It takes me about a year to write a novel. Sometimes more.. Assuming it takes everyone about that long, that means I probably chew through a decade's worth of other people's work every year, and probably a lot more than that. So here's the thing. I'm perfectly happy to share my readers with other authors. So this page, unlike the rest of my website, is here to talk about other people's work.
Cold Hands and Other Stories
No disclaimer here. I bought a copy of this book as soon as Jeff announced it was in print. The fact that it's taken me this long to review it is kind of embarrassing, but it's been a busy summer.
Jeff Duntemann has been a science fiction writer for a long time, and his body of work spans decades. Collected here are stories first published in 1974, at the very beginning of his writing career, extending up through the present, with three stories that have not appeared in print before. Where Souls in Silicon anthologized his work on AIs, Cold Hands and Other Stories anthologizes his other topics.
And what a range of topics. The eponymous story, Cold Hands, tells the story of Ed Graczyk, a space pilot, who has lost his arms in an accident. He is offered new cybernetic arms and his old job back by the Combine, the government/corporation he worked for, but such offeres always have a price. Dark, future-paranoid, and all too cogent of the flaws inherent in government-for-profit.
Our Lady of the Endless Sky is an unabashedly Catholic story about the religion of personnel aboard a damaged lunar base. No miracles, at least not in the Hollywood sense, but as a deep connectedness between people struggling to survive and trying to make sense (and perhaps hope) out of their technological world that is threatening every moment to fail them. Sophisticated and utterly human. Don't let the subject matter and title scare you off.
In space, nothing stands still. Inevitability Sphere is the tale of two guys who are pilots in different eras, both of them rapidly being put out of work by the Low Road, a kind of hyperspatial highway generated from Earth. The Captain, as he's referred to, used to fly fast courier ships. Old Tom Hoyt was a fighter jock in World War II, and makes his living flying, in this case, the Captain to the far end of the Low Road, which bounces around the atmosphere of the planet Grit like a cat toy in the wind. Hoyt's job: catch it and fly into it. It's a tale of adaptation, of the democratization of space, and how that democratization tends to leave the pioneers without the ability to do what they love. Subtle and fun.
Whale Meat is a weirdo. Jeff isn't known for his fantasy work. This is the only one he's ever sold. But such an intriguing idea. What if calculus gave you a way to frame magic? And what of the near-immortal witches who never learned to count? While I have some problems with the naming of spells in this story, it's a very small matter. An interesting story, and should Jeff ever tire of Sci-Fi and technical writing, I'm convinced he could do well with this genre too.
Born Again, with Water. This story is very much the flip-side of Our Lady of the Endless Sky. Catholicism is so very human, that the very comforts it offers in Our Lady cause huge problems when it is clumsily grafted onto a completely alien culture by well-intentioned missionaries. If Our Lady is about everything that's right with deep-seated religion, Born Again with Water encapsulates everything that is wrong with it. Challenging to read, because the point of view and narration are from a rather alien point of view.
Next up, Drumlin Boiler. Space-wrecked settlers on the planet Valinor have undergone a frustrating technological regression due to the short lifespans of the consumer electronics all their cultural knowledge was stored on, and are slowly clawing their way back into the steam age. Complicating this are artifacts on Valinor called thingmakers that can make anything you want, if you know the drum pattern to call the thing up. The two different technological spheres collide in a frenzied build and race of steam locomotives, one built of iron, the other of drumlins - parts that were drummed up. A little Junkyard Wars, a little post-singularity civilization, and hey, a locomotive race. Fun story, and a great introduction to the Drumlin world.
Drumlin Wheel is set in the Drumlin world as well. What if some guy named Roper happened to drum up something really useful? Like, perhaps, a wheel that turns on its own? And what if the guy writes down the drum rhythm and sells the things? And what if that put this ordinary guy squarely between the forces that champion the two ways of technology on Valinor, the Bitspace Institute on the side of conventional, Earth technology, and the Grange on the side of Drumlin technology. And of course, every pickpocket and thug who'd like to turn a dishonest gold hand on the stolen rhythm of an ordinary guy named Roper. Another peek into the complex world that churns under the agrarian surface of Valanor.
Roddie is a short, short story, again in the Drumlin world, about one man's encounters with an enigmatic drummer of drumlins who is looking to drum up some deeper understanding of everything. And there's a creeping, disturbing sense that he has it.
Also in Cold Hands is an excerpt from The Cunning Blood, Jeff's 2005 novel set in the same universe as the Drumlin stories, but on other planets where no thingmakers exist. I review this entire novel here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12388...
All told, a rich collection of short stories that you'd expect to be the work of half a dozen different authors. A wide range of ideas, varying styles, varying outlooks on the universe. Part of this can be explained by the gulf of years between some of these stories' creation and this publication. It's not often you can see the author evolve in an anthology, but because he's collecting the fiction of decades of work, you can. A good book. Lots of good stories. Highly recommended.
Cold Hands and Other Stories, by Jeff Duntemann, is available from Copperwood Press http://www.lulu.com/copperwood
Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with Linux
Where the Cool Kids Program
A long time ago, in a basement far far away, I was sitting in front of a long-suffering television set, banging away on a Commodore 64, trying to dive beyond BASIC programming to where the cool kids played, down below the user interface, down in the guts of the machine itself. Stripped of the training wheels, you could write programs on that ancient machine that would fly. The cool kids wrote programs in assembly language. I tried. But I never got there. By the time I hit college, they didn't teach it anymore, and gradually, I moved past it to other programming, and ultimately to more satisfying careers doing other things.
But I never forgot.
Given that background, I didn't have high hopes for Assembly Language Step by Step. I know Jeff. I've read and enjoyed his science fiction, and he's blurbed mine, and to disclaim a moment, I know him well enough that he wouldn't let me pay for my copy of this new, near total rewrite of his classic text on the matter. I knew if anyone could explain assembly to me, it would be him, but I still expected to hit the point where my eyes glazed over and I didn't care anymore.
Instead, by five chapters into the book, I had refreshed my knowledge of binary and hexadecimal math. I'd looked into computer architecture to a depth I never reached before, and begun to understand, really understand the true center of assembly programming, the addressing of memory. And it's not like it was in the days when I tried to learn assembly before. Modern operating systems treat memory differently, and it's this new, more complex memory mapping that I understand now. Even after 30 years in and around the computing industry, this book taught me things I didn't know about what computing is, when all the familiar abstractions are stripped away and the bare code is exposed.
I can't wait to go further.
Thirty years later, that geeky kid in the basement who didn't get it, finally gets it.
If you want to get it, if you want to program where the cool kids program, if you want to understand how that machine on your desk really works, you want, you need, you must have this book. Buy this book. You won't regret it.
Highly recommended.
Five stars
-JRS
Sleeper Awakes (Hidden Lands of Nod)
He is the surfer who surfed over the end of the world. He is the seer who saw it all. He is the target of a relentless, superhumanly fast contract killer called Edger. He is the traveler, a friend to the Dvarish, and to Sprites, Scums and the odd stray dog. Above all, Boyd is the sleeper, awakening to his own heritage and power in the psychedelic new world of shifting realities that he so abruptly joined. Post-apocalyptic psychedelia without the munchies. Highly recommended.
If this sounds like a blurb, it was written as one. The very first I've ever been asked for.
And what a treat the novel turned out to be. While I normally shy away from fantasy and sci-fi/fantasy hybrids, Stikmanz's world and his characters sucked me in. His world made /sense/ despite being rather satirical in nature. The civilizations that arise after the cataclysm make sense, in a perverse, amusing sort of way.
Most of all, though, I liked his characters, from Boyd to the gone-to-seed hippies around him, to the Sprite, to the Dvarish. Granted, I felt one of his villains needed a bit more killing than he got, but even that says something about the strength of the characters in this piece.
It's not perfect. There are rough spots with one of the villains as I mentioned. Indeed, I thought the whole sequence with Buck Toof needed some trimming, as well as Buck himself needing to get dead and failing to do so. And the apocalypse itself seemed a trifle fuzzy, and at times the arrivals and departures of the Dvarish were mighty convenient for the story, if not for Boyd, but these are small gripes, and I'm only docking one star for them.
So to Mr. Stikmanz, I say thank you for asking me to blurb this. It was an honor. To the rest of all y'all, if you like a little fantasy brewed into your sci fi, if you enjoy a bit of satire, you will dig this book.
-JRS
The Steel Remains (A Land Fit for Heroes, #1)
Before you ask, I got my copy of this book through Amazon.co.uk, where the book is in print today. This is my habit with Morgan's books, rather than waiting another year for them in the United States.
Traditionally, in Noir, it's customary to have a protagonist who is morally compromised, but who at least tries to better himself/herself, the world, etc. Morgan seems to have missed that point with the utterly unlikable Ringel, protagonist of The Steel Remains. Ringel is an empty husk of a human being, a war hero, a killing machine, in search of a reason to kill again. Unsurprisingly, he finds it.
Morgan's fantasy world is replete with brutally nasty ways to die, and not much worth fighting for, no causes, and no resolution to speak of. The only thing I carried away from this book was nausea, and a strong disinclination to re-read the book to try and track down all the loose threads of plot I was seeing. Morgan is a pro. It seems unlikely the corrupt priest he creates with such lavish care is not subsequently used. Likewise the corpsemites which are in the introductory scene, I'm sure somewhere they're used.
I like Morgan's work, generally. I had great expectations for The Steel Remains/Land Fit for Heroes, but all this book amounts to is a nasty sendup of the genre. If you're sick of the whole swords and sorcery meme, and you'd love to see it told the way it probably would have looked to anyone not romanticizing it, then you'll enjoy The Steel Remains. Hopefully you have a strong stomach.
Souls in Silicon
What if AIs turn out to be decent people?
I admit it. I'm a cyberpunk writer by trade (at the moment), so most of the AIs you encounter in my work tend to be malignant sociopaths, at best. Duntemann's collection of short stories, though present a different view. What if the AIs like us? What if they take on recognizably human values, and value us, their creators, and what we made them to do? What if, in short, they had souls which, to use Duntemann's own words, "[...:]that defining nature that makes us identifiably what we are and not someone—or something—else." What if they care?
Duntemann's AIs are like that. Many, though not all, of them feel, and sometimes behave emotionally and erratically, rather than the hyper-rational manufactured minds of, say, Asimov and Clarke. "Guardian" "Silicon Psalm" and "Borovsky's Hollow Woman" all present machines forced into logical conundrums, where two or more of their primary directives are at odds, and the feeling machine is torn in the middle. Each resolves the matter in their own way. Some embrace eccentricity. Some are self-sacrificing, One embraces what, in humans, would be called dissociative disorder, and splits into two personalities.
Other times, as in "STORMY vs the Tornadoes" and "Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your Legs", Duntemann's AIs are playful, scheming with each other to help their humans out, sometimes doing apparently irrational things, only because their rationale doesn't make sense to the bio-brains around them.
Not all of Duntemann's AIs are created equal. Some are the merely rational, logical machines we've come to expect from science fiction about AIs. When paired with AIs capable of feeling—AIs with souls—the contrast is crystalline sharp, as in "The Steel Sonnets". This matter is revisited later in "Marlowe", save that one of the participants, the unfeeling one, at that, is human, and the two are linked together cybernetically.
Duntemann takes the idea of an AI's soul to its full logical extension in "Bathtub Mary" and uses an AI to explore the origins of religious visions and their impact. Rover, the protagonist of the story, like many of Duntemann's AIs, is a charming creature. Rather dog-like in his devotion to humans, and yet there's this thing that he saw, or thinks he saw, or perhaps imagined, none of which should have been possible.
It bears mentioning that there's a reverence for our own creation in many of these stories. A slightly religious flavoring, more overt in some stories than others, that a lot of science fiction writers would shy away from. And yet, it's entirely appropriate in the context of this collection of stories, in the contemplation of these machines' souls, that those ancient ideas might re-manifest, might find new expression, that these machines' struggles with these issues might mirror our own. Duntemann handles this thread in his fiction with a deft touch. In other hands it might overwhelm the stories, preach, or deny. In these stories it just is, one of a set of ways these machines cope with the self knowledge that has been thrust upon them.
If Souls in Silicon sounds like a collection of fairly light science fiction, it's not. The tone is generally optimistic, but there are serious issues to contemplate in many of these stories, and the biggest of all is this: we stand on the threshold (for some function of threshold) of creating artificial intelligence. Whether that is something destructive, as I tend to envision it, or something deeply humane and positive, as Duntemann sees it, is up to us. And to them.
Highly recommended.
Irreconcilable Differences
My second novel. Naturally I think it's great, and everyone should read it. :)
Irreconcilable Differences is about a woman named Rachel Santana. She is an agent of Interpol Covert Services. She’s thirty-six years old, married, soon to be divorced, and an experienced undercover operator. They’ve taken a digital copy of her mind and personality, and implanted it in Micki Blake, a 16 year old hacker girl from rural Kansas.The mission: Locate the dangerous new player who is prowling the rural hacker ecology. Destroy him. Take no prisoners. Leave no trace. Use Micki Blake and her life as a cover.
What this means for the copy of Rachel Santana is that she’s spending time as a sixteen year old again. She’s in high school again. Above all, she has to face some hard questions. Who am I? How did I get to be this person/ Where do I go from here? These questions and their answers are a matter of life and death.
When I tell people about Irreconcilable Differences, the question I get the most is,Why Kansas?
My wife and I used to drive a lot between Colorado Springs and Sheridan Wyoming. It’s a long, dull drive. You wind up playing games like Road Kill Bingo just to pass the time. We stopped in Douglas Wyoming. It’s a town of about 5000 people, mostly support for farming and ranching, mostly retail and medical. It’s also the home of the Wyoming State Fair.
So anyway, we stopped there at the combination gas station, convenience store, and Subway Sandwich shop, and we’re sitting there, eating our sandwiches, listening to the country music, when these two goth-punks walk in. And they were in full uniform: Leather jackets, piercings, tattoos, chains, makeup, hair, the works.
No-one batted an eyelash. Except us. We talked about them for some time once we were back on the road. They were more interesting than road kill bingo. You don’t expect to see that kind of big city culture in Douglas Wyoming. But clearly, it’s there.
That idea rattled around in my head a while, and it really took off during another long drive, to the other end of Kansas. You want to talk long, dull drives? There’s not much interesting scenery. Not even much carrion on the road. I’d been working on a followup book for Looking Glass, I was thinking about cyberpunk and thinking about how yes, cyberpunk culture and technology would penetrate even here.
I knew this. I’m from these big square states. I knew it’d be different, going more rural with it, but Cyberpunk doesn’t have to be about big urban sprawls slowly being made over in the image of Tokyo. I’ve set it in normal cities before. What hit me at that point was that cyberpunk doesn’t have to be in cities at all. By the time I got home, I had a rough idea of Micki Blake and her life going in my head, so I scrapped the novel I was working on and wrote this one instead.
Time Enough for Love
Implied Spaces
Important safety tip. If you're picking up Implied Spaces with the idea of reading a bit before you sleep, don't. Don't even pick it up. Because when the dawn's early light starts peeking through your window, you'll still be reading it.
Background: In physics, string and 'brane theories in their current states seem to suggest that more universes are possible, even likely, and that indeed, it might be possible to create one's own universes in the lab. Since each universe's laws of physics are established early in the universe's existence, if one is creating them, one can, if one understands the mechanisms well enough, set the laws of physics therein.
Williams took this idea and ran with it.
In the deep future, it IS not only possible, but fairly routine to create universes for one's own purposes. The result? Mini-universes abound, with single stars and gobs of real estate, each one bound by a wormhole tunnel to the Universe we know today. Result: People move into these little universes. Set up civilizations as they see fit. And since people can easily be nano-disassembled, backed up, copied, and reassembled, everyone is functionally immortal too. In the Williams' deep future, humanity wields the powers of gods.
What do we do with them? Very much the same things we do in virtual realities today. Create role playing environments, island resorts, and all the other usual decadence. And why not? Humanity's endured more and uglier wars as this technology has evolved We deserve a little fun.
Except that it's hard to think of what to do with your life, with your existence, when you can have almost anything you want, live as long as you want, create anything. Existential problems are very real for the people of the future.
Except that the technology involved is so incredibly complex that it's really wielded by planet-sized AIs under the control of humans, and all the pocket universes are utterly dependent on this arrangement.
Except that someone, something, is swiping people from the pocket universes, for purposes unknown.
Except that at least some of the AIs seem to be involved, their Asimovian limitations notwithstanding.
Except that some of those people come back, with their priorities somewhat rearranged.
Except that someone, something, somewhere is deliberately trying to upset the whole house of cards humanity has wrought in exchange for something else.
When creating a universe, it's easy to say, "I want mountains here, and a sea there, and this universe shall respect continental evolution rules normally." Which results in Implied Spaces, from which the title is taken. Spaces in the new universes which were implicitly defined instead of explicitly specified. What happens in these spaces? What lives there? Are creatures accidentally specified there? That's what Aristide, our hero, sets out to find out. And in the spaces between what was intended, he stumbles across this growing conspiracy. Maybe he was looking for it all along. Maybe it was the implied space in his own character.
Some authors blink when staring down the muzzle of Kurzwell’s Technological Singularity. I certainly do. We find ways to assert, “Not very likely. Didn’t happen. Can’t happen.” All of which may be true. Williams, by contrast, has embraced it, asserted that our limbic systems, the seats of emotion, behavior, and long term memory, define us and even post-singularity will continue to define us as human. Having done so, he proceeds to tell a fascinating tale of criminality, conspiracy, war, and “higher” purpose, with side dishes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead.
As is endemic to stories that explore the deep, rational ramifications of What If, the characterizations are at times a little thin, in no small part because the humans in the story are so terribly jaded by what they themselves can do, but it’s a flaw you can overlook when faced with lines like, “Do you mean to say […] that our civilization has reached the point where we’re hurling hostile universes at each other?” But this is science fiction when it’s fun. The book is remarkably light hearted overall, gleefully extrapolating the possibilities, and how a mostly-rational society handles this new crisis. Bitsy the cat, physical avatar for the supercomputer Endora, is at once computer-like and catlike, and like a cat, creeps through the plot in ways that make you suspicious of her, without actually catching her being naughty. Watch for this, particularly at the very end of the book.
Williams is also being very sneaky in implying certain parts of the story rather than telling them. All the sex scenes are implied. Bitsy/Endora’s involvement is implied. The spaces in Aristide imply several characters. It’s very subtle, and I may have to revise this part of the review once I’ve had the chance to sleep more and reread the book during the day.
The only disappointment was the motivation of the overarching villian. His actual plan seemed to fall a little short, once revealed. There was also a certain amount of “Before I kill you, Mr. Bond” exposition that wasn’t entirely convincing, so I’m docking the book one star from a perfect score.
All told, though, a fine book by Williams. Highly recommended high science fiction.
The Cunning Blood
It's 366 years in the future. Nanotechnology is everywhere, but humanity is still humanity, and the social ills that entails have continued right along, evolving to fit the times. Meet Peter Novolio. Peter is in trouble with the law. Meet Sangruse 9, the distributed, sentient, self-evolving nanomachine symbiont that lives in Peter's blood as his constant companion. Peter and 9 are going to Hell, the prison planet, where an atmospheric nanomachine infestation detects and eats electrical conductors. It's a one way trip. There's no contact at all from the surface of Hell to the Earth. There hasn't been in years. End of story, right? Wrong. Peter's banishment is only the beginning. In the face of nanotechnology and sheer human determination and ingenuity, and a small but potent society of people like Peter, nothing could be so simple. By the time the story is resolved, the futures of Hell, Earth, and everybody, biological or nanotechnological will be forever altered by The Cunning Blood.
Duntemann pulls off several impressive stunts in this book. He deals with a dystopian future without being grim. He deals with super-technology without losing the reader's sense that this is all plausible, that this really could happen this way. He blends in social satire without bludgeoning us over the head with it. Most importantly, he manages to have nanotech as the keystone technology of his novel without letting it become arbitrarily powerful and magical. He creates machine personalities that are neither god nor slave. And he weaves the whole shebang together in a classic science fiction style that takes Progress as a given without entirely ignoring the nature of the human beings who drive it. These are difficult balances to strike, and Duntemann does it with aplomb.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who loves (and misses) old school science fiction.
Saving Fish from Drowning: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
The Bonesetter's Daughter
The Hundred Secret Senses
It's become a tradition for me to read Amy Tan's books when flying. My recent trip to Las Vegas was no exception, since at the last minute, I pulled down Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses - the Kindle version - and dived into it as soon as I could turn my electronic devices back on.
Where to start? On the face of it, on the first page, the very first line, it's easy to imagine that Tan saw the movie The Sixth Sense and it resonated strongly with her. I don't know. No details are provided about where this book came from, or how it came to be. But the book starts, "My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco."
There are ghosts a-plenty in this book. Two or three in particular are fundamental to the story line, and the stories of their lives, deaths, and in some cases reincarnations are woven seamlessly into the narrative, as Kwan shifts from her accented English into Chinese to tell her sister Olivia the stories. Kwan spends time in a mental institution for her troubles.
To Kwan, the ghosts are real. Olivia, born and raised in America, and not part of the culture Kwan is speaking from, is skeptical. And yet, against her will, over decades of listening to her sister, Olivia has learned the stories, internalized them, and become haunted by some of them herself, as well as taking on a few new ones.
The ghosts are the reason Kwan is so desperate to patch Olivia's failed marriage back together. The ghosts and their story are the reason Olivia, Simon (Olivia's ex-husband) and Kwan go to China. But a ghost can't change anything about its life. Ghosts are dead. It's for the living, the dying, and the newly born who ultimately bring the story to resolution.
Tan evokes both these women - Olivia and Kwan - so thoroughly you feel as though you know them, that you have known them since you were a child. Through the longstanding argument and story telling between them, she evokes the ghosts as well, and their stories, and their passions, their very lives that were, to the point that they too are characters in the present story.
If it sounds disjoint - like I'm still wrapping my head around this book, digesting it, trying to figure out how Tan did what she did, and why - that's because I am. There's a lot of story there. Tan's books are thick, dense with plot and rich with characters, and The Hundred Secret Senses is no exception. Totally immersive, and I found myself wishing my flight had lasted longer than the two hours or so it actually did, so I could get through more of it. As it was, I was up until 2:00am reading it in the middle of my vacation. It's that good. Read it. Enjoy it.
Queen of Denial
Rednecks in Spaaaaace! A lighthearted, farcical space opera about Drewcila Qwah, a spacegoing garbage and scrap dealer, and the kingdom of Barious she sets out to save from its post-war depression.
I enjoyed this book. It's light and funny, but at the same time it's dealing with issues faced by real world countries in similar situations. Some of the solutions proposed are a bit draconian, but it's all in fun. What is nice, too, is that despite her astonishingly foul mouth, I really found myself enjoying Qwah as a character. It becomes obvious in the story that she's got a good head on her shoulders and isn't afraid to use it, and that she really does mean well, and she's very good at aligning the interests of Barious with lining her own pockets.
-Jim
On the Bottom
This book is special to me. My late father read it to me when I was too young to read, and when I could read, he always said I read it back to him. (I don't really remember that second part. I learned to read freakishly young.) He, in turn, read this book when he was young, since it was published the year after he was born.
Personal history aside, this is an excellent book. If you want a manual on how to tell a technologically complex tale, Ellsberg does it. He brings you the cast of characters, almost all men, who were there, who made the story happen. He gives one chapter of the physics of deep sea diving (as it was in 1925) so the reader knows what he's talking about later when "The Bends" comes up. But the focus is always on the human story. The hopes and fears, the resolve, the mental toughness that drove him and his men to push the technology of the day and raise the submarine, despite conventional wisdom being against them. When they suffer a catastrophic setback close to the end of raising the sub, you feel it with them. When they finally get the thing above the waves, you cheer with them, only to endure the nail biting tow home.
I especially like the Flat Hammock Press hardbound edition of this book: ISBN-13: 978-0971830301. This edition, published in 2003, has afterwards and appendicies that give the reader more context, spell out the histories of all the ships in the story, and give some brief biographical information on Ellsberg himself, as well as some of the more famous people he worked with at the time. It also contains a DVD of newsreel footage shot at the time. (1925 - don't be surprised that there's no soundtrack. Widespread commercial adoption of movies with sound didn't happen until 1927 with Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer). Some of them do have an audio track of Ellsberg narrating them much later.
Summary: A book that's personally important to me, and also just a darn good book. Highly recommended.
Spook Country
Imagine if you took all the flaws from Gibson's sprawl books, combined them into one story, and then deprived the story of any interesting action and characters? That's pretty much how Spook Country reads. It's an interesting world, some interesting concepts, some interesting cultural and historical currents, but half an interesting character and if there's a plot, I missed it. I couldn't finish this book. I skipped ahead to the ending, discovered that, in fact, nothing had happened there either, and gave up. Disappointing, to say the least, that the only signed Gibson book I have is Spook Country.
-Jim
Neuromancer (Sprawl Trilogy, #1)
In the era of Blade Runner, Music Video, Cold-War Endgame, and skyrocketing crime rates; in the time of the very beginning of the digital revolution, Neuromancer hit like a ton of bricks. It took both trends and said, "here is what the future could be like." And while it wasn't pretty, it was interesting. It was cool. It was sexy. It even sounded like fun, in a short-lived, stimulant fueled sort of way.
The book's flaws are well documented. Case, the main character, is such an ass that by the end you almost hope something bad happens to him. Molly is interesting, but so very little is done with her as a person, she's kind of a sad waste. The rest of the cast of insane people, drug addicts, psychopaths, and strange AIs are similar. Interesting, but never really explored in any depth. Except for 3Jane, whose life is explored entirely too much. On rereading, it becomes very clear that the book's entire focus is on the 'visuals' - how it looks, the style of the story, the flash.
But what glorious flash it is. When Neuromancer came out, there was nothing like it. It was gritty before gritty was cool. It was harsh, in an era of harsh music and harsh reality. And it embraced the digital future that was exploding out all around us. It made most of the other science fiction of the day seem mired in the 1960s, both technologically and stylistically. It doesn't stand up as well now, as its best features have become cliched, its technology dated, and its stance so much a part of the real world that it's hard to see, which lets the flaws of the book show in sharper relief. But it was the first huge impact of cyberpunk, and it's worth reading for that alone.
Friday
This book is an old friend of mine. I originally picked it up after seeing the cover art and reading the description in Michael Whelan's "Worlds of Wonder" - a book of his art. It was the first Heinlein I'd read.
When I first read this book, Friday was among the first female action heroines I'd run across. She was smart. She was sexy (er... almost to excess), she was tough, and, I thought, still feminine. Subsequent readings dimmed that a bit. Friday is a good attempt to create a believable female character, but she's not very successful, and the excuse that she's an artificial person and not normally socialized only goes so far. Heinlein is often accused of making "men with breasts" for his female characters, and Friday often strays into this territory. There's also the matter of a rape, and Friday's (lack of) reaction to it really strains believability to the breaking point.
Still. The book was hugely influential for me for several reasons. First, Friday is cyberpunk. It has all the usual trappings - dystopian, dysfunctional future, corporate mastership of pretty much everything, main characters frequently operating outside the limits of the law. The only thing missing is that Friday herself is only minimally an anti-hero.
Second, of course, Friday is female. And an action hero(ine). It's a breath of fresh air in fiction that the action heroes don't all have to be male, that toughness doesn't have to come from masculinity, and so on. I found this absolutely compelling.
Third, of course, is Heinlein's storytelling. The man could spin a good yarn, with interesting plotlines, interesting people, often witty dialogue. I don't think he was going for absolute realism with Friday, and with that caviet, the story pulled - and still pulls - me in.
I still have that old copy with the Whelan cover art. Despite the flaws I can see in it now, it's still an old friend, and a fun ride to reread. 4 stars.
Recycled
Hardwired (Hardwired, #1)
Fledgling
Off Armageddon Reef (Safehold, #1)
Did you ever have a book that you really didn't think a whole lot of, but couldn't put it down? Did the characters ever grow on you over time, despite being ... ahem ... a little thin? Did you ever get caught up in a war at sea story when you started out reading scifi? This book does all of these things.
I got this book free at Mile High Con, in Denver in 2007. This, itself, was a little strange, since MHC is a *little* con, and not many companies really advertise with them. So I was surprised to be handed a 600+ page hardbound book at registration, and on first glance, it didn't look promising.
Off Armageddon Reef starts out as the usual plot-driven space opera. Humanity is being hunted to extinction by an alien force that may not have any other real function or culture than hunting interstellar species to extinction and taking over their resources. As a last ditch effort to preserve the species, the humans establish a new colony. In order to prevent that colony emitting any electronic signature, thus attracting the aliens, they brainwash all the colonists into a theocratic system mired in late medieval to early renaissance technology, and strictly proscribed by their refashioned religion from advancing that technology. Problem. Power corrupts. The majority of the people running the project began to see themselves as gods - or archangels, at least - and removed the seeds of technology that were supposed to have been left behind, so humanity could rise up again later.
800 years pass. The aliens move further out into the galaxy, without detecting the colony.
The main character awakens as a personality copy in an android body, hidden carefully where neither the archangels nor anyone else could find her. After much exposition, she switches her android body to be male (it's a male dominated society) and heads out to overthrow the theocracy and enable technological growth.
Then the story gets interesting, because what Merlin, as the main character is now known, does is to find the local equivalent of England in that era - small, mercantile, somewhat free thinking, and with a powerful naval fleet, as well as quickly running afoul of the corrupt church - and slowly nudge their technology upward. Here is where we start to get to know the characters, from the king, to the heir apparent, to the various members of the court, and the personal conflicts, and national intrigue that surround them. By the time war breaks out, Merlin's raised his allies' technology level perhaps a century in naval technology, from galleys to galleons, and made a few important steps, particularly in the area of naval gunnery. The country hasn't had time to incorporate those changes uniformly, though, so we follow the prince and heir apparent as he commands the small fleet of higher-tech ships in great naval engagements.
The book ends, though it is obvious that it's the first in a lengthy series, and I found myself trying to sort out what technologies wily Merlin is going to introduce in the next book. My guess would be iron-clads and turrets, the defining changes of naval technology in the American Civil War. Weber could also go with a land war for the next book.
As you can see, though, the book sucked in my interest, despite some of the characters (Merlin, especially) being a bit flat and stereotyped, despite being about events and politics rather than people, despite the pages and pages and pages of exposition in the beginning, Weber managed to hook me, and I'll probably buy the next book just to see what happened. So three stars. He loses one for the characterization problems, and the other for a somewhat far-fetched (and over-explained) plot setup, but I still liked the book. I still read all the way through, and thought about it afterwards. If you like a book driven by ideas, and enjoy the story of a society beginning to claw its way out of the chains of religion, you might enjoy it too.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
This book is interesting on many levels. First, for all his elusiveness while in office at the Fed (which he says was intentional and refers to as "fedspeak"), Greenspan writes clearly, directly, and entertainingly. There's a clear humanity to the writing - and the story - that came as quite a shock. Yes, Greenspan was a mathematics and economics geek from an early age. But he was also a professional musician when he was younger, and knowing things like that makes it a lot easier to follow him through the story, which at times delves deep into the guts of the economy. It helps the reader trust him, that he'll explain so we can understand. He also uses this part of the book to lay the foundations of economic theory as they stood then, and to follow their evolution through the story at hand.
And explain he does. Greenspan's service in the federal government began in the Ford era, during the financial turmoil of the day - double digit inflation, economic stagnation, Nixon's prior attempts at wage and price control. He details the Whip Inflation Now - WIN - program, which I can vaguely recall seeing buttons for (along with the more sarcastic LOSE buttons), and why the program didn't - and couldn't work). He goes into considerable detail of why the economy was the way it was then.
And so the story proceeds, from Ford, skipping Carter, to Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, and Bush2. Politically, Greenspan seems to settle in the small-l libertarian range, and so his biggest problems with government are when populism or special interest result in runaway spending and/or pork spending in Congress. As a result, he has great respect for Ford, under whose administration inflation finally was whipped by raising interest rates - but the rebound came too late to save Ford's election. He comments little on Carter, as he wasn't in the business at the time. He had great hopes for the Reagan administration, but they weren't realized because once again, Congress couldn't keep the purse strings closed. Skipping ahead, it's surprising (at least, to anyone who hasn't read the reviews), that he had great respect for the Clinton administration. He felt Clinton had a good understanding of the economy, and used his veto powers effectively to control federal spending. Which, in Greenspan's eyes, all went to hell with Bush2 and the Republican Congress.
He covers Black Friday, the fall of the Berlin wall (with intriguing insight into how the market economies that came up in formerly-Eastern Blok countries succeeded or failed due to factors of the societies, and the way the changes were executed )the growth and bursting of the internet bubble, the growth and bursting of the realestate bubble, and, of course, 9/11. All the major economic events of the last 30+ years, all the ones I can remember, he covers from the inside, and details what was done, by who, and why to try and make the economy work better.
And, of course, he lays out how the future might go, projecting forward for the next 30 years what might happen in the U.S., England, China, Japan, Europe, and Russia.
The book gets drier and drier as you go from Greenspan's life and the turbulent events he witnessed further into theory and prediction, and by the end, it's a bit of a slog through.
It's worth reading. It takes a long time to digest once it's read. And if economics is a new subject for you, you might want to read "Economics for Dummies" first, as I did, so you have some framework to absorb what he's saying.
Looking Glass
I wrote this one. You should know that up front. Because, like, my name's on the cover and everything. :)
Seriously, though.
When I set out to write Looking Glass, in November of 2004, I was angry. Angry about how the net had evolved, angry about the results of the most recent election, angry about how big corporations were exploiting everything, but especially exploiting DRM to own vast swatches of our culture, and so on. And cyberpunk has always been an angry genre. It's also a genre I'd tried once before, back in 1991, but never gotten very far with.
Since Looking Glass was my National Novel Writing Month project for that year, I cannibalized the world from that 1991 book - a world where petroleum is too valuable to burn, and the resulting energy crisis has forced technology in some very different directions - rolled in the years of net culture I'd absorbed since 1991, as well as the potential long term fallout of what I perceived as a growing lack of social bonds between groups who disagree.
This is the world of Cath Farro. She, in her turn, came out of that same anger, the same frustration with working in high tech, the same sense that once AOL connected itself to the Internet (known as the Endless September), everything got worse. She went through the same paradigm shift I can remember, except that she did it younger, when it was more keenly felt. She's also older - forty - because the kind of skills you need and kind of impacted fury you need in a cyberpunk world are the products of years of experience and study. Making her older meant that I didn't have to make all her opponents intrinsically dumb. It meant that I didn't have to come up with some improbable background to explain why she can do the things she can do and others can't. It also meant that, despite living in a near-future world, she's a product of our time, and the times we live in. Cath would be in her twenties today.
What happens? Well, the nutshell version I give people when they ask goes like this: Catherine Farro is a 40 year old paraplegic. She works in a virtual environment doing network security for a large corporation. On Friday, payday, someone attacks her and her team. The rest of the story is her figuring out what was real and what was virtual (and which parts of those matter), who did it, why they did it, who sent them, and going after them.
Enjoy.
The Forever War
War for the Oaks
Finder
Territory
Raymond Chandler : Later Novels and Other Writings : The Lady in the Lake / The Little Sister / The Long Goodbye / Playback /Double Indemnity / Selected Essays and Letters (Library of America)
Raymond Chandler : Stories and Early Novels : Pulp Stories / The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The High Window (Library of America)
Black Man
Broken Angels (Takeshi Kovacs, #2)
The followon to Altered Carbon. This book sends Kovacs to war, and confronts the legacy of the Martians head on.
The Martians, as they were introduced in Altered Carbon, were a race of sentient birdlike creatures, that have, apparently, been long extinct by the time their relics were discovered on Mars. Now a new archeological find in the middle of a war zone has corporate players scrambling to find it, understand it, and exploit it as quickly as possible, and woe to anyone who gets in the way.
Long and harsh. It's a good, if bleak, story, though for all the length, for all the details we get about Kovacs' life that we didn't get in the first book, the characters aren't as vivid as in Altered Carbon, and when he says early on "it's the closest I came to a victory on Sanction IV" early on, he's not pissing about. There are damn few sympathetic characters in this story. Kovacs' brutal nature is more in evidence, and Morgan kills off most of the sympathetic characters with gruesome efficiency, and there are so many of them, and so much violence and gore that does get excessive after a while.
The biggest problem I had with it was buying the Martians themselves. Morgan works very hard to create a species that is "intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman". The problem is, while this is realistic, it also makes the Martians seem less real, because the reader doesn't ever really get to know much about them except the scattered fragments that archeology has dug up, and the politics of the day that surround trying to interpret them. Morgan's making a point here, and it's an interesting one - that governments favor interpretations of the past that benefit them - but it doesn't give you much of a reference you can trust about anything anywhere in the story.
Still. The book is a good war story, a fairly realistic one, from what I've read about nonfiction war. It's ugly, and it's mean, and you get it. So a mixed review, and dock him a couple stars for it, although having fished through it for the quotes, I'm probably going to have to reread it now.
Woken Furies (Takeshi Kovacs, #3)
Takashi Kovacs goes home, and we finally see him where he belongs. Morgan returns with some wonderful characters in Kovacs' world, people who are as morally compromised as Kovacs himself (indeed, one of the characters I enjoyed the most was another Envoy) and he gets to know some of the most important influences in his life as real people, all the while fighting for a cause that means something to him. Action, characterization, Kovacs' series ends with a satisfying bang.
Market Forces
Before he wrote Altered Carbon, Morgan wrote the screenplay that became Market Forces. It's more snide, a little tongue in cheek, rather reminiscent in tone of RoboCop. It is a problematic book for me because there are *no* sympathetic characters in it. It's a hard trick to make the reader care about characters they don't like, and this book just doesn't quite succeed in doing that.
It's not a wretched book. I've read wretched books, and this isn't one. But it's disappointing when you're used to Morgan's better work.
Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)
The book that made it clear that cyberpunk - and first person story telling - wasn't dead. Also the book that started me down the expensive road of buying RKM's books from Amazon.uk, so I don't have to wait another 6 months to a year for them to arrive here in the U.S.
Altered Carbon is the story of Takashi Kovacs, a former U.N. super soldier who left the force and turned to crime. Then he died. But in his world, everyone's mind is backed up by a little piece of cyberwear called a stack. So he's tried, sentenced, and the contents of his stack are committed to storage for centuries. Just like any other criminal.
At the behest of a rich man he doesn't know he's been transmitted to Earth, a world he's never known, to do a detective job the police won't touch with a riot prod: find the rich man's killer.
Marvelous noir story telling, characters with some depth, and the overarching sense that they had lives before this story took place, and (the ones who survive) will when it's done. Morgan's first novel, too. Just in case I needed more inspiration. :)