Kim Miller

This novella follows on from Ashes of Man and is the best of the novellas in the series. It tells the story of Lorien Aristedes after he engineered the rescue of Hadrian.

It begins with Lorien already having been tried and entered into his sentence. The book starts out dark and gets progressively darker as Ruocchio strips Lorien of his dignity and ultimately his humanity. As Lorien is ground into the dust by his circumstances and the people around him the inner surety that has carried him in previous episodes also retreats from him. He is thrown into suffering and forced into performing actions that he would never have countenanced in his former life.

Next to Kingdoms of Darkness, this is the darkest story of the series so far and totally compelling. It was a two session read for me, and had I started it early in the day it would have been a single session to complete. It confirms to me that Ruocchio is at his best in longer form stories rather than shorts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This volume 4 of Sun Eater is such a heavy hitter. Ruocchio has a great talent as a story teller but this book takes that talent further than the first three in the series. Hadrian has been through some 'stuff' in those books, but this time Ruocchio throws him to the wall. At the 40% point Ruocchio stomps on Hadrian, and then does it again and again and again. This is not merely a crisis moment, for hundreds of pages Hadrian is pounded deeper and deeper into suffering. I found it a painful thing to keep reading, but the writing is so good and the story is so imaginative that it kept me glued to the page.

We know that Hadrian is writing this way into the future so he has to survive, but I could not fathom how Ruocchio was going to get him out of the fire this time.

There is a long denouement in this story and it's the first time for as long as I can remember that a book has brought me to tears.

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

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

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

This is #1 in a Steampunk series that the author started as a NaNoWriMo project - National Novel Writing Month. This is an international endeavour where people undertake to spend November writing as much as they can of a novel. When I was writing a few years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo so it has a natural attraction for me.

Nita is a general duties mechanic, a Free Wrench, in the boiler room of a power plant built into the side of a volcano. Yep, steam powers everything. In a fit of impulsiveness she finds herself trying to fit in with the crew of smugglers of a steam powered airship. And so the adventures begin.

This is a free-wheeling story that reads as a YA novel. It's a bit swashbuckling pirate, a bit "find the mole in the crew", a bit "how do these people even get along?, and a bit "I know this will all turn out OK because the author is too nice to his characters".

Rod Moss is an Alice Springs (Australia) artist and author. His work mostly features life in the red centre. In this book he travels to the coast.

Blue Moon Bay is a coastal town filled with comedic but weird characters living out their weird lives. Some of the characters are people, some are animals, some are puppets, all are grotesque. The book is a celebration of absurdist comedy with Moss's artworks peppering the text.

If this ever found its way to Florida they would ban it.

Not much needs to be said about one of the iconic works of American fiction. I first read this not too long after it came out as one of those university students who thought they were so cool for being abreast of modern literature. Or, as Vonnegut once said about his writing, "It's all just horseshit." Or something close to that.

Vonnegut gathers all his chaotic black humour into one place for this book. Billy Pilgrim's time jumps scatter his story back and forth, from childhood to the day he will die, from being abducted to another planet to watching his interplanetary lover in a porn film in a New York adult book shop, from running scared through a German forest before his capture to being a wealthy optometrist in the US.

It's an insight into Vonnegut's state of mind following his return from war and surviving the Dresden bombing, well before the term PTSD was coined or the condition even understood.

The second collection of short stories that fits between the Sun Eater novels. This is a mix of Marlowe stuff and minor characters who don't appear in the novels. The final story concerns Crispin, the follow up from The Lesser Devil novella. Getting a bit more family info bumps this book up a half star.

Shteyngart's telling of a future where the US has suffered financial collapse and is under the control of foreign national banks who are taking over everyday life. And Russian immigrant Lenny has fallen in love with Korean immigrant Eunice. They try to keep their struggling relationship alive on social media. Much of the novel is social media posts that demand the reader to keep up.

His characteristic satire once again rules the page in a weird but brilliant story.

Arguable PKD's most iconic work, and definitely one of his strangest. In a far future humans are colonising the Moon and developing strong psychic abilities. Companies are employing psychics to sit in a room and do industrial espionage from a distance. One company sends a team of them to the Moon for such purpose but there is an explosion and not everyone survives.

Second story strand: People who are almost dead can be put into cryo-sleep and kept alive. They can be temporarily brought out of sleep for conversations through a psychic medium. But these sessions shorten the ultimate storage time possible for the person.

Put these two strands together. Some of those sent to the moon have died and are in cryo-sleep.

Everyone tries to get on with their lives, but strange things keep happening. It seems time is running backwards and everything is inexplicably old. And then Ubik appears in advertising. It's the universal fixit. One spray and everything is good again. But what is in the can and where do you get it?

PKD puts together a narrative that has the reader questioning 'who is alive and who is in cryo-sleep?' And does it even matter? After all, PKD's ability to blend the reality of human consciousness with weird alternatives is never ending.

Shteyngart was born in Russia and was a child when his family moved to the US. This is his memoir of his early life and beyond written in his particular style of making things satirical, sad and funny all at the same time. It's the story of a constant misfit finding his way in a world that probably doesn't want him.

Shteyngart has a way of making the most ridiculous fictional story sound real. He digs into his Russian heritage to tell of a Soviet republic selling its oil to a multinational company. His father in this telling is an influential criminal who manages to dupe the company into believing all those oil wells out there are sitting on a mass of oil. "It's all yours for the right price." It's a tale of one betrayal after another as the author tries to crawl out from underneath his father's mess.

A collection of short stories that fit into the world of Reynold's novel, House of Suns. Each story finds a place and time within the original saga and fills in a bit of some of the characters. I didn't find that any particular story set up a future element of the original book, so they are engaging to read but are not necessary for continuity.

Consider that downloading your consciousness into a computer was possible. That means you could live forever, as long as somebody maintained that computer. Now imagine that a rich guy employed a software developer to write a software package that was self-preserving and could not be destroyed because it was deployed across some vast system, and in that package were various levels of habitat for downloads to live. Forever is now becoming more of a possibility.

Welcome to Permutation City. What could possibly go wrong?

Campbell is an Australian TV journalist who dreamed of becoming a war correspondent. He gets the job as his news outlet's man in Moscow. And from there he travels to various places in Russia and under Russian influence, wherever the news takes him. Things get very dangerous as his team heads into an all too real conflict and his cameraman is killed by a bomb blast. It's a memoir that starts out with a dream and ends in a nightmare.

A difficult novel to keep up with. A priest wanders into the desert outside Alice Springs to try to work through his crisis of faith. He starts to write a treatise where he imagines a conversation between two philosophers that he thinks might each have something to say to him.

Alongside that narrative is a story of living a chaotic life in inner city Sydney as a young man, weaving through the various worlds of Redfern's indigenous community, early indy rock concerts and the beginnings of community radio as people try to stake a claim in the local culture.

It reads in part as a personal memoir but uses the priest in the desert to frame a deeper sense of aimlessness and despair. It's not the easiest read but rewards the concentration needed to see it through.

This book hooked me early and held me until the end. In a far future Abigail clones herself into 999 other 'shatterlings'. Although they share her gene structure the clones can be either male or female and the original person is somewhere among them. The clones then take to space in separate space ships and over the next several million years they regularly meet up.

The book is told from the viewpoint of two main characters who are both clones, one female and one male. They are in a relationship, which is generally frowned upon in the clone community. The original story of Abigail as a child and into adulthood is spread through the novel.

These two are both late to a reunion and find destroyed spaceships and the debris of battle floating in space. The goal then is to save who they can and to find the perpetrators and the reasons for the attack.

Reynolds has a way of holding a story together over the millions of years of narrative time. His writing expands into the endless space allowed for it by the intergalactic environment.

I saw the TV series and loved it. And I'm a fan of both Gaiman and Pratchett, so reading the original story was essential.

The TV followed the book much more than most adaptations and the two are slavishly similar. However, the TV 'final conflict' scenes between the boy, the four horsemen, and the devil are much better than the book's portrayal.

One summer evening the children of some industrial scientists are outside on the lawn while their parents are having a dinner party. They notice that the stars suddenly go out. The adults inside have missed the most significant thing to happen in human history.

The book follows the world's exploration into what has happened and the path followed by the families of the children. It is slowly revealed that something very dangerous is happening to the solar system and the Earth is being protected from some imminent collapse.

The children follow different paths into adult life, all trying to deal with the catastrophe. Some chase scientific research, some join a religious cult, some seek answers through the terraforming of Mars.

Wilson has given us a magnificent story of hard science fiction woven around an exploration of what humanity thinks is fundamentally important when faced with the possibility of total destruction.

PKD does it again. In a far future where humans are colonising the planets they need to be 'chemically encouraged' with the drug Can-D to maintain their lives in the boredom of life on the bleakest places imaginable. The principle drug involves sitting around a playing board called a Layout - think of Monopoly in 3D - and engaging with each other as the drug blanks their minds and takes them into the game.

Palmer Eldritch is a mystical figure who enters the story with a new drug called Chew-Z that he says eclipses anything else. Of course he wants to sell it because of course he does. But Chew-Z does not require a Layout, and the Layout marketers don't like it.

It sounds like a silly plot but PKD works his magic and we enter the typical PKD world where we question the difference between human sentience and whatever other alternatives are presented.