Derek
This is so not the kind of story I love.
I love epic fantasy and space opera and technological thrillers. As one of my favorite reviewers says, a book needs BOOM! And yet this quiet character study moved me. But why is it a novella? I want to know more about Kit, and Rasali, and the empire, and Mist, and ... MORE!
I enjoyed the story, but the writing style was much too awkward. There are two primary characters, Pyetr and Sasha, and the point of view keeps switching between the two without warning, which made me take far too long to read it.
Also, from what I know of Russian mythological creatures, Cherryh's creatures are just too nice! Her rusalka, at her worst, seems like she's just a girl who made a mistake and regrets it. Never mind that she's destroyed a forest the size of a mid-sized country.
I'm so not a fan of short stories, that I have to have somebody shove them down my throat. In this case it was Michele, who grabbed me by the (figurative) lapel and shouted “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS! NOW!!” OK, Michele. I've read it! It was pretty darn good too. All of the stories are thought-provoking, from the opening Tower of Babylon which is a simple, fun, fantasy, or Exhalation in which a race of undying pneumatic-powered robots are faced with entropy; to the title story, in which a linguist finds her world-view forever changed by learning the language of an alien race, and the heart-rending final story The Lifecycle of Software Objects. Particularly that one. I know a lot about the lifecycle of software objects, but none of the software objects I've ever worked with have been quite as endearing as Chiang's digients. I'm actually quite pleased that there's no resolution, and Ana simply continues “...as best she can, the business of living.” I found Chiang's stories a little reminiscent of [a:Greg Egan 32699 Greg Egan https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1375595103p2/32699.jpg], though the science is not quite as likely to induce brain pain. Still, Divide by Zero is the purest of science. The story could only work with a pure mathematician at its centre. When the mathematician finds a proof that Arithmetic is not consistent (ie, that 1=2 or any other number you choose), she believes that it's the end of the world. Her husband says “How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds are't suddenly going to collapse from this realization.” And he's absolutely right. As it is, physicists are used to working with systems they know are wrong (say, Newtonian mechanics), because it's “good enough” for their purposes. And absolutely nothing's hard and fast in biology. But pure math, even though Gödel long ago proved that some of math is unprovable, is supposed to be the one thing everybody can rely on. On the other hand, I think there's a little sleight of hand going on in Story of your Life, because Fermat's Principle of Least Time absolutely doesn't imply anything about the future being already cast in stone. It doesn't stop the story from being an absolute gem. So, read this. Now. If you don't, I'll set Michele on you.
I know I've read this before, but didn't remember a thing. It's a little slow to begin, it jumps about confusingly, and it definitely seems a little dated (not as much as you might think for a book published in 1972, though). I could live without the lectures on the dangers of specific toxins like lead and PCBs. I'm pretty sure I knew all that stuff when I would have first read it. I think this is supposed to be set in the 1980s - though I can't find why I thought that - which is about the biggest error he's made. Brunner seems to have expected a much faster ecological collapse than has actually happened (I believe it's largely predicated on [b:Silent Spring 27333 Silent Spring Rachel Carson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442353674s/27333.jpg 880193]). Almost everything he's predicted has come true to a degree, though rarely on the scale of this novel. “Freon” cars are laughable (he wouldn't have known of the danger of Freon to the ozone layer) and steam cars as he's envisioned them are an odd way to get zero-emissions - but electric cars are finally coming along, and there's continual work on hydrogen as a fuel (which I personally doubt will ever come to anything). DDT has turned out to be much less of a problem than it could have been, as we pretty well caught it in time, but the importation of agriculturally dangerous pests may well be the thing that causes our apocalypse. I loved the opening, as Decimus Jones is “hunted by wild animals”. It really wasn't until “...it wasn't any of these that got him, but a stingray” that I finally figured out what sort of animals were hunting him. Some things just didn't make sense to me: “Similarly it's a short mental step from the notion of killing plants or insects to the notion of killing animals and people.” No, really it isn't. Or, when Felice and Peg pick up Hugh on their way to the wat in “the tiny back seat of the Hailey, a mere shelf intended to save a couple with a kid from having to change to a bigger car.” The campaign for seatbelts was well under way when he wrote this. I realize this is unrelated to the point of the novel, but it just dates the novel badly to suggest that this would be an approved means of transport in the future. I'm not at all sure how I feel about the inclusion of a USS Wounded Knee. I'm sure there couldn't be a ship with that name today, but I guess it fits with the general tenor of the story. The first time we see Petronella Page, she's interviewing Lucas Quarrey, and says “because not as much attention is paid to scientific matters these days as perhaps ought to be...”. That's certainly true today. The next time we see her, she's interviewing Bamberley, and asking him about his adopted sons, when her director tells her “don't lean on the queer bit too hard.” Shades of Michael Jackson! (Which is NOT to say that I believe Jackson was homosexual or a pedophile, but there were certainly all kinds of insinuation about homosexuality and pedophilia in the media.) When the journalist Peg meets Austin Train, the lone voice in the wilderness warning about the ecological dangers we face, she has to ask his astrological sign. “Aries, aren't you?” “Yes, provided you're asking as a joke.” God, yes! That was the most tedious thing to come out of the 70s. Everybody wanted to know everybody's sign, and barely any of them had a clue about astrology in the first place. Yeah, it's dated, but it's still funny. When General Kaika accuses Americans of deliberately poisoning the people of Noshri, it sounds like the accusations that have come up repeatedly for at least the last decade that various public health programs (particularly polio innoculation, but most recently ebola treatment) have been covers for CIA sterilization programs. But, maybe, in this case, he's right. I'm a little disappointed that Brunner was able to so vividly extrapolate our environmental future, but not nearly so much the treatment of racism and sexism. I'm not trying to suggest that racism has disappeared, but it's not acceptable by the state any more, and it's not as openly acceptable as Brunner portrays it. Similarly, while a number of women are empowered, there are just as many who still seem to be 50s housewives. On the positive side, his portrayal of homosexuality and bisexuality as being of practically no importance, just insignificant personal preferences, is downright modern. On the whole, I loved the story, had trouble with its structure, enjoyed the characters and plot, and despised the pathetic job done by Open Road Media in producing the e-book.
Yes, Jennifer, I enjoyed this book. Is [author:Graham Joyce] the best thing since sliced bread? I'm not so sure.
This is a fascinating story about three boys, a slightly older girl, and a tooth fairy. But nothing really happens. We see the boys grow up and do all the things completely ordinary boys do. Sure Sam has sex with a tooth fairy, and Terry loses his toes to a pike, and there's a murder (well, one that they're directly involved in, plus the murder/suicide of the rest of Terry's family), but what little action there is seems so merely incidental. And then the boys grow up. The end.
And yet, it's still hauntingly beautiful. My wife was much less conflicted about it, and read it in an evening.
If there's a common thread in this collection of short stories, it's “what makes me, me?”
From the opening story, in which a man travels the multiplicity of parallel universes, assassinating the people who cause breaches between them; to a pair of tales involving the use of neural implants to change what a person believes; to the stories about the Ndoli Jewel: a device that everybody has implanted in their skulls at birth, that learns everything they do, and is eventually used to replace the brain; most of the stories say “I think, therefore I am” is not enough. It is “I think, therefore I am me!”
In The Infinite Assassin, the protagonist knows that there are an infinite number of other copies of him in other parallel universes, and comforts himself with the thought that those that are “me” are the ones who succeed in their mission. But what would it mean if he fails?
In Learning to be Me, children taunt each other “are you the jewel, or are you human?” Of course, there's no way to know.
In the title story, a man with moral qualms about killing wants revenge against the man who murdered his wife. So he gets a neural implant that makes him not care about the sanctity of life... Would he be guilty of the act of revenge?
Most of these scenarios have been written before but, of course, Egan gives them a twist you won't see coming. Unlike most of his novels, except for the very first story in the collection, the science isn't particularly hard.
There's been a lot of hype about this book, and I'd have to agree it's all deserved.
From Leckie's handling of gender (about which more than enough has been said — I'll only say it's brilliant), to her “ancillaries” — biological (once-human) appendages of ship-sized artificial intelligences, to technology which is at once both advanced and recognizable, she's created a masterpiece. And it's her debut novel.
I love the characters. The protagonist, Breq (not her real name), is exactly what you'd expect of someone who was once an enormous AI, and is now restricted to a single person's perspective. Seivardin is an aristocratic jerk, forced to learn to fit into a universe that is probably stranger to her than it is to Breq, and even Anaander, ruler of the whole known human universe, has depths one wouldn't expect.
I'm looking forward to book 2.
It's a long while since I read this.
I don't remember the really annoying intro telling me everything that's happened leading up to the events of Downbelow Station. At least I don't remember being annoyed. Perhaps it's that I've read all the other Company Wars novels now, and didn't need the intro.
Otherwise, it's a pretty good novel. At least one reviewer complained about the Downers being an obvious instance of the “noble savage” trope. Well sure, by definition that's exactly what they are. But so what? They're innocents, caught in a war not of their making, and one of the themes explored so well in this book is what happens to those caught by war.
In a world destroyed by nuclear war, the monks of the abbey of St. Leibowitz preserve what they can of the science of the pre-apocalyptic world.
I wondered if this would have as strong an effect on me now as it did 30+ years ago. None of us are who we were 30 years ago, but the changes in me would seem to argue against liking this book. Then I was a devout, born-again & evangelical, Christian. Now... well, not so much! But the monks, and in fact the whole Catholic church of Miller's future, seem to be what Christianity should be, not what it was that turned me away from religion in the first place.
I had quite a few problems with the book. It's an unrelentingly male future, and I really have trouble believing some of the scenarios: the ancient lore that the monks manage to preserve is both too much and too little. They have a great deal of it, yet seem not to have a single complete text book – every single piece of writing is fragmentary. I could understand losing so much that they only had tiny scraps, but when you have store rooms full of sealed casks, some of those casks should contain reference books that provide more than hints of what the ancients knew. I also found the sequence of relearning science to be less than believable. Physics is easy: Newton would have understood Einstein; biology is hard: I rather doubt that any of the believers in “bodily humors” could have understood DNA. And yet, a New Renaissance scientist who is having trouble following Einstein tells us that a biologist is attempting to “create living protoplasm, using only six basic ingredients.”
My quibbles aside, though, the story affected me, if anything, even more than the first time I read it. It's inspiring and, for a time, it made me believe that humanity is really not completely doomed!
I'm very much of two minds about this book.
Let's start with its most egregious fault. We're told that the four, unnamed, characters who make up the expedition into Area X are women. It's a good thing we were told, because you'd certainly never know from the way they're written. I'm seriously considering nominating VanderMeer for the Tiptree award for a work that “expands or explores our understanding of gender. ” On the grounds that VanderMeer appears to be exploring the idea that there is no difference at all between genders.
The story's told in the first person, from the point of view of the expedition's biologist. Many things are said that make no sense at all in a modern context, but don't seem to make a lot of sense even within the fairly limited context of this novel. For instance, it's said of Area X: “In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach.” I can do most of that on my ½ acre property, and the beach is clearly visible from here. So, sure we can assume it's a future where much of that has disappeared, but yet the biologist describes her own field projects which make it clear that the natural environment hasn't been completely destroyed. Is VanderMeer being sloppy, or mysterious?
In another case, the biologist tells us: “I assumed that neither ... was intelligent, in the sense of possessing free will.” I've seen some odd definitions of intelligence before, but what does free will have to do with it? I'm pretty sure my dog has free will, and she's the smartest dog I've ever had, but intelligent?? Not hardly. Conversely, I know people who don't believe that we have free will. Ah, well, maybe they aren't intelligent.
Sometimes, these lapses may be on the part of the obviously unreliable narrator, rather than on the part of the author. When the biologist investigates the lighthouse that has been a focus of many expeditions she writes “I continued to encounter additional signs of violence, the higher I went, but no more bodies.” Which is strange, as I went back and reread the previous pages (twice), and she hadn't encountered any bodies in the first place! She finds a photo of the (presumably) last light-keeper, and says “I'd had experience enough with lighthouse keepers to know one when I saw one.” That's one of the most inane things I've ever read. Even assuming that keepers really do have “a look”, there's no chance she'd have encountered many. I live on a shore littered with lighthouses, and any that are still operating are automated. There are no more keepers!
The biologist was clearly not the most stable person before she entered Area X, and as her expedition leader — who we always knew was using hypnotism on the rest of the team — says “How many of your memories of the world beyond the border [of Area X] are verifiable?”, and so I'm not prepared to say these are errors by the author, but they nagged at me throughout the book, and just generally detracted from my enjoyment.
And yet, for all the frustration, it was a fascinating read, and even though we're nowhere close to understanding what's going on in Area X (this is book one of a trilogy), there was still a sense of closure at the end of the book. But now I'm going to have to read book two, in the hope of finding out what's really going on in Area X.
Ultimately disappointing.
Moon beautifully and, sometimes, heartbreakingly describes what it's like to be autistic (insofar as someone who isn't autistic, can). But we're told all along that while Lou is sometimes baffled by the social interactions of “normal” people, he functions well. When he's offered a chance to “cure” his autism, he initially doesn't want to take it because a “cured” Lou won't be Lou.
So when the procedure works, and the resulting person is decidedly not Lou, he achieves one of his dreams at the cost of another – and I felt we were being told that this was a Good Thing.
I'm firmly on the autism spectrum (well, I imagine we're all somewhere on the spectrum), so I read with special interest Moon's comments about recognizing (or not) people from their faces. I turned my wife onto Orphan Black last year. I knew the plot summary before watching an episode. She didn't, but as soon as she saw the first two clones, she said “it's the same person”. I was astonished, because even knowing that, I couldn't see it (and the first two are the most similar...)
But the insights into autism aren't worth the price of admission, and it took me 2½ months to actually read the book.
I'm stunned. Somewhere in the middle of this story (OK, perhaps more than half-way), Leon just suddenly abandoned it.
Not only did she not make any attempt to solve the original art-theft crime (which I can understand – that's not the sort of case that Commisario Guido Brunetti usually has to solve), but she wrapped up the murder case that developed from it by finding a possible murder weapon. Period. No motive, not even a confirmation that it really was the weapon.
I reserve one-star ratings for books I couldn't finish. In this case, I feel that the author denied me the right to finish it.
I can't believe I wasted so much time on this. I'm not even sure how I got it: I think I must have accidentally dropped a comment in a “free for review” thread. Well, he's getting his review, for what it's worth.
This book can't make up its mind where it wants to go. The cover blurb would suggest it's supposed to be satire, but it fails by not being remotely funny. The opening chapter has three kids get into a serious accident in a hands-free car, but half-way through the book (as far as I can manage) that's failed to show any relevance. So, our hero, Manny feels responsible for the creation of a Facebook-like social network, that ends up being used by a despotic government for the monitoring and control of the populace. But when he finds people who oppose the government, they're so ludicrously incompetent that we can't imagine how they haven't been caught and imprisoned.
The editing is weak (cache is not the same as cachet! Please don't use words you don't know.) My best laugh actually came when one of the Lefteas complained that Manny's software had incorrectly transcribed a voicemail: “...it's time to return to caring agrarian structures which redistribute....” He's incensed that the software used “which” when it should have used “that” — but the author doesn't himself have the slightest clue when to use either, and so invariably uses “that”!
But to my mind, the greatest flaw is one that is fairly common in bad science fiction. Instead of doing research, and basing his technology on advances beyond today's tech, Witherspoon makes up words and, with a bit of handwaving, tries to convince us that it's probable. The same goes for his world-knowledge. When Manny is forced out of his company, he leaves the US and goes to live in remote Western Bhutan, working in an orphanage (Gag me! What a trite trope.) where he learns the language of Tchanchzka. Why make up a language? There are any number of real languages known only to a “small, insulated group of academics” (though, naturally, Manny will encounter one of this small group completely by chance, for no better reason than to further whatever plot there may be).
I picked up this book because I loved the blurb, and it delivered 100% on the story I expected.
It's a great story about “what makes a human, human?” If your body is 50% artificial (or 75% or 25%) are you still you? More importantly, if you aren't still “you” (and I think you probably aren't), are you somebody else who's still a person?
But I was appalled by the lack of editing and basic e-book formatting. I gave up counting the number of places “that” was used when it should have been “which” or “who”, and that was just one of many repeated grammatical errors; and the book had NO table of contents, and no page breaks between chapters — this is stuff that the most basic of ePub software would have created automatically.
4 stars for the story, -1 for almost total lack of editing and -1 for not even making the effort to produce a proper ePub.
A science-fiction retelling of parts of the Norse Eddas (primarily the Volundarkvida from Elder Edda).
Like the first book in this series, it's full of gratuitous violence and sex (and women who are easily manipulated simply by having sex with them). But that's the way the Eddas rock...
I'd give this one 2½ stars if I could.
A science-fiction retelling of parts of the Norse Eddas (primarily the Elder Edda), in some ways this reads like [a:Jack Chalker 127191 Jack L. Chalker https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1207157841p2/127191.jpg] without the twisted sex. Not that there isn't sex, and some of it is as distasteful as you might expect from a Viking Edda. Ultimately, though, the characters are not well developed and the plot is mostly a lot of rather bloodthirsty fighting. Much as I expect of the Elder Edda, though I haven't read it.There's also a whole subplot where one of the gods causes the destruction of one of the ‘planes' (as in Norse mythology, there is the plane where the gods live, the plane where ordinary humans live, and then separate planes for giants and other monsters). This plot must have been snatched straight out of the Edda, because in his afterword, Drake talks about how the Elder Edda is an assemblage of fragments rather than a coherent story, and this is definitely a disjoint fragment. There's no explanation for the god wanting to destroy the plane, or why it even matters.
I'm really quite amazed that, after 29 novels, Alex Delaware can still grip me and pull me into his cases. I'm no fan of psychology and psychiatry: it seems so often to be stumbling in the dark and mumbling incantations, with no more hope of success than witchcraft. And yet, when Kellerman probes into the psyches of Delaware's patients and the criminals that he and Detective Lieutenant Milo Sturgis hunt, it gives me hope that there really are psychologists out there who have a clue. If there's a problem with [b:Killer 7134201 The Postcard Killers James Patterson http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1344271030s/7134201.jpg 7397179], it's that there are rather too many psychopaths involved. I know that these books deal with the worst of the worst, but really — by my count we're talking about at least six of the major characters are psychopaths. And that's if Alex isn't one himself.