Kim Miller
Bit of a disappointment, really. A bunch of puns spread through it was about the only indication Pratchett was in the room. That, and the thing where the 'stepper' that moves people between different dimensions is powered by a potato. But the scooting between alternate dimensions seemed like a travelogue of 'Tuesday, Must be Belgium'. It finished on an interesting note, but was it interesting enough to send me to the next book in the series? Not so far.
Book 2 of Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series.
The medieval seeming world of Severian starts to open up to a bit of SciFi. In this book there are conversations that mention a time when people flew between the stars, and one (time traveler?) character recognises and disappears in what seems a remnant "beam me up Scotty" device that is kept in a castle as a piece of forgotten history.
It's still a bonkers ride through Wolfe's world and still somewhat of an acquired taste. However, I love bonkers stuff and this series is keeping my mind running happily through his labyrinthine prose.
The second in Rajaniemi's Flambeau trilogy. I read the three as one story. And my comments about #1, The Quantum Thief, also apply here.
The first line of the book: "That night, Matjek sneaks out of his dream to visit the thief again." Once again it begins with a 'what on earth does that mean?' line, and continues the same throughout.
This is book 2 of the Suneater Series. Hadrian Marlowe continues to be tipped from one disaster to another. This time he's searching for links to the enemy from book #1 on a planet that nobody else believes actually exists, "it's only a myth" they say. And it's a big galaxy we live in. Things get very dark as this book proceeds and it left me reeling for days. I'm loving this series.
No spoilers here but the title of #1, Empire of Silence, seemed inappropriate to me as I read the book as Hadrian's Empire is very warlike. But towards the end something happens and the phrase appears for the only time in the book. But it's still a mystery. This second title, Howling Dark is the same. There seems to be no place where the title hits home until towards the end when the phrase appears for the only time. And with a bit of thought I realised it refers to the mystery of the first title. Now my mind is saying 'Ha, so is this a hint of where the whole series is pointing?"
Hadrian Marlowe is the son of a planetary governor. His father has plans for his life, Hadrian has other ideas. Every decision he makes takes him out of the frying pan and into the ... into the next frying pan over a different fire. The narrative is fast paced as he tries to plan, manipulate, and luck his way into a more desirable future.
It's fifteen thousand years into the future, humans have colonised countless star systems along one arm of the galaxy, there is genetically engineered perfection for the elites, cryo space travel between systems, plasma lances and stun guns etc. But the culture is more medieval with knights in armour, palace and family intrigue, political maneuvering, the Roman coliseum with fights to the death, a serf underclass, and over it all is the Chancery, the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition with it's powerful torturers and mystics. And Hadrian is well educated so there are quotes from Shakespeare, Thomas Aquinas and other ancients peppered into his thinking.
This one has raised a storm of fake rage in the US states where book banning is the new normal. So I decided to check it out.
It's a graphic novel of a woman's memoir about growing up non-binary. She is three years old at the beginning when her family moves to a backwoodsy house with no electricity, water, etc. Her parents are kind of hippie but well educated. At the end of the book she is approaching thirty and considering top surgery.
Her life is one of continuing identity crises as she struggles to fit in but feels she is pushed into silence about herself. While I can see that the religious bigotry of the US would hate the book, it seems to me to fill a real need with young people trying to navigate their way through the minefield of opinions versus the emerging genetics and neuroscience of how bodies and brains are gendered in utero.
This is book 1 of the Jean Le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Flambeur was the character known as Lupin, The Gentleman Thief, in books from about 1900. His character has been used in movies, even by Japan's Ghibli Studios, and a French miniseries on SBS a few years ago. He's a mysterious master of disguise character who keeps bobbing up and stealing very valuable things, while simultaneously solving crimes for the police. In this series, Rajaniemi has thrown him into the far post-human future where consciousness is uploaded into software and people live in multiple bodies enhanced by nanobots etc. It's very hard SciFi that almost demands a level 11 on the Mohs Scale.
Rajaniemi is relentless in writing a riveting story in a distant and strange setting but all the while giving absolutely no information on what his tech language means. You either keep up or you get left behind. It's reminiscent of Charles Stross but with much better prose. At about the 30% mark of the first book I was starting to get the hang of it and by the end I was charged up enough to go straight into the second one, and then the third.
The first line of the book: "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk." And the mystery of what this means keeps up through the whole book.
A darkly comic view of free will and purpose in life.
Malachi Constant has extraordinary luck in getting rich. In truth, he buys shares and stock by reading the Bible from the beginning and finding companies that match words as he progresses. His reasoning is that God is making him rich. Winston Rumfoord is already super rich and has his own space ship. Malachi loses his fortune and Winston manipulates him from that moment.
There is a prediction linking Malachi and Winston's wife, a war with Mars, a trip to Mercury, and time on Saturn's moon Titan. And it's all because of Winston. Oh yeah, there's also a sentient alien robot with his own space ship.
Remember when a steak and salad at a pub meant iceberg lettuce and beetroot but now it's three different varieties of rocket and some weird stuff called quinoa and we ask, "What is all this stuff doing here?" That's what this book is like. Vonnegut chucks together so many bits and pieces and expects it all to hold together with meaning. OK, he's good at that sort of thing. He just keeps chucking new things in and I could imagine him saying "You think I can't do this? Just watch me. And you will keep reading anyway." Smug bastard.
He ends the book with the thought that "the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
I picked this up because the book I'd just read (Ruoochio's Howling Dark) was such a heavy hitter and I wanted some relief. Sirens of Titan is weird comedy until it's not. Things got rather dark towards the end.
Book 3 of The Sun Easter series.
Ruocchio continues with the hard hitting tale of Hadrian Marlowe. In Book 2 Hadrian was spoken to by some mystical being and given insight into what he'd been called to. Then he was hijacked to the Emperor's court.
In Book 3 he goes looking for the higher ones behind that previous prophetic voice but leaving the city of empire is not as straightforward as he hoped. When at last he's able to continue with his search it's under the pressure of a looming war with the enemies of people everywhere. The book closes with another revelation that Hadrian is more than he knows.
Ruocchio has total mastery of his craft in this series. His prose is tight and engaging, even as his vocabulary is enough to bedazzle the reader. It would be good to have an author's lexicon sitting beside you for this work. I read ebooks and it's not easy to swap between the text and the lexicography at the end of the book to check stuff on the fly. For the rest of the series I'm considering printing out the end notes to have as a reference as I read.
This is book 2 of the Bobiverse.
In Bk1 Bob was cryofrozen and awoke to find his mind has been scanned and he's now in a computer. He gets put into a spaceship as its controlling AI and he sets out into the unknown.
Bk 2 sees him as merely the first of many replications, all Bobs, who are flying spaceships around the close galaxy regions. Any Bob can duplicate himself and his ship. New Bobs take a different name, Bob has become a generic type. In this book there are first contact stories, human colonies on other planets, and some serious battles. The chapters are short and bounce around the various planets with different narrators, each with a different name but all with the Bob voice. The first half of the book is a bit of a travelogue and it takes a while for higher stakes to build up.
Cliffhanger warning - it left me wanting to read Bk 3.
This is a bit of a romp as Dennis Taylor serves up some serious fun.
Bob is a successful software and systems engineer. He sells his company for a gazillion bucks, signs into a cryo company to have his body frozen for future revival in the case of his death, and looks forward to a life of luxury and leisure. That afternoon he gets fatally run over at a pedestrian crossing.
Spoiler-free gap here.
Much much later Bob's mind has been uploaded into the control system of a space ship exploring the universe. The ship has replicator machines and can duplicate itself, including Bob. So he makes a bunch more spaceships, each of them controlled by another Bob. It's the interaction of the Bobs where things become funny. Imagine identical twins in a pub, except more of them.
By the author of "The Martian". I saw the Martian movie and thought it was rather dull. Apparently I'm alone in that. Project Hail Mary was the total opposite so I imagine the Martian novel would be better than the movie. This is a great read.
A man wakes up. He can't see, can't even open his eyes. He forces them open but the light is blinding. He squints until his eyes adjust. There are things all over him. He can see sensors taped to his arms, chest and legs, an intravenous line, a catheter. He's naked on a bed. He doesn't know where he is, and he can't remember who he is. He sits up halfway and looks around. There are two other beds in the small circular room. The occupants are dead and their bodies are desiccated. He falls from the bed and two robot arms descend from the ceiling and lift him gently back again. He's in a space ship, but why? And where is it going to? And who is he?
The story is a race to a distant star system on a mission to save the Earth. He doesn't know what he's looking for or how he's going to fulfill the mission. The lone astronaut suddenly finds he has an unexpected companion and together they form a strange partnership and a common goal. The pace is rapid and Weir alternates between life on board the ship and the lead up to the mission as the back story slowly fills in, mirroring the steady return of his memory. And he doesn't like it.
I've read Le Guin before and love her stuff. This one is a standout for the multi-dimensional themes she explores.
A far future human visits a planet where the people are ambigendered, and being both (and interchangeably) male and female, reproduction means that either one of a couple can become pregnant each time. Added to the mix are the two main countries where one is a monarchy with a paranoid king and psychopath regent and the other is a totalitarian bureaucracy where various factions fight for power. Le Guin explores a slew of binary issues, political intrigue, sexuality and social relationships, religious enlightenment vs taoist philosophy, and what does 'alien' mean?
This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.
About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'
A book of short stories in honour of Gene Wolfe by a range of authors. Seeing Neil Gaiman among them hooked me in but the book overall was a bit of a disappointment. Some of the stories invoked either characters or settings from Wolfe's work. None of them hit home well. Wolfe had two stories in here as well. It took me much longer to read it than it should. The variation between the stories was such that reading a few at a time messed up my concentration, which considering how much concentration it takes to read Wolfe himself was a surprise. There's a part of me that doesn't want to quit a book part way through but calling quits on this one might have been better than finishing it.
The Earth and its space force has been destroyed by an alien empire. Only a few space crew are left, scattered into neighbouring star systems. John is a washed up commander living in a back alley and addicted to the local narcotic. Suddenly a car pulls up, the door swings upwards, and some guy says, "Get in the car, Marty. We're going on an adventure." OK, kidding. An old police car pulls up and a guy in dark glasses says, "We're putting the band back together." OK, then, not that either.
An old crew member pulls John out of the alley and cleans him up, then they round up the old crew. Somebody wants a bunch of mercenaries for quick hits against the empire. And the draw card? There's a bunch of woman who escaped Earth and need rescuing. "I'll tell you where they are when you've done some damage to the empire."
After too long spent telling us about anti-gravity drives and null-space drives and the body conformation of aliens etc the book develops into a shoot-em-up rampage reminiscent of an old cowboy movie on Saturday afternoon. The final quarter of the book has some really imaginative tech wizardry that makes the slow first half bearable.
Oh yeah, the author is irritatingly keen on the word 'whatnot'. Obviously not one of those corner shelf stands for aspidistras.
A great read by an author who I really appreciate for his ability to infuse the bleakest scenario with humanity and warmth. Human development sees everyone move to live on Jupiter, leaving the Earth to dogs and ants and robots. The dogs are the authors, and they are in a continuing debate about whether the mythical 'humans' ever really existed.
It was written as a bunch of related stories for a SciFi magazine over several years. Then he added an intro to each story to blend them into a whole as if they were consecutive chapters.
I saw an interview with Taylor recently and it prompted me to get this book.
Taylor was a Congressional Page at age 16, the kids who run papers back and forth between congress members. He completed post graduate study at Oxford and joined the Dept of Homeland Security as Chief of Staff when it was established after 9/11. He was still there when Trump came to power, something he resisted from the beginning.
The book tells of the 'Axis of Adults' who tried to keep the guardrails up around Trump for the following years. Through that time he'd written a revealing OpEd for the New York Times under the name Anonymous and after that a book called Warning, also as Anonymous. This book is the story of his time in the administration as one of the officials trying to contain Trump's erratic decisions and self-serving excesses, how he made the decision to leave, and the consequences of going public. It's a whole lot more scary than I had imagined.
I saw the Tarkovsky movie many years ago but his movies are so slow and dreamlike it was difficult getting into the story. I chased up the book but the English translation had come from the French translation and everybody bagged it out. This direct to English translation by Bill Johnston came out in 2011 and this was the one i read. Now I've got to go back to the movie, I'm sure it will make more sense.
It's a book that deals with mankind's inability to handle failure, and with no hero in sight.
Book 2 of the Firefall duo. It continued the wild ride of Blindshight with another weird bunch of characters, but a different spaceship on a different journey.
This time the ship is heading to a facility close to the sun. Among the different cast of characters we slowly find out how they are linked to the crew of the first book, and how the aliens of Bk 1 have somehow migrated to story 2. And it's not all good. In the first book Watts was exploring concepts of intelligence vs self awareness. In the second book he explores issues of free will vs whatever the alternatives are. His background is as a marine research biologist and this book closes with several essays on the scientific analysis of his weird characters and story elements, citing several hundred academic journals and articles in the process. So just as my mind was reeling from the close of the story itself I found myself in an academic treatise whirlwind where he seems to say, "See, I told you it was possible."
And on a completely different note. He minimally mentions the time when he flushed his mouth with a cocktail of marine animal and plant DNA just before a swab being taken by some American govt. agency. Now that's a story I want to know more about. :)
What a standout book. I loved it.
Harry August was born on 1st of January 1919 in the women's rest room of a railway station in the north of England. He lived an unremarkable life and died age 70. Whereupon he was born on 1st of January 1919 in the same women's rest room. Three years later he started to get memories of his first life and by age 6 he remembered everything. Speaking of such things won him no friends and he was 'put away' in an asylum where he died, whereupon he was born on 1st of January 1919 in the women's rest room of a railway station in the north of England. But this time young Harry knew not to speak of remembering each of his earlier lives.
So what would you do if you kept on being born into the same place and remembered everything from all your past lives with the foreknowledge to make better/different decisions? Kill Hitler before you turned 20? (spoiler: he didn't) It's a time travel story with a difference. And a totally captivating read of friendship, deception and betrayal.
George Orr (try to say that without thinking of George Orwell) is having dreams. Trouble is, they are coming true and retro-actively changing reality and history. Only George remembers the previous history and knows that it has been radically changed. He tries to drug himself into dreamlessness but ends up in drug therapy with a psychiatrist dream researcher who sees an opportunity to gain power. But as the power hungry psychiatrist hypnotises George into dreaming certain events, the dreams are not so controllable and become increasingly dangerous in a 'be careful what you wish for' kind of way.
The book is a rush of alternate histories that leave George scrambling to remember what is the current reality and what has changed. It's like 'The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August' except that Harry has some control over his various histories. And in each book they meet the woman to whom they were married in a different stream/life and have to decide how to relate to her.
The basis for the Blade Runner movie. I saw the first movie ages ago and the second movie not so long ago, but hadn't read the book. One thing I missed from the book was the atmosphere of the movies. PKD says very little about the visual state of the world, being content to say nuclear war and fallout has seen people move to Mars and lots of animals go extinct. Radioactive dust is everywhere but we are left to ourselves to put together an inner image. The movies are both visual masterpieces, as if a minor character has been elevated to star status. The Android replicant characters are also much more developed in the movie. In the book Deckard mostly just turns up and shoots them, with only one of them getting under his skin, and she's not even on his target list. Baty's hostility and the 'tears in rain' piece are movie only.
For me the movie fell into what my son and I call, the 'needs more exploding helicopters' genre and comes out at the head of the pack. The book stands in the line of PKD's exploration of what it means to be a thinking human vs an AI. The movie invents the android's goal of extending their life span to that of humans. The book emphasises the contest for the popular mind between the religion of Mercerism and the media saturation by an AI TV personality named Buster Friendly.
Finally, concerning the title. In the book Deckard and his wife have an electric sheep. Living animals are too expensive. Ridley Scott thought the title was too cumbersome for a movie and an associate said 'I've just read this dystopian book called Blade Runner about a guy smuggling medical supplies to poor people. That title sounds pretty good." And so we have a movie based on one book and named after a different book entirely. :)
I've read the book Blade Runner and will put up a review.
