SF: Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds (re-read)

So, by this stage in reading the books the first time around I had started to buy them in the larger format paper back. As an impoverished student before the days of Amazon, this is quite significant. Once again the thread of the story is not tightly tied to the previous book, though this time we hark back more to the first book, and get to spend some more time with the Nostalgia for Infinity and friends. Of course, by now much has happened with the inhibitors and they're starting to really make their presence felt after being prodded by young Sylveste.

In a parallel thread we get to meet some of the clever folks who made much of the travel in these books possible - the Conjoiners. However, it turns out (and this is just cool) that they only really learned how to do much of the clever stuff that they do by sending themselves back messages from the future. Go figure. So we discover that these people have known about the inhibitors for a while now, and some of them have even been making plans.

One big disappointment I found the first time around and I find again: huge chunks of the story are missing. Now, in fairness, they are probably not needed for the story to hang together and really they probably wouldn't add much, but it still feels wrong for them to not be in there. Still, a damn good read, about to embark on #4.

SF: Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds (re-read)

A follow-up if not a sequel to Revelation Space - this time though it's mostly about the lives of an incidental character from the previous book, and also introduces the main theme for the series from a different perspective. Yes, the text in this sentence is correct - nothing like being postmortal.

The story takes place in parallel, in three centuries with three different threads interleaved to form a much more substantial tale - which really challenges the idea of one character having one identity. The story starts in the middle, working forward in the main text and backwards through dreams & memories - and fits together better than this sounds. Turns out that the main character is a truly nasty piece of work, and we discover what the edge was that Sky must have had.

This begins to really introduce much more detail of what Chasm City life is like, and how the folks are getting on now their lovely technology isn't quite so healthy, in a watch-you-don't-get-trapped-in-a-mutating-building kind of way.

It occurs to me that in some ways these stories are similar to the "Cities in Flight" series - apparently unrelated tales which are linked as part of a bigger story. However, in this case they are linked though a small number of characters. It's interesting when you compare this with Peter F Hamilton's style, of a cast of thousands all intertwined through 3000+ pages of book. It's odd - here I am writing about other books, but AJR I guess can't be summed up in a few words. A good read, and have just finished the sequel.

SF: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (re-read)

A culture novel, and from a certain point of view Banks' finest (sounds like a kind of ale.) For a change, no time is spent on amusing ship names and interactions, it's all about the one character and some sneaky machinations from Contact / Special Circumstances - and a game. Gripping is certainly the word for it.

We start with a bored player of - you have guessed it - games. He rules. Win's em all but doesn't know where to go with it. Some of the more sneaky folks in Contact, Special Circumstances, have a cunning plan (it turns out) and suggest he goes to play a new game.

Oh, and the commute's a bit of a killer - it's in the SMC, in the empire of Azad. The games called Azad, and the empire literally revolves around it. Our hero gets on OK with it - enough to surprise the locals, but does kinda run out of steam. Then he get's a less than gentle prod to get more of an idea of Azad and hence more of an idea of what the game's about.

You get some echoes of this in The Algebraist, but it's not a patch on this one.

Crikey time flies

Bit behind with this - have had a couple of reviews as draft which I should really get finished... guess that this is the real make or break point for any blog. Well, let's try to make it rather than break it...

Thriller: Children of Men by P.D. James

Literally a book of two halves - Omega and Alpha. People stop having children, no one knows why. Set 25 years after Omega (the year when the last child was born) and the hero is a middle aged Oxford historian, exactly unlike the heroes of Dan Brown tomes. Raises some interesting questions as to what would happen if the human race really did start to die out with a whimper rather than a bang, though sadly makes little effort to really discuss the why of the apparently resulting melancholy. Still, all hangs together reasonably well. The "police state" is painted with something of a heavy brush.

First book sets the scene, introduces the characters and explains some (though not enough) of the why. Second half is a mad dash across a small chunk of southern England with Big Brother (who also happens to be the hero's cousin) in warm pursuit. Surprisingly the hero gets the girl, nails the bad guy and rides off into the sunset. Really, this is surprising.

Still not really sure what I think about this. I enjoyed it though.

SF: The Hyperion Omnibus by Dan Simmons

When it talks about this being two books in one, it's not messing around. The structure of the book is very odd, and it took more than a moment to get in to, but once you're in - wow. Once again we have a theme of pooters out to get you and telling you porkie pies, but this is much more ingrained than in Man Plus, much more substantial in scope.

The first book: this is essentially the back story as to why the main characters are in place at the start of the book, but none the worse for that - those stories are involving and really carried me along, so that in the second book I felt I had a genuine idea of where they were coming from. The MacGuffin of the shrike in the first book is almost imaginary - there's a sense that it's involved everywhere but is visible nowhere.

The second book is a different animal - leans much more on the usual crutches of science fiction (space battles, teleports, time travel and so on) but it's not really about that, as much of the story still involves the handful of characters in the first book. It's all placed in a good historical context, though some of the remarks wear a little thin (the Beatles being "classical")

Impressed with: back story of Rachel, idea of spreading your house across many planets (with a corresponding comeuppance) and clear indications of the risk of relying too much on technology no one understands...

SF: Diaspora by Greg Egan

This starts off well in a post-human future, where we have the human race split into three - real people, simulations and robot types. You then think that this could be interesting - seeing how they all interact and whatnot - but then everyone but the simulations get killed off in a gamma ray burst. Bummer.

Oh, then they find a message in a neutron with an image of the soon to collapse centre of the galaxy, and make a run for it. Then begins a rather mathematical journey through lots of nested universes and so on, climbing through neutrons to get from one to the next. Gets a little boring.

One interesting bit was the reflection on how having five dimensions of real space would behave as opposed to three. Gravity being unstable, no such things as orbits and so on. Could have done a lot more with that.

Overall - interesting starting point, substantial disappointment thereafter.

A little late: SF: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (re-read)

A different take on first contact, where we're the intergalactic aliens and they're the planet bound types. Being a Niven and Pournelle it's an easy read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Contains politics, a little philosophy and economics, and some interesting ideas - what happens to a planet-bound species that canna help but breed? Regular back-to-the-stone-age wars, that's what. Hiding this from the aliens (i.e. people) is a big-old job, but they're well evolved to it. Turns out we have a lot in common, then.

The story is written from both perspectives interleaved (unlike a Banks, one's not backwards or upside down or anything - they are concurrent) and hangs together well despite relying on a couple of SF cliches. May have to look for the sequel.

SF: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (re-read)

Proper science fiction this, that being fiction which leans heavily on science as a backdrop. Hardly surprising given that AJR is (or was) a pro, working for ESA. From the outset you get the sense that there's something bigger going on than we are told. Starts out cleanly at an archeological dig and with an assassination attempt gone wrong, but rapidly turns out that most of the main characters are being manipulated by a single metacharacter. In turn, seems that the "something" is bigger than you could ever imagine.

Some nice aspects of the way this is written is that there's no FTL travel - Newton's laws are by and large respected, though conjoiner drives (discussed in much more detail later in the series) let the side down a little at this stage. However, everything hangs together very well with the main emphasis on the characters and their interactions.

Would really like to have spent some time in the Yellowstone Belle Epoch though... sounds awesome. Can at least get some of that from "The Prefect."

Legacy SF: Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton

Weighing in at something like 3000 pages (in three volumes - these are big books) and with a cast of more characters that I can remember, it's a good job that these are real page turners otherwise it would be nigh on impossible to ever reach the end. This is very much the "non-hard" end of SF - full of lots of fun stuff without too much physics to get in the way.

These feel a little like you say to a kid "Hey, let's write some really cool books" and they go "Yeh!" after which it's all shall we have... and "Yeh!" but - and here's the thing - it works. It's not philosophical, it's not good for you but it's fun. Deus Ex ending really didn't do it for me, but overall worth a read.

A little bit of fun can be had from figuring out where PFH is from when reading the place / planet / people names in there. South East Midlands, made famous. Been a long while since I read these (hence "Legacy" above) but .... may be worth a rerun now I think about it.

General: Next by Michael Crichton

Be afraid - be very afraid - the lawyers are out to get you!

Though Crichton can be paranoid and carry it across well, this one goes a bit far. Much talk of ownership of genes and cells and derived control, hung together by what is actually a pretty weak plot by his standards. If you're stuck in an airport with a choice of this and "101 best goals in 20th Century football: an analysis" it's probably a goer. If you've got a choice, however, I'd look for anything else.

Readable, probably worth the 99p I paid for it in Oxfam.

Why "books what I read?"

So, over the holidays I read quite a few books and thought it would be a good exercise to make a couple of notes on them. However, such a thing could (in other hands) be in danger of becoming something of a literary review, so to help keep it from getting too full of itself, "books what I read."

These will frequently be science fiction books, as I have something of an interest in this direction, but I have been known to go outside the field quite a bit. Most recent posts have been the most recent reads, but I will also go back over some of the more interesting books when I get a quiet moment.

SF: Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

Interesting one, this - it pays a lot of attention to the effects of cybernetic enhancement on the donor, rather than so much emphasis on the resulting capabilities. The terror when the previous candidate expires is palpable. The reasoning (we have to adapt a man to live natively on Mars) seems a little weak when he travels there with "normal" people equipped with space suits, but if you take the argument as a given the rest hangs together well.

Every now and then an anonymous narrator pops up saying how they have worked hard to do this and that. At the end you discover their identity, a thought provoking twist...

SF: Death of Grass by John Christopher

Ok, opposite end of the spectrum from Mockingbird this time. The English go brutal, more than a hint of J.G. Ballard there then. A virus breaks out in the far east which attacks some kinds of grass. Gosh, isn't that a thing? Then it diversifies and starts to attack all grasses: rice, wheat, oats, you name it. Suddenly it becomes rather more significant doesn't it old chap? Better plant the potatoes then.

Much of the story takes place over a couple of days post-tipping point, less "old chap", more shoot first and kill the bast**d. Not one to read if you're of a sensitive disposition, but very gripping.

SF: Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

Read this one in a few days, very good (part of SF Masterworks, gives it a head start.) Essential principle is that the human race has been dumbed down and largely dehumanized by their own creations and is dying out due to an apparent administrative error. Nice take on the world going out with a whimper rather than a bang. Easy reading, if a little too carefully planned.

Excellent bit about the futility of making toasters.