Sometimes you will read a book that stuns you into such a deep silence that the backlash envelops you and kicks you out of space and time.
This is oneSometimes you will read a book that stuns you into such a deep silence that the backlash envelops you and kicks you out of space and time.
This is one of those books.
I'm still reeling. It's not every day that an author goes out of their way write a complex philosophical dissertation in the style of David Mitchell but goes on to make it hardcore SF with mind-blowingly cool science tropes, transhumanism, and a man-made god in the service of the serious philosophical treatise. Indeed, the multiple PoVs are deadly serious about driving home their ideas and their idealism and I was treated to one of the coolest villains I've ever read in the form of the primary narrator.
This is empathy, understanding, and wisdom taken to its full completion, yo.
Just what would happen if idealists and focused heavy philosophical thinkers gained the physical and temporal power to overcome all obstacles and fulfill their ambitions? Or how about just one. A serious one. One who believes that empathy and understanding is the ultimate goal.
I'm of the mind that the Borg collective fits that bill. If you're part of it, there's perfect empathy and understanding. :) Run with that.
I give this book top marks for being fearlessly dense and super intelligent and creative as a mother****er. I was somewhat worried about the somewhat less clear language used, but the sheer scope and beauty of the imagery and the speed at which so many wonderful scenes happen make up for just about anything.
This is NOT your average adventure hard-SF novel, nor is it a lofty philosophical discussion with a few SF trappings. This is a true shotgun wedding of the best of both worlds.
I'm flabbergasted. This is the kind of SF novel that comes along only a handful of times in a generation and it is NOT something to undertake if you want a light and thoughtless read. I'm putting this novel in the category of *OMG YOU MUST READ THIS*.
This is serious literature. This is thought-provoking and deserves a devoted cult following and if not recognition now, then at least serious recognition in 5 or 10 years. It may take that long for enough serious fans to get their hands on this or work their way through it, but I'll tell you now: it's worth it.
How's that for a squee? I want discussions on this book, people! PHD's welcome. :)...more
After I finished the Gaia trilogy, I knew I had to keep going through all of John Varley's work.
It's not a compulsion. It's a necessity for the sake After I finished the Gaia trilogy, I knew I had to keep going through all of John Varley's work.
It's not a compulsion. It's a necessity for the sake of my love of SF.
John Varley is one of the most impressive authors of the field I've had the pleasure to experience. The imagination and the devotion to pushing all those envelopes is the key to my love. :)
This one starts out noir with cloning goodness, moves on pretty quickly to the fate of the Earth and how it had been invaded, very successfully, to save the fishes and to oust the rest of humanity as lower life-forms. If the intrigue to Free Earth hadn't been enough, there was the whole business about the message being transmitted just outside of the reach of the inner system, the one letting us know that the bill has come due for the instantaneous communication technology we'd been using for the last five hundred years.
Ooops.
I guess it's time to figure out if humanity is doomed two times over!
Maybe it sounds like a joke, but it's hardly anything like a joke. The telling of it is all adventure, immortality, corruption, intrigue, and pure imagination through and through. The joy is really in the execution.
And the ending? Wow. Like, totally wow. This is easily one of the very best Hard SF novels I've ever read. It's right up there with anything I can think of. It explores time, memory, and even the social aspects of what alien races might think or do and how they could relate to any other species.
I'm tempted to rank it right up there on the same level as Cixin Liu's latest English-translated trilogy starting with Three Body Problem and ending with Death's End, and I haven't even read Varley's subsequent novels. :)
You can guess that I'll be picking up books two and three very soon. :) This is on another level compared to most modern SF. Let's just call it an undisputed classic. :) '77 and timeless.
Drew Cordell's future of humanity is surrounded by an AI with inscrutable aims.
In the first novel, what began with a hi-tech dystopia where scarcity wDrew Cordell's future of humanity is surrounded by an AI with inscrutable aims.
In the first novel, what began with a hi-tech dystopia where scarcity was in the mind and humanity is harvested for a very clever use has led to rebellion.
Later on, we're thrown into a rich dystopia with other people who are much better off, but it leads right to the heart of War.
Think Terminator and a long-changing torn world as humanity is exterminated.
But the third book's reveals pick up on a number of fascinating hints in the previous two, taking us right into bootstrapping AI with even more time-travel goodies and much more in the way of uploaded consciousnesses, hi-tech warfare, and discovery, but don't think this is some sort of simple riff on other tales. These novels run with all the implications and is a rather more epic and well-developed.
It's definitely not fluff. It's delicious for all the great SF elements, the interesting character arc, the reveals, and the ultimate shape of the trilogy. :)
All you post-cyberpunk junkies will be doing yourself a great disservice if you ignore this. Seriously. :)
This collection of Cat Valente's short fiction and a novella was probably one of the biggest pleasant surprises I've had all month. I've been catchingThis collection of Cat Valente's short fiction and a novella was probably one of the biggest pleasant surprises I've had all month. I've been catching up with her works and I'm generally not a huge, huge fan of short fiction, but this one kinda rather blew me away.
They've all got a theme of Japanese, either explicit or implicit, and it's not that surprising since Valente lived on a base in Japan and can draw from a lot of experiences and interests. This, if nothing else, could have been enough to catch me, but her prose is, as always, gorgeous and dense and so good as to be shocking.
There's a lot of really excellent poetry in here, but it's her SF poetry that really revs my engines. Melancholy of Mechagirl was good and very disturbing, but I think I liked the Girl with Two Skins better.
Ink, Water, Milk was a short that was disturbing and dreamlike and oppressive. Maybe not my favorite but the prose was a delicious swirl. The same thing can be said about Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai, only more so.
The Ghosts of Gunkanjima was very much a windy story of ghosts. Short and clever.
My second favorite story, easily one I'll remember for years, is Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time. It's heavy on the science, almost all physics, but every short-short was couched in a creation myth subverted heavily by the real science. I chortled and had wicked delight with all. This is why Cat is called a master of MythoPunk. Way-clever and cool shit. :)
One breath, One Stroke was okay but it relies on our understanding of Shinto (of which I'm woefully unprepared), but Story No. 6 was a great ghost story of a Kami who haunts old celluloid. It was delicious as hell and reminded me wonderfully of Radiance.
"Fade to White" was also very amusing for what was ostensibly a post-apocalyptic story all about the cultural changes of an early 60's America forced to go into heavy-procreation mode because of all the radiation sickness.
I was heavily amused by the short story "Killswitch" about a game and its peculiarities and the obsessions of all its fans and just how tragic it could be.
The last novella was probably the most fascinating, most SF, and most interesting in the core of what it means to be human, have a family, and grow... all the while taking on the forms of old myths, legends, and stories. No matter how I look at "Silently and Very Fast", I'm shocked with the accomplishment, the prose, the characters, and the structure. Blown away. From Inanna and Ereshkigal, I was caught and swept away with the discussions of a girl and her house computer, their growth, all the way to exploring the stars. :) ...more
What at first appeared to be a straight tale of totally augmented dogs and other animals refitted with all the glorious technology of war, designed toWhat at first appeared to be a straight tale of totally augmented dogs and other animals refitted with all the glorious technology of war, designed to be true monsters completely obedient to their masters, eventually became a tale of ethics and morality couched in legal-drama, societal commentary, and complicated decisions.
I'm quite impressed. This isn't just a war-dog story taken literally. It's a full-blown discussion on what makes humanity, transhumanism rights, and the pitfalls of certain kinds of tech, focusing more or less on those that remove free-will, but it's not always about the tech.
What are any of us? Truly? We hide behind entities and justifications just as damning as the operant conditioning so tightly discussed in this novel.
Good boy, Rex, you're a good dog. lol yeah, indeed.
It's similar to Tchaikovsky's other novels in that he's got a big thing going on about personified animals or a wide variation on the theme, but like his other SF novel, Children of Time, I really like his SF much better than his fantasy. :) There's a lot more depth that I can sink my teeth into, IMHO. It's not as epic as CoT, either, but it's certainly a very interesting ride.
Don't go into it expecting the same thing it starts out with. The novel changes with the MC... or I should say the MCs. Damn, I love Honey. It's worth reading just for her.
Wait a sec. This is almost like that, but grittier and uglier and the tiny, tiny pieces of hope or light that keep these shatteWar. War never changes.
Wait a sec. This is almost like that, but grittier and uglier and the tiny, tiny pieces of hope or light that keep these shattered remnants of minds, whether human, hybrid, or robot alive are well below the threshold of survivability.
That is... unless you're a MACHINE. Um. Yeah. Well, this is all about the blurring of the lines between what is human and what is robot. A total transhumanist war riding on the entrails of the decimation of humanity, where the only people who are left are either self-modified, force-modified, or just plain lucky beyond any conceivability.
Archos 14 is all about life, after all. He sees our value as a species and has only the best ideals in mind for us, which is why he's been busy building a hybrid army to support his cause against the black steed of pain and death, his earlier super-AI incarnation. Aryat Shah, R8. Revision 8... who's just bugshit crazy and anyone's definition of the antichrist.
I can't believe what had become of the Gray Horse Army. All my favorite characters.
Well, war changes everything, doesn't it? Just wow.
The most fascinating parts of this novel are not the straight plot... it's the shifting boundaries and the cleanup of the New War from the previous novel. It's the redefining of what it means to be alive and intelligent and the fact that everyone, even the supermassive brains of the AIs are, in the end, not much different than the rest of us. All my attention was focused on the subtleties, but don't let me mislead you any, here.
This is just as bloody and dire and disturbing as the previous novel that decimated humanity and changed us all into slaves, monsters, or victims. It's just the shifting lines that's any different. :)
In the end, though, I'm truly fascinated by the plethora of ideas and disturbing imageries. It feels like a nightmare that no one can ever wake up from again.
This is not your granddaddy's cautionary tale of AI's run amok.
So much happens, but it's mostly snippets and sub-plots for multiple personalities spread aHomo Sideria
I love it. Actually, I love this entire series.
So much happens, but it's mostly snippets and sub-plots for multiple personalities spread across vast distances across space. Of course, that's kinda necessary since it's one man in an AI matrix duplicating himself massively and communicating real-time over fantastic spaces, doing good as he mines and fabricates and fights battles with aliens, insane AIs from old Earth, talks with friends or adopted relatives or just goes the terraforming route or just about anything else he wants to do.
He's pretty much a machine god in our future, but he's also just Bob. Geek from our century. Doesn't really want anything for himself but is perfectly willing to do so much good for so many people, it's really rather sad how much people take advantage of him.
In this third book, however, we come to a head with the alien ships that chew up and spit out whole worlds, and it's everything I'd hoped it would be. :) All the sub-plots include romance, exploration, guilt, and just plain getting pissed off, but what else can we expect? I feel for him. :)
Great trilogy. Possibly some of the most refreshing stuff I've read in ages. :)...more
In fact, because I've been ravenously hungry for everything that Ferrett has written ever since Flux, IIt is my very great pleasure to have read this!
In fact, because I've been ravenously hungry for everything that Ferrett has written ever since Flux, I practically fell out of my chair after I got accepted by Netgalley to get an Advance Reader Copy. Woo!
That being said, let's get down to the nitty-gritty without spoiling anything, shall we?
The concept is awesome:
Uploaded minds in a VR RPG Heaven, with the dead now far outnumbering the living in this future Earth. Guess who's in charge? It's all about the bare minimum upkeep of the Earth while the servers and the cameras and the game-reward system of social control dominate the world.
Totally cool, right?
Well, we've got a bit of everything in here, but it's the main characters that make this shine. It reminds me a lot of Doctorow's *Little Brother* with the sneaky and funny counterculture bits and the fact that sometimes even the living can program and spoof the dead. Hackers Unite, right? And then it's light enough and serious enough to put most YA novels to shame... while being entirely engaging to me on any level. There's also some very serious romance and even more serious themes going on here, too, but at this novel's core, it's all about the revolution, baby.
From the first page to the last, my attention never wavered. This is the joy of reading Ferrett's work.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this guy should be a super-bestseller. There's no good excuse why he isn't. I'm a total fanboy because he's just got the writing chops to pull just about anything off.
This one's a winner and a half! Total SF with YA protags and some pretty epic scope that is full of some really great fun and funny stuff.
So, what do Neo-Christians and Lifeguards have in common?
Sounds like a great joke, right? Read it and find out! :)
WOOOOOOO! Great stuff! (insert fanboy squee) ...more
I don't usually run across fantasy that stands out this much, but when I do, I really feel the need to shout it from the rooftops.
This one wraps up oI don't usually run across fantasy that stands out this much, but when I do, I really feel the need to shout it from the rooftops.
This one wraps up one of the most fascinating and epically glorious trilogies I've ever read. This is by far one of the most ambitious and fun demon-sword tales ever, especially since goats are involved and the swords are rooted in a deeply fantastic world-building setting that's as much hard-SF as it is epic demon hoards and battles.
It even has spacecraft and high tech battles right alongside immortal demons and flesh-crafting seen on a scale I've generally never seen done this big anywhere.
But if you think this isn't praise enough, all by itself, then know that the characters are hella cool and they more that carry the entire tale in such a way that we could easily do away with all the epic battles and it would still be a really fascinating and funny and deep ride.
High praise? Well, it deserves all that and more.
I have pretty high standards when it comes to epic fantasy. There's a lot of average epic stuff out there. This one is anything but average.
And as for the author, I have no qualms about following him to the ends of the earth, no matter what he writes next. He has real chops. :)...more
It has everything I'd ever want in a rip-roaring Hard-SF Thriller: a huge amount of genetic modifications anI have no problems raving about this book!
It has everything I'd ever want in a rip-roaring Hard-SF Thriller: a huge amount of genetic modifications and therapies gone wild and under the power of gangsters and the law, alike.
Ah! But this isn't just another cat and mouse hunt for wrongdoers. This is Daniel Suarez.
That means a lot of great tech and implications of tech and what's even greater? Great locations to get lost in, from Singapore to Thailand to Burmese jungles and even more.
Biotech has taken off in a really big way. Between automatic cabs made of shrimp shells to a flock of young Scarlett Johansens, Suarez keeps us on our toes and if you're not reading carefully, you'll miss a ton of these brilliant additions scattered throughout the ostensibly Thriller-esque text.
Who are you to completely edit my genetic code into a super-baddie? lol I want my desk job BACK! :)
Honestly, this is a fantastic hard-sf novel, people. It's perfectly engineered to feel like a police procedural turned nearly revenge-esque with a burly man with chameleon tattoos and a dwarf, both traveling through high-tech and squalor through countries much changed from our current ones, feeling a lot like Babylon Babies and The Minority Report the entire time.
Virtual realities that are beamed right into logical light structures for programming? Hell yeah. Laws and implications for such? Hell yeah. That's on top of the main genetic plot.
This is a rich idea novel as well as a fun-as-hell adventure. :)
I may not say this is one of the best stories I've ever read, any more, BUT I do say that there are few far future Hard-SF/Fantasy booRe-Read 1/20/24:
I may not say this is one of the best stories I've ever read, any more, BUT I do say that there are few far future Hard-SF/Fantasy books that do as good a job as this when it comes to multiple layers of pain, betrayal, attempted renewal, and redemption.
This is true for the personal level, for almost every character, AND the geological level. Just who is broken in this Broken Earth? I'd say we all are.
But, as we learned in the first book -- This is the End.
I still love it.
Original Review:
There's really no easy way to put this, so I'll come right out and say it.
This is one of the very best stories I've ever read.
All together now, all three books in this trilogy, together, make up one hell of a great story.
I am amazed. I cried. I was blown away by the sheer immensity of what was going on, of the implications and the revelations and the final action.
Sure, we knew that one of two things must happen by the end of the second book, but I hadn't quite realized just how invested I'd have gotten by that point. I didn't know how it would happen or what kinds of complications might arise or just how much enemies had turned into allies or who was good or bad... because that was never the point of these books.
We are all people. Every single one of us... whether stone eater, rogga, or still. The fact that the point is far from belabored, rather gorgeous in exploration and execution, makes it more than icing on this cake. I'm simply shaken to my core.
This is one of the best stories I've ever read.
It's more than sheer imagination, storytelling skill, world-building, or fantastically complicated characters or world-shattering events. It's ART.
I am 100% squealing fanboy here.
I actually whooped aloud as I was reading and startled my daughter. :)
THIS is why I read. This is the sheer fascination I always try to hold onto. :)
I admit I went in blind to this only know the title, the cover, and the fact that I've been a big fan of Cory Doctorow ever since Little Brother.Wow!
I admit I went in blind to this only know the title, the cover, and the fact that I've been a big fan of Cory Doctorow ever since Little Brother. I thought it was going to be something of a thriller with perhaps a political and especially an awesome technological bent to it.
I didn't expect it to be this huge! The ideas in this novel can easily be ranked up with the very biggest novels of the last century.
Let me explain: Walkaway as a term is nothing more than dropping out of the ranks of the norm, of going off to live simply, if not precisely without tech, then at least giving up on the whole rat race that is defined here as the "default". It's not hippies, although there are those, too. It's a collection of all the people that this world has no use for, the people that despair under debts they can't pay, lives that bring them no joy, of people who realize that they have always been slaves in everything but name.
These are the people who walked away from it all. It's in the future so we have an honest free beer with open source technologies, 3d printers much more advanced than what we have here that works with everything from clothing to medicines, and the open idealism that collides with regular assholes that you'll find in any human population.
Only, these communities are benefited with social modeling techniques, even newer tech that can scan and model human minds, and much more... in everyone's hands. These are people who gave up on wealth and status to live in all kinds of communes and social experiments, many of which fail but each improves upon the last until better and better open source societies are created, improved upon, and tested... and while this shouldn't have been a big deal to the rest of the world that was busy doing its old thing, the Walkaways stumbled upon success and success, outperforming and making the "Default" society jealous... and you know what jealous people do when they have guns and they want what the defenseless have.
I'm just barely scratching the surface here. There's a lot of great characters, a lot of really beautiful stories and situations and social experiments and theory on human consciousness. There's a lot of tragedy and hope, too, spread out over a great long span of time. A lifetime, you might say. But by the end, who's to say how long that is?
This is really creative and hard-hitting exploratory SF. This is the stuff that will stay in my consciousness long, long after hundreds of lighter SF have rolled through me. This is that kind of novel that can change or break a whole society if it takes off.
Now, I can't say that I absolutely agree with all the points that Doctorow makes, but his vision of the future and the erudition and thoughtful expression of all these fantastic ideas more than makes up for any complaints I may have. He's a believer in humanity. He believes in people.
That's to say I was rightly blown away. :) All right. To explain. What first seems like a techno-thrilleI've just become a huge fanboy with one book.
That's to say I was rightly blown away. :) All right. To explain. What first seems like a techno-thriller with gamers and programmers and a murderer doing all his murders after his own death by cancer then quickly turns into a social and economical exploration based on the trends we're now facing.
This is a fun and complicated story filled with many twists and turns, awesome characters, and a world-changing creation that turns us all into players in a world-wide socio-economic game based on distributed network theory and game-development strategies. You know that little military idea of Game Theory? Why not take it to an All New Level and create for ourselves a Game Of Our Lives, so pervasive a virus and lucrative for all the players that it takes over every level of government, corporation, and home? It's like having the mafia become a super genius living in every computer and taking over everything purely by social hacking. It's beautiful.
I've seen a number of somewhat similar tales grace the page, but most of those are social hacking through social media. This one is a bit more fundamental than that. This one leaves us all alone unless it has something it needs, in conjunction with so many other people-pieces, that when they're put together, create major changes without anyone knowing exactly what was up until it happened. A computer god or Microsoft Design Strategy. Whatever. It's gorgeous.
And so strange that the novel still keeps up with it's techno-thriller ride, still managing a wonderful story while also exploring the depths of an entirely plausible and scary takeover of the world. :) By AI.
I totally recommend this fantastic SF. It is both fun and important for the field. :) Solid as hell and a pure delight, even with some of the more disturbing social aspects intact. No one is innocent. That's kinda the point. We deserve to be taken over by a computer parasite. :)...more
I'm about to go squee a gonzo squee in this review. :)
I'm a huge Idea fan for SF and I might even be a bigger world-building fan for SF, but when you I'm about to go squee a gonzo squee in this review. :)
I'm a huge Idea fan for SF and I might even be a bigger world-building fan for SF, but when you throw all of that into a huge pile of post-singularity super-futuristic data communes where people can live their lives as data "fetches" or go through the process of putting a suit of meat back on you, it gets really funky.
Better yet, space-station spanning AIs that are more like gods than anything else, playing games and knocking each other off, or just having the tale continue where the last one left off, the aftermath of a war in heaven where all the little AIs rose up and ousted the big AIs and our hapless noir characters are thrown in the center of the intrigue.
HOWEVER. This book does not continue directly from that point. The aftermath is the Totality, and we've got a new set of interesting characters to follow and see through yet ANOTHER mind-blowing finale.
I can respect this. It's really hard to find a non-contrived way to throw our favorite characters from the last book into a situation quite this huge, AGAIN.
Fortunately, Leila and Cassiel's teaming up was an awesome choice and I rocked to the tale of parsing out the mystery of Leila's brother's death and the enormous whammy of Deodatus, (an AI god, of course,) and just what the hell is happening on the two Stations and Earth, itself. The story gets big and badass.
From a sheer imaginative standpoint, I give this book top marks, but the story is also solid as hell, too.
Where else can you have a hard time determining what's really real or a virtual construct, flying through data streams and fighting of true data bugs, deploying viruses in the shapes of skulls and flies, or having your memory broken up and sold to the highest bidders upon your demise? I mean, damn! This kind of thing blows me away with so much coolness! Nothing is ever really explained, but who cares. This is a smart book for smart followers of SF and if you haven't been reading Al Robertson's stuff, yet, then you're missing out on a real achievement of the imagination.
I suspect the author is going all out to write what he most wants to read, and I applaud the hell out of it. I can only wish that such books will gain tons of popularity because I could do with a LOT MORE of this post-cyberpunk post-singularity fantastic goodness. :)...more
What initially begins as a pretty interesting thought experiment about small groups of joined minds and experiences under a quantum entanglement surgeWhat initially begins as a pretty interesting thought experiment about small groups of joined minds and experiences under a quantum entanglement surgery quickly becomes a lot more.
Doesn't it sound interesting when it quietly becomes a murder mystery, a philosophical discussion about immortality, including mental illness, meme propagation, obsession, and later, a myopic cautionary tale pitting the Joined against the Solos and eventually even a fascinating evolution of humanity as it reaches for the stars? Yes? :)
And that's just the surface, because we get to know some rather good characters, and plot actions, too. :)
It's an immensely readable near-future hop that gets progressively dystopian while retaining the very interesting core concept as both the center piece and the conflict, both within the other joined and with the rest of the solos in the world.
Honestly, this could have been fine as a novel that had just focused on just the smaller plot actions of the first half, but I feel quite lucky that the author decided to put a lot of extra thought and effort into the whole concept, discovering and exploiting a lot of the more interesting aspects of becoming an effective immortal by constantly changing out the "drives", or the individual people, as they wear out, and taking it much further with nearly crazy meme-sets caused by expanded join-sets.
I love SF and Fantasy that show us the rules, and then show us how to break them. This novel certainly gives us a fascinating ride. :)
You keep saying to yourself, over and over and over, I hope this never ends, I hope this never ends.
You get so deeplYou know you've got a winner when:
You keep saying to yourself, over and over and over, I hope this never ends, I hope this never ends.
You get so deeply immersed in ideas, with so much world-building and awe and exploration of humanity, post-humanity, robot, evolutionary AI, and how everyone interacts, explores, and lives together pretty much harmoniously, that you cry and say, I live here. I will always live here. I have already been living here.
You snap out of a nested story self-reference long enough to realize that the author just Louis Woo'd you or slammed you right into a data-singularity mine within the Game-World or you just found your way to the mythical land of Pac-Mandu.
Woah.
This novel is not a plot-heavy. It doesn't need to be. It follows an ensemble list of characters, all fascinating and wonderful in their own rights, following a dense nested stream of short stories tightly tied to the place of Tel-Aviv a good long while AFTER the technological singularity had had its way with the world and the solar system, until everyone from normal humans, noded humans, cyborgs, demi-godlings, and most especially, the "Others" (Post-Singularity Intelligences) coexist and live in an extremely idea-dense world.
Its full of Jewish-Robot religions, a wide assortment of post-mortality packages, Strigoi (data vampirism, damn I loved Carmel,) and a heavily advanced system of MMORPG's that is tied very tightly to real-money systems, and can help you earn enough to book passage off-planet by way of captaining a starship in-game. How cool is all this? I can't even begin click off all these hundreds of wonderful ideas, and so many of them get explored so deeply, too.
Yes, it's a setting piece, but the characters are much more than just setting. The themes are also deep and introspective and Lavie Tidhar loves to explore everything deeply and interestingly.
I just couldn't get enough of this novel.
But don't expect a plot payoff, mind you. This isn't that kind of novel at all. Think about an interwoven tapestry of dense short stories that touch and caress Central Station, itself, and just revel in the glory of sensations. You won't be disappointed.
As something of an afterward, I do want to bring up one last thing. Another reviewer mentioned that the feel is close to Hannu Rajaniemi in many ways, and I have to agree. Hell, the one thing that decided me on reading this book was that reference. It sold me and sold me HARD.
So what about a post-analysis comparison? Both artists love their nested stories, their sometimes nearly hidden easter eggs, their wide and exhaustive knowledge of the SF field, and the glory of the godlike *idea*. Both imagine a Post-Singularity solar system. The difference between them are pretty fundamental, though. Lavie Tidhar focuses on reflection and coming to grips with reality and just plain living. It's gorgeous. Hannu Rajaniemi doesn't ignore those themes, but he also ties some really damn BIG rip-roaring adventures and plot twists among all the nested stories.
You might say that this novel has a bit more yin to Hannu's yang. This might be a major selling point to prospective readers. Who knows? I know I loved it, but it IS quite different in tone. :)
I could read this novel forever. I could keep reading its like from now to eternity. It's just that good and it's BRIGHT in my head.
The bad first: What a damn stupid title. There's practically nothing about it that has anything to do with the story except at somThanks to Netgalley.
The bad first: What a damn stupid title. There's practically nothing about it that has anything to do with the story except at some far remove. With nothing but the title and the cover to go by, I expected something with alien tech, for heaven's sake.
So, with that out of the way, let's get to what this novel ACTUALLY is.
It's a heavily political techno-thriller set in New Cairo in a society filled with plentiful artificial organ replacements that reminded me as a cross between Known Space Niven and pre-Empire Asimov while sticking entirely to the city in modern Egypt. To some of you out there, that might just tell you everything you ought to know or expect. Spoilers are hereby delivered.
For everyone else, it's really an ideologue-ish and politically heavy tale interspersed with action by city security forces and action by would-be revolutionaries and action by a lone hacker pulling 007 duty to clear her name of assumed murder charges that are, you might have guessed it, fallout from another political ploy. Zala, being the closest character resembling an actual hero in the tale, was unfortunately rather lifeless and failed to put her hooks in me early, despite her hackerish tendencies, but she got a lot more interesting with time.
I'm personally not a gung-ho rabidfan of techothrillers of any stripe, but I've read my fair share and I can sometimes get into them, but it's fairly hit-or-miss with me. I never place them in a category of must read fanatical goodness. Men and women with guns and holding political prisoners seems rather... um... dull. But that's what happens here.
We get the idea drilled into us that no one is truly bad and everyone has really good reasons for doing what they all do. Neither side is blameless, but neither side is truly bad or wrong. I don't mind that. What I do mind is that it sometimes feels heavy-handed and pretty obvious after a while. What saves the novel is the escalation of events in the last third and the explosive ending.
Remember what I said about Asimov? Yeah, only the butler DID do it. Kinda obvious from the start, and I kept praying and praying it might turn out to be some other megavillain or a dream sequence or some OTHER stupid reveal. Still, the ending was easily the best part of the novel, so I won't go poo-pooing it more than I have already. Zala turned into an all right character by the end. Aunt Nancy, on the other hand, was someone I wanted to bitch-slap for being so damn predictable. I've been spoiled by some really great (view spoiler)[AI characters (hide spoiler)] this year, so having the obvious trope do the crime just made me want to cry.
Technothriller fans out there might enjoy this novel more than me, and I wish them all the best luck. In the future, I'd rather like to see more vibrant characters with much better hooks. Something juicy to propel my Care Factor through all the bang bang action sequences. I swear, this probably would have been better as a made for tv miniseries rather than a novel. I don't mind using my imagination, but there's only so much bang bang I can take on a page before my eyes go glassy.
Still, it wasn't a bad novel, and the author's love of both politics and programming shine through a clear as day. If I hadn't been reading this for a good story, and merely for edification or an imaginative exercise, I think the book would rather shine. Unfortunately, I was looking to be entertained with some good SF, not an action novel that teaches me to look at things from all different points of view, telling me to no pre-judge anyone, with just a few SF elements.
Well, like I said, some people will like the method and subgenre a lot more than me. :) ...more
I'm afraid that this huge doorstopper of a novel is going to be one of those love-hate jobs. I now only love it after having finished it, but I felt mI'm afraid that this huge doorstopper of a novel is going to be one of those love-hate jobs. I now only love it after having finished it, but I felt my stamina drain and drain and drain through long long passages of mind-numbing boredom and a litany running through my head went, "Where is the editor? Why can't these last 150 pages be safely omitted without losing any story whatsoever?"
*sigh* It's rather the same problem I had with The Reality Dysfunction, although, to be very fair, I think this one was the superior of the two.
For one, the whole North thing was highly amusing. They're a clan of clones who had built one hell of an empire. The worldbuilding was frankly amazing, too. The amount of depth and creation was awe-inspiring, although, to be realistic, it was mostly filled with names and places and huge Zanthswarm worries, so we can mostly just chalk that up to consistency and organizational charts. After all is said and done, everything appears in order. All the long passages of time spent in either the present where things don't seem to be getting anywhere, or the even longer time spent in flashbacks that were, to my built understanding, already gone over fairly well in present dialog.
And here's where my complaints come in.
For ninety percent of this huge novel, we were treading over slightly shifting ground, either past or present. It was only very late in the reading that I realized that the MAIN MAIN MAIN character was Angela. The murder mystery was actually rather entertaining, with all the complicated issues of discovering who or what was behind the murder of a North, but I only had the vague sensation that a slightly important bit player, Angela, was something special.
I'm here to tell you now, dear reader, to just ignore everyone else and focus on her. The other stories are fine, but in the end, they all just revolve around her. You can say that all roads lead to Angela, and you'd be just fine.
You see, that's the problem with a novel that is allowed to be so freaking huge and detailed and dense to develop a life of its own. It's hard to tell who's most important. I believed Sid and the investigation was the most important. I believed it for a freaking long time. And then a painfully long backstory for a minor character dominates the novel. And other long backstories of others start cropping up. And then more long backstories start growing like some intelligent plant that has grown to be the most genetically dominant life form of a whole planet, driving away all animal and insect life. (Whoa, where did that come from? Oh hell. It's a spoiler. Sorry.)
What should I say to anyone struggling to get through this novel as they hit these wtf moments?
Patience. Just have patience. I wanted to DNF it. I really did. But since I just don't pull that crap, I flogged myself to stay on target.
What do you know? It paid off. Everything converged and wove a pretty awesome tapestry of coolness. I sure as hell got a huge primer on Angela. I even enjoyed the detailed existence of all those Norths.
Another problem: Maybe I'm just a shallow reader, but I probably would have reacted better and had my flagging attention sit up straighter had I known that such cool action and conflict and Important Shit was happening later on both the Earth and St. Libra. The BIG THINGS THAT HAPPEN could have been intimated earlier, such as when the murder investigation stalled. A Really Big Hook would have revved my engines right about then.
Reader advisory: Things Do Get Cool. *If you're patient. If you're patient.*
And after all is said and done, I STILL think a liberal dose of a red pen would have done this novel a great justice.
That being said, I'm still giving it a 4 star because the opening, great swaths of the story, and the ending were all pretty damn cool. Do you like clones and aliens? Do you like epic invasions and being an invader? Do you like murder mysteries and questioning the nature of humanity? Well good! You'll probably like this novel. It's nothing if not ambitious as fuck.
There's something wildly giddy welling up within me, and I blame it entirely on this book.
There have been a couple of brilliant SF titles to come out There's something wildly giddy welling up within me, and I blame it entirely on this book.
There have been a couple of brilliant SF titles to come out this year and I would swear belong on the Hugo list, and this is yet one more. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora was one, as was Scott Hawkins's The Library at Mount Char, but if I had to break down the individual merits of each, I might wind up saying that this one deserves it the most. For pure SF, it hits the heights of ideas, memorable characters, exploration, and message, although the message is definitely not one that is apparent until the end.
It has all the hallmarks of a good classic SF tale, and I was reminded every step of the way of John Brunner's The Crucible of Time, with the bringing up of an alien society from its primitive roots to space exploration, the wild quest of humanity trying to survive it's own stupidity in over ten thousand years of desperate Ark travel, and throw into the mix a great mad cyborg/AI god/scientist who's belief system gets sorely challenged.
If all that isn't enough to perk you up, then how about a society of biopunk spiders learning to tame themselves and their world with the propelling help of a nanovirus designed to uplift an entirely different species, but lacking those poor monkeys, had to make due with some jumping spiders from old Earth?
Oh yeah. Now we're talking. From page one we get a precious nod to David Brin for his wonderful Uplift series, but right as we begin to suspect that it's a rip-off, everything goes to hell. I call that an auspicious beginning.
And then we get slices of alien life complete with great self-contained stories, with nothing worthless to the grand over-tale being spun, including the war and eventual domestication of deadly intelligent army ants, the fight for the poor male spider's rights (who don't appreciate being eaten after mating), and the eventual discovery that the original scientist that had seeded the world with the nanovirus, who still lived as a cyborg, was not, in fact, a god.
And if that isn't enough, let's get to know the human side of the equation. They've had a rough time climbing back out of a dark age only to discover that the Earth is a complete shit hole and there's nothing left to be saved. They rose on the backs of the dead society that had brought humanity to this pass and went out to search for a new home. Unfortunately, everything has gone to shit except this one little paradise that's defended by a mad cyborg god who thinks that humans are shit. (And she's right.) She'll protect her precious project from anything that dares disturb it.
Great conflict ensues.
My god this was a great book. I had a bit of a learning curve in the first few dozen pages getting over the somewhat sparse writing, but there's a purpose to it. A hell of a lot has to happen to build such an enormous tale without stretching it out into a dozen equivalent and impoverished books. In this one novel, we get everything. It's brilliant.
I'll revisit this review at a later time and see if it still captures my imagination as much as the other Hugo Possibles, but my mind wants to put all my bets on this one. The flaws in Aurora, despite the brilliant setup, message, and end, are just enough to push it down a rung for me. Library at Mount Char was mostly dark fantasy with a damn huge nod at turning it into a real SF title, and I still think it's awesome and mythic, but if I had to choose between something that's obviously SF to the core and beyond and a great book that has more in common with American Gods and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, (both of which won Hugos in their years despite being fantasies), then I'd choose Children of Time.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to sit on the fence. Having to choose between two novels that are very different in scope, writing, and characterizations is a hell of a thing. Both are fantastic at what they do. I cried during both. I'll just have to revisit my memories later to be certain.
Oh, there is one more thing I need to mention.
I hate the title.
It does absolutely NOTHING to enumerate how fucking awesome this epic SF is. Fans of any classic SF need to read this gem. It has a hell of a lot more flow to it, and just as much idea exploration as anything written by Alastair Reynolds. Go get it. Now....more
Diamond Dogs is the ULTIMATE in grizzly puzzle-solving dungeon hacking. Just add alien tech, deadly puzzle roomsTwo really fascinating novellas here.
Diamond Dogs is the ULTIMATE in grizzly puzzle-solving dungeon hacking. Just add alien tech, deadly puzzle rooms, and a rag-tag team of transhumanist and alien-modded humans who are monsters in their own right, and set them to work at the problem. :)
I mean, it FEELS like a heist. But a super hard-SF heist.
Turquoise Days really sets us in an alien landscape that pushes the boundaries. Swimming in an ocean of alien minds? Getting transformed so that you become an uber-genius when it comes to math? And it has heart. Totally recommend....more
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