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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | added to swap | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unknown
| 3.00
| 63
| Jul 2011
| Jul 2011
| 
| Connor Wright's short story, "Gone to Pieces," appears in the ebook Don't Read In The Closet: An M/M Romance Collection. It's billed as "...moreConnor Wright's short story, "Gone to Pieces," appears in the ebook Don't Read In The Closet: An M/M Romance Collection. It's billed as "M/M sci-fi romance with some light BDSM elements," but that billing is so far off the mark that it seems almost mocking. What we get instead is a masturbatory sex scene between a man and a mannequin, laden with enough suggestions of sexual sadism that I'm sorta glad he has a mannequin on which to take out his frustrations rather than another human being. Despite appearing in a romance anthology, there is no romance here. Neither character is emotionally invested in the other. The "robot," Tebri, is simply a beautiful boy mannequin with a tape recorder that says, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," and "Oh, please sir, fuck me," when triggered. Tebri is simply never depicted as being complicated enough as a robot to have genuine feelings, merely a fairly trivial decision tree over a script that could last a few hours. The protagonist, Brice, is merely a jackass managerial type who can afford a high-end sex mannequin. (And can we please stop having every gay managerial character work as the "Gay and Lesbian Outreach Consultant to Human Resources for a Large Unnamed Corporation?" If I see another one of those, I shall scream. Can't they do something else. I'm sure there are gay janitors, programmers, truck drivers and CEOs. "GLBT Consultant" is the new "hairdresser.") There is also no story here. There is no conflict, there is nothing to overcome. We don't even get enough of Brice's character to wonder what he could possibly be conflicted about. All he does is spank, fuck, and otherwise use his mannequin as a masturbatory relief toy, without any desire other than to relieve his sexual and personal frustrations in a blunt and somewhat passionless fashion. There's also some bad POV management. At least twice, we get sensual details from the robot's point of view without warning. And given that the robot's persona is shallower than the entire cast of Jersey Shore, that's an uncomfortably tight space to find yourself in. I know I'm being harsh here, but I write this stuff. And I take pains to make something out of the story, to make the story about something other than a man merely getting his rocks off. Human/robot stories are, usually, about exploring what it means to be human by eliding or changing the definition in the Other, and then trying to puzzle out what that means: what it means to feel, to love, to be angry, to be loyal. This is the basis for romance, and for conflict: the human character has to come to grips with his or her understanding of the Other, of what it means to love, and be loved by a machine, or if a human-seeming robot even has the capacity to love. Nothing like that is present in Wright's story. There is no story, no plot, no conflict, no speculation. There isn't even a couple at the heart of the story, so there's no romance. We're reading about a guy jerking off. Big Fat Hairy Deal.(less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| not set
| Feb 07, 2012
|
Feb 07, 2012
| free online fiction
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0983275823
| 9780983275824
| 3.18
| 11
| Jun 21, 2011
| Jun 21, 2011
| 
| A nice book, but not a difficult one. The premise of the book is a long-distance relationship between an American workaholic and a laid-back Netherla...moreA nice book, but not a difficult one. The premise of the book is a long-distance relationship between an American workaholic and a laid-back Netherlander who try hard to reconcile their lifestyles to their interest in each other.
Most writers understand that to make a romantic story interesting the characters need both a push and a pull, but there's not much push here. There's no outside force, only their own inner conflicts, that stand between them and relationships. Sure, that's what real life relationships are often like, but it means the story doesn't have much plot. "This happens, then this happens, then this happens" isn't a story. "This happens, BUT this happens THEREFORE that conflict emerges" is a story. Meagher doesn't have much of the latter, and the book sags because of it. Another problem is Meagher spends too much time establishing the workaholic character is, in fact, a workaholic. The love interest doesn't even show up until about 10,000 words in! By then, Meagher has established a single POV, and then breaks it hard, head-hopping between the two characters during the scene where they meet. That shows an undisciplined approach to writing. There's also a lot of "I did all the research on these lovely, exotic locations, so you'll have to listen to me talk about it." But I don't object too much to that. Still, it was a nice read. Not a waste of my time. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
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Feb 02, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0470089857
| 9780470089859
| 3.14
| 21
| Jan 15, 2003
| Jan 01, 2007
| 
| I mostly bought this book hoping to get insight into how to use Ensembl. Unfortunately, for that purpose it wasn't terribly useful: the Ensembl websi...moreI mostly bought this book hoping to get insight into how to use Ensembl. Unfortunately, for that purpose it wasn't terribly useful: the Ensembl website contains much more information, and eventually I did stumble upon a PDF that was almost word-for-word the chapter on Ensembl within Bioinformatics for Dummies.
It's not a bad summary of everything you might want to know. But it's neither comprehensive, nor unique: almost every resource they name is a publicly accessible institution, and most of them have been far more diligent about providing both summaries and comprehensive, in-depth explanations of what they provide. Bioinformatics is mostly being done in public, and a book like this neither alleviates the mysteries nor illuminates the darkness. If you know what you need to do, this book won't help much in getting you there; if you don't know, this book cannot help you find the path either. Nice as a reference. Terrible as a working guide.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
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Feb 02, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1402214405
| 9781402214400
| 3.80
| 274
| Oct 01, 2008
| Oct 01, 2008
|
| tl;dr: If you're a man, or a writer, don't read this. Just... don't. I can't speak for women who don't write. A friend of mine recommende...more tl;dr: If you're a man, or a writer, don't read this. Just... don't. I can't speak for women who don't write. A friend of mine recommended the Cat Star Chronicles to me a long time ago. After all, I write catboy/catgirl smut, I should be able to enjoy some of it. So let me say off the bat that I tried, I really did, to enjoy the second book, Warrior, and in that I have failed utterly. Here's your basic plot: In a science-fictional universe, our heroine lives on a world that has turned its back on technology. She knows her world has a starport, but nobody goes there, and in fact people teach their children that the stars, indoor plumbing, books, vaccinations, and decent communications are for crazy people. Sane people lead, and subject their children to, short, brutal lives in a sub-gunpowder world of furs and swords. She's also a "witch," which is the author's poorly-reasoned shorthand for someone with psionic powers, including talking to animals and setting stuff on fire. A supporting character drops off the romantic hero-- a cat-man supersoldier who's ill with an unspecified problem. The witch is supposed to heal him, at which point the supporting character will come back and claim his slave. I fully believe Cheryl Brooks is a woman, rather than a man masquerading as one. And as a man, I was offended from the very first sex scene: his penis is large, prehensile, knubby in just the right way, and worst of all, exudes a pre-seminal fluid, the scent of which is a perfect aphrodisiac to humans, and the taste of which induces orgasms. It's wish-fulfillment of the worst sort. Every sex scene thereafter is built upon these premises; our characters aren't so much in love as she's addicted to opiates he exudes. After their mutual compatibility is established, the supporting character comes back to reveal that something terrible has happened, and he needs the unified tracking skills of the witch and the cat-man to right a terrible wrong. What follows from this is a far, far too wordy journey through the snow to a distant keep and a final battle. Worse, the witch character, despite her rejection of all things technological, has the Weltanschauung of an American coastal liberal who's never thought too hard about her ethical and moral choices. She talks and she talks, often in tell-don't-show form, to the reader and the characters, pointlessly retreading the same ground in chapter after chapter. The epilogue is a piece of breathless, "Reader, you won't believe what happened next!" nonsense. I kept re-wording whole scenes in my head to show myself that important plot points could be revealed in dialogue and action without "as you knows" in front of them. An experienced writer could have done it easily. Cat Star Chronicles: Warrior reads like an ex-valley girl hauswife decided to write something vaguely like the Kushiel series, only without education, voice, or wit. If you're a man, you'll be insulted by the hero: He's a cardboard cutout with a massive strap-on dong dripping a mixture of Astroglide and meth. If you're a writer, you'll just be insulted. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 15, 2012
|
Jan 17, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0375756787
| 9780375756788
| 4.41
| 3,613
| 1979
| Nov 24, 2010
| 
| Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt was recommended to me by someone who was head-deep into something called "men's studies," del...moreEdmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt was recommended to me by someone who was head-deep into something called "men's studies," deliberately named by analogy to "women's studies." He told me that Roosevelt was an example of a truly manly man, one that should be emulated by all right-thinking men. I don't know that I agree with that. If Edmund Morris is to be believed, Roosevelt approached some apotheosis of human willpower, preternaturally blessed from birth with powers that destined him for a position of great authority. The book follows Roosevelt from his birth, through the death of his father and his first wife, to his strange adventures in the Dakota badlands, all the way up to his being Governor of New York and finally President of the United States. Roosevelt was born a sickly child with severe asthma and a very small frame. His father doted on him to keep him alive, and when he was young bought Teddy a complete gymnasium in the basement, instructing the young man that he must "build his own body to support the mind within." He was an obsessive dilettante, studying everything that came his way enough to satisfy his curiousity that he could master it. Only two things really sparked his life-long interest, though: the natural sciences, and politics. Roosevelt kept at both throughout his career, spinning off a long series of important books about American History and North American wildlife, as well as leaving behind an impressive body of work in a variety of government roles before becoming President of the United States. It's hard to encapsulate one man's life. The book is long-- 700 pages before the end notes! But it's a worthwhile life. You would exhaust yourself trying to emulate Roosevelt. And while it's admirable to be faithful to one's precepts and positions, Roosevelt's romantic priggishness is knee-jerk and not worthy of direct emulation; his morals make no room for human relationships that aren't also of a type sanctified by the Rick Santorum types of this world. That aside, though, Roosevelt deserves to be read, and so does his biography.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Nov 28, 2011
| Dec 30, 2011
|
Jan 10, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0765312182
| 9780765312181
| 3.83
| 2,167
| Oct 03, 2006
| Oct 03, 2006
|
| Peter Watts's Blindsight is, without a doubt, the most important science-fiction novel written in the past 20 years. No other novel written recently ...morePeter Watts's Blindsight is, without a doubt, the most important science-fiction novel written in the past 20 years. No other novel written recently comes close to matching Blindsight's attempt at prescience. Most science fiction novels are either fantasy (see: Iain M. Banks, David Weber, or me), or are books about the present (see: Charles Stross, William Gibson). Only Peter Watts has attempted to talk about the future in a meaningful way, and Blindsight is the novel that does that better than any.
Blindsight is, for its plot, a first-contact novel: the main character, Siri, recounts how the Earth was visited by alien probes that, all at once, imaged all of the Earth. A frenzied attempt to discover where the probe came from leads to the discover of a massive slower-than-light visitor approaching the solar system. The spaceship Thesus, an antimatter-powered ramscoop STL vessel, is sent out to visit it, determine the threat level, and act accordingly. But Blindsight is really a confrontation: between human beings and aliens who are really freakin' alien. These are neither the rubber-forehead humanoids of star trek or the transformed demons of archaic memory, but just about the most alien aliens a human being has ever imagined. Within that confrontation, Watts has room to discuss the many different kinds of humanity, reflected in his crew: the linguist whose mind has been fractured into six different personalities, each with its own language processing specialties; the science officer whose nervous system has been rewired so he can become the ship; the military specialist who can see and act through six or more robot soldiers at one time; the commander whose brain is wired to be the perfect leader by being the perfect psychopath, so hyper-attuned to manipulating human beings he thinks of ordinary human beings as prey; and the autistic translation specialist, whose job is to translate what these people do into "meaningful" reports to the ordinary human back home who think they control this crew. Each of these brings a unique view, and Watts does a masterful job of showing these views. And each shows how technology dehumanizes and disenfranchises; only those willing to sacrifice some essential humanity have the tools necessary to survive Watt's almost transhuman but still frighteningly plausible future. Within this confrontation, Watts tells us a story about human consciousness, and how it gets in the way: if we think about dancing, we fall. If we think about thinking about writing, we falter. What is consciousness for? There are so many ideas in Blindsight it's hard to discuss which ones I like best. As an erotica writer, was fascinated by Watts' observation that technology can perversely satisfice human desires. By the time of the setting of the book, robots and virtual reality have so satisficed the sexual market that dealing with real people, with their real problems and their meaty, sweaty bodies, was considered kinky. Science fiction readers love "sensawunda," that moment when the books makes you go "Oh, wow." Watts is the anti-sensawunda. When the linguist figures out what's really going on, when she delivers the final blow that tells the POV character, it was, for me, a sensahorra unlike any a book has delivered. It wasn't the shock of The Wasp Factory or Use Of Weapons, it was "Oh my ancient gods, if he's right, we are all so fucking doomed." And not in the sense that the characters in the book are all doomed. In sense that we, you and I are all doomed. Because Watts' book has a central thesis, the mention of which would be the biggest spoiler of all. No, really, read Blindsight. And realize that Watts makes a convincing argument, and we really are all fucking doomed. Blindsight has been in and out of print. An ebook edition is available for free at Peter Watt's website.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
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Oct 30, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1582972397
| 9781582972398
| 3.64
| 259
| Jan 17, 1993
| Jan 17, 2003
|
| There are dozens of books that promise to list out all of the plots possible. From Heinlien's famous three to George Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic ...moreThere are dozens of books that promise to list out all of the plots possible. From Heinlien's famous three to George Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, writers have been attempting to codify what makes a plot a plot. Tobias' contribution is certainly in that same vein, but this is probably one of the weaker books in my "how to write" collection. The first hint that something is amiss is the cover, which has scenes from movies rather than books (although how you would illustrate a cover with "scenes from books" does, I admit, present a bit of a challenge). The book lists 20 common plots (Quest, Adventure, Riddle, Rivalry, Forbidden Love, etc...) and where to use them. "Riddles" are for mysteries is the grand Poirot, Agatha Christie flavor, and "Forbidden Love" is a common theme of lots of modern Human/Faery/Vampire urban fantasies. It's certainly a worthwhile catalog, but for most part these aren't plots, really. They're meta-plots. They're ideas about plots. Even if your character is on a quest, how do you make his or her life hard between here and there? How do you reach the "all is hopeless" moment, and how does your character overcome it? You, the writer, must still invent that, write it, revise it, and make it meaningful to the overall arc of the story. Most writers know the story they want to tell. 20 Master Plots might have some ideas, but not enough to get you over the hump. You're still gonna have to write that book on your own. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0007133618
| 9780007133611
| 4.13
| 5,139
| Jan 01, 2001
| Feb 03, 2003
| 
| The Curse of Chalion is, understandably, not Lois McMaster Bujold's most popular work. The book is certainly not her best work; she is far too habitu...moreThe Curse of Chalion is, understandably, not Lois McMaster Bujold's most popular work. The book is certainly not her best work; she is far too habituated to science fiction, and phrases from that genre keep creeping into her language. The one that leapt out at me most was "emotionally toxic," which while apt for the scene seemed out of place in Extruded Fantasy Product. It is undoubtably some of the best Extruded Fantasy Product I've read in a while. And I have been refamiliarizing myself with the art of scene and sequel, so it is with joy and pleasure that I note the little scars scattered throughout this book where Bujold has sliced away everything inconsequential, every extraneous detail, leaving our hero with a stable world followed by crisis, response, widening crisis, emotion, decision, action, crisis... lather, rinse, repeat. Not a single moment to spare throughout the book, and it all leads to a satisfying if somewhat predictable ending. It is understandable why Bujold is as beloved as she is: there are two Lois McMaster Bujolds. Lois #1 loves Miles and Cazaril and everyone in her books with a passion, and writes about them with that kind of dedicated fury all writers wish they had. Lois #2 is utterly without sentiment, and takes what Lois #1 writes and cuts and cleans and trims and rewrites until there is nothing left but something breathtakingly readable. And, sigh, saleable.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0471267554
| 9780471267553
| unknown
| 3.61
| 423
| Sep 07, 2001
| unknown
|
| The book is a long list of statements that should all end with [citation needed] In order to distinguish his work from competing diet, Cordai...moreThe book is a long list of statements that should all end with [citation needed] In order to distinguish his work from competing diet, Cordain spends an inordinate amount of time in the early chapters dumping on the Atkins diet, but he does so in a way that skews the research. He complains that the Atkins diet does away with fruits and vegetables, "Cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables![citation needed]" A lot of the book is like that. He goes deep into anti-salt and anti-fat, which I supposed looked good in 2003. Recent studies show that low-salt diets do nothing to prevent progression to hypertension, and low-fat diets do little to moderate or control cholesterol and atherosclerosis. My own physician pointed me to recent articles in JAMA indicting starches. But what irks me most is that the Paleo diet, like the Slow Carb diet and every other diet on the market, is that to justify it to the masses it must delve deep, deep into nutritionalism. Food is not a set of nutrients. It's not just a vehicle for the transmission of components, for Omega 3 and polyunsaturated fat and calcium chloride and so forth. Food is what we eat to sustain ourselves, it's pleasure and socializing and ritual and experimentation. Boiling food down to a Power Bar and a glass of water isn't breakfast, any more than porn is sex. But somehow, to sell the product to the masses, The Paleo Diet, just like Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body, must describe in excrutiating detail the trade-offs at the micro level. I guess the basic message has been heard so often it no longer registers: all that sugar, simple starch, and readily digestible calories is what's making America fatter than ever, so stop eating those. Just like "exercise more" no longer registers. Hell, I can shorten the modern guidelines to one sentence: Eat food you cooked yourself.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812579143
| 9780812579147
| 3.94
| 104
| 2000
| Mar 15, 2001
| 
| It's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I ...moreIt's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I trust quite a bit, encouraged me to re-read her book Brain Plague. The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "brain plague" is moving through the population at large, a blood-borne disease that turns people into zombies who either die or mysteriously disappear. Our heroine discovers that what she is getting is, in fact, a colony of millions of sentient beings who live at speeds hundreds of times faster than she does, and their 'boost' is in fact her leeching off of their creative efforts. They don't mind, though: they can only live within a human host and she, in effect, becomes their "god," and all they do is for her well-being. The plague, it turns out, is made up of corrupt colonies of these beings who take control of their hosts pleasure centers, addicting their hosts and sending them on an involuntary religious quest to find "the Eternal Light." From here, much personal and political hijinks There are several problems with Brain Plague, not the least of which is the fact that Slonczewski's culture, as it is depicted, should have disappeared up the Singularity centuries ago. It's depicted as a benevolent Empire of some sort, a capitalist structure that's allowed to flourish as long as it pays its taxes. Medical technology apparently allows for the most Banksian of body modifications, but the best tech only extends human life by two centuries. They have nanotechnology in abundance-- their buildings are grown, not built, for example-- but our heroine lives near a slum and, upon getting rich off of her colony's efforts, volunteers one night a week in a soup kitchen. The wealthy suffer from problems that any capitalist worth his salt would have solved with the technology at hand-- and made a bundle doing so The distinctions in Brain Plague are artificial : there are uplifted apes, ordinary humans, enhanced humans, hivers of a sort, sentient robots, and super-sentient AIs "who think such deep thoughts that they never deign to use human speech." And never shall the twain intertwine, apparently. Although one human and one sentient robot are depicted as "married," as are one human and one uplifted ape, any shades of grey between the two are viciously suppressed by authorial fiat in order to create inter-identity-group conflicts and politics. The characters in Brain Plague never learned Vinge's Law: "The last thing we will have to do as a species is make a machine smarter than we are." Slonczewski's characters are morally suspect: there's no particular reason that the rich need their doors and windows to be independently sentient beings, and her depiction of serving robots "kept just below the complexity at which they might 'wake up'" struck a false tone in the face of current AI research. Almost everyone in the book is bisexual. The only strictly heterosexual character-- a character given to Liberace-esque self-aggrandizement-- is pelted in every scene he is mentioned with the epithet "medieval." He's also conveniently dead and therefore can't defend himself; his story is told in news reports and flashbacks. To add insult to injury, it turns out he was incompetent as well. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I become with it: the "war of the sexes" can be reduced to the "wrestling match of the sexes: play hard, play fair, nobody hurt" without making gender irrelevant or trivial, but Slonczewski chose instead a convention as artificial and as unrealistic as the New Soviet Man Thesis. Slonczewski's story is supposed to be "of the far future" but, if it is, then the future was depressingly static for a long, long time. The book opens with a Future That Is Like The Present, Only Moreso. By the end of the book, interesting possibilities suggest themselves, but only suggest. Slonczewski is a very competent writer: her scenes flow, her plot works from her first principles, her characterizations are strong. But I found some of the lesser themes in her work bizarre if not downright irrational. I was hoping, upon re-reading, to discover that I had read the story incorrectly. I had not. Instead, I found the story even more bizarre. The characters flit from starsystem to starsystem in starships as casually as you and I take a subway. Sentient AIs have a scatological problem: mentioning "waste heat" is even more offensive to them than any epithet human beings use among themselves. Despite the enormous variance among the AI characters, they're all trying to found a city on a planet for AIs only just to show the protein machines that they can. There is no investment scheme targeting poor villagers living on the backward from which heroine Chrys comes, exploring the economic value of an entire planet that it's quite cheap to exploit, no capitalist at work trying to make the universe more productive. The economy, the social structure, the moral milieu, everything about this universe exists only by authorial fiat. There is a class of writer that does not understand how the world came to be the way it is. She looks around and see class divisions and economic segmentation and doesn't understand why those institutions exist-- and then she extrapolates, badly, from the existing to an analogous SFnal setting. Slonczewski has done that with Brain Plague, but in the process she has given her class segments and economic segments (or their progenitors) capabilities that should destroy and re-arrange the distinctions with which she's trying to analogize. Slonczewski remains a great writer of characters and their relationships (except when she doesn't; she does a poor job of communication Chrys's social life, using it primarily as an excuse to drive her into the grubbier bars), but she introduces ideas willy-nilly into her story without really grasping the consequences of her actions.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
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Oct 30, 2011
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1841493368
| 9781841493367
| 3.85
| 1,485
| 2004
| Aug 2005
|
| Iron Sunrise is a sequel of sorts to Singularity Sky. Rachel and Martin are back, but they don't play a part until late in the story. The introducto...moreIron Sunrise is a sequel of sorts to Singularity Sky. Rachel and Martin are back, but they don't play a part until late in the story. The introductory character is Wednesday, a goth chick who goes from seventeen to twenty through the course of the book and who suffers a lot of hardships in between. My main emotion upon ending the book is disappointment. Charlie has two problems, and they're becoming more apparent the more often I read his work. This book sets the stage for an ongoing battle between the Eschaton, the superhuman superintelligence who keeps watch over humanity while denying humanity the right to engage in time travel, and the "unborn god of the ReMastered," a being who may or may not exist somewhere down the timeline, and who will possess the captured thought processes of everyone ever uploaded into storage by the ReMastered. He's setting the stage for sequels, which is a perfectly good thing for a writer to do. Except, if you've read Charlie a lot, you know this plot. Iron Sunrise is the tale of Nazis with some kind of negotiated relationship to a Lovecraftian dark god, all of whom are opposed by plucky and lucky mostly ordinary humans who just happen to come from Charlie's favorite subcultures: bloggers, geeks and goths. Iron Sunrise is Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archive... in Space!. Charlie's not even hiding this: his villain refers to herself as an "ubermadchen" and her boss is referred to as the overdepartmentsecretary [sic]. Wednesday breaks out of her stereotype late in the book and she becomes a well-drawn character, but really, you can just see a seventeen-year-old Christina Ricci (specifically, this one) in the role. The other thing is that Charlie writes his stories exactly once. He writes the story, figuring out what he's doing along the way. The trouble is, his stories lack the decorative panache that a full re-write gives to a story, and you can almost hear him chuckle with dark glee as he is inspired to a plot point. Everything in the story is broadly telegraphed. His foreshadowing looms over you. The plot is obvious almost from the beginning. When the epilogue's crisis began, with a letter in Rachel's apartment mailbox, I knew exactly where Charlie was going. I could have written the rest of that chapter myself. Iron Sunrise suffers from a lack of writerly subtlety. It'll be a shame if someday we remember Charlie Stross as the Robert E Howard or Michael Moorcock of his decade: churned out a lot of books in a very short period of time that introduced fresh and new ideas to the Venn diagram intersectives of the genres he loves, only to flame out in the end, stuck in the pretty new box he'd created. (And then there's me, who'll probably be remembered as the low-rent John Norman of his decade.) Iron Sunrise is a rollicking adventure set in a space-operatic universe with a well-thought-out brake holding the characters back from their second Singularity. Charlie has done a good job of thinking around what he made in the first book and realizing how much fun it would be to threaten that brake itself. It has good characters and great worldbuilding (although once in a while I caught Charlie doing the "worldbuilding while the reader is watching"™*). If you've never read Charlie Stross, this book and its predecessor, Singularity Sky, are fabulous introductions to the Singularity subgenre. It's only weakness is that if you have read Charlie Stross, you'll find yourself skipping over the familiar parts. *"Worldbuilding while the reader is watching" ™ is a trademark of D. Omaha Sternberg. All rights reserved. Used with permission.(less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1560258500
| 9781560258506
| 3.52
| 2,375
| Jan 01, 2004
| Mar 24, 2006
|
| I've just finished reading Monster Island, which has to be one of the best, most unapologetic zombie books ever written. After the big brouhaha last ...moreI've just finished reading Monster Island, which has to be one of the best, most unapologetic zombie books ever written. After the big brouhaha last year in which some NY Review of Books reviewer didn't "get" the whole zombie thing, looking desperately for allegory and meaning in the zombie genre (and to which David Langford gleefully pointed out "They don't have to be an allegory. They're zombies. They eat people. What more do you need?") it's refreshing to read a really gross, horrifying, not at all uplifting novel about zombies. Monster Island begins six months after the End of the World. The Epidemic, in which the dead shamble along meaninglessly, trying to eat the living, has taken over. Our hero, Dekalb, is a UN Weapons Inspector in Africa when the Epidemic breaks out. Dispatched by a third world dictator to New York, holding his daughter hostage as ransom for reasons that I will not give away, Dekalb meets Gary, the world's smartest dead man, the last Prestident of the United States, and Jack, the last Special Forces operative in New York. Battling zombies (human and animal) and even encountering the long-mummified remains of Egyptian Kings and Welsh Druids, Dekalb comes to and understanding that the Epidemic is something more than merely a disease. And maybe, just maybe, he might understand it well enough to give the living a chance. It was a fabulous read. I sailed along and loved every minute of it. There are moments in the book when the author intrudes with lines like "Sorry, won't be releasing this week, at a con," that made me understand exactly where we CC people are going. The battle scenes and adventure just move and Gary's really a very funny guy. Even if he is dead. (less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback / online serial novel
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| 1597800449
| 9781597800440
| 3.82
| 3,287
| 2004
| Jun 27, 2006
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| In the end, I enjoyed The Algebraist. It was long, and in some places a bit of a slog. I kept track: it took me eighteen solid hours to read my way ...moreIn the end, I enjoyed The Algebraist. It was long, and in some places a bit of a slog. I kept track: it took me eighteen solid hours to read my way through it. I don't read mysteries, so the two big surprises of the book were surprises to me, and in the end I was quite impressed with the way Banks had laid out the clues, giving me a "Wow, that should have been obvious in restrospect" feeling akin to reading Agatha Christie. Banks's sense of cosmic wonder is infectious even if he plays hard and fast with his "hard and fast SF" setting. He has moments set in a world of pure water, an adventure with a huge gas giant civilization, and maginificent moments of architecture that are just breathtaking. That part of Banks's imagination is intact and reliable. There are things Fassin (our hero)'s environment suit can do that you just can't acheive without AI and nanotech, yet AI and nanotech are "forbidden horrors" of the Mercatoria (the government agency in charge of the human part of the galaxy) and there are several agencies tasked with hunting them down and destroying them. (Banks has some ironic words about why there are "several" agencies.) Although Banks has tried to create a universe where FTL is all wormhole based and theoretically within the limits of known physics, but one voyage involves what it clearly not a closed timelike loop. Ah, well. The "villain" of the piece is a classec E. E. "Doc" Smith villain who has replaced his mustache-twirling for other kinds of evil biophysical enhancements. He's So Evil that he's got to be a satire and ultimately he is just a macguffin to drive the rest of the characters to act. If there was one thing that disappointed me about the book, it was Banks's return, several times, to the notion that human beings have a Will To Death. He introduces character after character only to describe in detail how they approach death, look forward to it, even embrace it. He does it so often, even to havi(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0865473897
| 9780865473898
| 4.13
| 246
| unknown
| Apr 01, 1989
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| I've been reading James Salter's Dusk and Other Stories, a collection of short stories from Salter's long career as a contributor to high contemporary...moreI've been reading James Salter's Dusk and Other Stories, a collection of short stories from Salter's long career as a contributor to high contemporary fiction. This is literature of the "literature genre," the genre which insists its not a genre at all, but the sine qua non of writing, as if they were artist of the human condition and genre writers merely illustrators. The New York times positively gushed about the stories in this book, but I went back to the well of the writer: A story is telling about a person with a crisis, what he or she is willing to do to overcome that crisis, and how she reacts to the success or failure. In Salter's book, however, there is no overcoming. Nobody ever overcomes their crisis. They just muddle through, tragically. Salter likes to tell his tales in glimpses. "Cinema" is about a film company falling apart after a big film utterly bombs, everyone involved knew it would suck, especially the scriptwriter, who knew the director and the actors were all wrong for the words he wrote. Salter jumps around, like a cinema verite director himself, point of view here, then there, then over there, never keeping us in place, making us read frantically and nervously. But what we're getting is anecdotes: These people made a terrible movie, and they live in denial of the consequences. There's nothing to overcome. They don't even want to overcome. The writer consoles himself by sleeping with the director's secretary: that's as close as the story gets to coherent response to the crisis. "Dusk" is about a woman dealing with being 46, as Tom Ford described, "Long past that moment when men stopped turning their heads to look at her." Her husband left her for a younger woman, her son was killed, and in the story her lover announces that he, too, is moving on, and she is at best second-best. But again, the character never once moves to resolve her crisis. She just muddles through. "Akhnilo" is about a managing ex-alcholic having a nervous breakdown. The main character follows a hallucination into the night, one that the writer describes with breathtaking beauty. In the final paragraph, the story comes crashing down again as he loses that beauty, and the camera suddenly jumps to his daughter, who in one gorgeous sentence reveals all the fear and heartache a child has when a parent wrestles with those kinds of daemons. But again, it's not a story. "Foreign Shores" is an insanely Freudian story about an American woman, her attractive Dutch au-pair, and the woman's strange sexual notions about the au-pair and her six-year-old son, notions which are hightenend when she discovers, by illicitly reading letters, that the au-pair has been recruited by a pornography filmmaker in Germany. But her crisis is about how this beautiful young woman's life is so interesting while hers is so dull, and by the end of the story... nothing. She seethes and hates, and changes nothing. All of the stories in Dusk are like that: sad anecdotes about people seeing the world through lenses of ruin and chaos, the ends of days, of careers, of lives. Nothing changes: they just go on, convicted to their eternal withering. The tales are incredibly well-written, and I've taken notes, but if I wanted anecdotes I'd read poetry. Maybe that's how these are meant to be read: as long prose poems, antipaeans to life.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0802134297
| 9780802134295
| 3.34
| 451
| 1958
| Feb 09, 1996
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| Candy by "Maxwell Canton" (a psuedonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) is a 1958 novel that is apparently fondly remembered by lots...moreCandy by "Maxwell Canton" (a psuedonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) is a 1958 novel that is apparently fondly remembered by lots of its fans for its breathless descriptions of an excessively naive, manipulable and attractive young lady as she careens through one bizarre encounter after another while a rolling cast of late-50s stereotypical characters attempts to seduce her: her teacher Professor Mephesto, her Uncle Jack and his wife Livia (who apparently also swings wildly between cocaine-fueled cockwhore and sullen brat), the peculiar Dr. Krankeit and the desperate Dr. Duncan, and thereafter by equally creepy physicians, doctors, police officers, cult leaders, Communists, religious gurus, and finally The Buddha himself. Very few of these men (and sadly, never Livia) ever get into her pants; those that do tend to have less-than-succesful moments. The book is replete with descriptions of her lush nakedness and cute euphemisms for various body parts. The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.) I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0241143950
| 9780241143957
| 3.60
| 1,066
| 2008
| unknown
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| So, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least. My primary reaction was one of intense ...moreSo, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least. My primary reaction was one of intense sadness: she really does believe that she’s braving new territory. She is completely unaware that she’s hacking through a jungle right next to a long, well-trodden road and the crew that’s building it is far, far ahead of her, and her course takes her away from the best conclusions. She’s off in a strange, dualistic universe in which robots come to feel “just because.” There are dialogues about how humans have emotions and yet this obviously emotional robots does not, and yet not a single word toward the general consensus that emotions are what give us the capacity to come to a conclusion, to shut rationalization down and make a decision, to break ties between competing choices, and without emotions we would be helpless. When a video game acts as if it wants to defeat you, it has been given that want by its developer; at some stage, we turn off the abstraction and act as if the game wants to defeat us. Winterson doesn't understand this. Winterson picks up the glittering tools of modern science fiction and engages in bronze-age reflections with them. The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale. The sense of used furniture is strong. Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story. She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster. She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself. Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one. Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine. Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce. That’s where it’s going. But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies. But Winterson makes me cry reliably. I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again. If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories. Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Hardcover
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| 0441013554
| 9780441013555
| 3.77
| 1,146
| Nov 29, 2005
| Nov 29, 2005
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| I really didn't want to like The Decoy Princess, by Dawn Cook. After all, it follows in the same vein as too many of my own fantasy stories: young wo...moreI really didn't want to like The Decoy Princess, by Dawn Cook. After all, it follows in the same vein as too many of my own fantasy stories: young woman from a commoner's background thrust into intrigue. Now, my stories frequently involve inappropriate pairings of woman and dragon, and nothing like that happens in this book. When I read the first three chapters, I was disappointed. We, the readers, already know the big revelation coming up: Tess is going to be told that her whole life is a lie, that she's not really the princess, that she's been used her whole childhood as a target for assassins while the real princess grew up elsewhere. There are some oddities of Tess's daily routine, such as why, if she's being trained to be a perfect princess, has her mentor instructed in her in such nasty things as knifeplay, bullwhips, and blow darts? But that's not the point of the story. No, that revelation just happens on the same day that the proverbial chu hits the fan, and Tess must somehow rescue her kingdom of Costenopolie from a terrible fate. In some respects, this isn't a great book. Cook has some native religion that might be Christianity (the real princess has been raised by nuns, and one of the characters shouts, "I don't care if it's the Second Coming!") but it's just window dressing. Nobody really cares that much for churchly things. She tries hard with the accents on some characters but overdoes it, telling instead of showing. Oh, and everyone has exactly one expletive, chu, which is a euphemism for "shit." (It was also a disconcerting euphemism for me, since chu is also the Japanese onomotopoeia for "two people cuddling." And yes, there's an onomotopoeia for that.) But when Tess finds herself trapped in the castle, her escape is one of those heart-pounding, breathtaking adventure scenes that few writers really get right. And Cook got it right. Many of the later scenes are as tightly written as the first, and the whole of the story hangs together. The book has the important parts: a little magic, a little suggestion, a lot of adventure, a plucky young girl in trouble who can save the day. Now I have to go find the sequel, Princess At Sea. Which is what drew me to the series in the first place. Yeah, there's a pretty girl on the cover, and the tagline, "Rough Seas. Royal Pain." That's a well-done cover. It didn't sell itself, it sold its predecessor.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1596326719
| 9781596326712
| 3.70
| 396
| Mar 02, 2008
| Mar 01, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
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| B0033Y94M0
| unknown
| 1.00
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| Oct 14, 2003
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| Wynd Temptress, by Kathryn Anne Dubois (2003, Ellora's Cave) is one of those stories that's been on my bookshelf for ages and I finally got around to ...moreWynd Temptress, by Kathryn Anne Dubois (2003, Ellora's Cave) is one of those stories that's been on my bookshelf for ages and I finally got around to reading, because I was bored yesterday and stuck on a bus for a long time without my laptop. I regret having read it. There's a modest infodump in the beginning where we learn that it is 2150 and the Earth is recovering after The Psychic Wars, in which the normals and their tame psis are now hunting down and trying to control or eliminate any remaining telepaths. Forty years earlier, the Psychic Wars ended with the death of the super-telepath the Tyrea, who apparently lit of nukes and otherwise trashed the planet in a "if I can't have it nobody can" spasm as he went down. The Tyrea left behind three daughters (convenient that, but I've written worse), whose names are suggestive of wind, fire, and water. Each of their "romance" stories is told by a different author, starting with Dubois's tale of "wind," Jezermaih, and the man sent to assess the risk she presents, Adam. Adam is a telepath, retired from the PSI Agency (an extragovernmental agency that all governments agree is necessary to stop the Continental Council, a renegrade group of telepaths trying to breed the next Tyrea, from succeeding), called back to duty to assess this greatest risk they've ever known: a child of the Tyrea, now living in Alaska. In chapter one, Adam tells us his plans: he'll kidnap Jezermaih and take her to one of the agency's Sekret Bases, where he'll interrogate her as roughly as necessary to determine her risk level. Oh, and Adam's favorite tool to accomplish his mission? Rape. Yes, it's that kind of story. It's presented as a romance. He does kidnap her, whisks her away to his Sekret Agency Base (which is in the middle of a vast Alaskan plain but somehow has power and a five-star suite of romantic bedrooms and jacuzzis and a heated swimming pool), ties her down, strips her naked, and molests her with his hands and mouth. She manages to get free, bashes him on the head with a lamp, and ties him up to try and get the numerical code on the ignition of his SUV so she can get out of there. After confessing to the reader that she's not brave enough to actually torture him with a knife or a strangulation rope, we get another sex scene where she "tortures" him with frustration. He gives her the wrong code, she runs to the SUV, he takes advantage of her absence to get free and again they reverse their situation and he's again taking advantage of her immobility. It's not just awful. Dubois is a competent writer, a little expository, but no David Weber. It's ugly. The characters' "love" that they achieve by the end of the book is presented as an ultimate state of being. Moral of the story: Somewhere out there is the perfect man (buff, exceptionally well hung, cooks a perfect meal, and has money), and if he has to rape you for you to figure out he's perfect, eh, so what's a little rape? She should have killed him in chapter three.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Kindle Edition
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| 0312868251
| 9780312868253
| 3.37
| 100
| 1982
| Sep 20, 2001
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| In contrast to the recently-reviewed Charles Runyon's "Deeply Sicko SF" (as determined by the readers of rec.arts.sf.written) about which I ...moreIn contrast to the recently-reviewed Charles Runyon's "Deeply Sicko SF" (as determined by the readers of rec.arts.sf.written) about which I blogged the other day, Norman Spinrad is simply a writer's writer, and his book, The Void-Captain's Tale is a masterpiece. His characters have individual, powerful voices, and one can literally feel the number of re-writes Spinrad went through to make sure everyone in his books is unique and special. His cultures are dense, and with just a few special touches-- here, it's the way characters "trade the stories of their names"-- he makes his worlds come alive. Ships jump from star system to star system, and a tradition has grown that the wealthiest passengers don't do cryo but instead help keep the crew from going nuts on the weeks-long voyages by filling the vast, heat-dissapating spaces with balls, gardens, and various "divertissements." There is decadence aplenty within these floating bawdy houses, but it is of a most mundane sort. The special touch, almost unique at the time it was written, is that hyperspace jump requires an organic component. Usually these "pilots," who are emotionally and physically wrecked by the experience, are plucked out of finishing schools already identified as being on a downward spiral, and are offered a chance to make something of themselves and retire young. But the experience of hyperspace is so ecstacy-inducing that, when forciby retired, most pilots go crazy or commit suicide. Sometimes they die en-route, and the captain is forced to pick a volunteer from among the passengers who, untrained and unprepared, is likely to die or destroy the ship with his inexperience. The pilot of this ship is a such a volunteer, one of the few ever to make it home alive, who liked the experience so much she's still doing it. Unlike other pilots who usually just try to recover from their experience and shun the rest of the crew, she is strong, conscious, arrogant, and brash, and wants to mingle with the crew and passengers. This violation of strict tradition brings out powerful feelings in the Captain, crew, and guests, and those feelings drive this book forward. The tension in this story is simple: the Captain becomes obsessed, almost Ahab-like, with this fascinating pilot and in his downward spiral makes poor decisions that ultimately doom his crew. Is it "depraved?" Yes, but in a different way: the captain in his obsession demonstrates that quality called "depraved indifference," and Spinrad has done his usual tour-de-force job of showing how a character can get himself into such a position, convincing us each step of the way that, yes, human beings really do think this way, and yes, what we're seeing is a slow, inevitable slide down into madness and no, there's nothing anyone could really have done or forseen to prevent it. But there's nothing to suggest that the universe depicted or any of the other characters in it are anything more than ordinary, sufficiently moral human beings. Great read.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
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| 1844162427
| 9781844162420
| 3.82
| 130
| Jan 31, 2006
| Jan 31, 2006
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| The second Grey Knights novel, Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering i...moreThe second Grey Knights novel, Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering it's 400 pages long. Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it. Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs. On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot. There's a description in chapter six that made me grin: The city's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-Gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers.My first thought upon reading this was, "Yeah, I saw Bubblegum Crisis, too." A lot of Counter's writing is like that: he does a very good job with his cinematic descriptions, as if you can see into his head and watch him replaying the best grotesqueries of anime or cinema he's ever absorbed. That's okay, I do it too. All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 1597800562
| 9781597800563
| 3.35
| 99
| Sep 15, 2006
| Nov 07, 2006
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| Trial of Flowers is one of those new books in the "steampunk and decadence" genre that seems to have become popular since the emergence of C...moreTrial of Flowers is one of those new books in the "steampunk and decadence" genre that seems to have become popular since the emergence of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Trial follows the adventures of three men: Jason the Factor, Imago of Lockwood, and Bijaz the Dwarf, as the three of them face the rising old and corrupt gods and their magick that threatens to either overwhelm their beloved City Imperishable, or attract the attention of neighboring nations determined to raze the City to the ground before the gods can gather their full strength. The City is a place of "eletricks" and "hedge mages," of "poor magicks" and "boxed dwarves," of steam and iron. It might be New Orleans, or Casablanca, or Shanghai, with the last magics and the first difference engines vying for attention. Jason is a mercantile agent who works for the city's most powerful mage and who has a secret torture chamber under his warehouse, Imago a shifty lawyer who's lost one case too many and owes money to legbreakers, and Bijaz is a "made dwarf," his body artificially stunted in its growth, trained as an accountant, with a taste for snuff theatre. These three don't necessarily get along as they each fumble their way toward saving themselves, and maybe the city as well. As I mentioned, the inevitable comparison to China Mieville is there, but if there's one thing Jay Lake does better than China, it's this: Jay does not flinch. Not for a second. Heck, Steven R. Donaldson, once hailed as the modern master of characters wallowing in their own degradation, was never quite as skilled at not flinching the way Jay does not flinch. Thomas Covenant's self-loathing was never quite as pointed or tangible as Bijaz's. That said, the issues involved do make it hard to care about Jason, Bijaz and, to a lesser extent, Imago. These aren't nice people, and the scatological hells through which Jay metaphorically and literally drags them, often face-down, is tough reading. The expected redemptions aren't as rewarding as we might hope. This ain't no book for the beach. But they're all done so well and so artfully that once you're into the book, once you've accepted the humane ugliness that Jay has decided to show you, you'll be hooked. Trial of Flowers isn't a perfect book. There's a sense of isolation to the City Imperishable; its presence on a world full of people never quite feels right. Even Moorcock's Melnibone' felt more attached to its wider world than the City Imperishable, and I sensed that discordance more than once. But the wider world isn't what the book is about, so once you've stepped into the City Imperishable, there really is only one way out. You'll just have to travel through the city's sewers, pursued by eyeless, frog-tongued children and accompanied by two mad dwarves, each insane in his own way, to get there. (less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
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| 0426205219
| 9780426205210
| 3.59
| 17
| Mar 1998
| Mar 28, 1998
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| Fifteen months ago a friend of mine bought me a copy of Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman, a sequel of sorts to Ben Aaronovich's Doctor Who novel The A...moreFifteen months ago a friend of mine bought me a copy of Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman, a sequel of sorts to Ben Aaronovich's Doctor Who novel The Also People, which is sometimes regarded as the finest Culture novel ever written by someone other than Iain M. Banks. I've finally gotten around to reading it. It is actually a very good novel. Ms. Orman has an strong grasp of plot, the novel proceeds along at a good pace and the complications are fit for the circumstances. She has excellent characterizations; I think she got Bernice down much better than Paul Cornell, who wrote the much less cleanly imagined Oh No It Isn't. There are moments in the book where she really has a grip on a character's emotions and the tension crackles along. The relationship between Beni and John Lafayette is just awesome, and when the inevitable love scene wanders into the book she writes with that kind of deft and delightful "I don't have to tell you everything to make this work" touch that I, and too many contemporary writers, are just too damned clumsy to make happen. The premise of the book is straightforward: Beni is summoned back to the Worldsphere, the Dyson sphere in which live The People, a collection of billions of individuals all hiding out from the rest of the universe, living in an AI-mediated utopia, all under the watchful eye of a prime AI who calls itself God and manifests itself to other people as a WalMart ikon. Someone on the sphere has broken the treaty with the timelords and created an interdimensional gateway to ancient Babylon. Beni is an archeologist and a former Doctor's companion and is therefore best equipped to find whoever it was and fetch them back. If Ms. Orman has a singular problem, it is that she can't pick a point of view and stick with it. Although she signals the transitions clearly, there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for her constant shifts from Beni in the first person to John in the third to some bystander observer nearby. This isn't the "three points of view" technique of David Weber to illustrate a battle, or the "two voices" strategy of romance novels to show a relationship. It seems that she simply picked whatever point of view she thought she could get away with. It's a workable technique, but here it feels choppy. The book is speedy reading and the shifts seem to come fast but not light. But that's my only real complaint. The story's fun. There's a weird disconnect that's not the author's fault: Beni belongs to Virgin Publishing, but Dr. Who belongs to the BBC, and the two parted ways a while ago. Somehow, Ms. Orman has managed to write a book in which a companion to The Doctor visits a world in cold war conflict with The Timelords and hangs out at (and with) a house that last hosted The Doctor and several companions-- without ever once mentioning The Doctor, Timelords, The Tardis, or any other BBC trademark. It's quite remarkable how well she pulls this off. As for The People, Ms. Orman once said to me that she had only read The Also People and was unaware that she was trafficking in goods that, as Mr. Aaronvich puts it, "he got off the back of a lorry." She does a great job of handling those goods of dubious provenance. God and the Worldsphere's populace are in full swing when they're the subject of a chapter. There's a little less detail in places, but when she puts her mind to it Ms. Orman can make a world as wacky as anything Ben or Iain writes. Her description of the Freak Accidents Interest Group is a moment of strong clarity, and her insight into what's wrong with The People, and her so much stronger handling of that insight, make Walking to Babylon a worthy companion to other Culture novels on your bookshelf. Or your Dr. Who bookshelf. Or maybe just your bookshelf, just because.(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0553587412
| 9780553587418
| 3.57
| 152
| unknown
| Dec 28, 2004
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| I read these books out of order. I just finished the book that came before the recently-reviewed Living Next Door to the God of Love, Natural History...moreI read these books out of order. I just finished the book that came before the recently-reviewed Living Next Door to the God of Love, Natural History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I really, really wish she hadn't. The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated, wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying ending. Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged, who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely drudge work. Spaceships, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work. Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to assess whether the Forged or "all humanity" should lay claim to it. But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may be just too damned high. What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past lives crap. Everyone in Natural History is brilliantly thought-out and realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just make you cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in service to an excellent story.(less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| not set
| Apr 28, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0385064918
| 9780385064910
| 3.00
| 3
| 1974
| Jan 01, 1974
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| I read this book because it was listed as one of the two most "deeply sick and depraved" books of SF, at least according to the readers of r...moreI read this book because it was listed as one of the two most "deeply sick and depraved" books of SF, at least according to the readers of rec.arts.sf.written. Unfortunately, it's not really that depraved. Or if it was, I was so overwhelmingly bored by it that the supposed sickness didn't make much of an impression. Perhaps the best thing I can say about I, Weapon is that it isn't a novel at all; it's the plotter's synopsis for a Marvel comic about the same year as the book. Doing a synopsis of the synopsis will be difficult, but here goes: it is The Future. The Morlocks-- excuse me, the Progs-- live on the Moon and on habitats about Jupiter. Their agents, the Stafi and Landed, do the grunt work and raise the Eloi-- excuse me, the Unguls-- humans so mutated after Terra's first nuclear war that they are fit only as foodstock. Humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, only to be forced back to a few dozen worlds by the villainous Vim. A desperate Prog, consulting The Computer, learns that the only possibility of success is a breeding cycle to create a godlike human who can crush the Vim. The first half of the book deals with her struggles to reach her goal: she has to collect the sperm of an Ungul, an Unchanged, and an "Evolutionary Variant", mix them all together, and then carry the product to term herself all "the old-fashioned way, without the use of a breeding tank or gene equipment," The Computer tells her. The end of the book is an unchallenging narrative of her offspring's heroic success after success. I won't spoil the ending, such as it is, for you. Is it "depraved?" It certainly may have been once upon a time: we have flat, drab, colorless passion meandering across the page as our blue-skinned, bug-eyed heroine (the lights are low in those sublunarian bases to preserve power) mates with these various creatures. Runyon takes particular delight in displaying the ranches where human-stock meat is raised and butchered, and spends inordinate amounts of time when the hero starts making it with a Vim female. So: you got your cannibalism, your pornography, your vague sense of bestiality. There's even a snuff scene for those with that kind of bent. There's a hint of lesbianism when the logic-driven Prog heroine tries to describe her feelings for her oh-so-useful-and-beautiful (illegally gengineered to be a sex toy, but now free and educated) Stafi assistant, but then puts them aside as irrational and never acts on them-- pity, as the Stafi seems to be the only real human in the place. But it's all so boring! Runyon is a complete hack; his exposition goes on for page after page after page. His dialogue is completely "as you know, Bob." When the hero gets into Vim territory he discovers that he is carrying a "psychic inhibitor"; without it, he is a God and an unimaginative one at that, and the book is really over when Runyon has another 80 pages or so to fill. Terrible read.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 10, 1999
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Oct 30, 2011
| Unknown Binding
| |||||||||||||||
| 0553587420
| 9780553587425
| 3.23
| 101
| unknown
| Mar 28, 2006
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| I've just finished reading Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love, which has probably one of the loveliest, most shelf-ready eye-catchin...moreI've just finished reading Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love, which has probably one of the loveliest, most shelf-ready eye-catching titles I've ever seen in my entire life. Which is a bit of a shame because the text inside is rather weak. Robson has created a universe in which a local light-cone controlling cosmic intelligence of undefined origin named Unity has apparently created a kind of cosmic crossroads with Earth, creating a whole host of "walking to another world" gates, and there are many different kinds of things walking around. Unity's apparent purpose is to discover the underlying meaning of life, and people run the risk of being "consumed" by Unity willy-nill as it looks for those who might have the answer. Some of the trans-universal stuff leaks into our space: creatures made of Stuff, and the Engines that maintain the portals and the human-friendly space between them. Unity isn't completely in control of the universe, and sometimes there are storms within Unity itself. One such storm broke off a piece of Unity, which calls itself Jalaeka. Unity wants the fragment known as Jalaeka back. The story is about a girl named Francine and how Jalaeka comes to understand that Unity can never succeed in its mission: that there are things that are ineffable to everyone, even the gods, and how he is the embodiment of the ineffability. From there, a massive cosmic battle ensues, Jalaeka vs. Unity, and the story... well... Y'see, that's the problem. Jalaeka is so very human most of the time. His relationship with Francine is told from each's point of view, with neither ever being clear (or convincing to the reader) about why they should fall so completely in love. They just do. She tries to avoid romantic cliches and somehow manages to avoid cueing us into the romance at all. Every scene in this book is completely gorgeous. Robson is a writer with a deep grasp of human nature and complete control of a lush and lyrical writing style that never gets in the way of her moving the characters from beginning to end. But the scenes never quite add up to a story. They never quite convince you; they never quite show you enough of the picture for you to feel satisfied with the ending. A lot of people liked this book, reading the reviews. I liked this book. I just wish it had more conviction.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 31, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| B003ATPPRQ
| unknown
| 3.00
| 1
| Oct 14, 2003
| unknown
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| I finished Mlyn Hurn's Rayne Dance. Man, what a dud. First, do you remember the ridiculous uproar when Cassie Edwards lifted an entire passage on th...moreI finished Mlyn Hurn's Rayne Dance. Man, what a dud. First, do you remember the ridiculous uproar when Cassie Edwards lifted an entire passage on the natural history of the blackfooted ferret for her romance novel from a book, passage by passage, and put it into the mouth of her "primitive" hero? Hurn's done more or less the same thing; there's an entire disposition on the history and origin of the white tiger. While cuddling in bed after sex, Sean asks Rayne where her pet white tiger (no, really!) comes from and Rayne says No white tigers in the wild were found after the 1950's in fact, and the wild species, which is really just a sub-species of the Bengal tiger, only survived in captivity due to inbreeding and crossbreeding programs. The white tigers, which survived until present times, are the result of the breeding programs using inbred and crossbred mixes of the Bengal and the Siberian tiger. An albino would have pink eyes, and there had been only one recorded instance of true albino tigers. In Cooch Behar, which we know as West Bengal, in India, two albino cubs were shot in 1922. The white tiger has pale blue eyes, a mottled grayish-pink nose and is white with the dark stripes that can vary from black to a chocolate brown color. White tigers are born only to parents who both carry the recessive gene for the white coloring.Yeah, that's real post-sex conversation. Sounds like it came straight out of Wikipedia (the Wikipedia article is pretty close, even mentioning the Cooch Behar incident, but I suspect she got her pillow talk elsewhere, as the wording and tone aren't quite the same). Oh, but the rest of the book's just as bad. In a scene in which our hero has been called away from Rayne's side to deal with some crises at his brother's farm nearby, our hero says of the third crisis of the day, "I think this goes beyond normal happenstance and things going wrong." What things? Oh, the phone line has been cut in two places-- but we're supposed to accept that the villain, an experienced international psychic man of mystery, would make such a mistake and that Sean, an experienced international psychic man of mystery himself, would not immediately jump to the conclusion that something very wrong is happening. Oh, and he's already met the villain, a man who wears expensive suits and drives an expensive car who visited Rayne yesterday with no apparent agenda and no explanation for his being there. Yet Sean's never actually shows real suspicion about him. The scene where Sean proposes to Rayne was written by Victor Appleton, only without the punning skill. On the other hand, the villain was by John Norman, complete with pointless exposition. Oh, Sean doesn't have a PDA, or a cell phone. Hurn tells us, "Using his computerized communication device, he had connected with the wireless remote to the Agency's database." Uh, yeah, it's called browsing the web with your iPhone, maybe using HTTPS. Amazing technology there, Sean. Oh, and toward the end of the book, Sean and his boss have a conversation in which Sean basically says, "I have everything under control. No, I don't need to be tested. She couldn't possibly have suborned me. I'm going to marry her, she's the best fuck I've ever had." And the boss says, "Okay. As you know, Sean, you're the best field man, so I'll trust your opinion." And that's it. No follow up, no procedures, nothing. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 08, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
| Kindle Edition
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| 1592240585
| 9781592240586
| 4.00
| 4
| Apr 05, 2003
| Oct 05, 2003
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| There seems to be a temptation among reviewers to go off the deep end with this book, but I shall refrain. He Do The Time Police In Different Voices ...moreThere seems to be a temptation among reviewers to go off the deep end with this book, but I shall refrain. He Do The Time Police In Different Voices is a collection of 25 style and theme parodies from science fiction, all written by David Langford, a usually funny guy who I was first introduced to via his collaboration with Brian Stableford.
I think I consumed this entire book in about four hours-- not bad considering it cost me $10, so in general it was the price of a movie, and my time was better spent. There are several pastiches in the collection that just had me laughing to tears, most notably "Outbreak," a direct parody of James White's Sector General series, and "The Last Robot Story," a send-up of Asimov that recognizes the real problem with robots. Being a serious fan of James White, I had to admit that Langford more or less accurately nailed the hanky-panky that we all knew was going on at Sector General, although the bit about Doctor Prilicla had me shuddering with horror. "The Gutting," was a great exercise in both disgusting the reader and illustrating how pointless such activity is in modern horror novels, but the description of the character is worth the price of admission. The E.E. Smith pieces are precise and agonizingly on-target, the Lovecraft is so clever it gets away with it, and the Herbert piece brilliantly shows just how Herbert could turn five lines of dialogue into an ocean of paranoia. And I have to admit, that's a helluva title.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 17, 2006
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0441015948
| 9780441015948
| 3.41
| 1,386
| 2008
| Jul 01, 2008
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| I read Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross, and after having thought about it some, I've come to the conclusion that the book is shallower than I want...moreI read Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross, and after having thought about it some, I've come to the conclusion that the book is shallower than I wanted it to be. The book follows the adventures of Freya Nakamichi, a sex 'droid designed to please her human masters. Unfortunately for Freya, human beings have been extinct for two centuries or so, leaving us with a character with no idea what to do with her life. Most robots designed to serve human beings were cute, anime-like designs for household use, but Freya's shaped like the real deal, a tall ogre out of place in a world of short bishi and chibi designs. Depressed and despondent, she takes a job as a courier, winds up in all kinds of trouble, and ends up careering around the solar system, gets possessed by the spirit of her dead sisters, and eventually comes face-to-face with the biggest dream and fear every robot has: meeting a real live human being. Unfortunately, this book falls off the end of the world toward the last chapters. Up until the info-dump where Freya reveals the true nature of robot devotion to human beings, a ham-handed scene if ever there was one (although fortunately the worst of it is ob skene), I was convinced that Charlie was going somewhere interesting with the book. Charlie mentioned that the book is an homage to Robert Heinlein (and the final set piece of the book is set in Heinleingrad, Eris), and the end of the book is as unconvincing as the ending of Freya's namesake novel, Heinlein's Friday. At the end of Friday, you might recall, the titular character ends up marrying the guy who raped her at the beginning of the book ("it was just business") and running away to some far away stellar colony, leaving Earth to collapse under its own corruption. The ending of Saturn's Children ends with a very similar, and even more serious problem, left unresolved: robots who are honest with themselves about their origins are terrified that H. Sapiens might someday re-emerge and assert their right to rule, disrupting the free will of the machines. It's presented as the central conflict of the main character, emerging throughout the book, growing in intensity as Freya gets closer and closer to meeting an authentic H. sap, only to be ignored in the final two chapters in favor of pyrotechnics and "aww, aren't they sweet" moments. Charlie's ability to create engaging, intense, and intensely clever tight spots from which his heroine must escape, often with that classic transition, frying pan, fire, is here in all its glory. He does a great job of cranking up both the threat and the resolution, over and over again, while weaving a Sol-spanning conspiracy that should ultimately leave you breathless. Charlie knows how to dress the stage and then set the furniture ablaze a la Jack Bickham, and his technical hard SF knowledge is second to none. But if Saturn's Children is a Heinlein pastiche and an Asimov homage, it's also unfortunately got something else: A Neal Stephenson ending.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 14, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
| Hardcover
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| 1597800651
| 9781597800655
| 3.30
| 142
| Jan 01, 2007
| Feb 20, 2007
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| Grey, by Jon Armstrong, is a science-fiction love story set in some far future Earth-based dystopia. The hero, Michael Rivers, is the scion of Hiro R...moreGrey, by Jon Armstrong, is a science-fiction love story set in some far future Earth-based dystopia. The hero, Michael Rivers, is the scion of Hiro Rivers, owner of the RiversGroup Security Service, supposedly one of the most powerful families among the citified. Michael is in love with Nora, daughter of the owner of the MKG Security Service, a competing company with which there was to be a merger until, at the end of chapter one, someone gets through RiversGroup Security, attacks Michael, and makes the value of RiversGroup plummet. The two companies accuse each other of the assault, and Michael and Nora embark on a Romeo and Juliet-like attempt to get together even as their world starts to come apart around them.
The real treat of this novel is Armstrong's extremely over-the-top übercultures. Hiro has a film team record his every moment for posterity, listens to heavy metal so powerful every concert leaves dead behind (and every band has ümlauts over every vowel, such as Alüminüm Anüs, Töxic Tësticle Färm and Hammørhëd), and curses like a potty-mouthed schoolboy while being interviewed on celebrity televsion. At one point, Michael is slated to marry Elle from another family; her überculture, Pentunia Tune, is the worst excesses of candy-raver visual kei, with eye-tearing colors strewn in liquid excesses throughout overly bright and empty lives. Michael belongs to the grey subculture; he lives for black, white, charcoal, soot, raven, graphite, onyx, and cobalt. He loves plain, severe suits in calm, elegant cuts. He's even had one eye surgically altered so that it only sees in black and white. He wants to be calm, cool, almost still-life. He and Nora get their inspiration and subculture from Pure H fashion magazine, and when they're together they quote to each other from captions as they attempt to understand what the photographer was saying. But the novel never adds up to very much. While Armstrong is very inventive in his creation of the ültra and petunia subcultures, he never really gives you any impression that his civilization actually works. How do these people get fed? What kind of economy is there? There's immense amounts of labor and industry shown in these chapters, from the thousands of people assembling Hiro's various rock concerts, to the ones rebuilding and then partying at Michael's PartyHaus, and yet you never get the sense that these people are anything more than mannequins Armstrong put there to dress the stage. Michael is a deeply passive character, as befits the subculture he has chosen, and makes very few meaningful decisions throughout the story. I wanted more out of this book. Sure, it's a satire, it's meant to show how shallow and flat the world can be if we allow our personas to be created and modified by our attachment to a media subculture. The last chapter, where Michael finally begins to understand Hiro, is meant to show that deep understanding comes only from deviating the script which you've been fed, but ultimately the power of the novel is cut short by Armstrong's bombastic finale. But to succeed it must be more than just satirical, it must be plausible, and Grey falls down on the job there. To create his malignant, magniloquent world, Armstrong has created a world that cannot exist, a world with too many contradictions, a world of post-human technologies and beastly excesses, and that ultimately detracts from the power of his satirical eye.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 30, 2008
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Oct 30, 2011
| Paperback
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