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Six Shooter Review
Jun. 27th, 2014 11:23 pmHi,
So one good thing about air travel is that I have lots of time to read. I picked up five books on the eve of my departure -- I had to put it off to the last minute because if I purchased them earlier, I’d probably start reading them and be left with nothing for the trip. By the time my flight landed in Omaha, I’d already plowed through one and a half of the total. By the time I got back from my trip I only had half of a book left to go. So...a big review.
What makes it bigger is that I forgot to comment on a book I’d read last week so you get six in all.
So my forgotten book first. Bald New World by Peter Tieryas Liu. The books posits a world where one day, everyone woke up bald. There was a fair amount of panic but eventually things settled down. Nick Guan is a cameraman working with Larry Chao making arty independent films no one cares about. Luckily, Larry happens to be the heir to the world’s largest wig manufacturing company and can easily afford to fund his creative visions. Larry’s determined to make one outstanding masterpiece but winds up dead and it’s up to Nick to unravel the mystery that got him killed.
I was kinda meh about this book. The level of chaos sparked by everyone going bald was a bit much (although this is only briefly covered in flashbacks). There’s some side social commentary on American life (and presumably Chinese life since the book splits it’s time between the two), but nothing really digs in until maybe the final paragraph or so. I dunno. It seemed like an interesting premise but then just never really came together in the book.
Onto my vacation books. We start with the appropriately titled Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea. Koko used to be a corporate mercenary. Now she runs a saloon/brothel and entertains tourists by day while being entertained by the help at night. Then her boss, a friend and former military commander, sends a hit squad after her. She flees into the suborbital cities above the Earth and tries to figure out why she’s been marked for death and how to turn the tables on her old comrade.
First off, this book passes the Bechdel Test in spades. And it’s a perfect example of why the test is an important starting point but not the sole criterion of how feminist something is. Because while Koko is a kick-ass operative, the story really seems to focus on Flynn, a cop working in the suborbital city Koko flees to. Yes, everyone’s out to get Koko and she does most of the fighting, but the only person who really seems to grow as a character is Flynn. I’m ok with characters who don’t really have any development, but at least pay lots of attention to them being bad-asses and don’t linger on supporting characters who need a military pixie girl to save them from their own ennui. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the text, but I didn’t have a sense that the protagonist was the person on the title. Plus, it ends with an obvious loose end for the next book in the series (already announced) to deal with so a letter grade off for that.
Following that we had Shield and Crocus by Michael R Underwood a book just gushing with fun ideas. To start, there’s the city of Audec-Hal which lies within the bones of a titan that fell from heaven. The city was a vibrant republic but then five tyrants captured the very soul of the city and made i their personal playpen.
Standing against them are the Shields -- a super-hero team in a fantasy milieu. You’ve got analogs for Batman, the Flash, Jean Gray, Terra, She-Hulk and Captain America (who gains his powers from a magical shield). They’ve been fighting against the tyrants for decades with more losses than wins. Now the tyrants are convening to try and unify against the Shields and the Shields have to try and put a stop to it.
So yeah, a superhero story set in a fantasy world where the bad guys have the upper hand. It’s pretty fun stuff and a very entertaining read. There are tons of great ideas and maybe a little too much is going on, but it’s well worth checking out to see the imagination on display.
Next up is some si-fi that’s almost as old as me. The book is Godwhale by TJ Bass. The book is set far in the future where the mass of humanity lives in a continent-spanning underground city called the Hive. In the sterile oceans, the Rorqual Maru despaired of ever working with humans to harvest the bounty of the sea. She sends one of her sub-units out to hunt for men.
Meanwhile, Larry Dever has been skipping through time. Freezing and thawing until he can find a full replacement for his lower torso, lost in an accident. He’s revived in the Hive where he’s seen as a waste of resources, but he flees “in-between” the walls and escapes to the ocean with a mutant named Harl. Together they rouse the Rorqual Maru as a mysterious event reseeds the oceans with life. The story follows the battles between the Hive and the sea people as they struggle to control this precious new resource.
I really liked this book. It’s clearly old-school SF. Everyone seems to have a fairly detailed grasp of a range of scientific disciplines and there’s maybe a bit too much optimism, but there was some really great human/AI interactions and discussions. TJ Bass was a medical doctor and there’s a lot of medical terminology deployed in a dextrous way that enhances rather than obscures what’s going on. I should note that Dr. Bass had some odd medical theories and I feel that some of that makes its way into the book. However, on balance, this was an interesting book that does a lot of stuff well.
I thought it was time for some non-fiction so I turned next to The Big Tiny: A Built-It Myself Memoir by Dee Williams. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Someone goes out and builds a tiny living space for themselves and talks about it. In this case, Ms. Williams built an 84-square foot house that fils on a flatbed trailer. She lives in the backyard of her close friends in a sort of co-housing situation since her house doesn’t really have utilities.
I was hoping for more practical nuts and bolts sort of discussions but Ms. Williams doesn’t spend much time on the details of the construction so much as the wider impacts of deciding to build a tiny house and what her interconnected life is like. There were some sweet moments, and Ms. Williams reminds me of many other fierce women I know or have known but it rambled just a little too far afield for me. Not unhappy I picked it up and read it, but it didn’t quite scratch my specific itches.
Finally, to close out the vacation books we have Lockstep by Karl Schroeder. Fair warning, I like Mr. Schroeder’s stuff a lot so expect some bias. The story starts with Toby McGonigal rocketing off to claim a tiny moon for a small planetoid lost between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri. An accident sends him off course and he remains in hibernation for thousands of years.
When he’s finally awoken it’s to discover that his siblings now run a star-spanning empire that uses synchronized hypersleep schedules to efficiently colonize small planetoids in space and to bridge the vast distances between them. His siblings have also placed him at the center of their civilization’s cult and Toby has a lot of catching up to do if he wants to save his family and the Lockstep civilizations.
So the idea of whole societies of people who skip 30 years at a time to be active for a month has a lot of potential holes and the book starts picking away at it’s own premises pretty early on. Still, that’s not really what this book is about. It’s about how this kind of technology would change the way you think about time. On a more personal level, the book is about the way time changes who we are and how we relate to each other. I don’t think this is Schroeder’s strongest work, but the Lockstep worlds and the cultures that grow up around and interlaced with them paint some interesting pictures.
So yeah, a boat load of reading this past week.the pace is probably going to slow down a bit, but we’ll see what July brings.
later
Tom
So one good thing about air travel is that I have lots of time to read. I picked up five books on the eve of my departure -- I had to put it off to the last minute because if I purchased them earlier, I’d probably start reading them and be left with nothing for the trip. By the time my flight landed in Omaha, I’d already plowed through one and a half of the total. By the time I got back from my trip I only had half of a book left to go. So...a big review.
What makes it bigger is that I forgot to comment on a book I’d read last week so you get six in all.
So my forgotten book first. Bald New World by Peter Tieryas Liu. The books posits a world where one day, everyone woke up bald. There was a fair amount of panic but eventually things settled down. Nick Guan is a cameraman working with Larry Chao making arty independent films no one cares about. Luckily, Larry happens to be the heir to the world’s largest wig manufacturing company and can easily afford to fund his creative visions. Larry’s determined to make one outstanding masterpiece but winds up dead and it’s up to Nick to unravel the mystery that got him killed.
I was kinda meh about this book. The level of chaos sparked by everyone going bald was a bit much (although this is only briefly covered in flashbacks). There’s some side social commentary on American life (and presumably Chinese life since the book splits it’s time between the two), but nothing really digs in until maybe the final paragraph or so. I dunno. It seemed like an interesting premise but then just never really came together in the book.
Onto my vacation books. We start with the appropriately titled Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea. Koko used to be a corporate mercenary. Now she runs a saloon/brothel and entertains tourists by day while being entertained by the help at night. Then her boss, a friend and former military commander, sends a hit squad after her. She flees into the suborbital cities above the Earth and tries to figure out why she’s been marked for death and how to turn the tables on her old comrade.
First off, this book passes the Bechdel Test in spades. And it’s a perfect example of why the test is an important starting point but not the sole criterion of how feminist something is. Because while Koko is a kick-ass operative, the story really seems to focus on Flynn, a cop working in the suborbital city Koko flees to. Yes, everyone’s out to get Koko and she does most of the fighting, but the only person who really seems to grow as a character is Flynn. I’m ok with characters who don’t really have any development, but at least pay lots of attention to them being bad-asses and don’t linger on supporting characters who need a military pixie girl to save them from their own ennui. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the text, but I didn’t have a sense that the protagonist was the person on the title. Plus, it ends with an obvious loose end for the next book in the series (already announced) to deal with so a letter grade off for that.
Following that we had Shield and Crocus by Michael R Underwood a book just gushing with fun ideas. To start, there’s the city of Audec-Hal which lies within the bones of a titan that fell from heaven. The city was a vibrant republic but then five tyrants captured the very soul of the city and made i their personal playpen.
Standing against them are the Shields -- a super-hero team in a fantasy milieu. You’ve got analogs for Batman, the Flash, Jean Gray, Terra, She-Hulk and Captain America (who gains his powers from a magical shield). They’ve been fighting against the tyrants for decades with more losses than wins. Now the tyrants are convening to try and unify against the Shields and the Shields have to try and put a stop to it.
So yeah, a superhero story set in a fantasy world where the bad guys have the upper hand. It’s pretty fun stuff and a very entertaining read. There are tons of great ideas and maybe a little too much is going on, but it’s well worth checking out to see the imagination on display.
Next up is some si-fi that’s almost as old as me. The book is Godwhale by TJ Bass. The book is set far in the future where the mass of humanity lives in a continent-spanning underground city called the Hive. In the sterile oceans, the Rorqual Maru despaired of ever working with humans to harvest the bounty of the sea. She sends one of her sub-units out to hunt for men.
Meanwhile, Larry Dever has been skipping through time. Freezing and thawing until he can find a full replacement for his lower torso, lost in an accident. He’s revived in the Hive where he’s seen as a waste of resources, but he flees “in-between” the walls and escapes to the ocean with a mutant named Harl. Together they rouse the Rorqual Maru as a mysterious event reseeds the oceans with life. The story follows the battles between the Hive and the sea people as they struggle to control this precious new resource.
I really liked this book. It’s clearly old-school SF. Everyone seems to have a fairly detailed grasp of a range of scientific disciplines and there’s maybe a bit too much optimism, but there was some really great human/AI interactions and discussions. TJ Bass was a medical doctor and there’s a lot of medical terminology deployed in a dextrous way that enhances rather than obscures what’s going on. I should note that Dr. Bass had some odd medical theories and I feel that some of that makes its way into the book. However, on balance, this was an interesting book that does a lot of stuff well.
I thought it was time for some non-fiction so I turned next to The Big Tiny: A Built-It Myself Memoir by Dee Williams. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Someone goes out and builds a tiny living space for themselves and talks about it. In this case, Ms. Williams built an 84-square foot house that fils on a flatbed trailer. She lives in the backyard of her close friends in a sort of co-housing situation since her house doesn’t really have utilities.
I was hoping for more practical nuts and bolts sort of discussions but Ms. Williams doesn’t spend much time on the details of the construction so much as the wider impacts of deciding to build a tiny house and what her interconnected life is like. There were some sweet moments, and Ms. Williams reminds me of many other fierce women I know or have known but it rambled just a little too far afield for me. Not unhappy I picked it up and read it, but it didn’t quite scratch my specific itches.
Finally, to close out the vacation books we have Lockstep by Karl Schroeder. Fair warning, I like Mr. Schroeder’s stuff a lot so expect some bias. The story starts with Toby McGonigal rocketing off to claim a tiny moon for a small planetoid lost between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri. An accident sends him off course and he remains in hibernation for thousands of years.
When he’s finally awoken it’s to discover that his siblings now run a star-spanning empire that uses synchronized hypersleep schedules to efficiently colonize small planetoids in space and to bridge the vast distances between them. His siblings have also placed him at the center of their civilization’s cult and Toby has a lot of catching up to do if he wants to save his family and the Lockstep civilizations.
So the idea of whole societies of people who skip 30 years at a time to be active for a month has a lot of potential holes and the book starts picking away at it’s own premises pretty early on. Still, that’s not really what this book is about. It’s about how this kind of technology would change the way you think about time. On a more personal level, the book is about the way time changes who we are and how we relate to each other. I don’t think this is Schroeder’s strongest work, but the Lockstep worlds and the cultures that grow up around and interlaced with them paint some interesting pictures.
So yeah, a boat load of reading this past week.the pace is probably going to slow down a bit, but we’ll see what July brings.
later
Tom
