Derek
I loved practically every word of this. All the way to the extremely disappointing non-ending.
I routinely trash books for cliff-hanger endings, but this isn't so much a “cliff-hanger” as a slow amble off the precipice!
One of the things I learned in school is that a novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. How is this so hard? If this hadn't been the (free) Tor E-book of the Month selection I'd have been really angry. As it is, I can't see bothering to buy the two remaining books in the “series” (i.e., the last two parts of this book).
I loved almost every page. I've seen quite a few comments that thought the "talking to the dog" metaphor got tired. All I can say to those people is "you obviously don't love your dog!" Or, worse, perhaps you're a cat person. My only problem with Emmy (the dog) was that she's clearly smarter than my dog, who really didn't get a thing out of this book. Like when Emmy doesn't get a joke: ‘“It's a physics joke,” I explain, because that always makes things funnier.' How can that not be funny? Orzel has a tendency to state a proposition, then use it later as a proof, which is bad science but probably good science-writing—actually demonstrating the proof would lose a lot of readers. For instance, "Back in chapter 2, we saw that the wave nature of matter gives rise to zero-point energy..." Well, no, we didn't. Back in chapter 2, he stated that. And, in fact, near the end of the book, where I pulled this quote, he actually does explain zero-point energy better. We didn't "see" this in chapter 2, but that's really just a quibble with his English rather than a complaint about the way he explains his physics. Whenever Orzel starts getting too far into dry science, Emmy gets him back on track. "So, basically, nothing is defined in an absolute sense? Isn't that kind of ... postmodern?" No wonder I have so much trouble with quantum mechanics. I have so much trouble with postmodernism... I was a bit disappointed in what I thought was short shrift given to the Many Worlds interpretation, but I guess his point was essentially that it could be entirely right but we can't ever know, because all those other worlds are lost to us. But again, Emmy keeps us on track. She likes the Many Worlds interpretation, because it has quantum bunnies made of cheese. She's not so enthralled with the Copenhagen interpretation: "I don't think I like this interpretation, it's awfully solipsistic, isn't it?" Well, duh, that's the postmodernism thing, again. Again, I'm a little disappointed in my dog. I had to define solipsistic for Vinka (which, of course, meant I had to check the dictionary). Orzel may understand quantum physics, but he's not always right about dogs. "A dog won't find dropped food on the same block every day, and a photon won't interact with a molecule in the same part of the interferometer every time." I beg to differ. My dog can be guaranteed to find food on the same block of Wolsdon street every morning. I'd give it about an 80% probability of being in front of one of three houses. Emmy also makes some great observations. On quantum tunneling: “So the electrons just drill holes through the barrier?” “No, they pass through it as if it weren't there at all. They don't have enough energy to punch through.” “But how do you know that?” “Well, the electrons show up on the far side of the barrier with exactly the same energy as before they hit it. If they were boring little holes through the barrier, they would lose some energy in the process, and we'd be able to detect that.” “Maybe they're just really tiny holes?” “No, we can look at that with a scanning probe microscope, and there aren't holes.” That's a pretty huge jump. Again, we're expected to accept that what he has just stated as a proposition is actually proven. How do we know that a scanning probe microscope can actually detect those "really tiny holes?" Sometimes Orzel makes statements he never makes any attempt to explain. On quantum teleportation: “You could use it to make a quantum version of the Internet, if you had a couple of quantum computers that you needed to connect together.” I know a fair bit about the Internet, a fair bit about physics, and have a better than average understanding of quantum mechanics... and I'd love to know how that's going to work. My biggest complaint with the book is actually nothing to do with Orzel. As written, it keeps citing page numbers of previously mentioned theorems and experiments: but they refer to a page number in some particular dead-tree-book edition. They aren't correct in my e-book edition, and they probably wouldn't have been correct in every DTB edition—or if they are (which means they must have been corrected for every other edition) why aren't they corrected for the e-book? It's particularly strange, because this e-book had the best footnoting of any e-book I've ever read, but it couldn't do page references. All in all, it's a great introduction to quantum physics for people who know nothing of physics. It's not useless for people like me who have a fair bit of physics background, but are not up on QED; and of course it's probably terrible if you're a graduate quantum physicist. But, dammit, we got through the whole book, and Vinka is still asking me why you can't know both the momentum and the position of a squirrel. Are we going to have to read this again? Postscript [2017.11.20]: Perhaps I've been unfair to Vinka. This morning, as always, she was stalking squirrels in the park. Normally, when she goes on point, I can trust that there really is a squirrel, even if I can't see it, but this time I was certain there was no squirrel. "There's nothing there." "Wait...," Vinka said. We did, and sure enough a squirrel hopped into view. "See—quantum physics! If you wait long enough, particles are generated spontaneously." "But, Vinka, they're generated in pairs. If there's a spontaneouosly created squirrel, there has to be an anti-squirrel." "Well, duh!" she said. "I'm the anti-squirrel!" Perhaps she got more out of this book than I had thought.
Pretty good space opera. A few amazingly unbelievable scenes, but that's space opera for you. In fact, that's opera... [For instance, the scene where the protagonist convinces an assassin to give up her advantage so that they could have a fair fight...]
Despite crediting both an editor and at least one beta reader, an awful lot of stuff that shouldn't have got through the editing process did. Really, spell checkers do work: check every word that the spell checker thinks is wrong, and if it belongs, add it to a local dictionary! What's left (e.g., “Cruthine”) is wrong. When unusual words are used, check them! A colloquium (or colloquiums, or even colloquia, which I would have said was the plural of colloquium) is not the same thing as a colloquialism! By a long shot! And I'd really expect a 42 century AI to know that. A debtor owes, not “is owed”, money. And then there was more than one sentence that just didn't parse at all.
The appendix was full of stuff that was irrelevant to this story. I presume it's relevant to other stories in the series, but that makes it less useful for this one. For instance, nowhere in this book is Tritium mentioned (and for the record, Tritium is ³H or just T, not T3 or 3H; Deuterium is ²H or D).
I really hate cliff-hanger endings. The last chapter just shouldn't have existed.
Also, though the cover blurb did draw me in, it's wrong! ‘Someone is out to stop the “GSS Intrepid”... from ... beginning its journey to 82 Eridani.' That could even be where they're going, but nowhere in this story is it called 82 Eridani. “Tanis tightens security and fights political red tape...” No she doesn't. If there's any red tape, she just ignores it.
Loved it! Yes, it's a thought experiment, and a simplistic one at that. But that doesn't mean you can't make a great novel out of it.
The idea that there might be three states of consciousness: Normal (people without actual self-consciousness), empathic and pyscopathic, is pretty much what we all think. So, never mind the current state of the science, it's a theory that basically fits the facts. But I'm sure nobody thinks it explains everything. It's just a place to start a story that doesn't contradict anything that's scientifically proven. Actually having those states changed by merely losing consciousness was a bit much to swallow, but as a writer I know recently said, every story can contain one big lie.
I'm starting to get really pissed about GR losing my reviews... I should know better than to post them only on GR. So, suffice it to say that I loved [b:The Eight 6425 Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum, #8) Janet Evanovich http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479699438s/6425.jpg 1616132], and this isn't that. It isn't even a shadow of that. What's worse, it's ground covered by [a:Dan Brown 630 Dan Brown http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399396714p2/630.jpg], and others, and Dan Brown did it better.
My wife gave me this before we got married, so 31 years ago, and I wasn't that impressed then. Now practically all of my Goodreads friends think it's five-stars, and they tell me how wonderfully layered it is, but I can't manage to see anything but the surface, and that seems ... weak.
I don't find the characters or their motives believable.
The violence is entirely gratuitous.
And the ending cliff-hanger?? It's not enough that it does end on a cliff-hanger, but the damn thing isn't even resolved at the start of the next book—you have to read half of that before you get even a hint of how this really ends.
I need to make it clear from the start that I don't like stories that jump around in time. My brain is too linear for that sort of thing. So, the rest of my opinions about [b: Station Eleven 20170404 Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1451446835s/20170404.jpg 28098716] are colored by the fact that this story flips around seemingly randomly over about a fifty year period. But no matter my opinion of time-hopping literature, my real problem with this is that I don't believe Mandel has really thought out the post-apocalypse: which leads me to feel that her apocalypse is nothing more than a gimmick. In the first place, a plague of her description is highly unlikely to happen (even though I'm pretty certain that we will suffer some kind of plague in the near future). A plague like hers, that takes such a short period to go from first infection to death, can't spread. You might kill the entire population of a city, but when you're seeing people die the day they catch the disease, it's hard for them to spread it before they die. Worse, she has an excessively pessimistic view of people's capacity for innovation. In the post-apocalyptic portions of the story, many of her characters pine for electricity. So, get out there and scrounge up the things you need! With so few people left, there are enough photo-voltaic signs along the highways of North America for everybody to have access to a few low-power luxuries (for instance, one well-lit room in every community). Add to that all the PV panels on homes, and—even better—solar water heaters, and everybody could have access to electricity. Once you have that, there'd be ham radio, and communication! It seems Mandel just didn't really care about the apocalypse. Now, there's nothing wrong with using the end of the world as a tool to tell a story. [b:The Road 6288 The Road Cormac McCarthy https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439197219s/6288.jpg 3355573] did it wonderfully. But if the apocalypse is not actually the story, I can't figure out what story Mandel is trying to tell. There's no central character. There's Kirsten, who probably has the most pages; there's Clark who never actually does anything; there's Miranda who only exists to write a graphic novel that is Kirsten's greatest treasure (and important to another character); Jeevan whose story seems completely unnecessary; and Arthur who dies on page 1, but who ties them all together (and because of the time hopping, shows up repeatedly through the rest of the book). And how is it that all of these people actually meet each other? Well, Jeevan and Clark may not have. It's just too much coincidence. The high point of this novel is that Kincardine, Ontario (where my mother lives), is mentioned four times. Even Alice Munro, who lives in that area, has almost certainly never mentioned Kincardine so many times in one book.
First, let me say that I last read this in a pirated e-copy. Somewhere, I lost my paperback copy, and it's out of print, and the only way I could re-read it was to download an illegal copy from the net.So sue me! Tom Ryan, if you contact me, I'll send you twice your legitimate royalty payment. And the epub I downloaded, which is MUCH better formatted than most books of a similar vintage that I get from legitimate publishing houses. It was a labour of love for somebody, while most of the traditional publishers who put out e-copies of backlists put no effort into it at all.So, to the story. This is an extremely flawed book. For the technical reasons, see Rob Sawyer's review. There's a lot of hand-waving about how a computer actually achieves consciousness. On a more personal level, having been at the University of Waterloo just shortly after the events set there, I'm ticked that he sets UW in Kitchener (an adjacent city) and clearly knows nothing about the area (though I'd say he was in the Math faculty computer center)—London is not six miles south of Kitchener, that would be Cambridge (or maybe, at the time, Preston). London is more like 60 miles west.On the other hand, there are moments that are sublime. When Burgess is first talking about hacking an IBM mainframe, his roommate says it can't be done.“Have you ever tried?” Gregory asked“No. And I don't have to try to know that I can't fly without an airplane.”That's brilliant, as it reflects the belief, less than a century earlier, that heavier-than-air flight was equally impossible.Sawyer's own books about emerging consciousness in a networked computer ([b:WWW: Wake 4418395 WWW Wake (WWW, #1) Robert J. Sawyer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440336390s/4418395.jpg 4466559] & sequels) are technically better, but this tale is absolutely seminal! For all its faults, it's the progenitor of the computer-gains-consciousness-takes-control-of-the world genre. Other authors had had intelligent computers, but Ryan was the one who actually tried to explain how it could happen (he was wrong, but at least he tried!). Programming an AI is far more difficult than Ryan would have us believe (which is why there still isn't one, 40 years later), but at the time of writing it sounded believable. I suspect Ryan never got as far in Computer Science as Moore's Law, because he just doesn't think nearly big enough. P-1 is planning a new crystalline storage medium that can contain 4 billion “addresses” in a 150mm x 400mm cylinder. Even assuming an address points to a 64-bit word, that would only be 256GB of memory. In something that's actually much larger than my current laptop, which in one tiny portion of the entire machine has a terabyte hard drive.But even knowing how badly he got some things wrong, and cringing at his American understanding of Canadian geography, the scope of his vision, and the things he got right make this utterly compelling. And he leaves us completely hanging! These days (or even a few years earlier with [b:Colossus 1797953 Colossus D.F. Jones https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1254074903s/1797953.jpg 1797049]) there'd be a trilogy. A must read!
This was my second read. I intended to just skim it while my friends read it as a group, but I got pulled in.
The writing is amazing, his descriptions lyrical, and the science is mostly believable.
But while there are a few bits of seriously suspect science, that doesn't bother me nearly as much as the complete lack of closure at the end of the story. What was it all about? What did the criminals really hope to gain? What IS the thing they're looking for (we are never told!)
It was 370 pages of tension, excitement and intimately feeling in the place of the protagonist (despite the fact that we're not even the same sex), and 20 pages of WTF?
On the one hand, an allegory about genocide, but probably particularly aimed at French complicity in the Nazi's genocide of WW II; on the other reminiscent of Swift's [b: Modest Proposal 5206937 A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348659670s/5206937.jpg 6627040], though where Swift encourages the eating of children, it's the eating of children that triggers the termination of this experiment.It's interesting more for the medical SF angle than the social satire, because the satire is confused. What is he satirizing? Medical experiments? Programs for the poor that do not feed them? Short-sighted politicians? Anyway, I've already spent more time writing this review than reading the story. He's not up to either Swift's, or his own, standards in this.
I am totally pissed off that GR thinks it's alright to create a fake book to make a point, when two years ago they deleted every single review they found that they didn't feel was strictly a review of a REAL BOOK.
And then if, as a GR librarian, you do what you SHOULD do with such a ‘book', and mark it “NOT A BOOK”, they threaten your librarian status.
I bought this book solely based on it's title—I think that authors often don't really think hard enough about titles, and this one is BRILLIANT! Too bad that Harper, when they published an edition, felt they should change the title to the totally boring (and oft-used) Year of the Tiger.
The story doesn't quite add up to that brilliance, but it's a solid thriller set in China, and actually more believable than Ridley Pearson's somewhat similar [b: The Risk Agent|13367202|The Risk Agent (Risk Agent, #1)|Ridley Pearson|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388268049s/13367202.jpg|18164589].
“Ancillary Mercy is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy that began with Ancillary Justice” says the blurb.
Well, that's not true. There's nothing stunning here if you've read the first two books, and there's not even a lot of action, compared to the first two, but there's plenty to love anyway. There's more character development, and Breq is finally showing some maturity after a mere 2000 years of life.
For such a short book, it's really difficult. The characters are all unstable—Constance is neurotic; Julian has dementia; Charles is just a humungous dork and a gold-digger; there are no ‘villagers', only a mob. The narrator Mary Katherine, or Merricat, is the only one who may not be actually mentally unhinged, and that only because pyschopathy and it's even darker cousin, narcissism, are often not considered mental illnesses.
So by the time I was halfway in, and cousin Charles appeared, and everything seemed to be heading in a perfectly predictable (and ugly) fashion, I had to take a half-day off and read something light and mindless.
Somehow, it's hard not to like Merricat, even though she's perfectly awful, and at the end you even feel a little sympathy for the vile Charles. On the other hand, Constance is probably an absolutely lovely person, and it's hard to feel much for her at all.
I wouldn't call this ‘horror', but it's certainly horrible, and not something I'd choose to read on my own, but my friends were reading it! My mother always said “would you jump off a bridge if all your friends were doing it?” (btw, Mum, the answer's yes...)
I was reading [b:We Have Always Lived in the Castle 89724 We Have Always Lived in the Castle Shirley Jackson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415357189s/89724.jpg 847007], but around the middle of the novella, it all got so predictable and depressing, so I put it down and whipped through this in about five hours, instead. It's more than four times as long, but ten times easier to read!Cas Russell is an odd kind of superhero—a math savant. In the first book of the series, she's friendless and essentially conscienceless, but by this point Arthur and Checker have become her friends (not through any fault of hers, Cas is quick to point out), and Arthur has also become her conscience. Now, she's taking jobs by choosing the ones that Arthur would most approve of—well, really, the ones he would leastdisapprove of.It's a non-stop race through the worlds of corporate espionage and the LA Mafia, with everything just a shade short of believability, but whipping by so fast you have no time to question it.
Orokafor writes tales about Earth-people who are shamelessly not white, and aliens who are equally not white. So much SF makes aliens seem just like furrier (or scalier...) European colonizers.
But the vast majority of the people of our planet are not of European (or even majority-European) descent, and it's so refreshing to find an author (and to find her being published...) who not only doesn't need to place her characters in a white-dominated landscape, but can make that landscape seem irrelevant. There's no tokenism here—these characters are all Nigerian (except Anthony, who's from Ghana, and the aliens who look like Nigerians).
Adaora, Anthony, and Agu are all human, but they all have histories they don't talk about. Adaora's husband thinks she's a witch. Do the alien's seek these people out because they're different, or are they different because the alien's have already touched them? It's never clear, but these three people must somehow accept the things that would make them less than human in the eyes of their neighbours in order to become a bridge between the aliens who have arrived in Lagos and the people—and perhaps gods—who have always lived there. In the process, or course, they learn a great deal about humanity.
I like the idea of a collection focusing on the other side of colonialism, especially when so much of SF is completely about colonizing. But I'm not sure that this collection accomplished what its editors set out to show. On the other hand, there's some marvellous stuff in here, anyway.
“What Really Happened in Ficandula” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is very good, but depressing. Are we really doomed to always repeat our history? Is this not just the colonized becoming the colonizers?
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's “Them Ships” isn't so much a tale of colonialism as poverty.
J.Y. Yang's “Old Domes”, a story of some future-ish Singapore deftly weaves an Eastern mysticism into Western SF, and is the best example, to me, demonstrating the beauty that can come from the intersection of cultures.
“Droplet”, by Rahul Kankia, makes it difficult to know who are the colonizers and who are the colonized. Subhir's parents and grandparents—Americans of Indian descent—are driven out of America, due to racism: or so Subhir believes. When he returns to the US, India is the colonizer, America is greatly reduced, and the truth turns out to be far more complex.