I am preparing to send in my Hugo Award nominating ballot, and am at the moment acutely aware that last year I didn't read all that much current SF. So I am currently trying to make up for lost time by reading books that seem like possible contenders (such as Great North Road and Blue Remembered Earth). That is why I am reading this book at this time.
I probably would have gotten to this novel eventually, I usually try to pick up everything Banks writes. On the other hand, I haven't really got on all that well with his more recent books. In fact, the last one I wholeheartedly enjoyed was Look to Windward, which came out in 2000. It is possible that Banks, like Steve Brust and China Mieville, has disappointed me too many times and will fall off the list of authors I bother to read any more (I'll get to the most recent Brust book some day. Probably. On the other hand, I will not be reading anything else by Mieville). I more or less liked The Algebraist, but it was a bit of a slog. I did not really like Transition or The Steep Approach to Garbadale. I tried and gave up on Matter and Stonemouth. I couldn't be bothered to get past the first few pages of Surface Detail, it just didn't grab me.
And so we come to The Hydrogen Sonata. I had heard that it was more of a classic, fun Culture novel, and it is. It's got alien races and spaceships run by AIs with names like Contents May Differ and Anything Legal Considered. It's got backstabbing politics and explosions and a droid who is convinced that reality is just a simulation. It's got a guy with over forty penises. It's also got a giant MacGuffin plot.
The Gzilt, a race who could have been one of the founding races of The Culture but decided at the last minute not to join, have decided to abandon their physical existence and Sublime. The novel takes place in the last 22 days before the big event is scheduled. In the run up, they are being visited by other races who hope to inherit (or just take) their planets once they're gone, by well-wishers sending messages, and several Culture ships who are there to observe and try to keep the peace.
One of the well-wishers is a ship sent by another race that Sublimed long ago, with a message that sets off the events in the book. It leads to the deaths of thousands, and a quest by they Culture and a Gzilt woman named Cossont, to try to find a man who could confirm or deny the truth of the message. Lots of people die. Stuff explodes. Weird planets and weird people are visited. But in the long run, frankly, none of it really matters, because it's just a MacGuffin.
I started out really enjoying The Hydrogen Sonata. It seemed like a return to form for Banks, and I get the feeling that he was deliberately trying to go for that style, and give his fans the type of book that they have enjoyed in the past. But after a while I started getting kind of restless. The book is too long, and the machinations of the politician behind most of this (I eventually started skimming over those sections) too irritating and unjustified. There is too much senseless violence, for no real stakes. It also doesn't help that Cossont does't actually have a personality. In short, I got bored by the halfway point, disgusted around page 400, and read the last 100 pages at a skim just to see if there was a point to all this. There wasn't.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
White Tiger by Kylie Chan
This was a real stinker. It's urban fantasy or paranormal romance, in which an Australian woman working in Hong Kong gets hired on as the full time nanny to the precocious four-year-old child of a handsome and wealthy man who turns out to be the incarnated form of a Chinese god.
We tromp through Chinese mythology as Emma yells at people a lot and talks her boss into training her in martial arts. She turns out to be the best human student he's ever had, picking it up easily and wonderfully, and she's fast and talented and smart and powerful and incredibly, obnoxiously pushy. And everyone in the household loves her, and she holds her own against various immortal creatures, and everyone wants her, including her hunky boss, but no, they cannot be together, so they're just going to pine away like 16 year olds. Aargh.
Meanwhile Emma has two female friends, both stupid in different ways, and I couldn't believe in either friendship, as there appeared to be no real chemistry or warmth between them, and nearly all they talked about was men. It was especially bad with her Chinese friend, as the two Australian girls both kind of looked down on the poor, stupid, deluded thing. After all, we wouldn't want to have any admirable Chinese humans in a novel set mostly in China, now, would we? Anyway, there aren't any to be found. The good characters are all Anglophones or immortals.
So her immortal employer decides to make her the guardian of his child for when he is unable to remain on the mortal plane, and basically makes her a princess, and holds a big reception for all the immortals to bow down and proclaim their loyalty to his chosen woman, and some day they hope they can be together, but not now, sob. Because she's just so damn special.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. This was so troubling in so many ways. Yuck.
We tromp through Chinese mythology as Emma yells at people a lot and talks her boss into training her in martial arts. She turns out to be the best human student he's ever had, picking it up easily and wonderfully, and she's fast and talented and smart and powerful and incredibly, obnoxiously pushy. And everyone in the household loves her, and she holds her own against various immortal creatures, and everyone wants her, including her hunky boss, but no, they cannot be together, so they're just going to pine away like 16 year olds. Aargh.
Meanwhile Emma has two female friends, both stupid in different ways, and I couldn't believe in either friendship, as there appeared to be no real chemistry or warmth between them, and nearly all they talked about was men. It was especially bad with her Chinese friend, as the two Australian girls both kind of looked down on the poor, stupid, deluded thing. After all, we wouldn't want to have any admirable Chinese humans in a novel set mostly in China, now, would we? Anyway, there aren't any to be found. The good characters are all Anglophones or immortals.
So her immortal employer decides to make her the guardian of his child for when he is unable to remain on the mortal plane, and basically makes her a princess, and holds a big reception for all the immortals to bow down and proclaim their loyalty to his chosen woman, and some day they hope they can be together, but not now, sob. Because she's just so damn special.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. This was so troubling in so many ways. Yuck.
Classic BLT - flavored Lays
Taste nothing like a BLT and are kind of bland and uninteresting. Just so you know.
On the other hand, when they had cheeseburger-flavored Doritos out a couple of years ago, they tasted surprisingly like a cheeseburger--sort of pickle/cheese/ketchup/mustard. And they were awesome, except for being too salty.
But the BLT Lays are very much not awesome. On the other hand, they conned me into buying a bag of Lays because I was curious, and I'm sure that was the real goal.
On the other hand, when they had cheeseburger-flavored Doritos out a couple of years ago, they tasted surprisingly like a cheeseburger--sort of pickle/cheese/ketchup/mustard. And they were awesome, except for being too salty.
But the BLT Lays are very much not awesome. On the other hand, they conned me into buying a bag of Lays because I was curious, and I'm sure that was the real goal.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
When I read the plot synopses of Reynolds's books, they often sound like something I should like. I want to like his work, and I keep expecting to like his work, but I find that his books are more appealing in theory than in reality -- I start a lot of them, I rarely finish them. I wish I knew why that was, because I really want to like them. To date I have finished Revelation Space (but only got through it by skipping most of the Sylveste parts) and Redemption Ark. I have tried and abandoned Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, and The Prefect. I keep trying his work, because it sounds promising and I keep thinking that maybe this one will work for me. And so we come to Blue Remembered Earth.
I finished this one.
It is set a couple of centuries in the future, and humanity has spread out within our solar system. The Akinya family firm was very important in making that happen, and they are very wealthy and powerful. We begin the story in Africa, as Geoffrey Akinya is informed that the family matriarch, his grandmother Eunice, has died. Geoffrey and his sister Sunday are the rebels of the family, who were uninterested in going into the family business. Geoffrey relies on money from his family to fund his research into elephant cognition, and Sunday has moved to the moon to be a struggling artist. They face a certain amount of pressure from the rest of the family to fall in line and join the family business, or at least do something more productive with their lives. They resist, and the dynamic is very reminiscent of teenagers resenting their elders, even though Geoffrey and Sunday are theoretically well past that age.
Geoffrey's cousins twist his arm into doing an errand for them: going to the moon and investigating the contents of a safe deposit box that Eunice had there. What he finds is odd, and he and Sunday decide to follow the trail of clues that Eunice left, all the while resenting the hell out of the rest of their family. What follows is a bit contrived, as they follow and decipher clues that Eunice seems to have left across the solar system, and they get involved with a political movement that may or may not be all that helpful to them rather than use family resources to do it. It becomes clear as they near the end that finally discovering Eunice's secret will be a big, big deal.
The mystery plot kept me reading, because I'm a sucker for a mystery and want find out what the secret is at the end. But. BUT. I came very near to abandoning this book around page 300, and eventually decided to continue only because I'd already invested so much time in it that I didn't want the effort to be wasted. If I hadn't been so far in when I got too disgusted with Geoffrey, I would have put the book down without hesitation. Because there is a big, big problem with the novel, and it is the characters. They are completely unlikeable and uninteresting. I don't have to like the main characters in a novel, but they have to have some characteristics that make me willing to follow them around for the length of the story. There wasn't a single character in this book that I found interesting enough to care if they lived or died.
I also found the big revelation at the end a bit of a letdown, and I found Eunice's actions (mild spoiler: she found access to amazing science, but couldn't decide whether or not to share it with humanity, so she foisted the decision off on a younger generation) to be rather a cop-out, and no guarantee that the end result would be favorable.
As I was reading this, I couldn't help but compare it with Great North Road by Peter Hamilton, which also is set in the not-too-distant future and also features a very rich and powerful family, and also involves a mystery to keep the reader going. I think this is the more successful book, in that I finished it, whereas I gave up on Great North Road about 400 pages in because it was too damned slow and not interesting enough for me to want to read another 550 pages to find out the answers. I don't know if anyone else would see the similarities between the novels, but to me there was some sort of resonance.
I understand that Blue Remembered Earth is the first of a planned trilogy. I will not be reading the rest of them. But I have to say, I do feel a certain sense of accomplishment for finally making it to the end of another Reynolds novel. I just wish I had liked it better.
I finished this one.
It is set a couple of centuries in the future, and humanity has spread out within our solar system. The Akinya family firm was very important in making that happen, and they are very wealthy and powerful. We begin the story in Africa, as Geoffrey Akinya is informed that the family matriarch, his grandmother Eunice, has died. Geoffrey and his sister Sunday are the rebels of the family, who were uninterested in going into the family business. Geoffrey relies on money from his family to fund his research into elephant cognition, and Sunday has moved to the moon to be a struggling artist. They face a certain amount of pressure from the rest of the family to fall in line and join the family business, or at least do something more productive with their lives. They resist, and the dynamic is very reminiscent of teenagers resenting their elders, even though Geoffrey and Sunday are theoretically well past that age.
Geoffrey's cousins twist his arm into doing an errand for them: going to the moon and investigating the contents of a safe deposit box that Eunice had there. What he finds is odd, and he and Sunday decide to follow the trail of clues that Eunice left, all the while resenting the hell out of the rest of their family. What follows is a bit contrived, as they follow and decipher clues that Eunice seems to have left across the solar system, and they get involved with a political movement that may or may not be all that helpful to them rather than use family resources to do it. It becomes clear as they near the end that finally discovering Eunice's secret will be a big, big deal.
The mystery plot kept me reading, because I'm a sucker for a mystery and want find out what the secret is at the end. But. BUT. I came very near to abandoning this book around page 300, and eventually decided to continue only because I'd already invested so much time in it that I didn't want the effort to be wasted. If I hadn't been so far in when I got too disgusted with Geoffrey, I would have put the book down without hesitation. Because there is a big, big problem with the novel, and it is the characters. They are completely unlikeable and uninteresting. I don't have to like the main characters in a novel, but they have to have some characteristics that make me willing to follow them around for the length of the story. There wasn't a single character in this book that I found interesting enough to care if they lived or died.
I also found the big revelation at the end a bit of a letdown, and I found Eunice's actions (mild spoiler: she found access to amazing science, but couldn't decide whether or not to share it with humanity, so she foisted the decision off on a younger generation) to be rather a cop-out, and no guarantee that the end result would be favorable.
As I was reading this, I couldn't help but compare it with Great North Road by Peter Hamilton, which also is set in the not-too-distant future and also features a very rich and powerful family, and also involves a mystery to keep the reader going. I think this is the more successful book, in that I finished it, whereas I gave up on Great North Road about 400 pages in because it was too damned slow and not interesting enough for me to want to read another 550 pages to find out the answers. I don't know if anyone else would see the similarities between the novels, but to me there was some sort of resonance.
I understand that Blue Remembered Earth is the first of a planned trilogy. I will not be reading the rest of them. But I have to say, I do feel a certain sense of accomplishment for finally making it to the end of another Reynolds novel. I just wish I had liked it better.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
The Quantum Thief came out in 2010 in Britain and 2011 in the US, and it got a lot of attention at the time. I always intended to read the book, but somehow I just didn't get around to it until now. And I am happy to say that, unlike certain other books that have gotten a lot of buzz (The Windup Girl, for instance), I actually enjoyed this one.
The Quantum Thief is Jean le Flambeur, who at the beginning of the novel is in the Dilemma Prison, designed to try to rehabilitate criminals by having them endlessly play out game theory scenarios in the hope that they will learn to cooperate. Mostly it involves getting killed, over and over again. He is sprung from the prison by Mieli, a rather unpleasant woman who is working for a Sobornost goddess who has a plan and needs a thief.
They proceed to the Moving City of Oubliette on Mars, in order to try to dig up a part of Jean's past that he had hidden away from himself and the Archons. They get involved with gogol pirates and a sort-of detective named Isidore with a Zoku girlfriend who sometimes works with the tzaddikim to solve crimes. We also delve into the secrets of the cryptarchs and the Quiet and the Voice, and trying to avoid an attack by the phoboi.
You may notice that I'm using a lot of terms without explaining what they mean. So does Rajaniemi. The world-building is a bit bewildering, because he is constantly throwing out terms and ideas and bits of backstory (such as events in the past called the Revolution, the Collapse, the Spike, and the Protocol War) without any explanation. The reader can eventually piece together the meanings of some of these concepts by the end of the book, as Rajaniemi drops oblique hints that can be put together, but nothing is explained up front, and lots of things are never explained at all.
Which isn't to say that the book isn't enjoyable. It's actually very good, that combination that is so rare and precious to me these days as a jaded reader: both very entertaining and unpredictable. I couldn't anticipate where things were going, half the time I didn't even understand what was going on. But the story just bounced right along and I didn't worry too much about the stuff that didn't make much sense, because I wanted to know what happened next. I read the book last weekend, so today I did a quick re-read to refresh my memory and see if I could make more sense of it. In some ways, I did understand it better the second time. In other ways, there are still things that don't make much sense or are just never explained. It's a book where you just need to sit back and relax and trust that the author knows where he's going, and not sweat the small stuff. It was, overall, a challenging but rewarding read, and I am looking forward to reading the second book in the series, The Fractal Prince. This was really good.
The Quantum Thief is Jean le Flambeur, who at the beginning of the novel is in the Dilemma Prison, designed to try to rehabilitate criminals by having them endlessly play out game theory scenarios in the hope that they will learn to cooperate. Mostly it involves getting killed, over and over again. He is sprung from the prison by Mieli, a rather unpleasant woman who is working for a Sobornost goddess who has a plan and needs a thief.
They proceed to the Moving City of Oubliette on Mars, in order to try to dig up a part of Jean's past that he had hidden away from himself and the Archons. They get involved with gogol pirates and a sort-of detective named Isidore with a Zoku girlfriend who sometimes works with the tzaddikim to solve crimes. We also delve into the secrets of the cryptarchs and the Quiet and the Voice, and trying to avoid an attack by the phoboi.
You may notice that I'm using a lot of terms without explaining what they mean. So does Rajaniemi. The world-building is a bit bewildering, because he is constantly throwing out terms and ideas and bits of backstory (such as events in the past called the Revolution, the Collapse, the Spike, and the Protocol War) without any explanation. The reader can eventually piece together the meanings of some of these concepts by the end of the book, as Rajaniemi drops oblique hints that can be put together, but nothing is explained up front, and lots of things are never explained at all.
Which isn't to say that the book isn't enjoyable. It's actually very good, that combination that is so rare and precious to me these days as a jaded reader: both very entertaining and unpredictable. I couldn't anticipate where things were going, half the time I didn't even understand what was going on. But the story just bounced right along and I didn't worry too much about the stuff that didn't make much sense, because I wanted to know what happened next. I read the book last weekend, so today I did a quick re-read to refresh my memory and see if I could make more sense of it. In some ways, I did understand it better the second time. In other ways, there are still things that don't make much sense or are just never explained. It's a book where you just need to sit back and relax and trust that the author knows where he's going, and not sweat the small stuff. It was, overall, a challenging but rewarding read, and I am looking forward to reading the second book in the series, The Fractal Prince. This was really good.
Friday, February 1, 2013
The Technician by Neal Asher
Once again I'm trying to review a book I read a while ago. I really need to get to posting reviews sooner.
The Technician is set in Asher's Polity universe. It takes place on the planet Masada, which we visited in The Line of Polity, the second Ian Cormac novel. Masada is an interesting place, so I'm happy enough to revisit it.
Masada is not a very human-friendly planet. The atmosphere is not breathable to unaltered humans, and there is a lot of very dangerous wildlife that makes it very unwise for people to be wandering out in the wilderness. The planet was settled and run by a theocracy, and the wealthy and powerful religious leaders lived above the planet on artificial habitats, while many of the regular people were slave labor on the surface, raising native animals to convert into an exportable resource. The lives of those people was brutal and short. There were also rebels living in caves where they could maintain a breathable atmosphere, just waiting for their chance to take down the Theocracy. The Line of Polity is a novel about how that happened.
The Technician is mostly set twenty years after The Line of Polity. Masada is in the process of being integrated into the Polity, much to the benefit of the populace. The Polity is learning more about Masada, and they begin to realize that the planet was once the homeworld of an intelligent spacefaring race that is long gone. There is almost no sign of them any more, but attention turns to a creature they call The Technician. The Technician is a hooder, an incredibly dangerous native animal that kills its prey in a lengthy and very painful way, but it's different than all the others. It's bigger, and older, vastly more dangerous than the normal ones. And at the end of the rebellion, The Technician attacked but did not kill a Theocracy guard, and the Polity suspects that it has implanted important information in his brain. Unfortunately the guard, Jeremiah Tombs, was driven insane by the encounter.
Now, however, the Polity has decided it's time to jar loose the information in Tombs's mind. They send him on a voyage of discovery, with an old rebel commander and two killer AIs to protect him, and terrorists on his trail. And it leads to much, much bigger problems than they expected.
I was concerned, at first, that the novel was going to end up as an anti-religion screed. And I'm an atheist, I have a very low opinion of religion, indeed--but I didn't want to read a screed about the evils of organized religion. However we fortunately got past that phase, and Tombs got to be a much more interesting character as his journey went on. There's lots of good stuff in this book, like war drones and gabbleducks, and it retroactively made Dragon's actions in The Line of Polity make more sense, which was good.
On the other hand, reading this was reminiscent of reading Brass Man before I'd read The Line of Polity -- I felt like I was missing a big chunk of the backstory. There are many references to an AI called Penny Royal and how it had tried to instill intelligence in a gabbleduck, and was nearly destroyed, but I have not encountered this story before. That was a little weird. Also, I thought the terrorists were written a bit too heavy-handedly, Asher's villains are always over the top.
Overall, I liked this. It was a good, solid, entertaining story. On the other hand, I didn't like it quite as well as Orbus. I'm okay with this, though, as it's still better than most of the science fiction I've picked up lately. This is good, but it really shouldn't be attempted without having read The Line of Polity first.
The Technician is set in Asher's Polity universe. It takes place on the planet Masada, which we visited in The Line of Polity, the second Ian Cormac novel. Masada is an interesting place, so I'm happy enough to revisit it.
Masada is not a very human-friendly planet. The atmosphere is not breathable to unaltered humans, and there is a lot of very dangerous wildlife that makes it very unwise for people to be wandering out in the wilderness. The planet was settled and run by a theocracy, and the wealthy and powerful religious leaders lived above the planet on artificial habitats, while many of the regular people were slave labor on the surface, raising native animals to convert into an exportable resource. The lives of those people was brutal and short. There were also rebels living in caves where they could maintain a breathable atmosphere, just waiting for their chance to take down the Theocracy. The Line of Polity is a novel about how that happened.
The Technician is mostly set twenty years after The Line of Polity. Masada is in the process of being integrated into the Polity, much to the benefit of the populace. The Polity is learning more about Masada, and they begin to realize that the planet was once the homeworld of an intelligent spacefaring race that is long gone. There is almost no sign of them any more, but attention turns to a creature they call The Technician. The Technician is a hooder, an incredibly dangerous native animal that kills its prey in a lengthy and very painful way, but it's different than all the others. It's bigger, and older, vastly more dangerous than the normal ones. And at the end of the rebellion, The Technician attacked but did not kill a Theocracy guard, and the Polity suspects that it has implanted important information in his brain. Unfortunately the guard, Jeremiah Tombs, was driven insane by the encounter.
Now, however, the Polity has decided it's time to jar loose the information in Tombs's mind. They send him on a voyage of discovery, with an old rebel commander and two killer AIs to protect him, and terrorists on his trail. And it leads to much, much bigger problems than they expected.
I was concerned, at first, that the novel was going to end up as an anti-religion screed. And I'm an atheist, I have a very low opinion of religion, indeed--but I didn't want to read a screed about the evils of organized religion. However we fortunately got past that phase, and Tombs got to be a much more interesting character as his journey went on. There's lots of good stuff in this book, like war drones and gabbleducks, and it retroactively made Dragon's actions in The Line of Polity make more sense, which was good.
On the other hand, reading this was reminiscent of reading Brass Man before I'd read The Line of Polity -- I felt like I was missing a big chunk of the backstory. There are many references to an AI called Penny Royal and how it had tried to instill intelligence in a gabbleduck, and was nearly destroyed, but I have not encountered this story before. That was a little weird. Also, I thought the terrorists were written a bit too heavy-handedly, Asher's villains are always over the top.
Overall, I liked this. It was a good, solid, entertaining story. On the other hand, I didn't like it quite as well as Orbus. I'm okay with this, though, as it's still better than most of the science fiction I've picked up lately. This is good, but it really shouldn't be attempted without having read The Line of Polity first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)