Another self-published book I tested with my one-chapter rule. Read the prologues (both of them) and the first two chapters before deciding not to conAnother self-published book I tested with my one-chapter rule. Read the prologues (both of them) and the first two chapters before deciding not to continue.
The writing is not terrible and the adventure is promising, as is the cover, which seems to capture the intended spirit of a Heinlein juvenile. The prologue is a Mayan grandfather warning his child about the end of the "Fourth Age." Then some scientific infodumps about Pluto. Then an entire chapter with ten-year-old boy stuck on an asteroid with his parents, and how bored he is. He is bored. It's very boring. This is repeated several times. Along with a lot of infodumping about the technology. Also, the chapter starts with the now-tired cliche of a space battle involving pirates which turns out to be the kid playing a virtual reality game before his mom calls him.
Chapter two shifts to a pretty young female captain Mary Sue, who spares a thought for how the greatest regret in her life is putting her career first and not having children, before she and her crew get out of their ship to explore Pluto. The chapter ends with them finding an alien artifact.
Despite the cliffhanger and the interesting premise, the writing and characterization was just not strong enough to motivate me to continue, and it seems like a very juvenile sort of book (the chapter with the kid literally had nothing happening except an introduction to him and his parents on their asteroid).
Valmore Daniels apparently is an industrious self-published author with some professionally-packaged books, this one being the first in a series. While it should have been up my alley, I did not get to the 50-page mark. I might read it some other time when I feel like some light SF, and it was free, but there are too many better books on my TBR list.
Merged review:
Another self-published book I tested with my one-chapter rule. Read the prologues (both of them) and the first two chapters before deciding not to continue.
The writing is not terrible and the adventure is promising, as is the cover, which seems to capture the intended spirit of a Heinlein juvenile. The prologue is a Mayan grandfather warning his child about the end of the "Fourth Age." Then some scientific infodumps about Pluto. Then an entire chapter with ten-year-old boy stuck on an asteroid with his parents, and how bored he is. He is bored. It's very boring. This is repeated several times. Along with a lot of infodumping about the technology. Also, the chapter starts with the now-tired cliche of a space battle involving pirates which turns out to be the kid playing a virtual reality game before his mom calls him.
Chapter two shifts to a pretty young female captain Mary Sue, who spares a thought for how the greatest regret in her life is putting her career first and not having children, before she and her crew get out of their ship to explore Pluto. The chapter ends with them finding an alien artifact.
Despite the cliffhanger and the interesting premise, the writing and characterization was just not strong enough to motivate me to continue, and it seems like a very juvenile sort of book (the chapter with the kid literally had nothing happening except an introduction to him and his parents on their asteroid).
Valmore Daniels apparently is an industrious self-published author with some professionally-packaged books, this one being the first in a series. While it should have been up my alley, I did not get to the 50-page mark. I might read it some other time when I feel like some light SF, and it was free, but there are too many better books on my TBR list....more
Oh how I wanted to like this book. A first contact novel, supposedly hard SF (it's not), with a linguist as the protagonist. It's getting buzz and accOh how I wanted to like this book. A first contact novel, supposedly hard SF (it's not), with a linguist as the protagonist. It's getting buzz and acclaim everywhere and a huge number of 5-star reviews. And yes, it has a gorgeous cover.
After reading it (50 pages in, I already knew I wasn't going to like it; at 100 pages, I had to force myself to keep going), all I can say to those 5-star reviewers is "Are you freaking kidding me? This is what you consider great science fiction?"
First of all, the writing is just not good. This was a self-published novel, and as much of a cliche as it is to say this - it shows.
Her heart galloped in her chest. In minutes she’d be stepping up to do her thing with no idea whatsoever of precisely what or whom she’d be facing. Dr. Jane Holloway would be Earth’s ambassador. Why her? Because some accident of birth, some odd mutant gene, some quirk of brain chemistry, gave her the ability to learn new languages as easily as she breathed. Did that mean anything once she’d left the safe embrace of planet Earth? She was about to find out.
She noticed the fingers of one hand trembling and gripped the armrests with determined ferocity. She’d maintained her dignity this long—she wasn’t about to let go of it now.
The unending, stifling journey was over. The nightmare of sameness, of maddening confinement, of desperate loneliness and unrelenting, forced togetherness, done. They’d finally climb out of this fragile, aluminum/lithium-alloy sardine-can that had kept them safe from the vacuum of space for ten months. They’d actually made it there alive.
The capsule vibrated violently. Jane glanced at Bergen for reassurance. His hand hovered at the clip that would free him from his harness and he grinned wolfishly through his ragged, blond beard. He was the closest she could come to calling a friend on this journey—and that label seemed a bit of a stretch.
The crew thrummed with the tension of tightly controlled excitement. It was a far healthier kind of tension than what had often prevailed over the last ten months. There’d been many a heated argument over issues as immaterial as who was eating disproportionately more of the chocolate before it all suddenly disappeared.
After being hit with cliche after cliche (hearts galloping in chests, trembling fingers) and adverbs and adjectives swarming every sentence, I found myself thinking "fan fiction." This reads like fan fiction. And in fact, the author's other major work appears to be a Stargate fan fiction novel.
Problem two is that the characters behave like idiots, and frequently in highly unrealistic and unprofessional ways, just because the author wants to write something clever or amusing.
Dr. Jane Holloway is a character right out of a teenager's fan fiction story. Thanks to "some accident of birth, some odd mutant gene, some quirk of brain chemistry" she can "learn new languages as easily as she breathes." This makes her of interest to NASA, which is about to launch a mission to Mars. Except, it turns out, the mission isn't really to Mars - it's to a big alien spaceship sitting in the asteroid belt, which they've known about since the 1960s, but just now have the technology to go investigate. They figure Dr. Holloway might help them talk to the aliens.
Who have not responded to any radio signals and whose ship has done nothing for the last 50 years. So why exactly do they think there are even aliens to talk to?
Not content to make Dr. Holloway some sort of super-linguist, she also turns out to have a backstory involving her parents' tragic death in Australia, and Dr. Holloway then having an adventure in the Amazon in which she singlehandedly saved her team from hostile tribesmen while suffering from malaria okay are you fucking kidding me?!
That wasn’t the reaction he expected. “You’re wrong. I had a chance to look over the other files. You’re the only person for this job. You’re the only one with the kind of stamina, talent, and sheer guts it will take to do this.”
Her expression was skeptical. “I’m sure it looks like that on paper—”
He let his frustration bleed through. “Look, they’ve spent months looking at linguists—we’ve been working with plenty of linguists already, on another, similar project—and none of them can match your level of natural ability and experience. Come on! You’re a goddamn living legend in your field—and you’re what? 35? Do you know what we’ve been calling you at NASA? We call you Indiana Jane.”
The smile snuck back, just for a second.
“Well, ok—I call you that—but it’s fucking true.”
She snorted softly and looked away.
He rolled his eyes. They’d warned him not to curse. “Sorry. You were right when you guessed I don’t spend much time around women.”
Dr. Alan Bergen, the scientist/astronaut who "doesn't spend much time around women," is this romance/sci-fi novel's safely tameable semi-alpha male, informing us in the above passage just how awesome "Indiana Jane" Holloway is.
So of course they go on the mission, and find that there is alien intelligence on board the big unmoving ship.
There was some serviceable sci-fi in this novel, as when Jane makes contact with the surviving "crew," and starts to learn about its mission. There are perils aboard the ship, though most of the action is forced by arbitrary authorial fiat or by characters behaving like idiots.
I mean, how likely is it they'd send a first contact team, aboard a thin metal can surrounded by vacuum, to go meet an advanced alien race carrying 9mm pistols? Really? I guess about as likely as the U.S. Air Force deciding that the thing to do with a crashed alien space ship is to start vivisecting the aliens alive. Because no one in the Air Force has ever read a science fiction novel or thought through the ramifications, I guess.
I also found it amusing that the Indian-American scientist has to tell Jane that she's not familiar with Hansel and Gretel because she wasn't raised on Western fairy tales, but then she's the one who explains to a NASA astronaut what "Terran" means.
There's a really purple sex scene, a lot of overwritten dialog with the alien, an unconvincing romance mashed with Dr. Halloway becoming ever more awesome, and finally a To Be Continued. Because they don't even get off the damn ship by the end of the book.
I'd have forgiven the bad writing if the story was great, and I'd have forgiven a story that stretches my suspension of disbelief if the writing was great. But it's amateurish writing and a story with huge plot holes and frequent unbelievable character actions. I didn't quite hate this book, but I did not like it, and it was bad. Will not be reading the sequel.
Also, the author knows jack about linguistics. Googling "monogenesis" and "polygenesis" is not research.
Merged review:
Oh how I wanted to like this book. A first contact novel, supposedly hard SF (it's not), with a linguist as the protagonist. It's getting buzz and acclaim everywhere and a huge number of 5-star reviews. And yes, it has a gorgeous cover.
After reading it (50 pages in, I already knew I wasn't going to like it; at 100 pages, I had to force myself to keep going), all I can say to those 5-star reviewers is "Are you freaking kidding me? This is what you consider great science fiction?"
First of all, the writing is just not good. This was a self-published novel, and as much of a cliche as it is to say this - it shows.
Her heart galloped in her chest. In minutes she’d be stepping up to do her thing with no idea whatsoever of precisely what or whom she’d be facing. Dr. Jane Holloway would be Earth’s ambassador. Why her? Because some accident of birth, some odd mutant gene, some quirk of brain chemistry, gave her the ability to learn new languages as easily as she breathed. Did that mean anything once she’d left the safe embrace of planet Earth? She was about to find out.
She noticed the fingers of one hand trembling and gripped the armrests with determined ferocity. She’d maintained her dignity this long—she wasn’t about to let go of it now.
The unending, stifling journey was over. The nightmare of sameness, of maddening confinement, of desperate loneliness and unrelenting, forced togetherness, done. They’d finally climb out of this fragile, aluminum/lithium-alloy sardine-can that had kept them safe from the vacuum of space for ten months. They’d actually made it there alive.
The capsule vibrated violently. Jane glanced at Bergen for reassurance. His hand hovered at the clip that would free him from his harness and he grinned wolfishly through his ragged, blond beard. He was the closest she could come to calling a friend on this journey—and that label seemed a bit of a stretch.
The crew thrummed with the tension of tightly controlled excitement. It was a far healthier kind of tension than what had often prevailed over the last ten months. There’d been many a heated argument over issues as immaterial as who was eating disproportionately more of the chocolate before it all suddenly disappeared.
After being hit with cliche after cliche (hearts galloping in chests, trembling fingers) and adverbs and adjectives swarming every sentence, I found myself thinking "fan fiction." This reads like fan fiction. And in fact, the author's other major work appears to be a Stargate fan fiction novel.
Problem two is that the characters behave like idiots, and frequently in highly unrealistic and unprofessional ways, just because the author wants to write something clever or amusing.
Dr. Jane Holloway is a character right out of a teenager's fan fiction story. Thanks to "some accident of birth, some odd mutant gene, some quirk of brain chemistry" she can "learn new languages as easily as she breathes." This makes her of interest to NASA, which is about to launch a mission to Mars. Except, it turns out, the mission isn't really to Mars - it's to a big alien spaceship sitting in the asteroid belt, which they've known about since the 1960s, but just now have the technology to go investigate. They figure Dr. Holloway might help them talk to the aliens.
Who have not responded to any radio signals and whose ship has done nothing for the last 50 years. So why exactly do they think there are even aliens to talk to?
Not content to make Dr. Holloway some sort of super-linguist, she also turns out to have a backstory involving her parents' tragic death in Australia, and Dr. Holloway then having an adventure in the Amazon in which she singlehandedly saved her team from hostile tribesmen while suffering from malaria okay are you fucking kidding me?!
That wasn’t the reaction he expected. “You’re wrong. I had a chance to look over the other files. You’re the only person for this job. You’re the only one with the kind of stamina, talent, and sheer guts it will take to do this.”
Her expression was skeptical. “I’m sure it looks like that on paper—”
He let his frustration bleed through. “Look, they’ve spent months looking at linguists—we’ve been working with plenty of linguists already, on another, similar project—and none of them can match your level of natural ability and experience. Come on! You’re a goddamn living legend in your field—and you’re what? 35? Do you know what we’ve been calling you at NASA? We call you Indiana Jane.”
The smile snuck back, just for a second.
“Well, ok—I call you that—but it’s fucking true.”
She snorted softly and looked away.
He rolled his eyes. They’d warned him not to curse. “Sorry. You were right when you guessed I don’t spend much time around women.”
Dr. Alan Bergen, the scientist/astronaut who "doesn't spend much time around women," is this romance/sci-fi novel's safely tameable semi-alpha male, informing us in the above passage just how awesome "Indiana Jane" Holloway is.
So of course they go on the mission, and find that there is alien intelligence on board the big unmoving ship.
There was some serviceable sci-fi in this novel, as when Jane makes contact with the surviving "crew," and starts to learn about its mission. There are perils aboard the ship, though most of the action is forced by arbitrary authorial fiat or by characters behaving like idiots.
I mean, how likely is it they'd send a first contact team, aboard a thin metal can surrounded by vacuum, to go meet an advanced alien race carrying 9mm pistols? Really? I guess about as likely as the U.S. Air Force deciding that the thing to do with a crashed alien space ship is to start vivisecting the aliens alive. Because no one in the Air Force has ever read a science fiction novel or thought through the ramifications, I guess.
I also found it amusing that the Indian-American scientist has to tell Jane that she's not familiar with Hansel and Gretel because she wasn't raised on Western fairy tales, but then she's the one who explains to a NASA astronaut what "Terran" means.
There's a really purple sex scene, a lot of overwritten dialog with the alien, an unconvincing romance mashed with Dr. Halloway becoming ever more awesome, and finally a To Be Continued. Because they don't even get off the damn ship by the end of the book.
I'd have forgiven the bad writing if the story was great, and I'd have forgiven a story that stretches my suspension of disbelief if the writing was great. But it's amateurish writing and a story with huge plot holes and frequent unbelievable character actions. I didn't quite hate this book, but I did not like it, and it was bad. Will not be reading the sequel.
Also, the author knows jack about linguistics. Googling "monogenesis" and "polygenesis" is not research....more
I wanted to like this book. It's got an eye-catching cover, and seems like it could have been a cool post-apocalyptic story.
50 pages in, I was almost I wanted to like this book. It's got an eye-catching cover, and seems like it could have been a cool post-apocalyptic story.
50 pages in, I was almost ready to DNF it (something I very rarely do) but I persisted until the end out of stubbornness, and because I was just barely interested enough to see what happens.
This is a far future in which the last remnants of mankind live in an isolated floating city-state called Osiris. After some unspecified environmental apocalypse, refugees from all over the world flocked here, and they then barricaded themselves within the city's boundaries and shut off all entrance or egress from the city. Now everyone believes that no one else survives anywhere else on Earth, and they've had no contact with the outside world for generations.
This makes Osiris somewhat like a more traditional "generation ship" story, where inevitably you find out that there is some deep, dark secret behind whoever is running the ship, or where it's going, or other survivors or whatever. Such is hinted at in this book.
E.J. Swift (another of those women writers hiding her gender behind initials, though the writing gave her away pretty quickly) does turn a pretty phrase, and throughout the book, the imagery of Osiris brings it to life, a sea-born city in which the presence of the ocean and their fearful dependence on it is always present.
He has spent hours in this space, high in the eyries of Osiris, where gulls and other birds wheel and screech their hunger. Sometimes he stands and leans over and peers into the depths of the morning mist. Other times he perches on the railings, with death at his side like a neighbour. Occasionally he sleeps. The cold is hostile, and he is not dressed to face it. He wakes in the frost, trembling, surprised still to be here.
In the brittle air he feels, acutely, the internal heat of his body battling with the outside draught. His blood pulses, torrid and bright. His heart tattoos a rhythm in his chest. Icy stone pushes against his bare feet. When the storms come, the elements sweep around him in multilingual conference. Rain lashes the windows and his skin, wind claims the moisture back. He has forgotten that he is afraid of storms. He turns his face to the heavens and closes his eyes.
Unfortunately, the plot itself is predictable and buried beneath excessive prose-smithing and overwrought metaphors. Everything in Osiris is nautical - they read "Reefmail" on "Neptunes" and watch things on the "o'vis" and chat via "o'voys." They eat kelp squares and fish, and even the alcohol is apparently fermented kelp. (Yuck!)
The two POV characters are Adelaide Rechnov, the super-wealthy daughter of one of Osiris's ruling families, and Vikram, a would-be activist living in the city's neglected, oppressed western district, where after the initial wave of refugees arrived, the rest were fenced off and made to eke out a precarious, subsistence living in unheated slums while the Citizens dwell in high-tech towers and throw gala parties. Adelaide is not a very sympathetic character, being motivated partly by spoiled rich-girl rebelliousness against Mommy and Daddy, and partly by a desire to find her psychologically troubled twin brother, who disappears as the book begins. Searching for him brings her into contact with Vikram, and the two of them use each other (in more ways than one) until the inevitable bad end. Rich girl picks up a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and then violence.
Really, nothing unexpected at all happens. The anticlimactic resolution of the central mystery was telegraphed in the prologue, while the intriguing bits of worldbuilding are left dangling as loose threads to be picked up in future books, which I'm not interested enough to read.
E.J. Swift is a talented writer, but the writing alone could not hold my attention, and in the end it was a chore to finish this.
Merged review:
I wanted to like this book. It's got an eye-catching cover, and seems like it could have been a cool post-apocalyptic story.
50 pages in, I was almost ready to DNF it (something I very rarely do) but I persisted until the end out of stubbornness, and because I was just barely interested enough to see what happens.
This is a far future in which the last remnants of mankind live in an isolated floating city-state called Osiris. After some unspecified environmental apocalypse, refugees from all over the world flocked here, and they then barricaded themselves within the city's boundaries and shut off all entrance or egress from the city. Now everyone believes that no one else survives anywhere else on Earth, and they've had no contact with the outside world for generations.
This makes Osiris somewhat like a more traditional "generation ship" story, where inevitably you find out that there is some deep, dark secret behind whoever is running the ship, or where it's going, or other survivors or whatever. Such is hinted at in this book.
E.J. Swift (another of those women writers hiding her gender behind initials, though the writing gave her away pretty quickly) does turn a pretty phrase, and throughout the book, the imagery of Osiris brings it to life, a sea-born city in which the presence of the ocean and their fearful dependence on it is always present.
He has spent hours in this space, high in the eyries of Osiris, where gulls and other birds wheel and screech their hunger. Sometimes he stands and leans over and peers into the depths of the morning mist. Other times he perches on the railings, with death at his side like a neighbour. Occasionally he sleeps. The cold is hostile, and he is not dressed to face it. He wakes in the frost, trembling, surprised still to be here.
In the brittle air he feels, acutely, the internal heat of his body battling with the outside draught. His blood pulses, torrid and bright. His heart tattoos a rhythm in his chest. Icy stone pushes against his bare feet. When the storms come, the elements sweep around him in multilingual conference. Rain lashes the windows and his skin, wind claims the moisture back. He has forgotten that he is afraid of storms. He turns his face to the heavens and closes his eyes.
Unfortunately, the plot itself is predictable and buried beneath excessive prose-smithing and overwrought metaphors. Everything in Osiris is nautical - they read "Reefmail" on "Neptunes" and watch things on the "o'vis" and chat via "o'voys." They eat kelp squares and fish, and even the alcohol is apparently fermented kelp. (Yuck!)
The two POV characters are Adelaide Rechnov, the super-wealthy daughter of one of Osiris's ruling families, and Vikram, a would-be activist living in the city's neglected, oppressed western district, where after the initial wave of refugees arrived, the rest were fenced off and made to eke out a precarious, subsistence living in unheated slums while the Citizens dwell in high-tech towers and throw gala parties. Adelaide is not a very sympathetic character, being motivated partly by spoiled rich-girl rebelliousness against Mommy and Daddy, and partly by a desire to find her psychologically troubled twin brother, who disappears as the book begins. Searching for him brings her into contact with Vikram, and the two of them use each other (in more ways than one) until the inevitable bad end. Rich girl picks up a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and then violence.
Really, nothing unexpected at all happens. The anticlimactic resolution of the central mystery was telegraphed in the prologue, while the intriguing bits of worldbuilding are left dangling as loose threads to be picked up in future books, which I'm not interested enough to read.
E.J. Swift is a talented writer, but the writing alone could not hold my attention, and in the end it was a chore to finish this....more
I enjoyed Marko Kloos's Frontlines series, but it went on too long. Set in a future where Earth has become an impoverished shithole and the only way oI enjoyed Marko Kloos's Frontlines series, but it went on too long. Set in a future where Earth has become an impoverished shithole and the only way out is through enlistment in the space marines, humanity finds itself fighting "Lankies," an alien race of gigantic kaiju who do not communicate or negotiate, but simply try to stomp humans on whatever world they find them, and xenoform the planets. The Frontlines novels were good military SF that got a bit repetitive, and I was kind of glad when Kloos wrapped up the series.
I picked up Scorpio because it's either a stand-alone novel or a new series set in the same universe. But it really felt like a YA side-novel that was an excuse for Kloos to make a dog the secondary character.
Alex Archer was child colonist on the planet Scorpio when the Lankies arrived. Her parents died in the initial attack, and the remaining colonists managed to survive for eight years, hiding underground and occasionally emerging to try to salvage in the ruins of their former colony. They only have about 150 people, but the handful of surviving space marines still try to maintain military regs. Alex has been trained as a dog handler, and accompanies the grunts on their salvage mission with Ash, a black shepherd who warns them of approaching Lankies.
Unfortunately, I felt like this book spent a lot of time with not much happening, and ultimately it didn't have much to say. Alex is roaming around with Ash and the grunts, there are a few terrifying encounters with Lankies, and then there is a second act which seemed pointless except that it sets her up for future novels. "A girl and her dog" seems to be the main draw here.
The tone was a little YAish (because the story is seen through the eyes of a young adult whose entire teen years have been spent on this colony). Scorpio was okay, but felt like an excuse to return to the Frontlines universe with a new character, without really adding anything new....more
The worst of the harem-lit books I've sampled so far.
"Cultivation fiction" is a subgenre of litrpg where the characters build homesteads and gather reThe worst of the harem-lit books I've sampled so far.
"Cultivation fiction" is a subgenre of litrpg where the characters build homesteads and gather resources and followers (*cough* harems) to become the biggest and best bosses.
The MC is an asshole biglaw partner who's about harass the uppity junior associate who dared to talk back to him, when the apocalypse happens. They wind up in some sort of zombie apocalypse and the asshole biglaw partner turns into an Alpha beating up zombies and saving the junior associate. So she suddenly decides he's hot and they have sex straight out of Penthouse Letters but more poorly written. He also feels an "instinctive" need to "breed" her, which she is now totally onboard with.
The game elements were underdeveloped, the sex was as awful as the dialog, and the characters are cardboard. Even by harem-lit standards, this was just really pretty dire. Again, take my review with a grain of salt since I only read the free sample, but it definitely did not tempt me to continue reading....more
Like most SF fans, I was a big fan of The Expanse, so I was looking forward to writing team James S.A. Corey's newest, which they claim will only be aLike most SF fans, I was a big fan of The Expanse, so I was looking forward to writing team James S.A. Corey's newest, which they claim will only be a trilogy because they "don't feel like writing another nine book series."
The Mercy of Gods is structured unusually. While the first book just gets the story going, we already know from the page 1 prologue that the main character, Dafyd Alkhor, is going to lead an insurrection against the alien Carryx that will destroy their empire and burn a thousand worlds. The authors admit that this is a kind of trick to pull the reader along with promises of things to come, plus reassurance that the entire series will not be humans having a boot stomping on their faces forever, because that's all that happens in book one.
The story starts on the planet Anjiin, which is another unusual choice: humans know they aren't native to the planet, but their arrival is lost in the mists of prehistory, and while they now have an advanced technological civilization, they are not yet spacefaring and have had no contact outside their solar system. (Will the big twist be that this is the same universe as The Expanse, thousands of years in the future? That would seem like a cheap gimmick, but it's not impossible.) The first few chapters are about a bunch of scientists playing academic status games, which we know don't matter because an alien empire is about to arrive and crush them.
The Carryx invasion is brutal and short, and it's quickly established that these are give-no-fucks aliens who commit genocide before breakfast. They have been spreading across the galaxy conquering and exterminating everything in their path for thousands of years, and humanity is just another acquisition. They wipe out an eighth of the population of Anjiin just to make a point, and then the main characters are among a select group of humans abducted to be taken to a Carryx homeworld, where they are put in a vast multi-species arcology, given obscure instructions and a scientific task by their alien overlords, and then more or less left alone in what becomes evident is some sort of survival contest, not just for themselves but for their species.
The Mercy of Gods has very familiar beats. The writing shows the same stylistic ticks as The Expanse, with dialog like:
"You said there was another way." "I did."
And lines like:
"It was. And then it wasn't."
As with the Expanse, the focus, despite the high stakes and the foreshadowing of a grand, epic scale, is on a small group of flawed human characters, especially Dafyd Alkhor, who was just a minor research assistant with some connections back on Anjiin, but starts putting pieces of the Carryx puzzle together faster than his companions and (per the prologue and multiple chapter preludes) is eventually going to put his boot on the Carryx. The humans have quarrels and rivalries and love affairs because they can't quite stop being petty backbiting academics even while enslaved by genocidal aliens, and while we're probably supposed to become attached to some of them, it's hard because only Dafyd is really interesting (and he isn't very), and all the rest are clearly in danger of dying at any time, George R.R. Martin style.
Mercy of Gods was like sliding into an almost-familiar series with a new storyline. I wish the authors had stretched themselves a little more, but I am looking forward to the next book....more
The Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to staThe Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to stand on its own while advancing the overall story only a little bit.
In an alternate Earth occupied by lemur-like Lemurians and raptor-like Grik, it turns out that the World War II destroy Walker and its Japanese pursuers were not the first humans from our Earth to stumble through whatever portal brought them here. There is already New Britain, descended from British ships that crossed over centuries ago, and the Dominion, descended from Spanish Catholics. While New Britain was introduced in the previous book, where Matthew Reddy and his crew figured out that they are based in roughly what is Hawaii on this world, the Dominion moves into the chief villain role in this book when the Walker arrives at the capital of New Britain.
Despite being very much a sea-going action thriller that is read by people who want battles and intrigue and banter between Lemurians and WWII sailors, Anderson does a good job of creating plausible alternate history empires. New Britain is very British culturally, but its politics have diverged significantly, as the East India Company has become a sinister "shadow government." The destroyermen and Lemurians also discover that (for reasons that kind of make sense but still seemed a bit tortuous), women are virtually chattel. Although the more salacious implications of this are only hinted at, there are a whole lot of British officers saying "Well, of course we don't like the system but what can we do?" while insisting they really love their wives.
The Dominion seems to have combined the worst aspects of the Inquisition and the Aztec empire, and the one Dominion character we meet, the Dominion ambassador to New Britain, is the Big Bad of this book. In previous books, the Japanese and the Grik both began as essentially faceless orc enemies, but later became individual characters with some diverging from their "racial archetype," so it remains to be seen if the Dominion will remain unambiguously evil or if there will turn out to be some nuance and dissent there as well.
Speaking of the Grik and the Japanese, much like the last book, we only get a few chapters showing cameos of our old foes and what they are up to on the other side of the world. Rising Tides is primarily split between Matthew Reddy and the Walker in New Britain, and his girlfriend Nurse Sandra and Princess Rebecca and their fellow survivors out on the seas, who have to survive hostile natives (of the non-human variety) and volcanic eruptions.
The Destroyermen is a series for people who like the premise and the action and don't mind the story being dragged out for many, many books. A little bit gets added in each book, there are usually a few new characters introduced, but long-running plot threads like the war between the Grik and the humans and Lemurians, which side the Dominion will be on, and for that matter, when Reddy will finally be reunited with his nurse gal who was abducted two books ago, get stretched out across several volumes....more
I only picked up this book because I have been reading DC Palter's Japonica publication on Medium. Palter is a venture capitalist who apparently livesI only picked up this book because I have been reading DC Palter's Japonica publication on Medium. Palter is a venture capitalist who apparently lives off and on in Japan, speaks Japanese with native fluency, writes lots of articles about Japanese language and culture, and apparently decided he wanted to write a novel. In other words, he's an old school weeaboo.
To Kill a Unicorn is a "Silicon Valley murder mystery," and one of the pleasures of reading this book for me was reading about the area I grew up in - Cupertino, San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Stevens Creek Boulevard and Half Moon Bay - so many places I used to drive around in. It also reminded me of early (late 90s era) Salon articles and short stories, when Silicon Valley was an optimistic glittery place high on its own supply and stonks always go up. In other words, kind of like now.
The inspiration, according to the author, was Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, and Bad Blood, the story of the fraudulent start-up Theranos and its beautiful blonde sociopathic founder, Elizabeth Holmes. To Kill a Unicorn combines a Murukami-like protagonist and a villain who is practically a carbon copy of Elizabeth Holmes.
Tatsu "Teddy" Hara is a Japanese-American computer programmer working for a FAANG company and turning into an alcoholic borderline hikikimori. He's got abandonment issues (his father drank himself to death, his mother was an angry, bitter neurotic who committed suicide) and his best friend Ryu has disappeared. Ryu's sister (who used to be Teddy's girlfriend) shows up asking Teddy to help find him, leading Teddy down a rabbit hole investigating a mysterious startup called SüprDüpr which is going to "revolutionize transportation." The story takes us on a satirical ride through the Bay Area's homeless problem, Silicon Valley's absurd startup culture, elephant preserves, Japantown, and every techbro trope (Bitcoin, blockchain, Soylent, gourmet ramen-topped pizza).
Teddy is a mess, and is an extremely annoying protagonist in the same way that Murakami's protagonists are annoying: he's a passive schmuck who keeps making shocked-Pikachu faces when the police don't take his stories of a billionaire using a teleportation device to murder homeless people seriously, and despite being a dweeby alcoholic loser, his hot lawyer ex is still into him.
Much of the story was a bit implausible (besides the central conceit of a working teleportation device), but it was pretty fun, and the Elizabeth Holmes expy villain was more Hollywood than the real Holmes. To Kill a Unicorn is probably more enjoyable if you are into the culture of Silicon Valley. Like many debut novels, it's sometimes over-described and the characters over-emote, but if you are willing to stretch your suspension of disbelief, it's also funny and touching....more
I don't remember where this book was recommended to me, but it offered all the elements I like in a SF novel - gallivanting space opera, hard science,I don't remember where this book was recommended to me, but it offered all the elements I like in a SF novel - gallivanting space opera, hard science, characters with personality and human motivations, and expanding scope.
It also had some red flags. It's self-published - I know, I know, that's what all the cool authors are doing nowadays, look at Andy Weir, etc. etc., but still, self-published novels are 99.9% crap (as opposed to traditionally published novels which are only 90% crap) and so it takes a lot to rise through my filters to "potentially readable."
And the author, Devon Eriksen, has kind of a hobby of being a dick on Twitter, writing long posts ranting about leftists and feminists. IDGAF if you are "woke" or "anti-woke" if you can write, but I don't want to read a book about how much your ideological enemies suck, which is something that most woke/anti-woke writers do.
That he is an anarcho-libertarian with multiple wives (he says this in his afterword) is very much in character. "Here is a guy who read a lot of Heinlein," thought I (a guy who read a lot of Heinlein). "That could be very good or very bad."
Mostly, it's good. I liked Theft of Fire a lot and will be reading the next book when it comes out. It's not perfect and it's got some debut novel roughness, but if you like Heinlein (including archetypal Heinleinian Men and Heinleinian Women) then you will like this book. If Heinlein sets your teeth on edge, though, then so will this book.
Now, despite my comparisons to Heinlein (and the Heinleianian influence is strong), Theft of Fire also obviously owes some inspiration to the Expanse series and maybe a bit of Firefly. It's set in a near future where the solar system has been colonized and there's lots of asteroid and gas giant mining going on, but technology is mostly within the realm of what we can understand (if not quite build) today. The one "gimme" sci-fi concept is fusion drives, which it turns out were reverse-engineered from some alien artifacts found way out on Sedna, a planetoid beyond the orbit of Pluto. Fusion drives are now patented and tightly controlled by SpaceX (yes, that SpaceX) and a few other corporations. Spacers have to pay exorbitant sums to the corps to lease a fusion drive that lets them cross the solar system in days, or else they can use old-style chemical boosters that take weeks.
This is a sort of libertarian future ruled by corporate oligarchies (it's not clear exactly what role national governments play, but it's implied that Earth is now basically a hellscape and the United Nations were the villains), but it's not exactly a libertarian paradise because the corps, naturally, screw over everyone else, including working class belters like Marcus Warnoc, the first-person protagonist of our story. Marcus owns an asteroid mining ship (with one of those leased fusion drives) and he's deeply in debt and has been engaging in some shady business (okay, piracy) to try to get out. He's an asteroid jock who hates corporations and rich people and he's got issues thanks to his traumatic backstory involving his dad and a bunch of other people dying a few years ago.
Miranda Foxgrove (sigh, yes, that's actually her name) is a genetically-engineered waifu. No, really, that picture on the cover? It's pretty accurate. Her parents actually designed her in vitro to be a buxom wasp-waisted faerie princess with anime eyes. She has a clever scheme to go out to Sedna, grab an alien artifact, and become unspeakably wealthy and powerful independently of her unspeakably wealthy and powerful family. She's got daddy issues too. (It's also implied she's literally the great-granddaughter of Elon Musk, who is presented ambiguously as both a visionary and a madman who caused most of the solar system's problems today.) Miranda's scheme involves taking over Marcus's ship and extorting him into being her unwilling lackey. Marcus isn't having it, which sets up the rest of the story, which is both a space caper and a will-they-won't-they? slapslapkiss power struggle between the space viking and the anime faerie princess.
There is also an AI, with the personality of a teenage girl (for reasons that actually make sense though still, it gave the book a bit of a YA feel) who acts as a sort of sassy sidekick and occasional deux ex machina.
As a SF novel, it was great. Eriksen is an engineer, and it shows. There are very detailed (at times too detailed) explanations of space maneuvers and physics, and all the science is plausible, even when the alien artifact starts doing alien artifact things. As a novel about characters, it was pretty good. Eriksen is a Heinlein fan, and it shows. Marcus and Miranda are both interesting and screwed up people, not wholly unsympathetic but often very frustrating, especially their mutual determination to completely misunderstand each other at every turn. This is one of my least favorite tropes, the characters who could fix 90% of their problems with a five minute conversation but spend the whole book finding reasons not to do this. (Leela, the AI, actually calls this out towards the end, but I'm sorry, lampshading the trope with a speech from your sassy sidekick does not make it less annoying.)
Then of course there is the romance. It's obvious from the moment Miranda boards the ship and sics her security drones on Marcus that these two totally want to fuck. Marcus responds the way you'd expect a belter who's been in space too long to react to a super-hot waifu who thinks she owns him. He struggles to control both his lust and his fury at this crazy bitch who's taken over his ship, so there is a lot of internal monologue about her perfect perky tits and her perfect shapely ass and also how much he hates her because she's an evil sociopath. At times it's a little creepy, but that was kind of the point, I guess. The extremes to which they go to justify pretending they hate each other past the point of reasonableness, and the internal monologues, were at times almost as tedious as the very long, extended chases in space.
Overall, this was a fun novel with the promise of more exciting stuff in the future (I mean, alien artifacts), but it could have been trimmed and tightened a bit. I was mildly annoyed at the "To be continued" ending even though I know the author has this planned as a trilogy. I was more than mildly annoyed at the typos. At one point I started bookmarking all the typos and grammatical errors, and found over a dozen before I finished. If you're gonna self-publish, your proofreading should be immaculate, though I will say in fairness I've seen more and more sloppiness from trad published books as well. But flaws notwithstanding, I'm on board for the next book....more
Nick Mamatas (famously called "a true Chaotic Neutral" by fellow writer Catherynne Valente) is a crafty writer, in every sense of the word. He leads wNick Mamatas (famously called "a true Chaotic Neutral" by fellow writer Catherynne Valente) is a crafty writer, in every sense of the word. He leads writing workshops, he writes in a lit style (I am again using that word in multiple senses), you always sense he's writing a bit tongue-in-cheek and low-key making fun of readers who don't quite Get It.
I didn't quite get this one. The Second Shooter is a strange book, set in Mamatas's stomping grounds of the East Bay. Mike Karras is a "journalist" working for a shoestring publisher, investigating the phenomenon of second shooters after mass shooting events. After every incident - an assassination, a school shooting, a shopping mall terrorist attack - there are reports of a second shooter, someone the police never caught. Karras thinks there is something to this, and he's writing a book about it.
Following leads fed to him by shooting survivors, by a crazy talk radio host, by "fans" and fellow conspiracy theorists, chased by feds and drones, Karras spends some time living rough in Oakland, California, pursuing leads from a nice Ethiopian Christian girl who survived a shooting at her church, who seems both fond and contemptuous of him, while trying to uncover... the Truth.
I really was not sure where the story was going or what it was even about. Mamatas inserts sly observations throughout, poking at the obsessions of paranoid right wingers and sanctimonious leftists, but I remained unsure what the point was. Is it about America's gun culture? About conspiracy theories? About the psychology of mass shooters? About social media derangement? About people trying to make sense of the senseless? At times the story had a bit of Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea Illuminati vibe.
The ending is where it gets really strange and earns the "sci-fi" label, but I cannot say I was left satisfied, or any less perplexed.
The Second Shooter is a departure from Mamatas's previous books; he usually dabbles in Lovecraftian horror, and I have to admit I preferred them. This one was just kind of weird, and seemed more like something born in a brainstorming session, perhaps inspired by some of the weird Japanese SF that he edits at Haikasoru, that never quite cohered....more
I'm sorry, I tried. I am a stubborn reader. I'll keep reading books that aren't grabbing me, I'll keep reading books that I don't like. But this one jI'm sorry, I tried. I am a stubborn reader. I'll keep reading books that aren't grabbing me, I'll keep reading books that I don't like. But this one just bored me until I was trying to force myself to pick it up again and every time I read a few more pages I kept thinking about how I wished I were reading something else, anything else, and finally I decided I don't actually have to keep reading something that is doing absolutely nothing for me.
This is some sort of slow-burn literary novel that apparently is a sci-fi rewrite of Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn (which I haven't read). There's a human/alien couple who runs the Skyward Inn. The aliens got conquered without a fight by Earthlings and now this couple runs an inn in rural England which feels very Daphne du Maurier, even though they talk about warp gates to other star systems. The aliens are never exactly described, but nobody does anything and there's some subplot about the main character's son and I just didn't get far enough to figure out what is supposed to be happening or what this story is about. Something something metaphor for colonialism, I guess.
Lots of people seem to review this book highly and think it's literary and shizz, and I like literary and SF, but this wasn't for me because I felt like I was just reading words, words, words, that didn't go anywhere....more
Most reviews of this book call it "True Grit on Mars," and this really is an apt description. Annabelle Crisp is a 14-year-old girl living in a small Most reviews of this book call it "True Grit on Mars," and this really is an apt description. Annabelle Crisp is a 14-year-old girl living in a small Martian frontier town with her father, when outlaws come and ransack their little restaurant, setting off a series of events ending with her father in jail facing the noose. Annabelle goes on a quest for vengeance. So, teenage girl trying to outwit and out-moxy bad, dangerous men in a lawless frontier. True Grit is one of my favorite books so I was predisposed to like this book, and Nathan Ballingrud does a good job of evoking both the frontier Western and all the other Martian colonization novels that have preceded this one.
The Strange is set in an alternate history in which Mars was colonized in the early 20th century, and also resembles what people in the early 20th century thought Mars was like (i.e., it's cold and dry but habitable, and has strange native flora and fauna). Annabelle lives in a town that was mostly settled by Americans fleeing poverty on Earth, but there are also British and Germans and a few other nationalities, and it's mentioned that some Native American tribes emigrated to Mars as well, though we never see them. The technology is "steampunkish" as there are flying saucers that run on traditional fuel, and also robots that function both as household appliances and war machines.
Annabelle's parents started a little restaurant on Mars. Then Annabelle's mother receives a message from Earth that her mother is dying, and she returns to say good-bye, promising her husband and daughter that she'll be back. After that came the Silence, when suddenly they lost all contact with Earth. No more ships arrived, and the one ship already on Mars has the only fuel left on the planet, so the colonists are afraid to send it back.
Thus Annabelle and her father are living in an increasingly poor and desperate frontier town while Annabelle is struggling with feelings of abandonment by her mother. Tensions in town, along with threats from the nearby mining settlement, lead to a series of tragic events and Annabelle, not acting entirely rationally, decides to go looking for vengeance.
I have previously only read a couple of short stories by Nathan Ballingrud. This is his first novel. I think the tone was perfect: Mars is a hard, gritty frontier full of desperate, scrabbling settlers and desperadoes, and it's also a pulp era alien planet with more weirdness than Annabelle realizes at first. Her adventures take a strange and eerie turn, and the threats range from old World War I-era war robots to alien moths that possess dead bodies. Annabelle herself was kind of annoying at times; she really is a 14-year-old girl. She's brave but not always very smart, and being driven by emotions leads her into trouble more often than not.
It ends with a much older Annabelle reminiscing about her life, so on the one hand, a lot of questions remain unanswered, but on the other, Ballingrud probably could write a sequel if he wanted to. The Strange is a good book that almost feels like an old sci-fi classic....more
This is a graphic novel about giant robots that almost destroyed civilization 800 years ago, and then suddenly powered down and froze into monuments fThis is a graphic novel about giant robots that almost destroyed civilization 800 years ago, and then suddenly powered down and froze into monuments forever. Cities rebuilt around them, and they became part of the landscape. And then one day, they start moving again.
The Monuments jumps back and forth in time a lot. It's set on a fictional island nation that was once split between five warring kingdoms, but in the Monuments era, has become a unified nation with a technological but somewhat dystopian government. A man from the past, for unclear reasons, awakens and leads a young woman living in the modern day on an adventure dodging secret police and cultists to learn the secrets of the giant robots who are now once more ravaging their cities.
The story was okay, but uneven, with a lot of things that just happen. How did the creators build this army of giant robots? Where did the technology come from? Why did our protagonist suddenly awaken? Why did no one ever look inside the monuments before now? These questions are half-answered or not answered at all. The time jumps don't help.
The art is expressive and had a bit of a Ralph Bakshi feel to it. But I'm always annoyed when there are lots of action panels in which it's not clear to me exactly what is happening.
Overall, this was an okay read, and another SF graphic novel I backed on Kickstarter. I might be interested in Monuments volume 2....more
I was expecting a furry space opera. Instead I got furry BDSM foe-yay with rape dragons.
I don't share the widespread fandom hatred of furries per se, I was expecting a furry space opera. Instead I got furry BDSM foe-yay with rape dragons.
I don't share the widespread fandom hatred of furries per se, and on a writing level, I thought Even the Wingless was fine. Hogarth's universe obviously comes with a lot of deep lore and history, and this book might not have been the best entry point if you're mostly interested in SF and you don't mind furries in your space opera.
That said, this book was not space opera. It was endless pages of interspecies BDSM foe-yay slashfic.
Even the Wingless is set in MCA Hogarth's "Pelted" universe, which apparently consists of a large number of books with different subseries, the premise of which is that humans genetically uplifted Earth animals, creating a variety of furriesanthropomorphic animal races. Now it's centuries later, there is an Alliance consisting of humans and their furkin, and also a race of empathic space elves called the Eldritch. Then there are the Chatcaava rape dragons.
The Chatcaava are shape-changing humanoid dragonkin, although we're told they are actually mammals (which is why their females have boobs). They have a super-misogynistic society where all females are chattel and males constantly fight dominance games which include raping each other (which they do to establish hierarchy and trust, as opposed to raping females, which they do for fun). They also capture and enslave aliens, including humans and Pelted, and rape them too.
There are many, many pages devoted to elaborate S&M, bondage, and rape. Like, seriously, if you took John Norman's Slave Girls of Gor and made them all dragonkin furries, that's the Chatcaava.
Lisinthir Nase Galare is an Eldritch prince who's been sent as an Alliance ambassador to the Chatcaavan Empire. All previous Alliance ambassadors have returned insane or dead, because the Chatcaava apparently treat alien ambassadors the same way they treat any other aliens (i.e., they fuck with them, first figuratively and then literally). Even though the Alliance supposedly has a peace treaty with the Chatcaava, the Chatcaava are not above piracy and enslaving Alliance citizens. Lisinthir is supposed to try to do something about that, as well as negotiating things like trade tariffs and finding out if the Empire is planning to go to war with the Alliance.
As background for an interstellar political intrigue, a whole bunch of things did not make sense to me. Like the Alliance's willingness to let the Chatcaava keep committing acts of war against them, or the Chatcaava supposedly being an advanced spacefaring race when the entire book is set in the Emperor's castle, where they all play medieval courtly status games with poison and killing each other with their claws and teeth. That's in between the prolonged BDSM sessions.
Lisinthir needs to find a way to win the Emperor's respect, because the Chatcaava regard all aliens as "female." It turns out that the way to be regarded as a male is to, uh, get raped and fight back, and then get raped some more. So Lisinthir spends most of the book getting raped by the rape dragon Emperor, and then they have sultry post-coital banter. Lisinthir, despite being a fragile space elf from a low-G world whose people suffer from touch-empathy, eventually becomes a bad-ass who's killing other Chatcaava with his bare hands. He also befriends the Slave Queen, the Chatcaavan Emperor's favorite sex slave, so eventually the three of them have a little S&M threesome party.
While there is a lot of psychological depth to the book, as we explore the viewpoints of Lisinthir, the Emperor, and the Slave Queen, all of whom undergo significant character development over the course of the story, I could not stop thinking that this is a book for women who love reading about hot totally straight dudes violently fucking each other. Who might also have some bondage and furry fetishes and other kinks. Ya know, not that there's anything wrong with that, but your kink, Dear Author, is not my kink.
The book is not pornographic in its detail, but it is explicit enough. Space opera with rape dragons I could handle, but foe-yay slashfic pretending to be space opera just kind of annoyed me, because the writing, worldbuilding, and character development was good enough that I probably would have enjoyed the story if it had more space opera and less biting of pillows. ...more
That this book was inspired by, and a reaction to, Robert A. Heinlein, is patently obvious even if there are no overt call-outs or references. I havenThat this book was inspired by, and a reaction to, Robert A. Heinlein, is patently obvious even if there are no overt call-outs or references. I haven't read anything by Naomi Kritzer before and don't know what her feelings about Heinlein are, but this book could not be more Heinleinesque if it added a few spankings and some Bugs.
I love Heinlein, skeevy spanking fetish and all. But Liberty's Daughter has the feel of a classic Heinlein juvenile — its protagonist is a smarty, spunky, capable girl whose father "runs" things in a vague, behind-the-scenes kind of way on their seastead home. Beck Garrison is an independent gal just trying to earn some pocket money, like most teenagers, but her part-time job as "finder" of miscellenry leads her to the dark underside of the seastead home where she has spent her entire life.
Which is where Liberty's Daughter is clearly also a response to some of Heinlein's other books, especially The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Many of Heinlein's books depicted societies, on the moon or in near-future Earth enclaves, that run on anarcho-libertarian principles. There was a lot of philosophizing, and there was always present the uber-competent Heinleinian Male, a stern, wise, yet loving patriarchal figure, and the equally uber-competent Heinleinian Female, as brilliant and capable as her man but always ready to do the dishes and then throw off her clothes for some proper servicing.
I'm being a little cheeky, and a little unfair to the old man here. Talking about Heinlein always invites the Great Heinlein Debate. The man has passionate fans and passionate haters, and after reading this book, I honestly don't know which one Naomi Kritzer is. Maybe both.
The seastead is a collection of separatist anarcho-libertarian communes in the Pacific Ocean, made of floating platforms and spare ships all tied together and turned into a collection of micro-states, not really recognized as governments by the rest of the world, but allowed to exist more or less autonomously. The United States and some other countries have "outreach offices" there, but since the seasteaders exist in international waters, as long as they don't give the U.S. or anyone else a reason to send in the Navy, they are mostly left alone.
Rebecca Garrison's father is a rich guy who brought her to the 'stead when she was four, after her mother died. We never learn exactly what he does or where his money came from, but he's a Big Deal on the seastead, which means Beck has grown up living a fairly privileged life. Through her eyes, we learn how life in this libertarian utopia works. People can "buy in" with a full stake on the stead and an apartment if they have enough money, but many people arrive as "bond workers" — basically, they sell themselves into indentured servitude, hoping to eventually earn their way to freedom and enough money to buy a stake of their own. Technically, there is no "slavery" on the 'stead, only because countries like the U.S. probably would get involved if their citizens were literally being enslaved. But as we (and Beck) learn, "technically" has a lot of wiggle room. While conditions on the 'stead have clearly become normalized for her, even she is shocked to discover that where the "laws" are basically that anything you can get away with is legal, people can and will get away with a lot.
After trying to find a bond worker who disappeared, Beck is recruited to help a producer who's arrived from Hollywood to run a reality show on the 'stead. This leads to Beck discovering even more of the stead's dark side, and running into direct opposition with her father, who wants to maintain the status quo and doesn't want his daughter stirring up trouble. Unfortunately, he learns that when you raise a Heinleinian juvenile on an anarcho-libertarian commune, you get an independent-minded troublemaker.
Her father, Paul Garrison, is an archetypal Heinleinian Male: brilliant, wealthy, and in Kritzer's version, completely amoral. The relationship between Beck and her father seems awkward and true to what growing up with this kind of a father would be: he appears to feel some affection for her, but it's hard to tell whether his "love" extends beyond seeing her as an extension of himself, and he doesn't take it well when his progeny turns defiant. He starts out just being kind of an aloof, authoritarian d-bag, but Beck learns more and more about the dark side of her father, and the seastead where they live. Beck, in turn, seems a pretty normal teenage girl, but whether with her father or with her boyfriend, she seems almost emotionally stunted and we never get any deep insights into how she feels about them.
There was a lot to like in Liberty's Daughter, whether you love Heinlein or hate him (or have never read him). As a near-future SF novel, it's barely science fiction, and presents teens doing things in an almost-today setting. Beck is smart and likeable, and gets her way by being clever and having a lot of moxy, and while sometimes her ability to get away with things seemed a little too easy, she does run up against the limits of being a teenage girl in a world run by adults. As social commentary, it's both a critique of the Heinleinian archetype of competence and individualism, and of libertarianism.
There were also things that annoyed me. Beck is a bit flat as a character, and the ending — really, the last third of the book — seemed to be a series of escalating consequences and abrupt transitions that Beck continues to react to in a rather muted way. The end just sort of trails off, though in a way that would certainly allow for a sequel.
I also have to say that I was appalled by the editing. I've heard that publishers have been cheaping out on editing lately, and this showed it; I spotted typos and grammatical errors every few pages. Not entirely fair to judge a book by its editing, but I do, dammit, so this 3.5 star book gets knocked down to 3 stars for not having had competent proofreading....more
This story is like The Martian if a chick wrote it. In fact, that's pretty much what it is.
Yes, I said "chick." Girlfriend on Mars is as much chick-liThis story is like The Martian if a chick wrote it. In fact, that's pretty much what it is.
Yes, I said "chick." Girlfriend on Mars is as much chick-lit as it is science fiction. Unsurprisingly, I liked the sci-fi parts and did not really like the chick-lit parts.
On the surface, this is a book about a smart, feisty geek girl competing on a reality TV show for a shot at being one of the first people on Mars. But it's actually about Amber self-actualizing, digging through her past trauma, navigating female friendships and rivalries while being slut-shamed on social media, banging a hot virgin ex-Orthodox Jewish boy, and extricating herself from her multi-year dead-end relationship with her loser boyfriend.
In other words, the plot is about Going To Mars but it's executed in feelingsdumps and alternating POVs between Amber, competing against 30 other people selected from around the world, and Kevin, Amber's boyfriend who has never had any ambitions beyond growing weed in their shared Vancouver apartment and who now resolves not to leave said apartment until Amber returns home.
Kevin is a nice guy and the chapters from his POV, where he whines, pines, and angsts are supposed to humanize him, I guess, while also making it very obvious why Amber cheats on him on the regular, but I never liked him and I was not sure if the author expected us to be sympathetic to him (yeah, it's tough when your girlfriend chooses Mars over you, but let's be real, who wouldn't?) or was just giving us a mopey illustration of the quality of boyfriend that would make living on Mars preferable.
Amber is spunky and smart and girlbossy, and deep down, not very nice, which is also not something I am sure the author intended. She had a difficult childhood with her evangelical Christian parents, leaving her with tons of mommy and daddy issues (all of which, rest assured, will be dragged out and held up to the light, and cameras, over the course of the novel), and she landed with Kevin because he was nice and he was there, and she spent the next 14 years with him growing ever more resentful about how she was doing most of the work running their weed business while he just wanted to smoke weed. We get explicit sex scenes just so the author can show us that, on top of everything else, Kevin is a lousy lover, and maybe to make us more sympathetic to the fact that Amber's coping mechanism is to fuck any cute guy who smiles at her and low-key hope that this will motivate Kevin to break up with her.
Besides Amber and Kevin's dysfunctional relationship, there is some not terribly original or clever commentary about reality TV shows and social media. The contestants compete in your standard elimination challenges + audience voting reality show, very little of which demonstrates anyone's fitness to be a Marsonaut, the end goal being to narrow it down to the final two who will actually go to Mars. It's all run by a billionaire named Jeff Trask who is basically an amalgam of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He is supposedly a visionary who wants to turn Mars into a new home for mankind, but it's 2023 and if you write a billionaire as anything other than a shallow villain you'll get cancelled, so of course the entire Mars Now project will inevitably turn out to be all about ego and selfishness.
Does Amber make it to Mars? Does she wind up with Kevin or the ex-IDF hunk? There is not much suspense; the ending is basically a formulaic chick-lit tearjerker that hits all the requisite buttons. Girlfriend on Mars was okay, and could have been great if the satire was sharper, but the target audience is not people who want to read about space exploration or biting social commentary, it's people who want to read about Strong Independent Women who lose their deadweight boyfriends and bang hot astronauts instead....more
This is the third book in the Children of Time series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera about uplifted species and terraformed worlds.
Since Children oThis is the third book in the Children of Time series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera about uplifted species and terraformed worlds.
Since Children of Time, a recurring character has been Avrana Kern, the scientist who began the original arc project to seed distant worlds with life and terraform them as an escape from a ruined, polluted Earth. Kern appears again, now in multiple manifestations as an uploaded consciousness. So do the uplifted spiders and octopi of the first two books, joined in Children of Memory by giant, super-genius corvids.
The scale of the conflict is smaller this time, as a multispecies crew of explorers, including an AI copy of the ever-acerbic Kern with her ongoing God-complex, arrives at a colony world called Imir that was terraformed centuries ago but now is barely hanging on. The inhabitants hardly remember their interstellar origins, and have been trying to eke out an existence on an inhospitable world, and over time, have begun blaming everything that goes wrong on mysteries "Seccers" who live out in the woods, just over the horizon, raiding and stealing and poisoning crops and basically taking on the role of witches or faeries.
The main viewpoint character, Liff, is a curious young girl, 26 in Imir years, about 12 in Earth years, who's smart and curious and discovers a witch in the woods. Then she notices things about the new teacher, Miranda, who's from some outlying farm no one has heard of, and who lives with an odd group of housemates who likewise don't fit in.
A straightforward lost colony story becomes a lot more complicated, because Tchaikovsky likes throwing speculative twists. There are explorations of the nature of sentience. The two corvids Gothi and Gethli are bound to be reader favorites. Their dialogs are both hilarious and deep, as they debate between themselves whether they are in fact sentient or merely stochastic parrots. It's a debate that is startlingly current; a few years ago, most readers might have taken this speculation with a grain of salt ("They're talking and contemplating their own self-awareness - and making jokes about it - of course they're sentient!"). But if you've played with ChatGPT 4 recently, well, Earth AI today is almost at the conversational level of Gothi and Gethli.
Avrana Kern herself, the AI with a god-complex, has to confront similar questions about her own existence. In a lot of reviews people compare this book to Peter Watts's Blindsight, another fantastic SF story that raised intriguing and scary questions about what constitutes "sentience" and whether we can even tell the difference between a true sapient being and something that's just really good at passing whatever Turing Test you throw at it.
Eventually, there is an inevitable confrontation between Miranda and her companions and the suspicious, increasingly paranoid Imirians. This leads to some non-linear back-and-forths in time, in which Liff's perspective, in particular, becomes confusing and inconsistent. Eventually this is explained with a big twist that I kind of saw coming. The question of sentience is never completely answered, but I really hope Gothi and Gethli return.
Children of Memory was a good third book in the series. I loved the first book, Children of Time, because I have always liked uplift stories (David Brin's Uplift series is one of my favorite SF series of all time) and the spiders were awesome. The second and third books have not been quite as awesome, but they're still pretty good, and Tchaikovsky's ability to churn out lengthy series that are never a let-down continues to impress me. Children of Memory is very much a sci-fi story even though parts of it have a more mythic, almost fantasy feel, and each book in the series has expanded this universe in a surprisingly hopeful manner. Humans, H-umans, spiders, octopi, bacterial hive-minds, all coexisting peacefully if sometimes uneasily....more
Plague Birds is a strange book. It's not labeled as YA, and I realize a teenage girl protagonist doesn't automatically make something YA. But the writPlague Birds is a strange book. It's not labeled as YA, and I realize a teenage girl protagonist doesn't automatically make something YA. But the writing was often gratingly YA in nature, with super-advanced AIs "screaming in outrage" and throwing tantrums and acting like, well, teenage girls. And the story is one of Crista unwillingly becoming a Plague Bird, questing through a post-apocalyptic world being harassed by her abusive ex-boyfriend, making kissy-kissy-woo-woo with a futuristic warrior monk who cracks bad jokes, and eventually becoming the Girl of Destiny...
So yeah, pretty much YA, with a heavy anime influence.
Set 20,000 years in the future, Plague Birds is technically science fiction, but the combination of AIs and nanotechnology gives certain people powers that are effectively magic, and which are about as well understood by non-magical folk. Normal humans are all genetically altered with animal genes, so everyone is part human and part wolf, cat, bird, badger, deer, etc. Crista is a wolf-girl.
Crista lives in a small village protected by its own AI, as most villages in this strangely pastoral future are. Roaming this world are "Plague Birds," humans who have been bonded to "Blood AIs" who exist as nanites in their bloodstream. Plague Birds effectively have super-powers; their blood AIs can instantly repair any injuries, and when the Plague Birds cut themselves, the blood AI emerges in a spray of nanotech-blood that can slay armies. Plague Birds are wandering judges, juries, and executioners who lay down justice (usually fatal) to criminals. They are hated and feared by the populace despite their function.
Crista's mother was killed by a Plague Bird, or so Crista believes. Everyone else claims she's imagining it. Then one day Crista meets a Plague Bird, who turns out to be an ordinary, very tired woman who's been doing this job for thousands of years. She's not a scary monster, she's just someone who got stuck with a job and immortality she didn't want.
In a contrived set of "tag, you're it" events, Crista winds up inheriting the former Plague Bird's blood AI, "Red Day," and becomes a Plague Bird herself. She is forced to leave her village and begin her circuit of this world, littered with post-industrial villages, the ruins of ancient cities, and the scars of world wars from thousands of years ago.
Eventually, Crista is caught in a plot that pits her fellow Plague Birds against sentient archologies and ancient digital libraries, each other, and an even more powerful AI threat.
There was a lot of imaginative world-building in this book. There are violent and bloody battle scenes. It's post-apocalyptic wizard battles, end-of-the-world conspiracy theories, technological riddles and enigmas, and romance.
I found it fun but frustrating, as many of the answers seemed pulled out at random and a lot of mystery was facilitated by the simple gimmick of "AIs can alter people's memories and perceptions." I also could not avoid seeing Crista as a YA protagonist. Her ex-boyfriend is an ongoing antagonist, her new boyfriend is a dorky man-giant, she banters with her blood AI Red Day like a pair of high school frenemies, and I grew tired of "her inner wolf growling."
It's an interesting book but it felt a little like a debut novel by someone who was going for a more literary SF tale but couldn't escape YA and anime tropes....more
This sequel to Lost Planet Homicide continues the adventures of DCI Lutero Cade on the hellish lost colony of Croatoan, where life is cheap, everyone This sequel to Lost Planet Homicide continues the adventures of DCI Lutero Cade on the hellish lost colony of Croatoan, where life is cheap, everyone is corrupt, and the author is working on a series a bite-sized novelette at a time.
In the first installment, Cade started digging into the secret true origins of the Croatoan colony, and that subplot continues to be a background detail in this book, where the main plot is about some new revolutionary movement that wants to "liberate" Croatoa. They're idiots, of course, useful fools being used by someone whose motives Cade and his partner have to figure out. We get more clues about Croatoa's secret origins and an unfolding conspiracy that stretches back to Earth. Lots of shooting and Cade being a tough guy and somewhat formulaic SF detective noir, but with the conspiracies and mysteries being woven through the police work, it's a decent enough listen....more
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