I finally convinced my buddy reader to read this trilogy, and while she's not an uber-fan like I am, I appreciate her willingness to tRe-Read 1/18/24:
I finally convinced my buddy reader to read this trilogy, and while she's not an uber-fan like I am, I appreciate her willingness to try.
As for me, I'm all for a bit of old anger and seismic activity. Father Earth is angry, after all, and people are shit. I guess things never really change.
I'm enjoying the slow reveals and journeys all over again. I'll move on to book two shortly.
Old Review:
Edit, 10:52 pm, tonight. :) N.K. Jemisin is the WINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) :) :) :) Was there any doubt?
Old Review (from a few hours ago):
Re-Read 8/20/16, the day the Hugo Awards Ceremony is to take place for the novel I voted for. :) Coincidentally, I'll be reading the sequel tomorrow. :)
So was it as good as I remember? Actually, better. But that's mostly because I'm in on the trick and the secret of the MC is is laid bare and the whole novel then becomes a character exploration for me as well as a jaw-dropping mountain-load of quakeworthy World Building and awesome implications.
Since I first read this, I read her trilogy and loved it, but what can I say? I still loved this one even more. It speaks to me right down to the absolutely horrible revelations, the personal impacts, the hopes, the fears, the successes... oh, especially the successes... and of course, the question of WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. :)
To say this book is full of questions is to say that a Jane Austen book is full of lace. It's kind of obvious. The question is: What the hell is the lace up to?
Jemisin is fantastic for mythology and mythology building, but what is best about this book is the sense of long history and cycles and the deep feeling like it is all headed somewhere huge. And it is. Just let me ask you... What DID happen to the moon? ;)
If you haven't read this yet, then you're a fool. :) It's deeply textured in all ways, and its not just the fact that the gods are chained or that we killed Father Earth's only child. It's pretty obvious that this is a deep time future Earth, too, and everything seems to seriously point toward a mind-blowing explanation beyond recurring extinction events. :) Which happen anyway, so yeah, let's get down to the real reasons, shall we?
WHY. :) Oh so yummy. :)
Looking forward to the awards ceremony tonight. Let's see if my top choice made it! :)
Original Review:
This is my first N. K. Jemisin, and I'm truly ashamed that I hadn't gotten around to her writing before now. I'm just putting that out right away, because this shame is all my own, and it is deep.
Secondly, this feels like an intensely personal novel, to me, and for me, although maybe nobody will ever know why, except me. The way she treats the volcanoes and the earthquakes make me seethe with jealousy and rage, because it is just so damn good.
And thirdly, I'm stuck straddling the line between how much I enjoyed the POV developments and how they eventually revealed something truly great by the end and how much I wish I had known the secret from the very start. It wouldn't have taken much. Just another line following each heading. There would have been no confusion, no mystery. But no, it is as it is, and I'm very likely going to have to reread the novel to pick up any possible failings of my inconsiderate attention span before I dive into the second novel that follows this.
So what am I trying to say, here? That I'm a miserable failure who is taking this novel way too seriously and admits that he may have missed too much on the first read because the novel was too dense for his little brain? Possibly.
But what I'm really saying is that this novel has skyrocketed to one of the topmost favorite novels that I've ever read, that I'm squeeing about it, and that I think I've just found my newest favorite author of all time.
I like to think that I'm fairly well read. I like to think I have a fairly discriminate palate that shows in my reviews, even if they don't always show in something as simple as a star on a bar. I like to think that I can pick out works of deeply fine quality and works that have obviously been borne quite bloodily from an author's head, like Athena, only with much more gore. This is one of those damn fine novels that just REEKS of imagination, forethought, CRAFT, and one hell of a fine setup, a fine conclusion, and finally, a fantastic and sharp new setup.
I remember the moon. I thought of it throughout this novel. Its having been missing throughout all these damn cataclysms caused me as much grief as the idea that the Fifth Seasons are actually huge diebacks on the Earth, recurring endlessly ever since we killed the moon in some mysterious and immense SF past. We have people with amazing powers, almost godlike in scope, having undergone so much social and historical upheavals, themselves, that no one even knows their history any longer, or why they chose to chain themselves.
We have our main character and her shadow, (view spoiler)[seen semi-confusedly through different names and time periods, from childhood to adulthood to middle age; the last being the present, shown to us through the POV of her shadow in second-person. (hide spoiler)] developing to a final convergence that is a truly wonderful reveal, while leaving us with even greater questions and a truly immense possible conflict. As if supervolcanoes and earthquakes and their control or release weren't enough conflict, right? We've the makings of one of the biggest revenge stories I've ever had the pleasure to read.
It's almost as if I'm reading a quality SF novel that has been allowed the freedom to go Super Sayan on me.
And so my jaw drops.
Am I utterly amazed after reading this? Yes. Hell yes. Do I have any reservations with the author's writing, timing, storytelling, subject, characters, or reveals? No. Hell no.
I do want so say one thing after reading the afterward, though. Thank you, Ms. Jemisin for not giving up on this amazing novel. All of your blood, sweat, and tears have brought forth something truly great. I am indebted to you, personally, for changing my life and my expectations about what can actually be pulled forth from a great novel. You did something Big. Thank you!
Update 4/27/16
And so now we learn that this novel has been nominated for both the 2016 Hugo and the Nebula! By my review above, I'm pretty certain I've expressed how much I love this book, and that has not changed one bit. If I was in a position to scream from my soapbox to say to the Nebulas that this is the clear winner, I would. As it *is*, I CAN scream from my soapbox to the Hugos and say it. :)
I mentioned in my review for The Aeronaut's Windlass, another book that also got the Hugo nomination for this year, that there really should be two separate categories for Standalone Novels and another for Novels in a Series, because most series novels have the luxury of taking things extremely slow and build character, setting, and plot in such long sweeping epics that when we look back on them, they fairly overwhelm us if they've done their job right.
Standalone novels can do the same thing, of course, but they have to do so economically and usually with a great deal of panache and brilliance and editing that probably makes it an entirely different kind of beast from the series novels. At this point in the SF/F genres, we have amazing examples of both and we're getting crowded in one single category that more often than not has to artificially balance series novels 3 out of 5 in 2016, crowding out a plethora of brilliant standalone novels.
I'm fairly naturally prejudiced to separate these two forms in my head, because I'm totally invested in the characters and settings in the series, while I'm learning everything new for the first time in the standalone.
When I think of the Hugos, I generally think of standalone novels, but I *know* it isn't true. I've recently finished reading all the Hugo winners and a very significant portion of the nominations all the way back to the start of the award. Still, I feel a bit prejudiced. I want excellent standalone novels to be recognized as such, uncontaminated by preconceptions.
BUT. I also have to make a decision based on just how F***ing Awesome a book is, too, and The Fifth Season, even if it is the first in a new series, is F***ing Awesome.
I'm sure a lot of people felt the same way about Ancillary Justice when it came out, and I can't say that was the wrong choice for that year, either. :) Good is Good is Good is Good.
So regardless of whether the category should be split up or not, out of all the choices we're presented, I think The Fifth Season should shake the whole ceremony up. :)...more
This is actually my second time reading this story and it's just as good this time as the first.
Let me back up. This Hugo winner for best novella a fThis is actually my second time reading this story and it's just as good this time as the first.
Let me back up. This Hugo winner for best novella a few years ago may not have taken the world by storm, but Valente herself has been taking a lot of us that way. You know. Blown away.
She has a fantastic talent with words, always lyrical, rife with ideas, and most importantly, beautiful.
This particular story starts with a parable about Inanna and Ereshkigal and Tammuz and draws it right into a tale of raising an AI from humble house beginnings to childhood to adulthood, and far beyond. It also seamlessly incorporates sleeping beauty, legends of many monomyths, and incorporates it into sexuality, mourning, and the nature of intelligence (and how humans failed the Turing test). :)
And believe it or not, Valente does this magically. It rolls off the page with such beauty and easy flow, we can hardly believe we're being riddled with myth, deep thought, and hard-SF. We come away from it, FEELING something grand. :)
Do I recommend this?
HELL YEAH. It encapsulates everything high-brow, magical, poetical, and lovely. This is literature AS hard-SF. :)...more
I'm already tired of my previous argument that the first book was the unconscious and the second was the superego. There's no where elReally 3.5 stars
I'm already tired of my previous argument that the first book was the unconscious and the second was the superego. There's no where else for this book to go except a healthy balance: Hence the name, Acceptance. My argument is too trite and obvious.
So, instead, I'll move on to how this novel either succeeds or doesn't as an actual novel meant to entertain us.
I had issues with the previous novel which did get much better once the Authority crumbled, and this novel takes place entirely in Area X, which I very much prefer. The place is a character, after all, and it had been filled with so many delicious developments that it was a shame to just get a dry point-by-point debriefing. I wanted to be plopped right back into the action, to revel in the gorging fruit and flame, and enjoy that unbearable lightness of being.
Well, as the argument goes, we've got a compromise.
The book is chock-full of good reveals, but unlike the first novel, the timing on them weren't quite as good. The first novel had an excellent horror aesthetic, rising and falling between intellectualism, memory, and being absolutely confronted by the Id becoming externalized, backing off and rushing forward like the tide.
This novel is stuffed full of characters like Saul the Lighthouse Keeper, living out his last days before the great change to the Area, (which I liked a lot), Grace the original psychologist and the director of the Southern Reach, her past and her current new self, Control, and (thank goodness,) Ghost Bird. All of them do their part to fill in the gaps we've been missing, and there's a lot of gaps that had to be filled, but that's the purpose of Ego. It's here to make sense of things that can't be quantified, just like Area X.
Here's your first warning about spoilers, people.
I really WANT to talk about the reveals. They're fun and worthwhile. I want to have a nice long discussion about them with people who like (view spoiler)[wormholes and pocket universes, alien intelligences who've perfected biology but who've outgrown the patience to try and communicate with the dregs, the altered starscape, and the functional immortality and time-dilation within the Area. (hide spoiler)] But I won't, out of respect for those who still want to be surprised. Because, let's face it, if you've gotten this far, you're RELYING on the surprises to keep you going, because the plot is kinda unreliable and organic, which fits the theme, of course, but if you're looking for something to actually HAPPEN, or for the Area to finally be Provoked, as was hinted at earlier, then you'll be disappointed.
Can a novel be carried entirely by it's reveals? No. Can they be entirely carried by only a few of the characters, who, like cancer victims, must find in themselves a reason to carry on despite everything that has happened? Maybe. It always depends on how the story spins out and what kind of things we can pull away from the tale, as readers.
Some people are going to take away a lot more from this novel than me. I loved the ideas. I'll rank this novel very high as an idea novel, rather than one that is written well. What really pains me is the hints that Mr. VanderMeer IS a very talented writer, full of great aesthetics and a great sense of timing, which, unfortunately, he declined to pull out for the readers in the second and third novels. (It's not quite as bad, in the third novel. My interest was held much more in it than in the second.)
I just feel as if the novel could have been great with a bit more plot-push or a complete submersion back into the weird. Either way, we bring it back to the characters, or we bring it Fully into Area X as character.
*sigh* Apparently, I have to Accept that the Area (the Id) and the scheming people (superego) must make up a third, ultimately less satisfying character.
Sure. It might be healthy to integrate the two, and it is a mark of character growth, whether it is within Us, as readers, or the peeps we are reading about, but let me ask the important question:
"Don't we, as readers, read for the conflicts, and not the resolution?"
It's where the action is. It's what puts us at the edges of our seats. Acceptance means the loss of conflict. Great for living life, but not so great for the readers of an obviously excellent setup and prolonged execution of an idea story that happened to have truly fascinating and well-drawn characters. It has so much potential. It's really reaching for the stars. I love that about it. I just wish I hadn't felt cheated at the end. We're still sitting on the fence. Neither Id nor Superego are going to win this one. It is ongoing, forever.
*sigh* Happiness and adjustment, in this case, is very off-putting and creepy, especially if you're eventually going to (view spoiler)[transform into the actual ecosystem of the Area and become a functionally immortal monstrosity (hide spoiler)].
(And don't argue with me about the thousands of great examples in Horror that leave us without happy endings. This is a one-off of those. This is an unhappy ending posing as a well-thought-out exposition and persuasive argument telling us that it's actually a happy ending. Or it's the ultimate argument, taken to extremes, of "Life must go on".)
I really want to like the novels, people. I really do. There's a lot going on that I appreciate with my brain and it's turtles all the way down. It's my heart that rebels.
On the other hand, I'm totally open to comments and discussions on this one. It deserves a lot more than just this.
It's going to be very hard to describe this work as anything other than genius.
Almost from the very start, I found myself slowing down and being draggIt's going to be very hard to describe this work as anything other than genius.
Almost from the very start, I found myself slowing down and being dragged into the hellish nightmare of war and such densely imaginative prose that I discovered that there was nothing left for me except to become completely submerged and try to breathe the canned air that Shepard provided. I became Mingolla. I began seeing patterns in the very fabric of reality that might help me survive his life. I became paranoid. I grasped at any and all straws. I grasped at Debora, who was just as fucked as me.
What really blew me away was the way the stories appeared like bulletholes ripping spaces in the mist, swirling and leaving deep impressions that made a whole that was much, much grander than trying to survive the feuding families that had torn apart South and Middle America, or even coming to grips with the immense implications of so much mindfuckery. I loved the stories within stories within stories. We were treated with a dive within the mind's labyrinth, the Mayan king on one hand and the ghost of the conquistador on the other, laughing in insane merriment as they drove a whole world into an excess of dissolution and hate, marked mainly by the burning embers of obsessive hope and love.
My god, what an intense and immensely crazy ride this was. Rabbit-hole crazy. And I had no choice except to fall deep within its labyrinth. It's a mark of a truly fantastic tale when it grabs me so tight and surprises me with tears, anguish, hope, disillusionment, anger, more anger, a seething cauldron of anger, and finally, love. Is it real love? Hell if I know. Remember, I've become Mingolla. Maybe he's right. Maybe the world is completely insane and the only thing we can do is cling to each other, making whatever damn sense we can of the moment as we change with each other, and pray that we can hold a sense of the eventual and far-off understanding for safe-keeping, and that we still retain that last tiny ray of hope after we've arrived.
So damn beautiful. This novel is poetry. It should never be entered into without knowing the risks.
It's an important and brilliant piece of literature. Period. It deserves your complete attention, kiddies. This is no fluff. This is no popcorn. This can be, potentially, life-changing.
I've always hated war. I've never even particularly enjoyed the best that movies or other fiction have provided. But here's the brutal truth: While I hate war, this novel has shown me a special kind of horrible beauty that I'm unlikely to ever forget.
Like the mad-painter and his gorgeous murals that he'd booby-trap to destroy any potential admirer, and destroy the work itself in the process. It's crazy. It's also one hell of a statement of Art.
Shepard's own conversation in the field of literature is more of a gigantic fuck-you to all the writers out there who think they've ever gotten close to telling a Truth. This guy can WRITE, damn it, but whatever he touches, circles, and swoops-in to illuminate, he then shells with artillery.
Fucking amazing shit.
I remember this author from the Eighties being a part of the cyberpunk movement, but that characterization is completely unfair and not worth setting up. He's got maybe a few connections, the seeding of tech and immense discomfort, but beyond this, we've got a masterpiece of storytelling that goes beyond most pigeonholing. He's a force of nature.
Once I got into the story, I wanted a much longer novel and a complete omission of its existing end. The novel is just too damn short to pull off suchOnce I got into the story, I wanted a much longer novel and a complete omission of its existing end. The novel is just too damn short to pull off such a meteoric rise. I liked Bandares. I had no problems with his descent into revenge and a black hole of a human heart. He truly began as a naive little kid, and I enjoyed seeing his fall into what he was slowly becoming, but that's part of the problem. I was still at the beginning of his fall when everything just turned off.
Believe it or not, there's a lot to love in the tale. I've rarely seen such a good blend of so many mind-boggling intense alien races to fill the gaps of the universe, skillfully borrowed and woven into this tapestry from so many of the best Space-Opera elements I've ever read, twisted sufficiently to be rather unique, and others that only give a glimpse of true coolness.
The three main characters are memorable and thrown right into the middle of the action pretty damn well, given problems and flushed down the toilet when things really got screwy. Believe me, I appreciated the speed and the direction of the novel and it was a damn easy read.
Other minor problems that I got stuck with at the beginning was the (to me) over-reliance on sex and sex-byproducts. Sure, it has a place in the novel from a worldbuilding perspective, but I would have felt more inclined to dive into the novel more without the gratuity of the cultural expectation. I would have been fine with implications without it being repeated so much. It's just my personal preference.
What the hell happened with Wa'raydon? I can't ignore the huge dangling rope of a plot like that.
It's another reason why the novel needs to be simply continued, maybe three or four times it's current length. I'd read the hell out of it, and enjoy much further development of the characters. As it is right now, we got to the end of the first act. I expect a hell of a lot more rise and fall and rise again and fall again before a resolution that either confirms or denies the internal issues going on in everyone.
What can I say? I'm hooked on the characters and I absolutely loved the space battle/s. They were all very strong.
As a reader, I'm saying that I want more! Don't pull away my satisfaction like this! Otherwise, I probably would have given it a five out of five. :) ...more
I have to say it's even better on a re-read. I think the trick is in my expectations. Stephenson has a weird way in his writings, pullRe-Read 4/19/24:
I have to say it's even better on a re-read. I think the trick is in my expectations. Stephenson has a weird way in his writings, pulling certain kinds of bait-and-switches that work extremely well for some of us -- especially when we're so tired of boilerplate plotting.
This isn't any kind of standardized novelization, and for that, I love it even more.
I think I got a lot more out of this, this time. I was now looking for parallels between methods of survival from the pre-and-post timeskip, of psychology, reliance on different technologies, and the most commonplace failings of humanity, itself.
There is a richness in the post-timeskip I don't think I truly appreciated the first time around. After all, after 5k years, that's an awful lot of recorded history on top of where we are now. Not so big as to be insanely out of reach, but seriously impressive if you consider technological necessities and advancements (or regressions).
From a purely world-building perspective, the novel is a true delight. In the pre-timeskip, it is an engineer's dream. I still believe it's a great two-for-one bargain. :)
Original Review:
I don't know what all those complainers are going on about. As far as I can see, I just got two novels for the price of one. The first 2/3rds is all hard science fiction, where science matters and the whole thing is tied together with plausibility. The last third is pure unadulterated speculative fiction with damn fine worldbuilding and extrapolation from the first 2/3rds.
Let me back up. I can honestly say that I loved the gigantic erector set that was the first novel, but I will admit that I wasn't head over heels in love with most of the characters, and the few that I really liked were at least two dimensional. This isn't a condemnation. A lot had to be covered to get us from a happyish world, through a blown-up moon, to a mad scramble to survive before the earth gets fireballed by our ex-moon. That means the International Space Station needs one hell of an upgrade. A lot happens, and it's tragic and heroic and beautiful. I've read a lot worse hard sf, and when I say it, it's not a condemnation, either. Hard sf is a lifestyle choice. It's hard to do and successfully pull off a great story with great characters against, say, any other novel that doesn't care about consistency and scrupulous attention to detail.
Mr. Stephenson pulls it off, and I'm not just touting him because I'm a lifelong fan of his writings. I'm saying the novel is solid.
Now on to the second novel. A lot of people have a problem with this one, going, "What the fuck?" Not me. This is where we stop being grounded and we let our imaginations fly. A lot can and will happen in 5000 years from the last hurrah of the plausible and likely end of humanity.
So I see another tradition being followed, one I like even more than the strict master of hard sf. I immediately got sucked into the imagery, the action, the curiosity, the mystery, and the unfolding of a brand new Earth. I don't need to bring up all the greats who have done hopeful and optimistic futures, although I will if anyone asks, but Mr. Stephenson has served up a beauty.
So much is bright and colorful about it, and I'm including the different human races, the flying, the landscape, and the revelations about what the people find down there. No spoilers, but suffice to say there's always a way to bring conflict in, even though the future is hopeful. It was a sheer pleasure to explore, and if the novel was NOT an extension of the first 2/3, I'm pretty sure that most of the haters out there would have thought it was an interesting tale on par with any of the classics. It's all about survival, rebuilding and restoring, genetic engineering, massive scale engineering, and the supremely toned-down idea that love endures.
It was very touching.
All right. I'll mention Brin. It reminds me of the best of Brin.
So that brings me back to the main question: Should these two novels be considered one? There's obviously ties throughout the second one, but I'll be honest with you, they could have been added long after the fact, just so the second novel could see print. That's a very negative way to view it, in my opinion, because I happened to love it for what it was.
Is it a sign of the times that old-style adventure novels set in the deep future can't get published any longer? I hope not. I'd love to see more, assuming the stories still kick ass.
But to answer my own question... Yes and No. The first novel could easily have turned into an ultimate bummer. The second novel could stand on its own. Left to itself, the first novel would have absolutely needed some sort of machinery of god or perhaps the triumphant return of the assholes who had raced to Mars. It would have needed something, anyway, to satisfy the readers. We aren't reading traditional fiction. It wasn't a character study. If the only way to give the reader what s/he wants is to give us a resolution that doubles as a whole second novel, then I say, "Hell yes!"
Because at least this way, I wouldn't have to wait a long time for a sequel when I wasn't satisfied with the first. Can you imagine, or do you remember when Hyperion came out and you got to the end and went, "Huh?" with no Fall of Hyperion to complete it? It's the same deal, although, I'll be honest, Hyperion is still better than this novel. (If you peeps haven't read it, then do so. It's still very high praise to be compared to it, even in a lesser capacity.)
Of course, Neal Stephenson has a whole catalog of some of my absolute favorite reading list, so I'm amazingly biased here.
Was this novel good? You betcha. Did it surprise? Absolutely. Do I recommend? Yes, for fans of the SFF genre with keen eyes and adjustable expectations.
Update 4/27/16
This has been nominated for 2016 Hugo for best novel!
While I think it's pretty awesome in retrospect for the ideas, the science, and the rather epic scope of both saving the race in the first part of the novel and the far-ish future ramifications in the last 2/3rds of the novel, there were also wide swaths of boring info-dumping, too. I might have gone hog-wild all over this novel as the biggest contender for the Hugo, otherwise, but that might also have something to do with how much of a fanboy I am for the author. :)
Unfortunately, this is isn't my first or even second choice for the Hugo winner for this year. Good promise, but the pacing was off....more
I keep hearing Elizabeth Bear in all my regular haunts, I knew she had a lot of writing with nanotech, heavy-sf, and mythology, all of which I'm partiI keep hearing Elizabeth Bear in all my regular haunts, I knew she had a lot of writing with nanotech, heavy-sf, and mythology, all of which I'm particularly fond. So why haven't I picked up her works before now?
I'm an idiot. I can't think of a more accurate reason.
So here I am, reading Dust and seeing a serving girl rescue a princess who just got her wings torn off and the lady of the household is preparing for war. All good and fine for a fantasy novel, only they're preparing for war within a generational spaceship that broke down, it's all-encompassing AI gone schizo, and everyone wants to put humpty-dumpty back together again by eating each other's minds until "The One" can become the Captain.
Okay! I was wondering where this was going. Now I know, and I really like it! But wait, the schizo AI is really fragmented and spun out conflicting personas that are called Angels and like to stab each other in the backs. And they're also godlike. And they like to mess around in the destinies of mere bio-and-nano enhanced humans living in this experimental breeding ground. Who's good? Who's bad?
Our serving girl gets an upgrade, and our rescued princess tells her that she's her half-sister. (What? Oh wait, that makes sense after you see how inbred everyone is on a generational spaceship.) Politics plays a big role throughout the novel, but only in the sense of gods playing with mere mortals, fathers using their children as bargaining chips, and the sense that we've all just been sent into a final battle royale.) The sibling's love can get rather complicated, but their regard never wavers, even when the two get pitted on either side of a tug of war between gods. Good conflict there, I suppose, but it didn't quite have the outcome the setup might have warranted.
Am I dissatisfied with the outcome? I'm not sure. Something nags at me about the entire direction of the novel, and it's more of a forest question, not the trees. The trees were just fine. I like the ending. I just wonder if we could have had more directed conflict in the middle or even a few more reversals. The confusion of the main characters was fine, I just wonder if there should have been a bit more tugging from the non-godlike characters.
That being said, I'm excited to read the other two books in the trilogy.
Spoiler alert!
Computronium is people. COMPUTRONIUM IS PEOPLE! I like the development where we've all been turned into breeding farms for smart swarms of nanos in order to retroactively fix the starship. There's a hell of a lot of fun in here once you get beyond the angel's machinations. It's a much smarter fix for the Duracell argument.
Do I recommend? Hell yes if you want a good dose of symbolism and nanos, a-la Zelazny's Lord of Light, but not as powerful. ...more
I liked this one much better than the previous two novels, full of better contrast, deeper ethical considerations, and more interestingIt's all light.
I liked this one much better than the previous two novels, full of better contrast, deeper ethical considerations, and more interesting intrigue. Mind you, this is all subject to my own subjectivity, but It was much easier to fall into a society of dull board members and sit back confidently as they get pounded ideologically by a godlike feudalist ecology, and back again as they said, "Uh, no thanks, I think we'd best stay on Prozac."
It's funny and delightful, with some real promise of cohabitation except for that one little bit of sophistry that would bring all hope to the brink. You know how people are when they know they're right.
Still, I enjoyed the deeper conversation with the reader about being alien, as with the second book, forward to the uncontemplated reality of colonizing a planet that already housed another intelligence, successfully putting our heroes and heroines on the moral high ground, as opposed to in the moral high ground.
The ending was satisfying and I can honestly say I'm glad I got through the trilogy. The compromise surprised me, somewhat, but it was a logical concession. The trend of the novels supported it, even if it wasn't what anyone really wanted.
In that regard, at least, the novel felt real, and that's a treat when we deal with nanoswarms, a near godhood over a closed system, lots of near resurrections, and unhinged enemies rewriting other's brains.
I'm afraid that I won't be able to review this book as seriously as I originally intended. I wanted to read it as an adventure and a novel of chase, bI'm afraid that I won't be able to review this book as seriously as I originally intended. I wanted to read it as an adventure and a novel of chase, because that's how it felt, but I got sidetracked by alienish and outright aliens being bred in the bowels of the generation ship. I wanted to get waylaid by Tristan, the toolbox, the necromancer, and the fragment of our big bad angel from Dust, but I'm afraid I was distracted.
It could be because the novel was a departure from the excellent setup from the first in the trilogy, and perhaps it is because the main actors from Dust were forced into more cerebral and sendentary roles. Perhaps I wanted a smarter overmind, incorporating the pizazz of the angels from before.
Unfortunately, the novel felt like it was suffering from the same problem as the ship. It was outrunning a supernova, but it had no idea where it wanted to go. I know, it sounds rather damning, but that's my take, and the characters within go and hunt for a reason, or an engineer, to take them by the hand and just go astrogate.
We do get it, by the end, with the help of leviathan, but it felt more like a whimper than a bang. The first novel was much better.
Fortunately, I'm still riding the supernova of the first novel, so I haven't given up on the trilogy. I'll take on Grail right away and pray it picks up again.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I do have to let everyone know that this novel is going to suffer, in my mind, because I devoured a singularly fantastic book during the reading of this one. The problem is simple. I've suddenly had to rearrange my favorite top 3 books of all time to make room for Raphael Carter's Fortunate Fall. This out of print book was a complete unknown to me, but it STILL has an iron grip on my mind and makes me look at EVERYTHING else in a poorer light. It's not fair to the books that come after or, in this case, during, because it's become almost impossible to be objective.
This is also the best reason I can give for continuing on to the third book in good faith....more
I just realized that I haven't updated my top ten book list in my own mind for almost a decade. I certainly haven't modified my topI don't believe it.
I just realized that I haven't updated my top ten book list in my own mind for almost a decade. I certainly haven't modified my top three in over 25 years.
What I have just read has just supplanted number three. Perhaps even number two.
For the moment, I feel like it might have supplanted number one.
I cried like a baby when I closed the book, and even now I can't believe what I just read. It was lyrical and it unpacked with a density of a rushing locomotive. It was full of heart and soul, and it was smart, smart, smart in its choices.
It is a double tragedy. Raphael Carter, as far as I can tell, never wrote another novel. I will likely be a lifelong devotee to this novel, and I'll be rereading it soon. I'm already missing it and I just finished it.
Maybe it's a triple tragedy, because the book is out of print. I was lucky enough to find it used. As far as I can tell, the novel is the greatest unknown mystery of the world. So few people even know about it. Hell, I need to shout out its praises to the world and not let this beautiful work ever be forgotten. And yet, it is. I only picked it up because Jo Walton praised it from her mountaintop as a work that should not be forgotten, and I can't thank her enough.
What is the novel, you ask? It's the soul of humanity as sung from the soul of the last whale. It's the redemption and utter loss of ghost girls and cyborgs. It's the chains that we bind ourselves with, whether in our heart or our minds or everyone else. It's hope. It's horror.
It's recalling, for me, the most heartbreaking moments of V for Vendetta, a movie I've seen a dozen times so that it brings me to tears. It takes the best traditions of cyberpunk and pushes it through the meat grinder, showing us what despair can lie behind the eyes of telepresence ratings.
It's about same-sex true-love and mind rape.
Too much for a novel of 288 pages? Hell no. The writing carries it all and a lot more, effortlessly. This is what I want to make when I grow up.
And it hurts, almost unbearably, that so few people will ever have the chance to experience this novel. If there is justice in the world, then everyone would have the chance to cry over it.
I've had Greg Egan on my radar for a long time but aside from a lucky chance encounter with a novella, it still took me almost two decades to finally I've had Greg Egan on my radar for a long time but aside from a lucky chance encounter with a novella, it still took me almost two decades to finally break down and read him! It wasn't his fault. That lies entirely with me. I'm absolutely ashamed.
Why? Because this hard-SF novelist is unashamedly tackling some of the hardest quantum physics interpretations, (smearing possibilities and collapsing the wave functions of reality) to very, very courageous levels.
The writer runs with a loaded gun with a safety off. It's pretty awesome. The risk he takes from turning a cyberpunk Private Investigator novel into a completely sidelined thought experiment including the mythical Observer and the death of all the wave functions to create a single reality, multiplying it by a few observers, and then eventually to the whole Earth, is not an end ANYONE ought to miss. I cheered. I gasped. I whooped.
Am I explaining this too esoterically? Possibly. Okay, let's back up. The Earth is suddenly quarantined in a quantum bubble to protect the rest of the universe from summarily changing realities willy-nilly because we THINK it into being. It starts out as quantum tunneling on the macro scale, cheating at cards, getting hugely improbable number sequences right, but then we go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole where multiple worlds can be chosen from at will, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and each die as the "best" possible world becomes real. Now let's throw that into the stew and add more people. How about adding everyone to that powerful quantum schedule? What happens when we all get the ability to be gods?
Yeah, Egan attempts just this. :) Brilliant attempt, too!
So why didn't I give it 5 stars? Because great ideas don't always equate great fundamental stories with plot and characters. There's nothing wrong with this one, but most the plot and characters are puppets to the need to make clear what is going on, science-wise. I like good exposition when I need it to follow the intent of the author. In this case, it's absolutely necessary. And delightful. But it necessarily slows down the plot, too. Like, to a crawl.
Fortunately, it was never boring to me. Just uneven. No harm, no foul! And what we have here is a novel of quantum possibilities gone totally nuts. :) I LOVE THIS!...more
What starts and ends as a basic search for immortality as data, as in uploading perfect copies of yourself to cheat death indefinitely, makes this 199What starts and ends as a basic search for immortality as data, as in uploading perfect copies of yourself to cheat death indefinitely, makes this 1994 novel a rather focused utopian novel. Not that things are all rosy, of course, but that it's the search for utopia, or heaven on earth, that drives the characters here.
Distinctions get very hazy between real and real. When the universe is math and math is the universe, a perfect copy as data will have no real difference with everything we have. Change some basic laws, add new elements, ramp up your perceptions or slow them way down. It doesn't really matter. Create a universe that is self-evolving, have it compete with itself and all the parts within it, run a simulation of Life, and turn Darwinism and Game Theory upon data elements.
It's smart. It's evolution in data. And when you can live thousands of years working out all the kinks in your programming in a few eyeblinks in that boring other reality, why not go all the way and live forever for real, speeding up and slowing down within the actual universe, give yourself robot waldos, meet new neighbors... or aliens... and generally play god?
We're already the running software platform in our own universe, after all. Matter doesn't really exist anyway. We're running on an encoded holographic universe. This novel just flips the concept in a mirror and spells out what we might need to do to survive.
Sure, we've seen this concept done many times now, but look at the date here. It's ALSO been done before, but few have gone as far or all out as Greg Egan. The denizens of Permutation City seem to be doing it right.
Yes, there's a good story and good characters, too, but in its heart, this is definitely a utopian novel. :)
I am very safe in saying that this is one hell of an ambitious, dense, and thoroughly grounded novel of mind-blowing physics housed in one of the mostI am very safe in saying that this is one hell of an ambitious, dense, and thoroughly grounded novel of mind-blowing physics housed in one of the most hardcore hard-SF frames I've ever seen.
That's including Cixin Liu's recent trilogy.
I've read a lot of physics books for the sheer pleasure of it and I have a pretty good imagination, but when I was reading this particular novel, I was hard-pressed to keep up with the wall of information, exposition, and detailed descriptions of particle and quantum physics, theoretical frameworks, then more theoretical frameworks branching off the first, and then yet more in case we might have been getting used to the previously heavy load. :)
Am I complaining? No. Hell no. In fact, I'm frankly amazed and thrilled. The underlying story feels like a MORE coherent and theoretical run on Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, delving much deeper into the possibilities brought up by Contact, and it goes just about as far as you can go in transhumanism, ranging widely between regular humans, purely software/robot humans, and virtual polities within wide-umbrella AIs housing vast numbers of uploaded personalities.
The center of the galaxy went boom. It's the end of all life. Run. Run! Run!!!!! :) Vast number of years and high tech isn't enough to escape this.
What we have here is a full and vast adventure of exploration, discovery, and a mind-blowing physics reveal that not only lets the reader fall sideways through the universe and multiple dimensions, but it does it in an excellently ACCURATE direction (at least as far as we understand current physics).
The added realism is bolstered by a very excellent bibliography at the end and I can attest to the quality of at least three-quarters of them. :)
While this novel is NOT all that accessible to casual readers of SF, it IS extremely rewarding to those who are willing to sit through long theoretical (and not so theoretical) modern mind-blowing physics lessons. Is all the science necessary?
Hell yes, at least the way the plot requires them. :) This novel will not hand-hold anyone. And for that, my hat goes off. Much, much respect. :)
Oh, the novel makes me feel stupid, too. :) But that's okay. I've already sealed away a copy of it in a time capsule that will open in a thousand years for the enjoyment of our machine children with brains made of neutrinos who will have all the underpinning physics written into their bones.
I don't know why I never got around to reading this back when I used to see it all the time in the bookstores, even knowing that I was such a cyberpunI don't know why I never got around to reading this back when I used to see it all the time in the bookstores, even knowing that I was such a cyberpunk fan and the whole field was blowing up left and right. Maybe it was all the hardware and the focus on guns and metal that turned me off. I didn't really care about this kind of "punk" so much as I cared for the "cyber".
Granted, back in those days, I might have picked it up, read the blurb, maybe a few random dozen pages, and concluded that it was too cowboy-ee for me to care and I never would have begun anyway.
But today, I have a slightly more refined sensibility. I still don't care for westerns that much, but at least I've picked up the classics and seen that they were, in fact, good. I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood.
So while I'm still not a huge fan of the genre, I can at least appreciate what it does very well, and in some cases, much better than any other type of fiction. The main characters are Cowboy (yeah, that's what he goes by,) and Sarah, and both of them are very well rounded and interesting characters, full of subtle and not so subtle flaws and merits, detailed and fleshy histories, and an eventual love story that is neither gushy, idiotic, or verbose. It was built on quiet respect and blooming friendship. It was almost completely unlike what I was beginning to suspect the novel would wind up being.
Oh no, though, you say, what happened to the cyberpunk aspects? Was there lots of computer-y stuff and explosions?
Why, hell yes, I say! Dogfights in the sky! A battle against the orbitals, lots of scary smuggling runs, but more importantly, a heroic message about getting out from under the short-sighted concerns of the crazy, sick, and bodyless brains in crystal. The worldbuilding is more than solid, filled with past and lost wars, body-sculpting professions, and cocaine-rockets. (This did come out in 1987, after all, and it both shows and shows itself off well.)
Was I expecting it to be a bit of a knock-off of Neuromancer, riding the wave of such a fantastic book? Well, yeah, I guess I was. How did it stand up? Great, if you like more hardware and aerial battles that would make rather more pedestrian space-operas hang their heads in shame. I actually got into the battles, and I've never been one to particularly like military fiction.
I was very impressed not only by the execution of this novel, which never felt much like a knock-off, but because I really got into both the main characters. They weren't flashy or snarky. They weren't bigger than life like Holden in the Expanse or unreliable but still awesome like Kvothe in Name of the Wind.
Cowboy and Sarah felt like real people with real problems in a real world doing their real goddamned best in a really shitty situation.
I honestly liked this book a lot, even if it isn't my normal cup of tea. Why isn't this author sitting on more laurels?...more
I truly didn't have a clue what I was getting into when I started this second book in the Kovacs trilogy. Altered Carbon was a VERY different beast.
ThI truly didn't have a clue what I was getting into when I started this second book in the Kovacs trilogy. Altered Carbon was a VERY different beast.
That being said, we pick up with Kovacs thirty years after his reawakening on Earth and he's far down his lonesome path, giving up on private eye stuff and giving up his free will to join a war. An ongoing war that's either economics or ongoing economics by other means, that is. Give him something bloody to bite into and he's happy enough. It certainly doesn't hurt that his particular Envoy training gets him all the best gigs and privileges.
But is this a hard-bitten war novel? It certainly seems to be, with the wrinkle of easy sleeving into new flesh and the bitter by-line of corporations versus colonial governments.
But. Add an ancient civilization, the one that we stole the tech that turned us all into immortals, a fantastic find, and then turn it into an exploratory heist novel with enormous opportunities for cross and double-cross, and we've suddenly gone into great hardcore SF territory.
Kovacs is still fantastic and Morgan has a talent turning out complicated and memorable characters up and down the line. I felt sad for each death. And what beautiful deaths they were. This was some harsh territory filled with great mysteries. Kovac's intuition still runs as hot as his hallucinatory madness.
Few hard-SF novels are quite as memorable as this one, but that's more a feature of the characters than anything else. I've read some really amazing epics. Even so, this one is deeply satisfying and a winner on nearly all levels.
It IS NOT anything like a repeat of the first. Get that expectation out of the way and I'm sure everyone's enjoyment will be very high. :)...more
I have nothing bad to say about this novel. I was forced to stay up very late to read this, and I ducked out of other entertainments just to finish itI have nothing bad to say about this novel. I was forced to stay up very late to read this, and I ducked out of other entertainments just to finish it. Did I get sucked into the idea of a transhumanism emergence? I think so.
At least with Nexus, it's definitely my favorite Linux distro. I've got about a dozen ideas for apps that I'd like to write. If I can't find it in open source, of course.
I want my new OS!
As for possible complaints about evil governments... Come on... Anyone read history? Ideas and backlash through coercion abound everywhere. It always has.
Now, I don't really know if this might spark a resurgence of telepathy in SFF lit, but I hope so. People might have gotten burned out on stories like that, but this novel feels fresh. Ignore 30+ years of SF that has resurfaced these ideas across the board, of course. That doesn't matter. When a novel reads well, has excellent rounded characters, absolutely fucking-fantastic pacing, I'm not only willing to run with the novel; I'm willing to shout it from the rooftops.
The story is Damn Good.
The respect for Taiwan cultures propelled the undercurrent of themes so well as to make it inevitable. The expressed deep heart made me stare at the corner of my desk for half an hour and made me cry, especially when everything came to fruition.
You know, now that I think about it, the many fight scenes actually continued to develop the characters. The undercurrent of themes, as well. They were memorable and emotional. I can't often say that about fight scenes in writing. Maybe just a handful of books. I'm very impressed.
Absolutely nothing was wasted.
I'm putting this in my fanboy collection. Seriously. I'm shocked....more
I took this one at a leisurely pace because the children deserved it. All of the children, the post human, the autistic, and the abandoned needed a liI took this one at a leisurely pace because the children deserved it. All of the children, the post human, the autistic, and the abandoned needed a little bit of love to see them through this dystopian near-future. The call was just as strong for me as it was for Sam.
I haven't lost any of my deep desire to be a part of the emerging consciousness of Nexus, despite the abuses or the moral quandaries. Indeed, I love its promise as much as Kade.
I suppose this means the novel did its job, whether or not I'm going to eventually classify it as a novel of great ideas or as a novel of great writing. Something about it didn't quite match my hopeful expectations. It didn't have the same pace as the first novel, but there was certainly better action and higher stakes, so I suppose things balance out nicely. Holtzman was at first an annoying detractor to the story, but by the end he served the story's needs awesomely, propelling yet more conflict into the future with his death. Thank god.
All things being equal, I really enjoyed it. On to the next in the trilogy!...more
This third novel is a serious departure from the first two. Global politics and truly high stakes action is involved, including several full-featured This third novel is a serious departure from the first two. Global politics and truly high stakes action is involved, including several full-featured revolutions, the machinations of an evil world-mind, and a nuclear war. Sound pretty epic? It is.
And there was enough action and solid pace to make the introduction of many new characters worth continuing.
Don't worry, though! If you're worried that those surviving main characters don't carry over into this novel, rest assured. All of them have central roles, and it was satisfying enough to be a retelling of Siddhartha. (Although, to be perfectly honest, I much prefer this version. It's as accessible as only a transhumanist revolution featuring love and hate can make it.)
I always thought my idea of throwing thousands of poisonous snakes into a locked congress was a good idea, but Mr. Naam had a better idea. Read this novel and tell me if I'm wrong!
Did I think the novel surpass the first? Hard to tell. It's very different. The first novel was full of sympathetic and idealistic characters that I really latched on to. The second novel really departed from that, and so I was stuck in the pov's of morally ambiguous people who eventually redeemed themselves with their choices, or not. The third novel focused on anger and revenge versus redemption, but on a nicely grounded but still global scale, jumping from China to India, to the US, and back again.
One thing I really loved was the huge homage to Gibson's Idoru, made to serve an awesome purpose. I found myself cheering. :)
I still want to be a part of Nexus. I'd down the drug in a heartbeat. Maybe I have a lot of faith in humanity. ...more
Does the geeky mad scientist have a girlfriend? How about zombism? No? How about super experimental blood nanites? No? He must have a girlfriend, tho.Does the geeky mad scientist have a girlfriend? How about zombism? No? How about super experimental blood nanites? No? He must have a girlfriend, tho.
This is definitely one of those stories that he'll tell in a bar someday....more
The novel is surprisingly easy to place in the taxonomy of great science fiction. Of course, to do so, one must first place Blindsight in it's proper The novel is surprisingly easy to place in the taxonomy of great science fiction. Of course, to do so, one must first place Blindsight in it's proper place. It was a philosophical discussion on consciousness. Echopraxia, follows it's predecessor's conclusions, necessary story extrapolations, but it takes a sharp right turn when it brings up its primary philosophical mode. We put down consciousness for a moment, and pick up the discussion on free will. It might help to know the definition of the title: The involuntary repetition or imitation of another person's actions.
I loved the old topic. I rather prayed that it would continue, and it did in a lesser capacity. But instead of blowing my conscious mind again, we came along on a Hard-Sci-Fi ride that bumped me about on a God trip.
Wait! Wait, you might say. Is this a lovecraftian mashup with hard sf? Nope. Then is it an unintelligent social-dynamic exploration thing? Nope, not at all. Then what is it?
It's an exploration of how biology wires us to look for god, and how that expression manifests in all the new subspecies of human, and it happens in some of the most surprising of ways. Why do his absolutely friggin' fantastic portrayals of vampires believe in God? They're so smart that we've enslaved them to play the stock market or work out the hoariest of mathematical calculations. They glitch when they see right angles, unless they're put on a drug cycle, but more than anything, they're the most frightening thing from humanity's past, and the reasons are constantly renewed.
Seriously. I'm in awe. Vampires are so damn unpredictable, and it's worse because they can fly ahead with so many strange mental predictors to play everyone out in real life as if we're just pawns in chess. You think you've heard this tale? Try again. These aren't any kind of vampire I've ever seen. Try describing an autistic savant as an ultimate predator and you might have a slight inkling, but believe me, these vamps are better. They're hardly one or two dimensional, and they definitely don't match up with anything remotely social.
If they can see ahead so far as to play with all our destinies, then we've got just a small part of this novel revealed. Unfortunately for us, every species likes to play god, and let's not forget the alien species that still makes me shiver in delight and awe.
For a novel that devotes so much attention to free will, I rarely had a feeling that I had any during the reading of it.
I think I play a game with novels that most of us play to a more or less greater degree. I enjoy trying to parse out the plot well before the official reveals. For this novel, I really tried. Unfortunately, I was consistently left floundering because my brain had short-circuited in much the same ways that the characters did, as well. We are wired this way. We see the tiger in the bush, whether or not the tiger is really there. We draw eyes on the wall and immediately extrapolate a deity that watches over us. I get it. And I love how these quasi-post-singularity humans mess with their own programming along the spectrum, to greater or lesser successes in warding off the tiger.
Even aliens have to deal with the tiger. You know what I mean, you Kipling readers. It's all about eat or be eaten, even when you're discussing God.
The one thing I love the most about the novel is the main character. It was a severe departure from Blindsight, because he isn't one of the many strangenesses that came out of humanity's evolution. He is an honest baseline human surrounded by others who are smarter, faster, and more adaptable than him. I won't get into his story because it's quite fun in the novel, but suffice to say, it's worth it.
Is this a worthy successor to Blindsight?
That's an excellent question. I truly loved Blindsight, and most of that was due in particular to the main topic at hand. Echopraxia, by contrast, is up against a very, very long tradition of writers who have all tried to tackle the same question. I did particularly enjoy how Peter Watts gave credit to Dune, which was an excellent example of the same.
On the balance, Echopraxia is a fantastic standalone novel. As a direct sequel, there are a few solid connection points, but it doesn't need or beg for true resolution from Blindsight.
If I try to balance the two novels together, Blindsight's weight will knock Echopraxia off the scale. It only suffers in direct comparison, but by itself it rocks.
Do I recommend the novel? Hell yes. Great action, great characters, excellent suspense, and (again) fanfuckingtastic aliens.
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