Science Fiction / Space Opera: Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinson
ISBN: 9780316098106
Read April 29, 2016

Ugh.  So many mixed feelings.

This one's going to be bullet points, because I'm not coherent enough to offer a spoiler-free review.

• The title and blurbs are all misleading; this tale is actually a (long-winded and pompous) polemic against space travel. The author has an axe to grind, and grind it he does, with tortured metaphors and similes (literally) and scenarios designed to belabor the point. The misdirection and the subsequent lecture vexes. Enormously.
• Despite that, I did enjoy the story (and the three, maybe five if we're being generous, whole characters we get to follow around), but it was not original at all. Chapters and sections and concepts and musings were all lifted wholesale from everywhere: Asimov, Heinlein, Pern, his own old Mars stuff, David Brin's stuff, up to modern movies: I caught bits of 2001, and of Moon, and whole scads of The Martian and whiffs of Interstellar and I'm sure there are more I missed - both books and movies. Anyone even slightly invested in the genre should catch them - they aren't subtle. I got the feeling at those times that he was the authorial equivalent of the student who isn't technically plagiarizing, because he's writing his own content. But he read the wiki article and skimmed the original studies and he isn't actually contributing anything more than a slightly self-important regurgitation of the previously-skimmed material. That also vexes.
• I'm as much on for hard science as anyone, and the sections in The Martian (book and film) where he sciences the shit out of things are enormously satisfying. Likewise I like a good Asimovian philosophical/sociological muse every now and again. The sections here would have been also, if they had not been quiiiiite so long, nor quite so tortured in the specific interests of point-belaboring.  
• World-building. We are roughly 800 years into the future, have permanent settlements of multi-billionaires on Saturn's moons that can fund an interstellar ark for shits and giggles, sea-levels have risen 30some feet, there are the beach-building equivalent of "rewilders" out there as a niche lifestyle (all of which I have serious questions about the implications thereof), but we're still using spray cans of aerosol sunscreen that only last one hour. Seriously? Vexation.
• Dropped plot-points and Checkov's guns lying about like crazy. What do ancient historical genocidal feuding, ship explosions, "secret" passageways through maintenance systems, civil unrest, purposefully-flawed printing instructions, and imperiled colonies all have in common?  Who knows!  Me neither, even after finishing the freaking book!  VEXED.     

Science Fiction: Area X, Jeff Vandermeer

Area X (collected volume of short novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance)
Jeff Vandermeer
ISBN: 9780374261177
Read April 15, 2016

Weird book. The first of the trilogy was divisive: either it was the future of American sci-fi (weird fiction) or it was a self-congratulatory writing exercise by someone with an overactive imagination but no discipline.  The furor died down a bit as the other volumes arrived on schedule, and then built back up a bit with the release of the collected volume.

Plot summary time: (attempting to be spoiler-free)

There is a government research facility called the Southern Reach that is investigating a strange disaster that occurred along a portion of the southern coastline of the country, forming an impermeable border around that section with only a few mysterious terrifying portals.  The area inside the border is called Area X.  These three books are concerned with the people who either work for or are guinea pigs sent on "expeditions" inside Area X.  The government is attempting to understand and control whatever mysterious force is maintaining the border, the portals, and the facility (Southern Reach) is trying to figure out and stop it from doing horrific and unexplained things to all of the truly unfortunate expedition teams that are repeatedly shoved inside the place.

Thoughts on the collected edition:
The first book is absolutely the best, by a notable margin.  We are introduced to a peculiar character beginning a new expedition, with a curious background and emotional hooks to the expedition concept and to the oddly horrible and mundane natural setting of Area X.  The plot goes quickly, the horrible things are interesting and haunting and cleverly written to be evocative rather than overly helpfully descriptive.

The middle book lagged badly.  I wasn't enamored with the new characters we follow there, and thought that the slow progression towards madness was less inevitable and looming and more simply interminable and plodding.  It was also the most "obvious" of the three books, with heavy-handed symbolism and events that were painfully obvious to the reader, while the characters labor on unsuspecting.  Oddly enough, except for sections about two previously minor characters, not necessary to the progression of the story, and one could almost read only the first and last books and not miss too much substance.  In the middle book, we shadow a new director who has been sent out to run the Southern Reach facility after the previous directer was lost to Area X.  He's got problems of his own, and the Reach begins to really impact his sanity as he tries to figure out what is going on (and mostly fails, frustratingly).

The last book is the one that really ended up lighting people on fire.  We follow a set of characters (alternating sections) this time, most from the second book. They return to the actual Area X, and things get promptly weird and a lot more metaphysical and philosophical.  It has been compared to the TV series LOST, where the series appealed to two different types of audiences: the ones who like a good mystery to be solved and "figured out" and completed and put away into little tidy boxes, and the ones who like weird mysterious conspiracy-theory ideas and don't mind the world (or their fiction) to be messy and unexplained in the end.  Like LOST, this book pissed off roughly half the readership - the ones who like things to be tidy and explained.  I read it fairly quickly in a few big chunks, and so was less unhappy with the very open ending, but even I was confused by the massive shifts in tone and focus right at the end.

So.. I don't know if I recommend it or not.  If you like creepity haunting descriptions, and don't mind a meandering plot and unresolved endings, then read the first book by itself and see if it intrigues you.  If you've read Lovecraft or Hodgson's ancient The Night Land, and thought that they were a bit too linear, but nicely desciptive, you're likely going to like this.  If you really want things to be explained and "finished" in any sort of tidy way, don't even bother - you'll just frustrate yourself.

Urban Fantasy/Horror: Rolling in the Deep, Mira Grant

Short and shivery.  Lovecraftian in the good way (creepy and atmospheric, not racist and sexist).

Rolling in the Deep
Mira Grant
ISBN: 9781596067080
Novella: documentary-style horror story featuring creepy mermaids.
Read April 11, 2016

This was SOOOO GOOD!  This is another that I had been sitting on all winter, waiting to feel better and for the weather to brighten up.  I'm so glad I saved it and read it now.  The only better time would have been actually on summer vacation, when you can start worrying about what might be peeking through the ocean murk at your delectable toes in the surf.

Our book is all serious and set in the future (post 2017) and recording a documentary about 'ghost ships' and the great modern mystery of ghost ships is the 2015 vanishing of the good ship Atargatis with all hands (plus a film crew, a slew of desperate/broke scientists, a team of "professional mermaid performers," and our Felicia Day stand-in internet blogging personality) in the waters above the Mariana Trench (the official name is singular - I had to go look it up).  Since we know from the start that something killed all of them, and because the book is billed as a horror on the back, I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything to say that they're all dead by the end.

However, it's the voyage that counts, and we get a lot of mileage from just a few pages as our colorful cast assert themselves and work themselves ever deeper into the mire.  What I found interesting is that save two particularly nasty pieces of work, every character is more or less sympathetic, from the worry-wart captain to the den-mother troupe-leader, even to our dynamic if not particularly bright duo of cameraman and blogger personality.  Unlike a lot of horror, you never really get the sense that this poor crew of people deserves it (again, save two specific exceptions), but at the same time, the novella is so short that the slight glimmers of personality don't do much to quench the heady satisfaction of a good blood-bath.  Grace-notes abound, from the unfortunate attempts at communication via ASL, to the sweet morbid scene between the elder-statesman scientist and the creeping death advancing on him, to the fine line between the natural curiosity and camera-ready smile of our personality.

Really quite fun, in the most creepy way.    

Science Fiction: Last First Snow, Max Gladstone (Craft Sequence)

So far I've read Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, and I'm planning to get to Full Fathom Five this summer as my beach read.  I wanted to hit up Last First Snow because we get to go back in time to Dresediel Lex and Temoc and see Caleb as a child, and of course Elayne in her prime standing up to The King in Red.

Last First Snow (Craft Sequence)
Max Gladstone
ISBN: 9780765379405
Read April 10, 2016
Direct prequel to Two Serpents Rise, featuring Elayne, Temoc (& Caleb), and the King in Red.


This look back in time shows the traumatic events that shaped Caleb's young life and his estrangement with his father Temoc, which forms a huge part of Two Serpents Rise.  As part of a deal to revitalize the inner city, Elayne attempts to broker a deal that would slowly "improve" the warrenlike slums that form the Skittersill through investments and gentrification.  The locals heartily disapprove, and mysterious forces collude to skuttle the deal.  Furthermore, Temoc, the last of the old priests, is attempting to revitalize the worship of the old gods (whichever ones of them hadn't gotten outright killed off in the very recent God Wars) through spiritual rituals instead of human sacrifices.  The King in Red is brash and young (well, newer?  fresher?) and more easily led by spite and pique.  All of this is going to collide in an awful conflict that no one really wants, and no one quite knows who started, or who will gain.

Each of these books marries a weird spiritual or philosophical question with a banking issue, and this one is (no spoilers) concerned with gentrification and ownership of property and insurance fraud, twined around by questions of destiny, of legacy, of loyalty (between people, and between gods, and to ideals or philosophical goals), and of the peculiar responsibility that comes from being a public servant.

The story veers wildly between spiritual banking and physical mayhem, and the ending (even though you know what's coming, having presumably read Two Serpents Rise) is brutal and scouring.  I started this book way back in the fall last year, and put it down right before the finale due to ill health, and I'm glad that I did.  I'm much happier reading about terrible and horrible events in the bright light of a new spring than in the faded dead light of November.  I'm also glad to have had a while to disconnect from the characters, or the torment and anguish they face (especially Temoc) would have been too much for me to enjoy the story.

I was reminded again how much I like this conceit of soul-stuff as the basis of commerce, and of gods and magic as fundamentally financial and transactional in nature.  It's such a weird perfect system and the world is so like our own but skewed in so many little weird ways.  In this book, a character expends their entire stock of personal soul in a wild taxi ride, then pops up to an ATM in a hotel lobby and withdraws a fresh stock from a personal bank account to refill their soul and stay alive.  It's so wild and exotic, but so mundane and familiar.    

2015 Review Round-Up: Science Fiction: Star Wars Aftermath, Chuck Wendig

Star Wars: Aftermath (book 1)
Chuck Wendig
ISBN: 9780345511621
Mostly focused on a rag-tag band of thrown-together allies on a single world under imperial influence, with obviously-required-by-Disney snippets of scenes with major characters or locations.
Read September 2015

This is the first official Disney-licensed Star Wars book after all the rest of them got relegated to the "Legends" trash heap.  Wendig has his work cut out for him, because anything he does is going to contradict or re-write EU canon, well-established in the hearts and minds of rabid fans everywhere.

Despite that hobble, and the obvious contractual obligations mandated by his mouse-eared overlords, Wendig crafts a lovely "Tales of the Mos Eisley Cantina" sort of adventure.  We have a ragged band of tired Rebels, the squabbling and back-biting remains of the Empire, and all sorts of planets and peoples who really don't like or want much to do with either of those institutions.  There's a rocking bounty hunter, a droid with an oversized personality, and a maybe-innocent kid thrown into a situation he's really unprepared for.  Mix all that together with the patented Star Wars brand of intense family issues, a few x-wing and tie-fighter dogfights, a healthy helping of explosions, a dash of squicky alien biology, and you've got yourself a solid textual re-introduction to that galaxy long ago and far away.

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited and annoated by Leslie S. Klinger

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
Editor, annotator: Leslie S. Klinger
Norton & Co
ISBN: 9780871404534
852 pages.
Collection of most of Lovecraft's "Arkham Cycle" stories, from Dagon to the Haunter of the Dark.
Read ALL FREAKING SUMMER

Confession.  I've never actually read any Lovecraft, other than At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu.  This is a fantastic way to have remedied that oversight.  The collection puts them all in roughly chronological order, and only includes the stories that have major elements of what Klinger calls the "Arkham Cycle" of nebulous mythology.  (Interesting discovery that the idea of a coherent and complete "Cthulhu Mythos" was more likely the hero-worshipping tendencies of the young author who oversaw the preservation of Lovecraft's legacy.)

Anyway - if you like Lovecraft, or enjoy a good annotation (don't be ashamed to admit it - I've got my eye on that Laura Ingalls Wilder annotated autobiography Pioneer Girl next...) then this is an excellent collection.  Just be warned.  It's a freaking TOME, and it's heavy and awkward as hell.  This is a desk read if I ever saw one.


Stories: great fun, occasionally a bit overwrought.  Not actually frightening, which was a bit unexpected.  He name-dropped his own mythos and his own stories (and to be fair, the mythos, characters, and stories of other authors) with truly astounding frequency.  Not much for subtlety.

Annotations: usually very interesting, occasionally a bit too densely architectural or local-history-centric.  Really drove home the amount of research (or, alternatively, the really terrifying amount of arcane science and historical knowledge) that went into writing; setting these stories in superbly realistic, everyday, mundane surroundings, up to and including citing recent scientific discoveries and having accurate moon phases referenced ALL THE TIME (I'm giving Tolkien a dirty look here).

Author: (ie Lovecraft) blazing racist asshat with really severe anxiety about progress and "otherness."  Lots of weird fascination with the size and scope of the universe, and of our solar system, and humanity's relative un-importance in relation to that.  Lots of body horror.  Overly concerned with inhuman things coming out of the ocean or from space, from what we now know as the Kuiper Belt.


So, that's Lovecraft for me done.
Now I really want to go out and hit up Klinger's Annotated Sherlock and Annotated Sandman. I'll leave you with a lovely link to a really nice interview by Klinger and Neil Gaiman about Lovecraft and the New Annotated collection.

Fantasy: Short Stories: Old Venus, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Old Venus
Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Stories by Allen M. Steele,
Lavie Tidhar,
Paul McAuley,
Matthew Hughes,
Gwyneth Jones,
Joe Haldeman,
Stephen Leigh,
Eleanor Arnason,
David Brin,
Garth Nix,
Michael Cassutt,
Tobias Bucknell,
Elizabeth Bear,
Joe R. Lansdale,
Mike Resnick,
Ian McDonald
ISBN: 9780345537287
Short Story Collection:
Read June 2015

This collection asks modern fantasy and sf authors to imagine that Venus was actually the
steamy jungle (or water) world it was imagined to be in the pulp sf years, and write new stories set in that mythical world.  And did they ever deliver!

Allen M. Steele's Frogheads takes us to an ocean world where the locals are very fond of chocolate, and the Russian bureaucracy is still shaking off the accumulated inertia of failed communism.  We follow a jaded and taicturn PI searching for the missing son of a rich shipping magnate, and he finds that the son isn't exactly missing.

Lavie Tidhar then gives us the seriously creeptastic and more-than-slightly-Lovecraftian The Drowned Celestial, where our hero is dragooned into a sinister cult, but on the flip side, manages to find a lover!  Bonus points for the Aztec link.

Paul McAuley's Planet of Fear pits a tenacious scientist against a war-mad general who is convinced that the evil Americans are plotting against him.  And of course a science outpost filled with evidence of crazy people, and lots of dead pigs.

We get my favorite story of the collection, Greeves and the Evening Star, from Matthew Hughes.  This was a Jeevsian romp through the most politest of society gentlemen as they attempt to wrap their heads around the amorous advances of a most persuasive and persistent Venusian.  Hughes language nearly killed me in this story, and it's the only one that I've gone back and re-read.  Just as enjoyable the second go round.

A Planet Called Desire, by Gwyneth Jones, was strange.  It had the bones of a white colonial "Crocodile Dundee" sort of story, but the lead driver of the action was an enigmatic scientist mired in regnal red tape, and it resolves itself with a lingering creepy hope.  Extra points for being one of the only stories to delve into teleportaton.

Joe Haldeman gives a short creepy first-contact sort of story set in a truly nasty jungle Venus.  Living Hell is a perfect descriptor of a place where everything seems designed to do horrible damage to humans.  We arrive mid-crisis, as our rescue pilot attempts a desperate rescue of a science outpost that has been cut off due to a giant solar flare.  Our pilot is about to get real close and uncomfortable with the biota.

Bones of Air, Bones of Stone, is Stephen Leigh's contribution to oceanic Venus lore, with a strange tale of a pair of ex-lovers united and driven apart by the urge to conquer the extreme - do what's never been done.  Here, it's the Great Darkness, a huge pit of deep black water that laughs at the Marianas Trench.  Complicating matters is the lore of the locals, who believe that oceanic darkness to be their sacred resting place, and forbid anyone from diving there.

Eleanor Arnason also likes the idea of Communists on Venus, and Ruins gives us a National Geographic meets Washington Post intrigue featuring a team of scientists and explorers, and yes, a National Geographic photography team, complete with "Autonomous Leica.  My model name is AL-26.  My personal name is Margaret, in honor of the twentieth-century photographer Margaret Bourke White.  You may call me Maggie." which juust about killed me.  They're headed into the back country in search of a persistent rumor about ancient ruins, but they discover something a lot more sinister.

The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss by David Brin was my second favorite story, and also the second-best serious tale in the bunch.  I was in awe of this story the whole time I was reading, and I'm still in awe at how well it all flowed.  I can't say much without destroying the impact, but the tale reminds me that even when things go badly wrong, life finds a way.  So very very good.

Garth Nix gives military sf a whirl with By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers, which, really, that title is just about all you need to know about this story.  Oh, and clones.  And military draft rules.  And really colorful personal fungi.

The Sunset of Time didn't quite work well for me.  Michael Cassutt gives it a good shot, and the story is interesting, but the weird parentheticals took too long to be explained, and the characters never quite gelled for me.   Earth has gone all Handmaid's Tale, and deviants are shipped out to exile on sinful Venus.  The natives are prepping for their regularly scheduled End Times, but humanity just keeps tootling along, although our protagonist Jor is beginning to have his concerns.

We follow that one up with a gut-punch of a story, beautifully and hauntingly told by Tobias S. Buckell.  Pale Blue Memories has a light-skinned black member of the exploratory astronaut team narrate the horrible, but oh-so-human consequences of his team's ill-fated Venus landing.  Painful to read, but so very well done.

Elizabeth Bear follows this one up with a tale of a bruised spirit who takes refuge in death-defying exploration - far away from her perfect and overbearing co-worker and lover.  The Heart's Filthy Lesson balances the pain of jealousy with the overwhelming ecstasy of discovering new places and pushing your limits.

The Wizard of the Trees is John Carter of Venus, and god bless Joe R. Lansdale for giving him to us.  Unlike Carter, our hero is plucked from his world by a slimy glowing thing, and chucked into a muddy hot pool.  Things don't get much prettier from there, but Jack Davis, our intrepid US Buffalo Soldier, isn't afraid of a challenge.  He even has a kick-ass princess encounter of his own!

Mike Resnick works from the same basic story structure as Tidhar, but The Godstone of Venus is a lot less Lovecraft and a lot more Indiana Jones.  A merc and his partner are picked up by really strange clients in a run-down bar.  The partner can't read the lady's mind, which is odd, because he can read anything's mind.  They're on a quest for an artifact that can't exist, and things only get weirder from there.

Our last story is, in my opinion, the absolute best.  Ian McDonald delivers to us Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan.  It was absolutely and incontrovertably perfection.  I loved the conceit, I loved the execution, the story was gripping, and the mystery was lovely.  Utterly, utterly delightful.

YA SF, The Cage, Megan Shepherd

The Cage
Megan Shepherd
ISBN: 9780062243058
First in a trilogy:  Cora, along with five other teens, wakes in a crazed warped-spacetime funhouse designed to superficially resemble various cultures and biospheres on Earth.

This was an interesting read, and a really good example of how to have a solid, tight, COMPLETE storyline and climax, while still leaving lots of good space for the remainder of the trilogy.

Cora is a solid character, and she attempts to befriend the others in the menagerie, but their own complacency and the capricious nature of their captors (zookeepers?) keeps her apart from them.  I really liked how Shepherd made Cora fight, mentally and physically, against their captivity, even when her actions weren't helpful or were actively hampered by the rest of the group.  Nice to see a really powerful girl kick back against the "victim" mentality.  

My one major quibble is that the kids are supposedly meant to represent human diversity, yet there are no black characters at all.  There are two darker-skinned girl characters, but one is dead before the story begins (which is unfortunately stereotypical) and the other is introduced as a crazed feral creature (which is also unfortunately stereotypical), and the one male "ethnic" boy is Polynesian or Maori - Pacific Islander, instead of black.  There is one other Asian character, and the remaining three (also the most important three for the majority of the story) are white.  On the one hand, I hate to dock a book because of casting choices, but when the premise is established as specifically as this was, it's a little noticeable when fully half of your "genetically diverse" menagerie is made of lily-white people, when the actual demographics of planet Earth are fundamentally different.  I was left with the stunning realization that if Cora herself had been a black girl, the story would have been in large part the same, but with an even more powerful engine behind her drive to never be a victim.  I have to think that alternate-universe version would be even more amazing.

Still, the book ends with our character group divided and split up, with the promise of more potential characters to add to the mix.  It's scheduled for May next year, and I'm already looking forward to it.

For people who want to read an entire trilogy at once with no waiting, I would highly suggest Shepherd's earlier trilogy; The Madman's Daughter, Her Dark Curiosity, A Cold Legacy.
    

Australian Science Fiction: Spare Parts, Sally Rogers-Davidson

I saw this book described online and I was intensely curious about it.  I'm glad I read it, but I don't know that I would describe it as a good book.  Still, an interesting near-future premise, and a very excellent job of worldbuilding a split society grappling with transgenetics and cyber-life.  

Spare Parts

Sally Rogers-Davidson

ISBN: 9781471095382

Shortlisted for the 1999 Aurealis Award, and a Notable Australian Children's Book for 2000.

Kelty lives in Melbourne, lower Melbourne to be exact.  She's a subby, and lives on the street level of the city, as far from the rich in their beautiful towers as night is from day.  She's been toying with the idea of getting away from her limited prospects by joining the Space Exploration Program; a move that will require her to transplant her mind into a cyborg body capable of withstanding the rigors of space.  Her decision is made more urgent when her best friend is gravely injured in a boiler accident, and Kelty's young, beautiful, virginal body is the only thing she owns of enough value to help pay for her friend's necessary medical treatments.  

This was a delightful premise, and the worldbuilding and sociology was deft and interesting.  The class divisions between the subbies and the Skywalkers were realistic and individual, while the concerns and moral questions raised about the morals of body-shopping and becoming a cyborg were interspersed with more philosophical questions about citizenship and choice and social currencies.

The story itself was not as interesting as it could have been.  Despite being quite frank about sexuality and body image/nakedness (this book would never ever ever fly as a children's book in the prudish  USA), the actual plot is rather disappointingly simplistic and naive.  Kelty sees a problem, sets out to overcome it, and does so.  There aren't really any huge roadblocks or massive difficulties in her way; by contrast, she's constantly helped by the people she meets, and even the "twist" of the story is a benign one.  I would have appreciated a bit more peril, to be quite honest.  

Still, it was interesting and thought-provoking, and I'm glad to have read it.

Science Fiction: Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

Ancillary Sword
Ann Leckie
ISBN: 9780316246651
Sequel to Ancillary Justice, followed (please hurry) by Ancillary Mercy.
Read March 31, 2015

Basically just read my gushy review for the first book in the series, and you'll have it.  I can't really talk about anything without spoiling the story, and a good part of the fun of the story is watching everything unfold.  It's amazing, Leckie is amazing, and I can't believe that the sequel is just as good (but not even remotely the same story) as the original.

Science Fiction: Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
ISBN: 9780316246620
First of Imperial Radch series, followed by Ancillary Sword, and (TBA) Ancillary Mercy
Read January 31, 2015.

I just don't even know where to start.  I've been putting it off because I've wanted to get to the sequel before I wrote this, but that's not working out so well (my brain is weird and life has been busy).

It's amazing.  The concepts are fantastic, the writing is superb, and the characters, especially our lead, are just phenomenal.  Read it and be inspired.  I'll come back later with an actual spoilery review (I really can't see any other way to do it) and more gushing, but this is really all I've got right now.  It was just so very very good to read and it's even more fun thinking about it these past few weeks - parsing through all the implications and possibilities of that world.

Classic SF: Power Play, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Power Play

Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ISBN: 0345388267

Read January 28, 2015
Third (final) book of the Petaybee trilogy (Powers that Be, Power Lines)

Oof.  The well water gets a bit gritty towards the bottom.  Overall storyline concludes nicely - the assholes from the two previous books hire a notorious space pirate to kidnap Yana, Marmion, Diego, and Bunny.  Meanwhile, the planet and the people on the surface (mainly Sean, Johnny, and 'Cita/Aoife/Goat-Dung/Youngling) repel invaders intent on despoiling the ample hunting grounds and medicinal biota of the planet.

Plot-devices that were faintly apparent and easy to overlook in the first books got much worse: the slang is dated and ill-used, the language (especially dialogue) is stilted and ridiculous, and situations are obviously contrived for effect rather than sense.

Despite that, and the many eye-rolls and sighs, I did enjoy reading it, and I'm glad I finished off the set.  Namid especially is a good character, and it was nice to see the religious supplicants actually being useful characters (although we never find out what happens with "Brother Granite" who isn't who he appears to be).

Also, with the epilogue, can we stop with the fantasy of women giving birth with no pain and it being a magical dreamy perfect experience that ends with them immediately rising from the birthing pool looking "flat-bellied and lithe again"?  Seriously?  It's patronizing.

Classic SF: Power Lines, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Power Lines

Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ISBN: 0345387805

Read January 21, 2015
Second book of the Petaybee trilogy (Powers that Be, Power Play)

Book two of the set was as interesting, perhaps more-so than the first, but suffered from un-wrapped threads at the ending, especially regarding Shush.

Petaybee has just forced a confrontation with Intergal, and they've sent a duo of company execs to determine the best course of action to continue making money from the planet.  The lady capitalist Marmion is our added protagonist, along with Goat-Dung (good grief) and Coaxtl on the planetary side.  Our new antagonists appear in the form of the "ethnographer" Matthew Luzon, and the continuing obstruction of Torkel Whittaker from the first book.

The planet is melting, the growing season is either early or the climate is shifting, and Intergal is desperate to find pockets of colonists who don't believe Petaybee is a benevolent sentient being (since finding anyone who doesn't believe that it's sentient at all is a bust) and Luzon is off to the southern continent to find them.

There are missing siblings, miraculous rescues, pointedly-useful biota, and general asshattery from the corporation.  I thought the pacing was better, and the variety of cultures and attitudes was refreshing, but at the end, there were too many strings to tie up, and some were left to hang, or were tied up in ways that don't make sense even by the very loose plotting standard set by the rest of the book.

Still, fun to read.  I'm going to try the last, just so I can say I finished the trilogy.  

Classic SF: Powers that Be, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Powers that Be
Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
ISBN: 078572852X
Read January 16, 2015
First book of the Petaybee trilogy (Power Lines and Power Play)

Really more Science Fantasy than SF, this is very much like Pern in that "psy" type abilities and planetary sentience are treated as having equal possibility with space travel and terraforming.

Most extra-Solar work these days is done by Intergal, a massive company that discovers, colonizes, and exploits the resources of planets across the galaxy.  Our hero is an ex-company soldier, who was injured during a "terrorist attack" on a remote colony world.

Now she's sent to Petaybee, a small rural, backwards ice-ball of a planet, to live out her last few years on the company's dime before her injury does her in.  Except, now that she's here, would she mind horribly integrating with the locals (a bizarro mix of Inuit and Irish cultures) and spying on them because they keep obstructing company efforts to locate and mine the planet's valuable resources?  If so, she'll find that her pension is increased, and she'll get access to the company base, rather than the useless empty company store meant for the locals.

Now, she's stuck between loyalty to her employer, and a growing sense of unease that the company is about to commit a terrible moral offense against a sentient mind.

I enjoyed it enough to pick up the next, but it was a bit weak in places.  It's fairly obvious that the weird Irish/Inuit blend was the reason for the story, and everything else was sketched in to support that odd premise.  The company goons are company goons, the locals are nearly all wonderful people, and the "powers" of the planet and the genetically-altered (good lord the dithering about with genetic manipulation and genetic alteration and adaptations was enough to drive one nuts) residents were even more thinly-related to actual science than the magic dragons of the Pern books.

Fun to read for the history lesson, and to see how far the genre has come; I'm reading Ancillary Justice at the same time, and the contrast is mind-blowing.

  

Gemsigns, Stephanie Sautler (Book 1 of REvolution Series)

Gemsigns
Stephanie Saulter
ISBN: 9781623651602
Dystopian near future, post-apocalypse, cloning, gengineering, gene therapy, social order, racial tensions, caste systems, slavery, human rights.

First off, I have to say that the author was very lucky that I did not have anything else I was interested in reading when I read the prologue/chapter zero.  She is also lucky that I did not read that bit while I was still in the library, or it would have gone right the hell back onto the shelf.  That was some pompous self-congratulatory word play and storyline musing going on in there.  (The note on the jacket copy about wanting to write literary fiction didn't help her case with me either.)

However.  I got past that, and the writing from then on was excellent!  I had a great time reading, I enjoyed the story immensely, and I am glad to see that there is a series supposedly in the works.  I have concerns about the worldbuilding and minor nits about characterization and plotting, but then I ALWAYS get snippy about worldbuilding, and characters and plots are difficult.  For a first attempt?  Pretty damn solid writing.  I hope to someday do as well myself.

It's hard to summarize the world without getting into either plot-spoilage or my own worldbuilding gripes, but I'll give it a shot:  (If you want to avoid spoilers of how the world got how it was, and learn about the world through the course of the book, stop reading now.  It's all explained pretty well through in-universe sources over the course of the narrative.)

Seriously.  Spoilers for worldbuilding.

Cool?


The world's population, some years from now, succumbed to a plot-device, er, disease, that necessitated massive advances in genetic engineering to ensure the survival of the species.  Most religious and cultural objections were steamrolled (and subsequently eradicated) in the urgency, and the few outliers (social or religious) were isolated either willingly or unwillingly into ostracized camps of extremely small token minorities, while everyone else got on with the new reality of homogenized religious, cultural, and social mores which have made wars, violence, and "racial" differences largely an unremembered part of pre-disease history.

Due to the massive scale of the disease, the gene therapy for cure and prevention of the disease was scaffolded into further gene manipulation to provide the reduced population of normal humans with additional disease resistance and general health and long life.  After all that work was put in, corporations realized they could encourage further modifications to create genetically-enhanced specimens to perform tasks which were now too hazardous or difficult to risk with precious rescued normal human lives.

Because it's important to know the difference between these creations (who are expensive and useful) and normal humans (who are precious and untouchable) the corporations designed obvious markers into the genetic expressions - glowing unnaturally colored hair becoming the standard.  Adapted gene-lines were also distinguished by the presence of conditions which were negative expressions of useful traits:  Enhanced visual light spectrums often came with synesthesia or migraines.  Data-hacking or enhanced memory could result in autistic-like mentalities.  Enhanced hearing, underwater breathing, or extra organs (for donation) all made obvious physical changes to the body.  These mental or physical handicaps were not of concern to the corporations, as long as they did not too badly impact productivity.  All of this was in stark contrast to normal humans, who by this point are all preternaturally healthy and largely physically homogenized.  This all made identifying genetic property easier for the corporations, and easier for normals to think of them as "other" and to dismiss.
Eventually, these properties (GeneticallyModified, G-M, pronounced "gem") realized they were being used as slaves, rebelled, society was made aware of horrific systemic abuses by major corporate entities who "owned" these genetic profiles (and the resulting Gems), a limited Declaration of general universal human rights was created, and at the beginning of our tale, we're in London, preparing for a convention to decide on the possible avenues for granting limited or modified "human" rights to the recently emancipated populace of Gems.

Whew.  That took some telling.  Isn't it an interesting concept?  Don't you want to read about the events leading up to this historic Conference, and the Gems and norms who will play a part in shaping the new social order?



I will mention my niggles, in vague and general terms, just to have them out.

1) The world is largely black&white.  Evil is very evil, good is very good, no one is grey.  In a situation and society such as described in the book, that seems a peculiar narrative choice.

2) Despite evil being very evil, most of the evil happens offstage, and not to main characters.  Evil is also terribly incompetent and fragmentary.

3) There is one plot-point that is very difficult for a southern American to accept the way it was presented.  I understand that things are quite different in other parts of the world, but as an American living in the Bible Belt, I can quite firmly say that particular revelation would not have been possible in any city near me, at any time in the future, regardless of the chaos and death between now and then.  It was unfortunate, because it took me quite out of the story at a time when the climax was just getting rolling, and also because it really wasn't necessary to present it that way.  In fact, it could have been built obviously into the narrative with no real difference in outcome.  It seemed to be a cheap "look how different the future is!" trick, and it just fell flat for me.

4) There is a particular genetic modification that is difficult to rationalize from the explanations given.  (I am prepared for this to be explained or dealt with in further books, but it is bothering me.)

5) One of the characters spends the entire book with hints dropped constantly at as to the nature of their genetic modification, and then the ending doesn't deal with one whole aspect of the hints.  (Again, this could be purposefully kept for another book.)

6) General place-keeping tab for worldbuilding niggles that are too picky to really inflict on everyone else, but still bother me!

Overall, really glad I read it, and a really good debut by a new author.

The Green Book, Jill Paton Walsh

The Green Book
Jill Paton Walsh, illustrated by Lloyd Bloom
ISBN: 0374327785
(Printed 1982)  Juv reader b/w illustrated Sci-Fi: chronicles a small band of colonists settling on a new world of crystalline plants, glowing jellyfish, and red-and-grey moth people.
re-read June 11, 2014

This was one of those books where I saw the cover and the flap and I thought I had read it before, but couldn't remember.  As soon as I started reading I was sure, but still couldn't remember the story.  So I read it again.

Pattie is quite young when her family boards a not-so-large, not-so-new starship with her family, hoping for a new life on a new world which Pattie names Shine, far away from the failed human civilization on Earth.  Each colonist has a short list of what they must bring; clothing, boots, tools, one personal item, and one book.  Pattie misunderstands, and selects a blank journal, a commonplace book, which causes her family much amusement until the colony is settled, secured, and mostly assured of surviving - at which time it is revealed that Pattie has been recording the story of the colony itself.

Details are sparse, and the science is either old-fashioned or inconsistently handwaved; databank tapes have enough power to nearly instantly compute that their colony is devoid of life, but doesn't have enough room for a few text files of Shakespeare.  Stringent weight limits for the colonists, but the ship carries concrete and multiple types of heavy machinery that is intended to only work a single time (why even?).  No room for livestock or pets, but live rabbits and chickens are brought and not treated as pets or even carefully preserved.  Likewise, the logic of the colonists in several instances is a little shaky, and the world, while carefully different in some ways - less gravity, no wind, no rain, no clouds - has treeish trees and grassy grass and lakes of temperate water and a species that is confidently and immediately associated with moths, even up to having fuzzy wings.  

Still, the story is sweet, quick, and at a great level for a serial bedtime read for younger children, or for a first chapter book for a precocious reader.

Other than the handwaving and logic mishaps, the only quibble I have is an odd interlude where the Father essentially bitches about science and technology, and intimates that as soon as we moved to "technology" instead of "tools" we lost something fundamental, and that he was planning to be the most important person in the colony by becoming the "Maker" of these old-fashioned tools.  As a professional, an educator, and someone very much in favor of what science and technology can do for improving life, this left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth - a seed drill is every bit as much "technology" as an MRI machine, and to denounce the latter simply because it relies on a larger and more advanced infrastructure to support it is both short-sighted and very dangerous.  The real confusion here is that the father's job description is not really vital to the story, and neither is the conversation where he espouses these views - it's essentially an aside, but in a short book of 74 pages (with quite a few full-page illustrations) it's an aside that takes up valuable real-estate.  Like the concrete on the spaceship, I'm not quite sure why that made it in.
 

The Truesight Trilogy, David Stahler Jr.

Truesight Trilogy, David Stahler Jr.
1) Truesight: ISBN: 0060522852
2) The Seer: ISBN: 9780060522889
3) Otherspace: ISBN: 9780060522919

Juv/YA science fiction: a boy escapes from a repressive society where sight is blamed for the ills of humanity.

I'm glad that I'm reviewing these as a whole, because I have to say that the first is the weakest of the bunch, and as a standalone, you're really just better off re-reading The Giver again.  However, because it sets up the next two, which are much more interesting, it does become worth it.

In Truesight, Jacob's friend Delaney is a rebel.  Their society is made up of blind people - most genetically altered, but some voluntarily blinding themselves to join.  Her father is the head of their isolated, communal society, but she isn't happy there.  She wants more - she wants to SEE.  Jacob doesn't care about any of that, he's just worried what the community will assign him as his career.  Until the headaches that he has been getting regularly are joined by a dull grey blur, which slowly resolves into true sight.  While he's hiding this horrific secret, Delaney finally pushes her father too far, and she's reported as a suicide.  Jacob is the last to (literally) see her beforehand, but he doesn't have time to worry about that - his secret is too hot to keep, and now his community is demanding that he go under the knife to lose his sight.  Suddenly, Jacob has to make a very hard choice between the life he always thought he knew, and the life he now knows is real, because he's seen it with his own eyes.

In The Seer, provincial community is left far behind as both Jacob and Delaney navigate the world of the seeing, trying to figure out a place where they fit in, and where they won't be exploited or returned home.  Delaney especially has a rough time of it, as her musical aptitude make her the perfect target for unscrupulous media moguls.  Jacob pledged to help her, but he's being more and more distracted by headaches, visions, and a strange choral voice in his head, pleading with him to come and find them.  Is Jacob's sight a blessing or a curse?

In Otherspace, Jacob is off on his own, finally trying to solve the mystery of the voices in his head.  He partners with a space captain, and tries to hide from an enigmatic and threatening stranger who seems to be stalking him, meeting up with witches and seers, and facing both unexpected betrayal and the promise of a new home after all hope is lost.

None of these books truly stand alone as decent reads, but together they make a nice little space-age fable about acceptance, understanding, friendship, and finding your own path in the world.

A solid "middle grade" read, this set would also be quite good for younger adept readers who have mastered The Giver or The House of Stairs, and want more mental/psychological puzzles to occupy themselves.

  

Manta's Gift, Timothy Zahn

Way back in 2002, Timothy Zahn wrote Manta's Gift, which begins with a premise familiar to anyone who has seen Avatar (James Cameron, not elemental magic). 

Matt Raimey was 22 when he had his skiing accident, and he was the only tetraplegic crazy enough to accept Project Changeling's offer - to be reborn as a Qanska, the behemoth flying/swimming alien creatures discovered in Jupiter's hurricane winds.

Unknown to Raimey, the project isn't for the purpose of creating new biological treatments for injured people, or even to promote cross-species understanding, but specifically to insert an agent into Qanskan society in order to find out their greatest secret.

I want to start out by saying that I really liked this book, and I really enjoyed the concept.  I need to say that before I start in on the criticisms:

1) The Qanskans are distressingly human.  They have a strict hierarchical society based on tolerable pressures, but despite being TOLD fairly often that they are aliens, they never seem like such - it's the 'bumpy-head' ailment from Star Trek and Star Wars.  Friendships, love, even mentoring relationships all act exactly like they do in mainstream American culture.  I know it's an established way to deal with "alien" cultures when that isn't your real focus, but I really felt that some more effort could have been expended on this, especially given the payout plotline at the end of the book. 

2) If you are 22 years old, and move to a different society, even one where you have to move and speak much differently from normal, even after 8 years, you don't forget your first language and the world you came from, especially if you have people in the back of your mind speaking to you in that language constantly for the first three of those eight years!

If you prefer the new language, that's fine, and if you forget specific terms without having to think hard for them, then ok, but you don't totally forget language and your childhood experiences so thoroughly as the main character did.  I was very taken out of the story when that happened.

3) Maybe I've read too much David Weber, but the hints and teases about the "Five Hundred" and all the things going on back on Mars, Earth, and on the Jupiter space station were a little frustrating.  I would have really liked to have spent more time with the secondary characters, and on the bad guys and their motivations.  I think a contrast between all of that going on, and the totally different conflicts down on/in Jupiter would have been really nifty.  Actually, I think I have read too much David Weber. 

That's all of the critical stuff.

Specific likes:

I actually liked an epilogue for once!  Yay! 

Arbiter Liadof was an awesome bad guy.  I liked her a lot, and really wished we could have gotten more of her.

Farraday and his team were extremely interesting, as was the concept of the Jupiter Prime station and the various projects and turf-wars going on up there as a result of politics and demagoguery.  Again, really wished to see more of that.

I liked the explanation late in the story that revealed the Qanskan reasoning for allowing this "half-breed" birth into their society - it was one of the few times they were shown as having truly alien thoughts and lives.  I liked that they recognized that as a species.

I really liked the central conceit (the secret) of the story.  That was an interesting concept, and one that would be fun to follow up on, especially considering the epilogue.

Overall, a nifty read!