loose women, cats, factories, puddles. They manage to force her to turn off so much stuff that everything disappears and they are free of her mind.

in this manner they cycle through the minds of other visitors, finishing in a brutal communist state. For this they blame Hamilton's wife, who has been called a communist because of her support for social justice issues. At the start of the story Hamilton has been dismissed from his job researching rocket propulsion as the bosses see his wife as a security risk. However, Hamilton works out that the real communist among the visitors is the very security chief who has charged his wife.

They emerge from this 'mind cycle' when the paramedics pull them from the rubble. Hamilton is back before his bosses and points to the security chief as the real communist among them. They don't believe this and he walks away and with another member of staff starts his own business building HiFi systems.

The book shows itself to be a manifesto of rebellion against the McCarthyism of the era by pointing out that pursuing people for thought crimes is ridiculous once we see what lives in the minds of the ordinary people around us.

Internationally famous TV personality Jason Taverner wakes up in a run down motel with no idea how he got there. His ID is gone from his wallet, and it seems nobody knows him or remembers him. And in a tightly controlled police state where everybody is under surveillance that is a dangerous place to be.

Police databases don't know him, and yet here he is. The man standing before them does not exist. Jason bribes somebody to make false ID for him and it nearly works. He finds he doesn't know who to trust and who is a police informant. He tries to go on the run but it turns out not existing doesn't mean it's easy to hide.

He finds himself being taken to police headquarters and the commander is intrigued by his situation, but can't find anything to charge him with as not existing is not a crime. The entanglement tightens around him with the introduction of some crazy characters, and of course, this being PKD, drugs are involved. Weird drugs, not the normal mind altering stuff, but reality altering stuff.

And just like that it all ends. He wraps up the book like a 'Where are they now?" moment at the end of a TV documentary.

I would have given more stars but found Jason to be often unlikeable and inconsistent. He rarely made me care what happened to him, whereas the surrounding characters had more charm.

YA Sci-Fi about kids fighting off an alien invasion.

Bo is eleven and is escaping from captivity by the aliens. Lots of kids have been rounded up into warehouses and infected with a 'parasite' injected into their abdomen. The adults have been fitted with devices that render them zombie-like and living in some euphoric simulation. There is no help coming from any adult.

Bo runs through the dark city being chased by an alien blimp, and having gotten clear he's found by Violet, an older girl, who takes him to the abandoned theatre where a bunch of runaways, the Lost Boys, are hiding out.

Their fight the basic survival comes to a head when they capture one of the blimps, that turns out to be the alien itself, and in the ensuing chaos, Bo and Violet find themselves on the alien ship hovering overhead. They team up with another captive, Gloom, with whom the start forming a plan to retake the city from the aliens.

It turns out that the parasites in the kids are being tuned into powerful mind weapons to be used by the aliens to bring more ships to Earth.

With the help of Gloom, and fighting against the fear of betrayal of one of their own, they start putting the plan into action. There is a certain body count as some of the kids don't make it, and the stakes are raised as Bo goes for one last desperate rescue attempt.

This was my third Silverberg novel about exploring the mind and the dissolution of the self.

In a future world perpetrators of serious crimes are sentenced to have the inner self removed from their brain. Once that person is removed a new self, a new person, is inserted. With a new name, a lifetime of manufactured memories, and no real provenance, the new person is allowed back into the flow of city life.

Paul Macy walks out of the rehab centre, inhabiting the body of Nat Hamlin, a once famous artist convicted of multiple rapes. But something triggers a hidden danger deep in his brain, and he finds himself in conversation with Hamlin. And Hamlin wants his body back.

The bulk of the book is the back and forth struggle for control. One man is a work of fiction, a construct, but the legal person. The other man has walked the Earth in this body for decades, become internationally famous, but who allowed his inner danger to surface in multiple crimes.

There was a point through the story that I thought I could guess the outcome, but Silverberg brings a fresh imagination to the final confrontation.

Four college students drive into the desert to see who stays alive.

An ancient manuscript in a dead language sits deep inside the storage stacks of a university library. A student finds it, translates it in a rudimentary way, and is fascinated enough by the promise of eternal life in the text that he talks his roommates into driving across the country to find the mystical community that it references. Take no notice that the document is 1500 years old, the student is convinced that the community is still out there. Also, dismiss the thought of danger when the document prophesies that four people will go, one will be killed by another, one will take his own life, and two will go on to never die.

The story is told by each of the four young men, swapping between them chapter by chapter. There is their response to the invitation, the decision to take the Easter break and go west, the drive across the country, finding the monastery, and what happens once they are there.

The prose is tight and engaging, the move between narrators is not jarring even though the men are very different from each other. And the events in the monastery are somehow banal - eg. the daily life of the monks as they care for the garden - and unsettling at the same time. The end of the book approaches and nothing seems to be happening in relation to the prophecy, until it does. And once certain events are set in train we are struck again by the banality of the prophecy's fulfillment.

If this is SF it's on the very soft end of the genre. It's more the probing of one man's mind as he probes the minds of others.

David can read people's minds. It's something he discovered in child hood and quickly learned to keep it secret. He grows up relating to others more by what he sees in their thinking than what they present on the surface, something that make other people think he's a bit strange, or possibly threatening.

in middle age he finds the ability falling from him, and it's like he's cast adrift into the ebb and flow of normal human interraction and he's about to drown. The narrative is not as important in this book as the metaphor of the aging man, losing whatever it is that has defined his view of himself.

Having said that, the story of his life is engaging. The prose is constantly smooth and draws the reader into itself. His life of reading the minds of women to find easy sex partners, his job as a stock broker reading the minds of the successful traders, and his fall into ghost writing term papers for university students, they are all woven into a web of comfort. The book jumps between various moments in his life and there is an outside narrator who appears at times. This might disrupt the flow of the story but Silverberg keeps it unified. It's as if he's building something with Lego bricks and adding in pieces at will rather that starting from the bottom and working upwards. The unified whole is very satisfying.

Two other authors came to mind while reading this. Gary Shteyngart in 'Little Failure' and Philip Roth in 'Portnoy's Complaint'. There seems to be a trope of the 'New York Jew' in authorship and protagonist. Coming from the other side of the world I don't know i'm reading too much into this.

The book closes with David coming to grips with what it's like being a normal human. He doesn't handle it well. However, his young nephew has dropped his cautious view of David and is suddenly talking to him like a family member. 'Welcome to the new you, you loser', says the universe to David.

This is a fun run through a metaphor of Ikea being a series of parallel universes.

A women goes missing in the furniture store. The management recognises that she's fallen into a parallel universe and they send two employees to go after her with the equipment necessary to find her and bring her back. And just in case she hasn't survived they are asked to bring back another version of her from another universe.

Through the barrier the two rescuers find chairs that eat people like those flowers that eat insects. They find dangerously psychotic versions of their workmates. They find other perils, but they also find an alternate lost lady. With the help of the author they make it back to their own store and deliver the alternate woman to her granddaughter and all is well. Or as well as it might be.

It's a light read with tongue in cheek narrative and crazy events, all wrapped up in the universally loved Ikea 'how do I get out of this place?' trope.

The second book of Tom Dreyfus, and the sequel to Aurora Rising. In this story people are dying suddenly from something in their head overheating and destroying their brain. The people are unconnected and all over the Glitterband. And the deaths are increasing so the Panoply can plot the rising curve and predict a catastrophe in the near future.

Dreyfus sees a tenuous link, the people are risk takers either in sport or business etc. Is this real or imagined? A very dangerous person offers help, but there's a cost and he's forced into a decision he never thought he'd be making.

Alongside the deaths there is trouble brewing from political/social unrest being fomented by a charismatic member of a once powerful family from the beginnings of the Glitterband. He seems to have inside knowledge of the deaths and spreads the rumour among various habitats in the system. And he also has knowledge of Dreyfus' movements. So Dreyfus starts putting things together.

He looks into the family's history and finds a link to a mysterious decommissioned clinic on an abandoned habitat. Restored computer records show links into the mysterious deaths and the race accelerates.

The story is told from two timelines. One is Dreyfus and the investigation. The second is about two boys, twins, who are growing up in the home of the originator of the Glitterband but we are not told when this timeline is happening. The boys are being trained to manipulate quickmatter and how to interfere with the Glitterbands polling system of governance. They are in conflict with each other but joined together in their fight against their parents' control of their lives.

As the story progresses we see how these two boys figure in the current investigation. At about the 76% mark things start rushing towards a disaster as the deaths build up. But as they close in on what seems to be the source of the deaths, they cause an increase in the rate of death. Are they being given a warning?

The crisis builds and Reynolds works his magic of story telling as the action comes from all directions. The book closes in a satisfactory manner as the twists and turns start to unwind and we can see the path he's been leading us down since the beginning.

Overall a good story with a high stakes sub-plot, but the writing style is up not to it.

A fast paced story about racing mini space ships on a specialised track. Pilots win by shooting down their opponents so there are a lot of dead pilots. The story is rapid fire major events with no time for the characters to really process these events. Final result, actions with consequences but no emotion - he tries to write the emotion elements but hasn't got the chops for it.

Man is a pilot as the money gets him out of a life of poverty. He kills too many others, especially a women he cares about, and calls it off. Years later his son picks up the Dad's racing life. Son is then forced into the Empire's military to fight the Alliance. He gets into a fight and kills two men in the back streets. Abandons his unit and becomes a racer again. Finds himself in the Alliance on a Death Star clone that is about to destroy Earth. Gets attacked by the Empire. Everything goes haywire. Father turns up again to save the day. The Emperor is revealed to have been manipulating both sides. Emperor gets killed. Father gets killed. Son becomes next Emperor.

The sub-plot gets hints in the early stages but by the time it's put into effect at the end it sounds tropey and almost cut and paste from Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace. Also, a giant moon-like space station with a weapon that can destroy a planet. Where have we heard that before?

This book really hit my funny bone. It's a satirical take down of Star Trek, based on the premise that in Star Trek they have to kill off one or more cast members early in the episode to heighten tension and those characters are all wearing red shirts. They are minor crew members, often newly introduced, have little bearing on the plot, and are designed to be expendable. Senior officers don't wear red uniforms, so are safe.

The story is set 350 years in the future and a spaceship, the Intrepid, is being sent on lots of dangerous missions to distant planets. They are attacked, or they send out a ground crew which is attacked, and some members return and some are killed. A new crew member sees a strange pattern. Certain senior officers go on away missions and are sometimes injured but never killed. And often when one junior member is killed all the others are safe from that moment.

A few of the crew start to chase up some answers, but the search takes them to an impossible idea. They are playing out a scripted TV show from 2012 in what seems to be a parallel universe. The TV show writes and films the script each week and somehow it travels across time and whatever weirdness is in the way, and impacts their lives. They have to stop the TV show from doing whatever it is they are doing.

The first half of the book is filled with satirical references to the tropes of such TV shows. The second half is suddenly deeply human as they make contact with the cast of the TV show. Characters blend between the two time slots as it meets grief and trauma head on. The story gets rounded out well at the end, although there is a lingering question of what will happen to the Intrepid once the TV show is off the air.

One funny element sticks in my head. It's 'the box'. When somebody on the Intrepid is infected by a body-dissolving virus they are given six hours to find a 'counter virus'. They get out the box, put the bio-sample in it, set the timer to five hours and wait. The box dings, they transfer the data to a tablet and rush it to the captain. He points out the place they have to investigate, the sick man is saved. Nobody knows how the box works. It turns out that when the TV shows writes in bad science or impossible solutions it works for TV but won't work in real life. So somehow 'the box' becomes part of the Intrepid's arsenal. They don't need to know how it works, it just does. Whenever they are faced with an impossible challenge they put the relevant thing in the box and all's good.

If we were to construct a Venn Diagram of genres that populate this book it would include Fantasy, Steampunk, SF, Grunge, Weird, and a whole lot of descriptive stuff like Squalid, Dysfunctional, Abusive, and Weird again. The story is well put together, but these themes of disgust drag the whole thing down into the mire.

The book starts with a traveler entering a city. The traveler is not detailed but the city is. It's filthy, stinking of sewerage, squalid, worn down and worn out, and there's no escape from these putrescences. (Also, the author uses lots of words like this. Some of them sound made up but aren't.)

We meet the main character, Isaac, a scientist working in his backstreet lab doing some mysterious stuff. A Garuda, a half bird half man creature tracks him down. He wants to fly again but his wings have been cut off. So the journey to finding flight begins. Along the way there are other fantasmagorical creatures, aliens but not interplanerary aliens, just inhabitants of different continents on this weird world. One with a scarab head, one who seems made of water, others augmented with machinery in place of limbs, and zoo keeps surprising us.

Isaac sees the flight solution to involve his idea of a 'crisis engine'. Throw someone off a building and it puts them in crisis. If he can harness that 'crisis energy' he can feed it back to the falling man to power flight. Easy peasy.

Not so fast, Isaac, First you have to find out what this strange caterpillar with grow into. And then you have to find out how to capture the winged monster that sucks life from people. And then you have to work out how to save the city when it releases others of its kind. And then you have to work out how to stop that monster AI that built itself on the junk heap from taking over your crisis engine. And then you have to escape the twin forces of the city militia and the drug dealer you've inadvertently wronged. Oh, and don't forget you lover is caught up in all this.

OK, that's enough of the story. What happens towards the end is that the author throws the whole cast of characters into a series of moral dilemmas. The whole 'these are the good guys' theme gets turned on its head. It's as if the rotten stinking mess of the city has risen up to pollute the motivations and actions of the characters, and nobody gets off easy. We walk away, as do they, thinking, "Well, that was a punch in the guts."

I did not relate well to this at all. I mostly read a book in a few days, this one took three weeks as the prose was so unattractive that I'd read for a bit and put it down until tomorrow or the next day. It was very unmotivating.

The first half is a non-stop series of jump cuts as characters are introduced, and as we try to come to grips with understanding one it jumps to the next. The story revolves around the various attempts to hack into the mind/thinking of people and to share their minds in a cyberpunk network world of increasing fantasy. One of the characters makes advertising pieces just by thinking of them and uploading those images into the network. Another is a business executive who is trying to take over the network of financial gain, and hoodwinks the advertising guy into becoming part of the plan. Others are friends or associates of these two.

A major part of the story is the development of 'sockets' whereby probes are set into a person's brain and wires plugged into them for easier connection into the network. This is fraught with problems.

The language tries to reflect a punkish patois but these people are middle aged, not the teen or twenty somethings of a world where language is fluid and on a downhill trajectory.

The story doesn't do a great deal until the 70% mark when there is a disaster. One socketed man has become a human virus in the network and everywhere the viral damage spreads and causes chaos. The remainder of the book is made up of the other characters trying to stop him and limit the damage. It tends to fizzle out at the end.

Tao Solandis is an archive of all history of the universe that sits at the end of time, orbiting a dying black hole from which it has been drawing its energy. A visitor arrives and the archive tells him stories of the universe.

The book is scattered in scope with two of the stories having merit above the others. Much of it works too hard to sound deep and thoughtful with the result that the prose is turgid and sometimes stumbles over itself. The goal seems to have been for the stories to relate to each other in a manner that is increasingly revealed towards the end, but that hardly happens.

What does happen is that it reveals itself to be something of a love story as two lovers are reunited at the end of time.

The two stories mentioned earlier concern firstly the discovery of an object that attracts the attention of astronomers on Earth. They send out a probe to the asteroid belt to retrieve the object, a shard of material that seems to be both of Earth and not of Earth. It holds a coded set of coordinates to a place on the outer edges of the solar system. Another ship is prepared and a crew set out to investigate. They discover a worm hole into which the original discovery scientist flies in an escape pod. He meets the aliens who first seeded life on Earth in the process of panspermia. They reveal future tech which some of the other stories mention.

The second story of note is of a world governed by Virtual Reality with each person logged permanently into the system and their own whims and preferences being the controllers of how they see and experience life. The main character finds that they re all being manipulated by the masters of the algorithm. He gets involved in VR battles until trying to escape the system, only to fall victim to a deep psychosis brought on by the VR environment.

The typos, missed words, and use of the wrong homophones (eg. sliver and slither) shows that the author needs an external editor.

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.