This short book turned out to be way, way better than its semi-cheesy title and cover art would lead you to believe, so much so that I'm tempted to adThis short book turned out to be way, way better than its semi-cheesy title and cover art would lead you to believe, so much so that I'm tempted to advise author Donnie Comstock to just start all over and release the same story under an entirely different name and cover. Set in a world that undergoes a nuclear apocalypse on, like, page five, the first comparison that will pop into many readers' heads will be Andy Weir's The Martian, in that the book is a first-person journal from a very smart, very rational scientist who manages to survive the apocalypse (he happened to be a prepper on top of everything else), then struggles during the rest of the book with all the post-apocalyptic challenges that are thrown his way.
But the farther into the story you go, the more you realize that this is actually a classic "anti-villain" story in the spirit of Breaking Bad; that is, unlike our good-guy hero in The Martian who we root for more and more as the story continues, the narrator of Mad Scientist starts out as a good guy, but then slowly becomes more and more unhinged, in a way that's easily justifiable from his viewpoint but that nonetheless results in more and more horrendous behavior as the months and years continue. (Also of interest to Breaking Bad fans, the way our unreliable narrator dispatches a group of Mad Max-style scavengers who try to break into his underground bunker, which is as delightfully clever and absolutely evil as Walter White's disposal of his drug-dealing competitors.) And then too, this book will remind many people of The Walking Dead only without zombies, in that a huge chunk of the manuscript is devoted to examining the various ethical and moral issues that come with the idea of surviving in a dangerous, lawless post-apocalyptic land. (So yes, in other words, it's The Martian meets Breaking Bad meets The Walking Dead; and yes, I only wrote that sentence so it can be eventually quoted by the publisher.)
The best compliment I can give this book is that I feverishly read it from cover to cover in a single day, even putting off dinner and cancelling meeting up with my friends in order to do so. That's the sign of a really gripping, really compelling genre actioner, when it literally becomes "un-put-downable," and it comes strongly recommended to other sci-fi fans in this spirit. You'll cheer for our gene-splicing hero, then eventually you'll be ashamed that you ever cheered for him, a surprisingly sober story with a high amount of gravitas for being set in circumstances that so often are used by other authors to tell a deliberately silly tale. Just in terms of pure entertainment, Apocalypse for a Mad Scientist has turned out to be my most pleasurably surprising read of the last year. ...more
DID NOT FINISH. I had the opportunity to read this Hunger Games prequel for free, so I decided to go ahead and do so, especially since I'm not particuDID NOT FINISH. I had the opportunity to read this Hunger Games prequel for free, so I decided to go ahead and do so, especially since I'm not particularly saddled with nostalgia for the original (I was already in my forties when the original trilogy came out, so I read them with pleasure but also with the disinterest of a middle-ager who was curious to see why the kids were going so crazy for them), so I wasn't going into it with any particular baggage about Suzanne Collins' fan-controversial decision to make the villain of the original trilogy now the hero in this. But no matter what your opinion of this decision, the fact is that it's hard to pull something like this off, especially when you choose to make your protagonist continue the kind of sniveling, manipulative behavior that originally made him a villain in the first place, essentially making this a story about a place that's already terrible and the events that led to it becoming even more terrible.
That's a tall order for a 500-page novel, to pull out something compellingly readable about suddenly making your villain the hero even as they continue acting like the villain, within a world of shit that you already know beforehand is just going to remain shit even by the end of those 500 pages; and Collins is simply not up to the task, making me lose interest quickly in this, a book which ultimately doesn't have much more to say than the story of why a fascist society eventually becomes cartoonishly fascist. When all is said and done, it feels too much like a cynical cash grab to re-boost a waning public interest in the "Hunger Games" franchise -- if Collins was legitimately interested in flexing her literary muscles again, it feels more likely that she would've just written a brand-new story in a brand-new universe -- and when you add the fact that I don't usually read childrens' books at all, that was exactly enough to make me give up on this novel soon after beginning. ...more
I have no idea if this is actually true, but Alastair Reynolds' 2001 Chasm City, book 2 of his remarkable "Revelation Space" series, feels at all timeI have no idea if this is actually true, but Alastair Reynolds' 2001 Chasm City, book 2 of his remarkable "Revelation Space" series, feels at all times like it was actually the first book he wrote in the series, that he couldn't get it published and so moved on to another story set in the same universe, and that after the surprise smash success of that one (2000's Revelation Space [my review], the book that gives the entire series its name), his publisher Ace then hastily published the first book 14 months later as a "sequel" to capitalize on the newfound interest. Partly it feels this way because the plot of Chasm City doesn't have anything to do with the ongoing epic storyline established in Revelation Space and then (hopefully?) continued in books 3 through 6; set in the eponymous city that served as only one of a dozen locations in the sprawling first book, it tells a self-contained noir crime story that doesn't even touch on Revelation's ongoing saga about a billion-year-old galaxial war that wiped out nearly all life as the universe then knew it, and how the remnants of that war affect the modern human race a billion years later as Earth finally starts expanding for the first time beyond the confines of the Solar System.
More troubling, though -- and why I suspect that this is the work of a younger and less experienced Reynolds, that was originally rejected by publishers when first making the submission rounds -- Chasm City simply isn't as good as the mindblowing Revelation. In fact, it's much, much worse, a simplistic revenge story that doesn't even begin to justify its wearying and sometimes glacially slow 700 pages, with almost none of the fantastical hard-science thinking-out-loud that has made these books so beloved among those in the scientific community. Granted, it has a clever third act twist, but it ends with a silly and rushed climax that dishonors the nearly thousand pages that came before it, and a storyline that just in general did not engage me in the obsessive "must! read! more!" way that Revelation did, a disappointment that left me actively angry that I wasted a month of my life on it. Make no mistake, I'm going to continue with the series; but from this point forward, I'm also going to check each new book at Wikipedia first, to make sure it actually follows the saga first established in the initial volume. It's getting 2 and a half stars from me, rounded up to 3 here at the no-half-point Goodreads, but certainly in either case is not a book I recommend to others. ...more
This is a retro cyberpunk actioner like is so popular with the kids these days; and as someone who was a big fan of the original cyberpunk genre when This is a retro cyberpunk actioner like is so popular with the kids these days; and as someone who was a big fan of the original cyberpunk genre when it first appeared in the '80s and '90s, I'm glad to see a new appreciation for what I think is a very clever style of storytelling. Here, Gordon is heavy on the military/chase-scene side, describing a complex mythos whose most interesting feature is a layer of augmented reality that's been slapped on the surface of every real thing in the physical world, as if the entire scenery around you had been wrapped in a Michael Bay movie that you can't look away from. It's never going to win the Hugo Award, but it's a solid-enough thriller for heavy readers of the genre, especially convention goers since Gordon means for this to be volume 1 of a new series. That's exactly what this novel feels like, a book you would expect from one of those authors you party with at all the science-fiction conventions; that's neither good nor bad, just a reflection of who will like it the most. That would typically get it 3 1/2 stars from me, rounded up to 4 here at the no-half-point Goodreads. ...more
Figuring out where to start with my completist read of Philip K. Dick turned out to be more complicated than with many of the other authors in this challenge; for while with most you can simply start with the first book they published and move forward chronologically from there, that's complicated in PKD's case because he started his career as basically a hack writer of quickie Silver-Age-style Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi, while the main reason to read him now is for the trippy mind-bending classics of his 1970s late career, and especially the ones he wrote after his drug-complicated hallucinatory schizophrenic breakdown in February and March of 1974. But the whole point of doing a completist challenge is to search back and start before an author got to their mature classics, to see whether you can spot telling signs in the early books of the masters they would become; but I'm aware that the earliest of his books is not much more than mediocre pay-per-word space-opera kiddie stuff, and I don't want to actively torture myself just for the sake of saying that I did a truly complete read of his entire oeuvre.
So I thought a good compromise would be to start with his 1962 The Man in the High Castle, which won PKD his first and only Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was also the first book that made many in the industry say, "Oh, okay, this isn't just a hacky writer of quickie pulp stuff, he's capable of greatness too." But I've already read High Castle, albeit almost 30 years ago; and I also just recently watched the Amazon Prime adaptation of the book as well, and wasn't feeling like going through such a well-known project again as my first PKD read. So instead I chose the first book after that, 1964's Martian Time-Slip, and now at this point am promising to stick chronologically to the rest, until we finally reach the final book he wrote before his premature death, 1982's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. At that point, then, I'll decide whether to go back and read all those early space operas from the 1950s, or the string of '50s titles that only got published in the '80s after his death in order to further cash in on his name. Whew!
As I was expecting, Martian Time-Slip reads through a lot of its page count like the kind of normal mid-'60s Silver Age sci-fi story that was so in vogue at the time, combining the "Long and Grand Terraforming of Mars" trope with the "Libertarians in SPAAAACE!!!" trope to tell a tale of political intrigue between the various factions (private institutions, national governments, the UN) who have formed the first settlements on a barely livable Mars, with PKD in this case envisioning a red planet that already had life when Earthlings first visited, essentially distant cousins of African aboriginals who have now suffered essentially the same colonial, oppressive fate as those Earth cousins did hundreds of years ago. But we know we're in for something different when PKD suddenly takes a detour in our Mars tour to examine the fate of the small number of autistic children who have now been born on the planet, who are all basically removed and housed in a special institution walled off from the rest of society, and with there being a hot debate over whether autistic children shouldn't instead be quietly euthanized upon diagnosis, because there's so much to be gained right now by convincing Earth's overly crowded population to emigrate to Mars en masse, and that's going to be even harder if everyone's convinced that their children will come out as deranged freaks.
In fact, echoing common actual medical theory at the time, PKD posits here that autism and schizophrenia are actually the same thing, only one being a form you're born with and the other a condition you specifically develop (and hence is the one form that can eventually be "cured"); and as the page count continues, the story becomes more and more focused on this particular aspect of Martian society, as our main menagerie of characters slowly become convinced that autism/schizophrenia is actually a case of select humans having the ability to time travel using only their brains, much like how others are apparently born with the gift of ESP, and that they're experiencing the space-time continuum in such a profoundly different way than us that it renders them virtually incapable of normal communication with non-affected people.
Mind you, this is all in service of a convoluted plot about Martian politics and a coming secret land grab, and the story never really transcends the mid-'60s boundaries that PKD was forced to work within at the time in order to have any kind of viable commercial career. But in this case, you really can see him yearning to add the trippy stuff he was genuinely interested in exploring within what's essentially a Robert A. Heinlein pastiche (just from the standpoint of the political plot, this could easily be a sequel to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), and is a nice portent of the truly weird, truly brilliant novels that would start coming out of him in just another ten years. It's not perfect, which is why it's not getting five stars from me; but if I was a contemporary sci-fi reader back in the mid-'60s, I would've finished this and thought, "Hmm, yeah, that was quite clever and good. I bet this guy's going to have even better stuff down the line." That's always a great thing to catch in the early volumes of any author in this Completist Challenge, and makes me excited to dive into the next PKD book, The Game-Players of Titan which was basically published at the same exact time as this one but by a different publisher. See you again then!
Philip K. Dick books now read: Martian Time-Slip...more
The problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that aThe problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that all the stories in those genres all tend to eventually blur into each other, until it's all sort of just one big collective story in our heads and with little difference between each title. That's the heart of the problem here with T.S. Beier's post-apocalyptic thriller What Branches Grow, her published debut through specialty press Nostromo; for while it's entirely well-written and a fine example of the genre, that genre itself (from Cormac McCarthy's The Road to Mel Gibson's The Road Warrior) relies on such a very specific combination of tropes that it feels more sometimes like Beier is filling in a puzzle, getting her Post Apocalyptic Bingo Card marked up one square at a time until she can finally turn it in and go home. That combination of competent but derivative usually gets 3 1/2 stars from me, bumped up to 4 here because of the unusual and interesting climax; but the majority of the book isn't anything different than The Walking Dead but with no zombies, so the main reason to read it is if you're a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre specifically, and enjoy reading a lot of different takes on the subject that are only slightly different from each other. It comes with a narrow recommendation to that specific fan base, who will like this a lot. ...more
2020 reads, #25. This is essentially a continuation of the first and second books in Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" series, so what you think of this thi2020 reads, #25. This is essentially a continuation of the first and second books in Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" series, so what you think of this third book is going to pretty much be exactly the same thing you thought of the first two. Therefore, you should read my extra long review of Too Like the Lightning to know what I thought of The Will to Battle and Seven Surrenders (spoiler alert: I loved them all), basically three volumes of what in the future will likely be one single 1,350-page boxed set....more
This was the latest free download from science-fiction publisher Tor, in exchange for belonging to their mailing list; in fact, they're offering up alThis was the latest free download from science-fiction publisher Tor, in exchange for belonging to their mailing list; in fact, they're offering up all four of Martha Wells' "Murderbot" novellas this week for free download, in anticipation of her first full-length Murderbot novel coming later this summer. This first story in the series is a simple little shoot-em-up that can be read in its entirety in a single afternoon, and I didn't find anything particularly wrong with it, which is why it's getting at least a middle-of-the-road score from me. But that said, its central metaphor -- about how Murderbot's story arc is a stand-in for the troubles autistic IT consultants have when trying to get along in a corporate office that has temporarily brought them in -- is done really, really heavy-handedly, without even a hint of subtlety or finesse, and overly obvious metaphors are a big pet peeve of mine; and when you remove this clunky metaphor, there's literally nothing left to this short, one-note story, which means it doesn't deserve any higher than a middle-of-the-road score either. I'm going to read the second novella tomorrow as well, but if it's no better than this one, I think that's going to be the end of me following along with the adventures of our Netflix-binging, no-eye-contact android hero. ...more
2020 reads, #18. Up to this week, the only experience I'd had with the work of Ian McEwan was back in 2007 with On Chesil Beach, which...um, did not g2020 reads, #18. Up to this week, the only experience I'd had with the work of Ian McEwan was back in 2007 with On Chesil Beach, which...um, did not go well; but as a genre fan, I couldn't pass up the chance to read his 2018 science-fiction novel Machines Like Me, merely because of his ill-fated interview with The Guardian in which he declared that this wasn't in fact a science-fiction novel, because unlike science-fiction authors he is a real writer, and his book actually deals with real human issues instead of obsessing over rocketships and laser guns, which then collectively pissed off the entire science-fiction community so much that he later had to backtrack and apologize, and explain that he has in fact never read a science-fiction novel in his entire life, yet somehow felt qualified to write a book set in a parallel universe about the invention of artificial intelligence.
And indeed, never has a book been written about artificially intelligent, flesh-and-blood androids that gives less of a fuck about the details of its artificially intelligent, flesh-and-blood androids, nor of providing even the merest hint of consistent rules or a plausible set of physics in which to set a tale about artificially intelligent, flesh-and-blood androids, a story so cartoonishly schizophrenic in tone that it's hard not to laugh out loud at its sheer ineptitude. It reads exactly, exactly as if you had approached a 70-year-old mid-tier academic author who hasn't had a single experience with science-fiction and has nothing but contempt for genre fiction, and then asked them to write a science-fiction novel, a reading experience so awful that it comes all the way around and becomes Tommy-Wiseau-style delightful. A book that must be seen to be believed, it's not often that I recommend actively hate-reading a book merely for the pleasure of seeing how terrible it is; but McEwan makes the act of hate-reading just too impossible to pass up here, easily the most high-profile literary misfire so far of the entire 21st century. It comes ironically recommended in this spirit, a novel worth picking up just so you can roll your eyes and say, "Wow, I can't believe I'm actually reading this."
2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foret2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foretold the rise of complex characterization and serial storytelling in the "Peak TV" era a decade later; but he's equally as famous for his record-breaking stints in the comic-book industry, his screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Oscar-nominated Changeling, and for co-showrunning the Netflix series Sense8 along with the Wachowskis. In any of these cases, though, I don't think anyone would've suspected that JMS's childhood was the stuff of nightmares, complete with sex-molesting grandmother, a mother who tried to murder him as a baby, and a violent, alcoholic, deeply racist father who still proudly displayed the mini-Gestapo uniform that was lovingly made for him by the Nazis he happily bummed around with as a child himself in World War Two eastern Europe.
That JMS overcame this and became a normally functioning adult at all is a miracle worthy of celebrating, especially when the very first move he made as a newly independent adult was to fall straight into the arms of a religious cult; but the way he built himself up into an award-winning, cultishly loved millionaire sci-fi author along the way makes his life the stuff of legend, especially when reading this candid autobiography and realizing that he did it the longest and hardest way possible, literally starting by grinding out one-acts for no pay and turning in a dozen articles a week for his local college newspaper, accepting such ignoble assignments as punch-up for '80s children's cartoons like He-Man and The Real Ghostbusters, eventually becoming a freelance entertainment journalist for the LA Times and host of a SoCal radio talk show about sci-fi, continuing to write 80 hours a week like clockwork no matter how little or much that work was actually getting purchased and published. It's a mesmerizing, inspiring story, and the only reason it's not getting 5 stars from me is because it also backs up his critics' main complaint, that his writing is the very definition of pedestrian and lacking style. This is a great story, but it would've been mindblowing if told in a witty and sophisticated way; this is more like hearing an accountant tell it in the most plodding way possible during a dinner party filled with other accountants, which still makes it great but lacks a certain final oomph. It still comes recommended to a general audience, though, a story so crazy and unbelievable that you can't help but get sucked into it, no matter what your opinion is of our narrator or even whether or not you've heard of him before.
Felicia Watson's 2020 Spooky Action at a Distance, the newest title by startup genre indie publisher DX Varos, also happens to be a sequel of sorts toFelicia Watson's 2020 Spooky Action at a Distance, the newest title by startup genre indie publisher DX Varos, also happens to be a sequel of sorts to 2019's We Have Met the Enemy, and the publisher kindly sent both books so that I'd be up to speed when I read the newer one. Known collectively as the still-ongoing "Lovelace Series," it's essentially your standard space-opera fare with shades of James S.A. Corey's superior "The Expanse," in which a motley spaceship crew in a now-colonized Sol system first get entangled in an ongoing war with a seemingly unstoppable alien race known as "Eternals" (the main plot of Enemy), then in Spooky get dispatched to investigate a scientific curiosity which unsurprisingly turns out to be more complex than anticipated. The books are as much about the interpersonal relationships between the crew members, and a universe-building deep dive into their backgrounds, as they are about the unknown threats that drive the plots; and while I didn't find either of them to be particularly disagreeable, I must confess that I didn't find them to be particularly great either, a pleasant foray into mid-tier SF that ate up a week of my free time in a way I found pleasant but afterwards forgettable, for which I would normally award 3 and a half stars but am rounding up to 4 here at the no-half-star Goodreads. For these reasons, I'm mainly recommending it only to hardcore convention-going genre superfans, the kind who blow through a different sci-fi book each day and therefore are perhaps less critical of any one particular title. These people will enjoy both Lovelace books just fine, although others would be best off steering clear altogether.
Felicia Watson's 2020 Spooky Action at a Distance, the newest title by startup genre indie publisher DX Varos, also happens to be a sequel of sorts toFelicia Watson's 2020 Spooky Action at a Distance, the newest title by startup genre indie publisher DX Varos, also happens to be a sequel of sorts to 2019's We Have Met the Enemy, and the publisher kindly sent both books so that I'd be up to speed when I read the newer one. Known collectively as the still-ongoing "Lovelace Series," it's essentially your standard space-opera fare with shades of James S.A. Corey's superior "The Expanse," in which a motley spaceship crew in a now-colonized Sol system first get entangled in an ongoing war with a seemingly unstoppable alien race known as "Eternals" (the main plot of Enemy), then in Spooky get dispatched to investigate a scientific curiosity which unsurprisingly turns out to be more complex than anticipated. The books are as much about the interpersonal relationships between the crew members, and a universe-building deep dive into their backgrounds, as they are about the unknown threats that drive the plots; and while I didn't find either of them to be particularly disagreeable, I must confess that I didn't find them to be particularly great either, a pleasant foray into mid-tier SF that ate up a week of my free time in a way I found pleasant but afterwards forgettable, for which I would normally award 3 and a half stars but am rounding up to 4 here at the no-half-star Goodreads. For these reasons, I'm mainly recommending it only to hardcore convention-going genre superfans, the kind who blow through a different sci-fi book each day and therefore are perhaps less critical of any one particular title. These people will enjoy both Lovelace books just fine, although others would be best off steering clear altogether.
2020 reads, #4. DID NOT FINISH. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the 2020 reads, #4. DID NOT FINISH. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the writing team known as James S.A. Corey, as well as the Amazon "peak TV" adaptation that's being made of it. Unfortunately, this fourth book is where it feels that the series goes off the rails for the first time; finishing up the original trilogy in the previous book with answers to most of the mysteries that drove it, the authors made the unwise decision to make this next one an almost completely stand-alone story, almost entirely devoted to the underwhelming drama between a group of Outer Planet refugees who have claimed squatters' rights on a lithium-rich planet via the "Gate" from the original trilogy, and the colonizing team authorized by the Inner Planets to come and eradicate them. But this also happens to be the book that season 4 of the TV series adapted, which just got released a few weeks ago, so at that point I dropped the book altogether and just started watching the show; and that's when I discovered that this is one of those rare cases where the TV show is actually better than the book it's adapting.
That's because the TV version has to keep a huge roster of actors on the payroll from year to year, so need to build in things for them to do throughout the season, unlike the books which can drop a major character for a thousand pages at a time if they don't happen to fit in with the small-scope story they want to tell at that moment. And so the TV version actually has a much broader scope than the novel, which keeps things more interesting; in that version, we also follow former Martian soldier Bobbie as she returns to a disillusioned Mars, UN secretary-general (and thus leader of Earth) Chrisjen Avasarala, and a changed Naomi Nagata who in the TV version undergoes painful "gravity treatment" so she can go to the surface of New Terra too, just to have the whole thing backfire on her. That relegates the conflict between the squatting Belters and colonizing MCE to just one of many storylines being followed, which keeps the story in general just more sweeping and riveting than the book version. So, this will be one of the few occasions that I actually encourage you to watch the TV version instead of reading the book version, although I would appreciate veterans' opinions on whether this gets better with later volumes, or if I should just skip books 5 through 8 altogether....more
2020 reads, #2. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the writing team kno2020 reads, #2. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the writing team known as James S.A. Corey, as well as the Amazon "peak TV" adaptation that's being made of it. This is the third in the series, and I was surprised to see it come to such a satisfactory conclusion, given that there are now seven books in the series with an eighth and final one later this year; but then I realized that Corey probably only had a contract at first to deliver a trilogy, so ended it on such a conclusive-feeling note just in case, even while leaving enough mysteries still open to warrant the books that have further come. No worries, no worries -- if you've liked the series up to now, you'll like this one as well, for sure. ...more
2020 reads, #1. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the writing team kno2020 reads, #1. See my much longer review of book 1 for all the reasons I'm a fan in general of "The Expanse" series of novels by the writing team known as James S.A. Corey, as well as the Amazon "peak TV" adaptation that's being made of it. This one takes the final reveal of the first book as act one here, then deepens both the mystery and the universe, giving us a wider look at the solar system 350 years from now when it's finally been colonized by humanity out to Neptune, and the soap opera saga going on within its triad of equally powerful human planet-states (Earth united under the UN, a fiercely independent Mars Republic, and a conglomerate of soldiers, scientists, miners, entrepreneurs, immigrants and pirates politically known as the "Outer Planet Alliance"). Fans of the first book will be fans of this too, no worries. ...more
I was completely unaware of the "Expanse" sci-fi novel series by "James S.A. Corey" (in reality the collective pen-name of writing partners Daniel AbrI was completely unaware of the "Expanse" sci-fi novel series by "James S.A. Corey" (in reality the collective pen-name of writing partners Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), or of the TV adaptation of it that ran for three seasons on the SyFy network, until it recently got canceled and then picked up by Amazon Prime Video, who did a major publicity push for it last year in preparation for all-new seasons that just began this month. But once I did sit down and watch those first three seasons on Amazon, I found myself really loving it, so thought I would go to the trouble of actually reading the novels before taking on the just released season 4 of the TV show. For those who don't know, this famously started as "universe-building" research for a massively multiplayer online role playing game (or MMORPG -- think World of Warcraft) by Franck, who's actually not a full-time writer but has served for years as the personal assistant to George R.R. Martin; but after his buddy Abraham (who is a full-time writer) looked through the material and was impressed by what a complex universe Franck had created, he suggested that they write a novel together set within this universe, which became a surprise bestseller and Hugo nominee for best novel of the year, which is what led to a contract for the eventual eight books this series is now comprised of. (The ninth and final volume of the saga comes out in 2020, yet another reason to start reading these now.)
That helps explain the most beloved aspect of this series, that the milieu it's set in feels so rich and lived-in, basically imagining a 350-year period of future history in which the human race finally colonizes the solar system step by step -- first by terraforming Mars, which eventually rebels against Earth because of its second-class colonial status; which leads to Earth uniting into a single government under the auspices of the UN; which leads to a centuries-long cold war between the two planets, Mars particularly becoming known for their superior military but inferior resources; then eventually the establishment of mining outposts in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as administrative and scientific outposts on the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn; and this leads to a libertarian "Belter" culture separate from the "Gravity Well" culture of the inner planets, a scattered population who are wary of both Earth and Mars as superpowers (to the point of establishing an IRA-like quasi-legal separatist movement and militia), and who have evolved into eight-foot-tall delicate-boned creatures because of never spending even a single day of their lives in the full 1g gravity of the inner planets. And this is to say nothing of humanity's first expedition to recently make it all the way out to Uranus and set up a secretive new colony there; nor of the Mormon church's current construction of humanity's first-ever "generation ship," in which they plan on sleeping for a century until reaching the nearby galaxy of Tau Ceti, so that they can convert any space aliens they might meet to Christianity.
Yeah, that's page 1; and although it's best left a surprise, in general this first book of the series is about a sudden new outside threat to this status quo, with subsequent books (or, well, at least the next three subsequent books) being about the increasingly complicated fallout of how this threat resolves itself. I'm being deliberately vague here, because a big part of this series' pleasure is the way the storyline zigs and zags in unexpected directions, the authors setting the reader up to believe that they're reading one type of trope, just to pull out the rug from under them and reveal the story to actually be about an entirely different type of trope. And they do this very competently too, a mature and assured prose style that mixes in space opera, noir, detective fiction and body horror, and keeps the proceedings moving at a fast pace that makes the 600 pages fly by. In fact, my only complaint is not about the book itself, but rather the fact that I had already watched the TV series first, so was already aware of the big rug-pulling moment that serves as the book's climax; and that's precisely why I've decided to stop and read the eight books that have already been published before moving on with new television episodes. (Or, well, okay -- at 600 pages per book, maybe I'll read just the first four books before watching season 4 of the TV show.) A surprisingly great reading experience, which is not usually the case for hefty once-a-year TV-friendly franchise novels (I'm looking at you, Jack Reacher), I'm not hesitant at all about recommending this to any science-fiction fan out there, thrilling enough to satisfy the Star Wars crowd but full of enough Big Ideas to keep any Philip K. Dick fan happy too.
I recently made the decision to start accepting advance review copies (or ARCs) of soon-to-be-published novels again, for the first time in three yearI recently made the decision to start accepting advance review copies (or ARCs) of soon-to-be-published novels again, for the first time in three years; and then almost immediately I started regretting the decision, in that the first four ARCs in a row I read were fucking crap, the exact kind of dismal middlebrow bullshit aggressively promoted by shrill freelance publicists that made me quit accepting ARCs three years ago in the first place. So that makes me doubly glad to have had a chance to recently finish A.R. Moxon's remarkable debut novel, The Revisionaries, which is arriving in bookstores the exact week I'm posting this; because it wasn't just a crackingly great weirdo saga marking the arrival of a major new literary talent, but it was also a reminder of why it's worth taking a chance on unknown new writers in the first place, a reminder I definitely needed here in a 2019 that was mostly defined by my ever-increasing dive back into the great classics of the past.
The Revisionaries is in a genre known by its fans as "bizarro," although it's less of the David Lynch variety (weird shit thrown at you randomly for no particular reason) and more the Tim Powers kind (weird shit thrown at you randomly but with the sense that it'll all come together by the end). Or put another way, the marketing material for this book compares it often to Thomas Pynchon, as shorthand for "it's long and strange," but would be better described as "Haruki Murakami meets The Wire," in that its long page count and endless strange details take on a curious kind of logic as you're making your way through it, even as this weirdness takes place within the usually gritty social-realist milieu of competing street gangs in a poor section of an unnamed city, and the liberal religious organization that services this community. That's an act-one feint to be sure, but as good a tip of an iceberg as any for a novel that's over 600 pages long, contains four small books worth of plot, details the secret evil history of Dollywood, and oh yes, features a sewer tunnel that may or may not traverse the entire planet and perhaps even pierce the fabric of the space-time continuum itself.
To reveal any more of the plot would be to spoil the fun of this endlessly inventive novel; but I can say that this will be equally up the alley of both convention-going fanboys and ivory tower MFAers, because the main subject driving this gonzo storyline is that of "metafiction" -- that is, stories about storytellers who are writing stories about storytellers, in which some characters of the book suddenly realize that they're characters in a book, and are able to have a confrontation with the author who created them, who then somehow becomes a character in his own book, only it's not his book anymore because one of his characters has usurped him and become the author himself. If you get a headache just thinking about this, it would be best to skip The Revisionaries altogether; but if you get excited about a synopsis like that, you'll want to rush to the bookstore right away, in that this gets Postmodernism right in a way that a thousand hippy-dippy novels in the '70s tried and failed at. It's not perfect, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five -- its chief sin being that Moxon forgot the first rule of bizarro lit, that less is always better than more, making this a book he could've realistically cut in half and still convincingly make his point -- but in general I have to admit that I was surprised, pleased and delighted by how great a story this actually turned out to be, one of those emotionally weighty barn-burners that makes you feel like you legitimately accomplished something important once you finally finish it several weeks after you began. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a book that you need to commit to and occasionally forgive, but that is well worth your time and energy when all is said and done.
This wasn't bad enough to officially be thought of as a "bad book;" but the whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of that line Homer says to RiThis wasn't bad enough to officially be thought of as a "bad book;" but the whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of that line Homer says to Ricky Gervais during that one episode of The Simpsons -- "You take forever to say nothing!" It's particularly bad in this case, because this is supposed to be a science-fiction novel, regarding an arranged marriage that will be perceived to take place in 25 years from the standpoint of the newborn infant wife growing up on a stationary planet, but only one year from the perspective of the deep-space trader groom who zooms around the galaxy at time-bending almost-light-speed. The problem? Nothing actually happens for the vast majority of the book, until a packed finale that simultaneously feels overly delayed and too rushed, a clear case of Greene getting an idea for the beginning and ending of a decent short story, then unwisely thinking he could just throw 40,000 words of filler in between and call it a novel.
Also, I must admit that I'm not much of a fan of social-realist sci-fi like is the case here (ugh, I get it, the space refugees are space poor and live in their space slums while dressed in their space rags), and am especially annoyed when it feels like an author is going through a checklist of #MeToo tropes, not because he's sincerely into them but because his publisher gave him a memo of details to be awkwardly inserted into the manuscript wherever convenient ("#7: Make sure a main character is in a loving gay relationship! #8: Have a minor character identify with third-gender pronouns!"), so to not be screamed at by Woke fangirls at his Conoconocon panel discussion six months later. I'm all for these kinds of additions when they feel organic to the story, but not when they feel randomly plunked down for the sole purpose of calling attention to themselves; and that plus a story that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing for 90 percent of its page count left me feeling deflated by the end, a book that at least is not badly written (and thus is at least getting a middle-of-the-road score from me) but still not one I recommend to others. ...more
The most frustrating thing about being a fan of a genre publisher, like I am with the science-fiction press Tor, is that for every amazing book they pThe most frustrating thing about being a fan of a genre publisher, like I am with the science-fiction press Tor, is that for every amazing book they put out, we have to wade through ten mediocre ones, designed mostly for hardcore superfans who burn through a book a day and therefore have a much lower standard of quality than we do, essentially the literary equivalent of bingeing an entire season of Law & Order over a weekend because we're too lazy to get off the couch, and the show provides the barest minimal excuse we need to indulge ourselves. Take Corey J. White's Repo Virtual for a great example, part of that nostalgic retro obsession with '80s and '90s cyberpunk that seems to be coursing through the industry right now. This novel feels like White tore through the complete '80s work of William Gibson one summer, loved it and wanted to try one of his own, but couldn't come up with any original ideas himself, so just threw Gibson's books into a salad spinner until all the pieces came out in a slightly different order than before. To be clear, that doesn't make this a bad book at all; indeed, that's precisely the problem, that it's just middlebrow decent enough that it will never offend anyone, but by definition will never be memorable to anyone either. It's a perfectly fine choice for a convention-going fanboy who's looking for something to kill a random Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon; but for the rest of us, you can go ahead and start the countdown from nine now, until we're ready for another astounding title from this high-volume publisher. ...more
I really knew nothing about Philip Reeve's seven-book (and counting) young adult "Mortal Engines" series up to recently, but got convinced to pick it I really knew nothing about Philip Reeve's seven-book (and counting) young adult "Mortal Engines" series up to recently, but got convinced to pick it up through an article at the blog for science-fiction publisher Tor, because the premise sounded so insane: first humanity blows itself up with nuclear weapons, which then kicks off a chain of natural disasters like new volcanos, which then leads humanity to build motorized wheel platforms for all their cities so they can be packed up and moved at a moment's notice, which a thousand years later has turned into a series of weaponized island-states that roam the wasteland of central Europe and battle each other for resources. Yet Reeve somehow makes it all stick together, astounding given that he's decided to tell the whole story through the prism of complex steampunk world-building on top of everything else. Granted, it's written specifically in the simplified vocabulary designed for a younger audience, which is why I'm not going to bother with any of the other six books in the series; but this was a great rollicking read just by itself, all action and mythos-building all the time, one that creates a great lived-in universe then plunks us down in the middle of it. Strongly recommended, not to mention its underrated movie adaptation by Peter Jackson and company, which any fan of the book will plainly love yet was one of the ten worst movie bombs in history. ...more
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