Kim Miller
This is a short story compilation that scatters through his Xeelee Sequence novels and stories. His stuff is always a good read although this one loses its grip at times with characters and story lines not being as sharp as expected. However, covering about five billions years of cosmic history is no mean feat.
I'd seen the movie years ago but it didn't send me to the book. 'Hollywood cute kid' gets manipulated into turning gaming skills into making war. Ends up causing mass genocide of alien race when he thought he was on a practice gaming session. Han Solo / Indian Jones (Harrison Ford) was the bad guy this time. The end.
Somebody recommended the book and it was a much better story than the movie. Instead of the apologist piece for American military and imperialism of the movie it explored the implications of brutalising people to make them into fighting machines. Ender's relationship with his brother (psychopath) and sister (empath) ran through the whole story and formed the foundation of Orson Scott Card blurring the boundaries between compassion and fascism.
This was a one-day stop-for-meals read and carried itself well.
In the 1800s a sailing ship named Demeter is among the icebergs up the coast of Norway, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. A steam ship named Demeter is sailing up the coast of Patagonia, looking for something. There's a serious accident. Next chapter it starts all over again. Early 1900s, a Zeppelin named Demeter is exploring a giant ice rift in Antarctica, something goes very wrong. Dr Silas Coade is the ship's physician each time, and he's the only person who remembers that 'we've been here before'.
Also, when does the scifi start? I didn't sign up for some sea captain shipwreck story. Reynolds is a master at telling a tale that circles a high stakes crisis while keeping the heart of the story hidden as we inch closer to the truth. This one caught my imagination so that I could not put it down. It was finished in less than two days.
A barbarian turns up in a medieval tavern, gets into a fight with the locals, things turn bad etc.
This book has a weird history. It was written in 1970 by 16 year old Jim, who was a member of a zine club in his town. The zine was a stapled together collection of writings from members and produced on those old wax masters that we'd type on. The master was put onto the belt of the duplicator and the machine wound by hand. The technology of the day. The writing was all over the place with Jim using fancy words, often spelled badly and used incorrectly for the context.
The editor of the zine sent a copy to a zine friend in another city, not realising that the back page had come adrift from the staples. That guy read some of it at a zine conference, people fell about laughing, especially as the story had no ending page. So they passed the zine around the circle, each person reading until they started laughing, then the next person etc. Over the years it got copied and copied (still no last page) and became a zine conference comedy thing to read it like this. It got tagged with 'Is this the worst fantasy story ever written?'
Jim heard about it and was upset that he was being mocked for something he'd written as a youngster and said he'd never write anything ever again. Jim died in his forties. Then somebody found an original copy of the zine with the back page intact. Over time the story found its way onto websites for downloading. Taff.org.uk has the full ebook with notes on its history.
I feel for Jim. Had his original story received some simple editing before circulating as it did it would not have been the subject of ridicule that it became. And perhaps Jim could have written more.
This is the coda novel of the series, 'Book of the New Sun'.
It is mostly SciFi content but skinned in the fantasy world of the protagonist Severian. In this final book he is doing crazy time jumps back into events set through the first four books, and some of the strange elements of the original story start to find explanation. The whole thing demands concentration as it's easy for important things so slip by. On the other hand, I was sometimes scratching my head to remember the characters that appear in the final book from their original settings. And when I did remember them I realised that much of the story is hidden by Wolfe's technique of hinting at things as if he wants to have the last laugh, "Ha! I knew you would not get that bit." He's an evil genius author.
This is the book from which Ridley Scott pinched the movie title instead of using 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.
In a future dystopian society (imagine the same world as the Blade Runner movie - rich/poor divide, flying taxis etc) health care is only granted to people with little illness impact. If you get sick too often, or if your illness has a genetic link you only get health care by agreeing to sterilization. After all, if we manage your diabetes you'll then pass on the genes to your kids and then we manage their illness and the genes pass into a widening pool of people until everyone is diabetic.
Of course there is resistance to this by the population and medical personnel, and underground medical practices spread through the under parts of the city. Regular doctors work nights doing surgeries on kitchen tables in patient's homes. But where do they get instruments etc for that work? Bladerunners are couriers between black market suppliers and the doctors. Billy Gimp is a bladerunner.
Throw into the mix a community of hotheads called the Naturists who deny all medical intervention, either legal or underground, "as God intended". And those guys can get violent. Then imagine a potentially fatal air-borne respiratory virus that reaches epidemic proportions and something has to give.
Reading this 1974 story so soon after covid and all the 'stuff' that hit the fan in those years was more than a little ironic.
I read this as a bit of a break from the SciFi I normally read.
A stoic primer on how to manage a good life. Lots of insight into the mind of a Roman Emperor as he balances the power of his position with being human. It's not a book to read and put down, but to have on hand to dip into in quieter moments of daily life. Of course it contains some good stuff, that's what made it a classic. But I'm not usually much of a reader of self-help books so it didn't hit me as deep as it does others.
The Wayfarer is a worm-hole building spaceship. That's right, they build those things. And there's a crew. So next time you are driving past a road building team with stop/go guy, leaning on shovel guy, digger driver guy, roller driver guy, think your way into the future about traveling through a worm hole to a distant planet. Somebody made that super fast interplanetary motorway called a worm hole.
The Wayfarer crew has a captain, a pilot, a navigator, a repair/techie, a computer guy, an office manager, a doctor/cook, a fuel guy, and a sentient AI that controls the ship. Three of them are human, the others are aliens of different species, and they have different levels of affection or antipathy to each other. It's a small operation doing mainly 'local roads', until a major job appears. Along the way various crises occur, each impacting one or other of the characters and causing shifts in their relationships.
The book is strong on character development and world building but Chambers' prose doesn't get the most from those strengths. I'd just come from reading Christopher Ruocchio whose prose is extraordinary, so Chambers had a challenge from the start. However, the book was short listed for the Arthur C Clarke award, so maybe I'm being a bit tough on her.
The bulk of the story is about 'the long way' but towards the end of the book we find out where this worm hole is taking them. And that's where everything hits the fan.
Book 4 of Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series
What a crazy ride this was. Gene Wolfe started out with a bonkers story and accelerated to the end. It's the same fantasy world all the way through but the SciFi element increases through book 4.
Although the series is split into four novels, and sold as two books, it's one story and these days would probably be edited down a bit and sold as one book.