Joe Martin
I really enjoyed [b:The Way of Shadows|3227063|The Way of Shadows (Night Angel, #1)|Brent Weeks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327881551s/3227063.jpg|3261241], the first book in this series. I thought it was exciting, fast paced, and a real page turner. I did not feel the same way about this book.
I wish I'd been taking notes as I read this book. There were several instances where the dialog was downright pedestrian or things were awkwardly phrased. The pacing felt odd in places. There was a lot less action and a lot more moping around and traveling from place to place. This definitely was not a page turner.
I'm hoping this was just a sophomore slump or a middle book muddle. I'll be disappointed if [b:The Way of Shadows|3227063|The Way of Shadows (Night Angel, #1)|Brent Weeks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327881551s/3227063.jpg|3261241] was the highpoint of this series.
I put this book on my reading list for 2015 because Brandon Sanderson described Weeks' writing as "epic fantasy novels that read with the pacing of a thriller". After reading this novel, I can confirm that Sanderson wasn't exaggerating. This book is an absolute page turner, even as Weeks paints a world worthy of epic fantasy.
And it's a gritty, dark, painful world. Pain, viciousness, and brutality are everywhere. Don't spend too much time hoping for things to come up roses for our heroes—no one will make it to the end of the story uninjured. Azoth is a 10-year old member of a criminal street guild, barely able to survive. He wants to become a “wetboy” (an assassin with magical Talent) because he's tired of being afraid and powerless; he wants the security that kind of power can give him. His desired mentor and teacher is Durzo Blint, the best wetboy in Cenaria.
This is the story of how Azoth becomes Kylar Stern, the wetboy that he always wanted to be. He has to make painful decisions about whether or not to have friends and how to protect the people that he cares about, in spite of trying not to care.
This isn't a great story. But it's a good story that's written very well. I read it to see if Weeks was an author that I wanted to follow closely. Given that I read a 659 page novel in 3 days, I think I've got my answer. I'm already looking forward to the next novel in the Night Angel series.
Time travel stories are my favorite sub-genre of science fiction. I've always loved the idea of visiting other times. I'd like to experience history directly. I'd love to sit in the audience for the first performance of Handel's Messiah or one of Beethoven's symphonies. I'd love to experience Teddy Roosevelt's charisma for myself. What was imperial Rome like, at the height of its power?
I'd also like to experience the planet as it existed in the past. I'd love to see what it would be like to walk through the forests that used to sit where Buffalo now stands. What would it be like to hear Niagara Falls from a distance and walk up to it through the trees? What did the Great American Plains really look like, during the pioneer days?
In this collection, Robert Silverberg provides three time travel stories that touch on these elements. I've read a lot of time travel stories and these three are all worthy of a place in my personal top ten list.
Hawksbill Station is the perfect prison for political dissidents. Instead of spending money to guard them or courting political dissent by executing them, just exile them to the past instead. In this case, the late Cambrian era. The only form of life is trilobites; everything else is rock and water. There are no trees, no grasses, no ferns, no birds, no fish, no mammals, nothing. There's nowhere for the prisoners to escape to and no way they can interfere with history, to change the world of their past.
When I first read this story, I fell in love with Silverberg's description of the bleakness of the late Cambrian era. It's haunting, in the best possible way, and makes me excited about that part of the Milwaukee Public Museum's pre-history exhibit in a way that probably mystifies everyone else.
But the setting is almost the least important part of this story. “Hawksbill Station” is really a character study of Jimmy Barrett, the King of Hawksbill Station. He was a reluctant revolutionary long before he was a political prisoner. Silverberg invites us into his life, both at the beginning and end. It's a moving story where the time travel, as fascinating as it is, is the least important part of the story.
This is a more comic story. Judson Daniel Elliot III is a bored young man, who allows himself to be talked into a job as a Time Courier, a tour guide of the past, because of his love for historic Byzantium. A job as a Time Courier gives him the opportunity to criss-cross Byzantium's history, seeing all of the great events, people, and places.
Don't picture the Time Couriers as lantern jawed heroes, in love with the past and devoted to their duty. You should picture them more like a group of clock punchers, more dedicated to having fun on the job than to the job itself. And, well, with all of history to play around in, hijinks will ensue. Things will go wrong, and the police (the Time Police) may get called.
As is typical with Silverberg, the story revolves more around the characters than around the gizmos. It's a human story, but also a bit of a farce as we get to witness how human nature mixed with time travel can be a recipe for trouble.
Two identical twins: Eric and Sean Gabrielson are the subjects of the very first human experiment in time travel. They'll start their journeys through time together, from the same platform. They'll both move through time, like a pendulum that's gradually increasing its swing. First Eric will move five minutes back while Sean moves 5 minutes forward. Then Eric will move 50 minutes forward (from the fixed reference point), while Sean moves 50 minutes backwards. They'll continue alternating swings through time, each swing taking them an order of magnitude further into the past and future.
That's the hook. Silverberg uses it to paint one vignette after another of both humanity's past and humanity's future. With the twins, we see an inauguration parade for President Harding, have an encounter with neanderthals, and get to experience the majestic grandeur of California's redwood forests, centuries before they were overrun by development and tourism.
This is another story, like “Hawksbill Station”, that I'll love just for its beautiful descriptions of lost worlds. I'll never be able to see them in person, but Silverberg has a genius for helping me to see them in my imagination.
Haden's Syndrome is a flu-like virus with a nasty side effect: one percent of its victims experience “lock in”. They're fully awake and aware but they're completely cut off from control of their own bodies. They can no longer speak or move. It is, essentially, a conscious coma.
A whole panoply of technologies were created in reaction to the disease. The locked in are able to interact with the physical world through the use of cybernetic bodies called “threeps”. (In homage to C-3PO.) They're also able to control the bodies of volunteer Integrators, through neural links.
Lock In is the story of FBI agent Chris Shane's first week on the job. It's a nasty first week, as his first case involves the murders of multiple “Hadens” and the suicides of multiple Integrators. As he investigates, he begins to see a common thread weaving everything together.
That grand tapestry is what ruined the book for me. (This is where I spoil the mystery.) The criminal mastermind is that most likely, most stereotypical, of suspects: the corporate billionaire. One man, seeing harsh times ahead as his government subsidies come to an end, decides to keep the profits flowing by any means necessary.
The billionaire's plan involves committing multiple murders, blowing up a competitor's research facility, manipulating stock prices to crash multiple competitors, and then buying everyone up to create a near-monopoly. Because, greed. Everyone knows the rich are greedy and will doing anything to keep the wealth coming. Murder and stock market manipulation are common tools of the wealthy elite. One frequently sees it in the news headlines.
I like the set up Scalzi created for this novel. I though Haden's Syndrome was creative and the various tech created to help the Hadens offered a lot of storytelling potential. But Scalzi decided to waste all of that on a murder mystery with an unintelligent plot.
This is a plot that I expect from the worst of the mass-market action thrillers. This story is science fiction only in that the hero has a robo-body and the villain controls people through neural links rather than blackmail. Without those elements, it's just another by the numbers murder thriller. Boring.
This was certainly one of the odder short story collections that I've ever read.
The centerpiece was the Culture novella “State of the Art”. I rate that 3/5 stars. The concept was good and it had the literary shadings that I expect from Banks. But I didn't like the fact that the story took place on Earth of the 1960s. I don't quite get how the Culture can be a far future humanity and yet take place at the same time as Earth's recent past. That felt really out of place.
The rest of the stories: wow. I think surreal is the best word to describe them. “Odd Attachment” is the one that will stick with me the longest for its sheer horrific alien banality.
In my opinion, don't come for “State of the Art” but do come for everything else in the collection. It's SF, but it's SF of a rarely seen sort.
I liked this a little bit more than I liked [b:Slanted Jack 18919272 Slanted Jack (Jon and Lobo) Van Name, Mark L. https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385257618s/18919272.jpg 26925411], the previous book in the series. I didn't love it, but I liked it just enough to continue reading in the series. The story was okay, but I'm still don't find all of the character interactions to be believable and realistic.
This article was a collection of short snippets of different individual recollections. The anecdotes were too short, by themselves, to be that interesting. Many of them were lacking the context necessary to turn them into stories and the author made no effort to supply that missing context and weave the anecdotes into a story. I can't recommend this.
A data-driven look at what really mattered in the 2012 election. Given that both candidates ran very good campaigns, it boiled down to “the economy, stupid”. Economic conditions had been slowly improving throughout the entirety of President Obama's time in office. Things weren't fantastic, but they were slowly, continually, getting better. That turned out to be just good enough to keep voters happy with the President they had, propelling Mr. Obama to reelection.
Peter Baker wrote a surprisingly even handed account of the Bush presidency. I say “surprisingly” because I was familiar with the antagonism between the New York Times and the Bush White House. I wasn't sure what to expect from a book written by a Times reporter. What I got was a well researched, balanced look at how Bush ran the White House and how decisions were made.
Baker starts the book with a back-and-forth look at Bush's and Cheney's early careers. He covers their respective college years, then moves on to their political years. He covers Cheney's years in Congress and in the Ford White House. He covers Bush's political efforts on behalf of his father, his time with the Rangers baseball team, and his time in the Texas governor's office. He focuses the majority of the book, of course, on their partnership while running for office and while in office.
The book wasn't just about the politics of the White House. Baker relates some of the interactions between Bush and his staff. Bush, like most Presidents, had many ways to torment his staff. Visits to the ranch at Crawford provided unique opportunities.
[H]e loved clearing brush, of which there seemed to be endless supplies.
Aides would be recruited to join the brush clearing and judged on their prowess and endurance in the sweltering heat. Stephen Hadley, the new national security adviser, was teased for showing up in tasseled loafers. (In fact, they were leather shoes with laces, but the loafers legend stuck.) “There was like a hierarchy that was completely different from any other hierarchy,” said Steve Atkiss, the president's trip director who traveled regularly with him. “When you start, your job is basically, after someone cuts down a tree, to drag it out of there and put it wherever it is going to go. Then, if you really did good at that, the next level up was you could be in charge of making a pile of all the things that had been dragged over so that it burned well when you lit it on fire. If you were really good at that, you might be able to, one day, get to use a chain saw.”
John Yoo was now gone, and a new crop of lawyers had arrived at the Justice Department, only to be shocked at what they found. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor who had taken over as head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, thought some of the opinions he had inherited were poorly reasoned and unsustainable.
And yet to blame or credit Cheney for the president's decisions is to underestimate Bush. “Bush had a little bit of Eisenhower in him,” said Wayne Berman, “in that he didn't mind if people thought that he was the sort of guy who was easily manipulated because it also meant that his opponents underestimated him and the people around him thought they were having more influence than they really were. And he used that always to his advantage.” While Cheney clearly influenced him in the early years, none of scores of aides, friends, and relatives interviewed after the White House years recalled Bush ever asserting that the vice president talked him into doing something he otherwise would not have done.
Bush, in the end, was the Decider. His successes and his failures through all the days of fire were his own. “He's his own man,” said Joe O'Neill, his lifelong friend. “He's got the mistakes to prove it, as we always say. He was his own man.”
Overall, I really liked the story. But, it was mainly about the protagonist's ability to play a specific game and how that game changed him. Given that, I really feel that the book should have given more details about the game's mechanics. It didn't have to be exhaustive detail, but it would have been nice to have had more than vague descriptions.
This is the second 2014 Hugo nominee that I'm reading, before voting.About three months ago, I listened to an EconTalk podcast episode about autoimmune disease and parasites. Russ Roberts, the host, interviewed Moises Velasquez-Manoff about his book, [b:An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases 13259821 An Epidemic of Absence A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases Moises Velasquez-Manoff https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339809226s/13259821.jpg 18461324].Roberts and Velasquez-Manoff discussed why allergies and autoimmune diseases have been increasing over the last 50 years. Epidemiologists have recently theorized that these diseases are increasing because of an overly hygienic environment that's causing a decrease in various microbes and parasites. They've also theorized that we could reverse the recent trend by reintroducing parasites into our bodies. Several groups are running FDA trials to test that theory.This is a theory that I've read about a handful of times in the past 2 years. I was ecstatic when I discovered, a few pages into Parasite, that the story explored this very idea. It takes place in our near future.In 2016, SymboGen gained FDA approval to sell a genetically engineered parasite—based on a tapeworm—called the Intestinal Bodyguard™. Patients ingested the parasites in pill form. From there, they grew in the intestines and cured asthma, allergies, and diabetes. They also secrete natural birth control and prescription medications on a regular basis, freeing patients from the tedium of managing schedules for different drugs. They became the universal miracle cure that humanity had been looking for.Our narrator, Sally Mitchell, had an implanted Intestinal Bodyguard™ when she suffered a seizure while driving and crashed head-on into a bus. Ten days later, her doctors declared her brain dead and tried to persuade her family to let her body die. Then she woke up. Her memory was completely gone but, somehow, she'd lived through the brain trauma that should have been fatal.The story proper begins 6 years after Sally's accident, in 2027. SymboGen has been paying for her medical care for the past 6 years, investigating how her parasite saved her life. Sally (now preferring to be called “Sal”) has built a new life and just wants to be free of SymboGen, psychologists, and the constant medical examinations. That's when the “sleeping sickness” starts, quickly growing into an epidemic. It appears to be linked to the Intestinal Bodyguards™ and as the world's most famous survivor, Sal is right in the middle of the chaos.Mira Grant's story captivated me. I read well-nigh the entire thing in less than 24 hours. I could not put it down or—once put down—resist taking it up and devouring it in large chunks. The pacing and tension were superb, effortlessly driving the story forward.Best of all, this story was true speculative fiction. Mira Grant took an on-going scientific debate, ran it on fast-forward a few years, and then wrote a compelling story about one possible implication of pursuing the science. It's been a while since I've read speculative fiction and I hadn't realized how much I'd missed the excitement of thinking through the implications of scientific discoveries.Mira Grant's story isn't perfect. The biggest flaw is that too many of the characters are one-dimensional. Sal Mitchell, our narrator, is fully realized. Her motivations and conflicts are believable and understandable. Unfortunately, few of the people around her are similarly well fleshed out.Dr. Steven Banks, one of the putative villains, is mostly a caricature of the evil profit-grubbing corporate scientist. Sally's parents and sister are insubstantial. Her boyfriend is too, although to a lesser degree. Some of this is understandable, as Sally is the narrator and has all of six years of life experience. It's understandable that she would feel distant from her family and wouldn't know them intimately. Given her expressed desire to learn though, the story's lack of strong secondary characters is a weakness.Don't let that weakness dissuade you from reading Parasite. It's an intriguing scientific idea, woven into a thriller of a horror story. It's easy to see why it was nominated for a Hugo award.
This is the first of the books that I'm reading before voting for the Hugo awards. I'm ambivalent about this book. I don't hate it but I don't love it either. It has an interesting premise, but it never emotionally grabbed me.
The central character, the narrator, is Justice of Toren, the AI for a ship, a giant troop carrier. She is the ship. She also operates hundreds of human bodies, as her ancillaries. The ancillaries are the bodies of criminals and rebels, now transformed through implants into extensions of the Justice of Toren. (Punishing someone by making her an ancillary is equivalent to punishment by execution.)
Ann Leckie gives the reader a good idea of what it would be like to be an individual that's capable of being in multiple places at once, doing many different things. It's interesting to think about what it would be like to be able to multitask to that degree and to handle multiple different situations and tasks simultaneously. We get to experience that often, throughout the book.
SpoilerAncillary Justice also raises the question of what it means to be of two minds about something. We often talk of being internally conflicted, of disagreeing with ourselves, or of being at war with ourself. Would that look any different if you had multiple bodies? What kind of effect would that have on the world around you?
Finally, the book plays around with gender. The Justice of Toren has been operational for thousands of years. She's seen many different cultures—and many different versions of the same culture—over the years. Gender markers are constantly changing: long hair or short, make-up or not, style of clothing, type of clothing, behaviors. As a result, she can never tell which gender an individual is and defaults to using the feminine pronoun for everyone unless forced to do otherwise.
Every character in the book is referred to as “she” or “her”, regardless of actual gender. I finished the novel and I still don't know the gender of some of the characters. Even when I could figure it out, the constant repetition of the feminine pronoun made it hard to remember. It played with your head, in the best possible way.
This was a book with a lot of good ideas. On paper, I should love it. But I didn't and I never felt like I just couldn't wait to get back to it. I was disappointed by that.
Update (20 September 2014): I'm lowering my review to 2 stars. This was prompted by reading Nathaniel's review of this book.
SpoilerThe entire story is motivated by basically two decisions the protagonist makes, neither of which make the least bit of sense. First, she decides to assassinate someone who has literally thousands of bodies / incarnations spread out over a good chunk of the galaxy using—I kid you not—a handgun. She spends 20 years tracking down the special handgun so that she can go kill this person knowing full well that, while she'll probably be able to kill one or two bodies, it will have no significance whatsoever.
Quite often, Jim Butcher uses a Dresden Files novel to either introduce a specific type of supernatural character or tell a specific type of story. In Skin Game, Butcher tells a heist story.
Harry Dresden's spent the last year living on his magical island, Demonreach. He's been forced to stay there because of the magical parasite in his brain. It's been giving him incapacitating headaches and will soon kill him, as it continues to grow. Demonreach's caretaker has been suppressing the parasite. But that's only a partial solution and it looks like Dresden has only a few days left before the parasite finally rips free, killing him.
That's when Mab, the Winter Queen, shows up offering Dresden a deal. She'll help him deal with the parasite. But first she's going to use him (as the Winter Knight) to pay off a favor that she owes Anduriel, the Fallen angel possessing Nicodemus Archleone. Dresden has to help Nick, one of his worst enemies, rob the vault of Hades, Lord of the Underworld.
Mab will kill Harry if he doesn't follow her orders and help Nicodemus. Nick will try to kill Harry as soon as he doesn't have a use for him any more. And Hades will kill them all, if he discovers their plan to rob him. Whichever way you look at it, Harry's going to have a hard time saving his skin and living with himself afterwards.
If you're already a fan of the Dresden Files, you should definitely read Skin Game. Butcher's added another solid story to the series. The humor and one-liners are there. So is Dresden's self-doubt and fear of turning into a monster. Dresden's reactions and fears are very realistic, especially his feelings regarding the safety of his friends and family.
Best of all, Butcher succeeds at making his world feel real. This story is impacted by most of the previous stories in the series. Dresden's decisions continue to have rippling consequences and previously minor characters return to become focal characters. Everything is built on what came before it, in a way that feels natural and inevitable.
You could read this novel as a standalone story but it is very much richer when read in the context of the entire series. Butcher does a great job of rewarding his fans for being fans and for being invested in the series.
Patricia is 88 or 89 years old. She's living in a nursing home. Her nurses make daily notations on her chart: confused, less confused, very confused.
She gets most confused when she thinks about her children: does she have four or three? Did she have five stillbirths or none? When Cathy comes to visit, she knows Cathy is one of her four children. But when Philip comes to visit, she knows Philip is one of her three children.
Her memories of the last 60 years are all doubled. There are the memories of the life where she married Mark, had four children, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the moon has a research base. Then there are the memories of the life when she didn't marry Mark, had three children, President Kennedy was involved in a nuclear missle exchange, and the moon has an armed military base.
Her memories of her early life aren't doubled. She clearly remembers growing up in Twickenham and attending Oxford. She'd made one crucial choice. One day, in a little phone box in a corridor in The Pines, and Mark had said that she would have to marry him, now or never.
Patricia's current, confused, state forms the framing story for the novel. My Real Children starts and ends at the conclusion of Patricia's life. For the rest, Jo Walton transports us back in time to 1933, when Patsy Cowan was 7 years old. She then moves us through her life to the fateful moment in 1949 when Mark Anston demanded that Patricia marry him “now or never”.
From that point on, the story alternates between the life in which Patricia said “yes” to Mark and the life in which she said “no” to him. One chapter will take us through a short period of Tricia's life and the next will take us through the corresponding period in Pat's life. Alternating back and forth, through the years, we saw how her decision rippled through her life, creating two very different people.
Realistically, I'm not convinced that this book qualifies as science fiction. There's the fact that the story covers two alternate views of one life and that Patricia can remember both sets of personal histories. And there's the fact that both sets of histories contain a moon base. But that's it. There's nothing in there that's beyond current science and technology. There are no machines or gadgets that created Patricia's two lives or allow her to step between them. It is, quite simply, a story about one person and the two possible paths that her life could have taken.
I enjoyed this book very much. We often talk about how decisions, such as marriage, can change the course of a person's life. It's one thing to talk about that, in a casual way. It's another thing to see it lived out, over the course of one woman's life. I found the story to be moving and I loved the way that Jo Walton set it up so that neither life was clearly “better” than the other. They were different, but each had its own joys and sorrows.
The book ends on a poignant note, reminding us that both lives mattered. At the very end, Patricia thinks back to the crucial moment and tries to decide which life she'd pick, if she could pick just one.
Spoiler
She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn't meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important. She bounced a little on her strongly arched young feet. She felt again the Bakelite of the receiver in her hand and heard Mark's voice in her ear. “Now or never!”
Now or never, Trish or Pat, peace or war, loneliness or love?
She wouldn't have been the person her life had made her if she could have made any other answer.
Three years ago, Er Thom yos'Galan met and had a torrid relationship with Anne Davis. He hasn't seen her since and has spent the last three years acting as a Pilot for Clan Korval. Duty requires that he take a wife and produce an heir for yos'Galan. But he hasn't been interested in, or attracted to, any woman since Anne Davis.
In desperation, he decides to visit her one last time. He intends to declare his love (verbalizing it for the first time) and then return home. Once home, the Healers will dim his memories and he'll be able to move forward, as a dutiful son to the clan.
His good intentions quickly go awry and he's drawn right back into the torrent of emotion that he never left behind. Anne, it transpires, is still equally enthralled with him. She loves him too much to allow her love to stand between him and Duty. He loves her too much to allow Duty to take her from him without a fight.
The real problem is the fact that he's Liaden and she's Terran. He thinks he understands Terran culture and mores. And she, a professor of Comparative Linguistics, think she understands him and Liaden Culture. And, yet, they spend the entire novel never quite communicating on the same level. They're constantly misunderstanding each other and those misunderstandings threaten to tear them apart.
This is a romantic tale, almost a comedy of manners. At times, it put me very much in mind of the conflicts central to all Jane Austen novels. The real conflict is between two lovers who struggle to transcend two very different Cultures and two different conceptions of Duty. In the end, of course, they do. But the journey is the interesting part. This is another enjoyable story in the Liaden Universe.
Read this review on my blog.