bluegargantua

Hi,

  More books.  More reviews.

  First up:  The Heap by Sean Adams.  In the near future Los Verticales, was a soaring city in a skyscraper.  Then it all came tumbling down and now a group of Dig Hands works out of a makeshift camp in the desert to clear away the debris and salvage anything they can.  Orville Anders is a long-time dig hand.  He's here because his brother Bernard was a DJ inside of Los Verticales and even though the building has collapsed, Bernard is still doing his radio show trapped under tons of debris.  

  Orville is approached by the owners of the radio station Bernard is broadcasting from.  Bernard has a call-in show and Orville makes regular calls that are the highest rated part of the program.  The studio asks Orville to drop in a few product plugs here and there.  Orville refuses and his access to Bernard is cut off.  But the show keeps going on and Orville suddenly hears his voice on the radio, talking to Bernard and doing the product pitches.  Orville determines to find out just what's going on setting off a spiral of chaos exposing the secrets of Los Verticales and the Heap it's become.

  I rather liked this book.  It's very much in the Thomas Pynchon vein with secret societies and odd conspiracies and your enjoyment of such weirdness is probably going to impact how much you like this book.  The main plot is broken up with little vignettes of life in Los Verticales written by the survivors of the disaster that paint a window into what life was like in the city skyscraper and are a fun complement.  Overall a fun read.

  Next up:  The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.  Nia is a starship captain piloting her ship on a trading route between major planets and their outlying colony worlds.  Travel between the stars is fast, but not that fast -- Nia spends decades in suspended animation plying her ship.  She's asked to help return a boy found at the site of a starship crash to the main world in hopes that he can be reunited with his people.  Nia and the boy grow close and she's reluctant to turn him over to the authorities at the end of her trip.

  Fumiko Nakajima is the genius who opened the stars to mankind.  Thanks to suspended animation and other advances in medicine, she's kept pace with her expanding civilization but she's not entirely happy with the results of her work.  She's working on another project and thinks the boy might have the keys she needs, but for now, she needs to keep Nia and the boy away from civilized space because a lot of people have a vested interest in the system as it is and the boy could upset that.

  Another pretty good read.  The plot clips along nicely, but it's really a much more character driven book with Nia and Fumiko pondering their decisions in the past and how they might make amends or change direction.  The boy, too, has his own moments of growing into a person.  If you're a fan of Becky Chambers's books, this will be right up your alley.  A warm, humanistic sci-fi story.

 Itinerant lesbian librarian-revolutionaries roaming the American Southwest -- I mean, it's a pretty good hook for a book.  Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey is a fun short story with a neat fusion of old west and post-apocalypse...well, maybe not apocalypse.  The US is still around, just worn down into a tired fascism where most people eke out a miserable living and try to keep the war effort alive.   Esther is a young woman who's just lost her best friend (and illicit lover) and is now slated to marry her dead friend's ex fiance.  So she hides in the book wagon of the Librarians, a group of women delivering the approved books, pamphlets, and literature to the isolated towns and farms of America.

  Esther quickly discovers that the librarians are not exactly the models of a patriotic citizens, but they might offer her a chance to make a better life for herself.  So, it's a fairly short book and clips along, but c'mon, secret agents for an antifascist resistance movement posing as government-sanction librarians?  A delightful read.

  I'm sure at some point everyone has tried to learn a magic trick.  Most of the time, it either takes a lot more work than we have the patience for or the trick is so obviously gimmicky that it's hard to impress anyone above the 4th grade.  Some people have a bit more determination and interest in the art though and the last several years have seen a new generation of magicians bring new ideas to the table.  Delving into modern magicians and how they view their work is the subject of Magic is Dead by Ian Frisch.  Mr. Frisch fell in with one of the more popular internet magicians and through him, discovered a secret society of magicians and magic-adjacent people, and becomes something of a magician himself, even inventing a new trick.  

  The book is just as much about Mr. Frisch's history as well as that of the other major magicians he interacts with and while it shows how magic is often a method of working through personal tragedy, it does break up the narrative a bit, a weird focus on the author and not his subject.  Perhaps influenced by a topic that thrives on deception, the book itself feels a little manipulative -- there's a lot of focus on the business of magic and how many modern magicians are using the internet to hawk their wares.  That Mr. Frisch makes it into the mysterious 52 Society as something of a chronicler of the group comes across as perhaps a bit deceptive, an acceptable way for the magicians to sort of toot their own horn.  I will say it's caused me to watch a few more magic trick videos online and there's always a bit of a subtle hustle for merch going on in all of these.

  Again, the book is full of people who make a living by tricking you so it's hard to take the book at face value.  I think a lot of the underlying ideas/principles behind modern magic is interesting, but rather than a manifesto for a new kind of magic, it feels a bit more like hagiography.  Not the worst book in the world, but unless you're fairly into magic, probably not a must-read.

  I also struggled through Mazes of Power by Juliette Wade, but teenagers who are somehow more adept at political situations than their elders just doesn't work right and the main antagonist isn't that compelling.  I also skimmed through A Child's Garden of Grass -- Reloaded by Richard Clorfene and Jack Margolis.  This is a reprint of a book from the late 60's talking about, well, weed.  While there is some genuinely interesting information in the book (some of which is only interesting because it's info from the 60's), this is a humor book and...

  Dear reader, the humor is dreadful.  Do yourself a favor and don't bother.  If you're really curious, drop me a line.

Anyway, that's what I've been reading lately
Tom

Hey,

I was on vacation recently and long plane rides are a great way to knock off a few books. So let's take a look:

Pre-vacation, I wanted a bit of palate cleanser from the fantasy coming up so I blew through Galaxy's Edge: Legionnaire by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole. It's the opener to a military sci-fi universe that ranges from deep space fleets to boots on the ground. As you might suspect, this one focuses on the ground pounders. Sergeant Chhun is stationed with the members of his squad on some dirt water planet at the ass-end of the universe. His commander is some idiot political appointee, the natives are restless, and there's nothing to do. Then everything goes to hell.

I finished the book so it wasn't awful, but it was the most paint-by-numbers military fiction I've seen in ages. Yeah, they're on a different world with alien locals and the warship that got them here orbits overhead, but with almost no effort at all, this would read like modern day military fiction set in the Middle East. I realize that perhaps war never changes, perhaps there will always be idiot COs, and grumpy natives, and bad food, and sand in your shorts, and the bond of battle that forges strangers into family, etc., etc., but even the most hard sci-fi settings would have profound effects on the way war is waged. Even the idea that it'll come down to boots on the ground might not be true. C'mon guys, spark my sense of wonder *and* my thirst for bloodshed in one literary package!

Also...I am almost 100% positive there weren't any women in Sergeant Chhun's platoon. There were references to higher level female officers back at base, and I'm pretty sure no one is saying women can't fight, but I don't recall a single female trooper. Again, maybe I've just forgotten, but if I go back through to check, I'll either fall asleep or be mad that I didn't do something better with my time (like sleeping).

Next up: The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I keep remembering how much I've enjoyed other Swanwick stories in the past and then I go searching around for more of his stuff. This time around, I came up with a dense, rich, prosaic, slice of fantastic reality that it took a bit to work my way through.

Imagine the Fae realms of Celtic lore, a world that's a fun-house mirror of our own. Now imagine that the alchemical-industrial revolution came along and turned the fields and forests into a dense urban sprawl. At the edge of the sprawl is a massive factory where dragons are made -- jet-powered, cybernetic, air combat dragons. Working in this factory is a young mortal girl named Jane. The book follows Jane and her attempts to grow up and grow out of Faerie.

I don't really want to talk about the plot because the plot is sort of a distraction -- the underlying metaphors are where the story is really at and as you read through it, don't be afraid to take in your surroundings, there's a lot to look at and see in new ways as Jane grows up and tries to get out of Faerie. It's not as thinky as some more "serious" pieces of literature, but it's not as obtuse, or perhaps it's poetically obtuse and that oddly helps you see it better. Anyway, it's a good book, give it a try.

On the flight back home from my recent vacation, I poured through Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The blurb that grabbed my attention was: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!”. The palace was actually on the Imperial Capital, but otherwise that quote is 100% accurate and if that seems like your jam, rest assured it is totally your jam.

So you've got a far future empire that runs on Necromancy. It's suggested that a lot of high-tech hardware like starships are mostly well-maintained relics rather than something in steady production. Below the Immortal Emperor there are nine great houses, one for each planet in the Imperial Capital's solar system. Gideon is an orphan ward of the Ninth house. The Ninth is a near-forgotten house charged with maintaining the tomb of the Emperor's greatest foe. Run like a massive monastery its an endless round of prayer and ritual. Gideon wants out. Partially because she wants to be a warrior in the Second House (essentially the Imperial Military) and because she's the personal whipping girl of Harrowhawk, daughter of the rulers of the Ninth House and in no way are those two attracted to each other.

Just before Gideon is finally about to escape the Ninth House an Imperial summons arrives -- each house is to present their chosen successor and their Cavalier. Harrowhawk has no Cavalier and despite being trained as a soldier and not a noble bodyguard, Gideon is the only person available. These house scions have been called to the Imperial Capital, a world dedicated solely to the Emperor's abandoned palace where they will undergo a series of tests to determine who will go on to become a Lyctor -- a sort of undead lich-saint who serves the Emperor. The first Lyctors were created shortly after the Emperor's rise and no new ones have been created for thousands of years since then. It's a golden opportunity everyone is anxious to seize.

So the bickering pair travel to the homeworld, meet their rival teams and their enigmatic hosts, and start trying to work out what the test is and how to pass it. Then people start dying.

It's a fun book. It does have that YA "young people are somehow much more capable and experience than their age would suggest" issue, but the sci-fi necromancy is a lot of fun and the plot clips right along. It does set up an obvious sequel, but at least it doesn't end on a cliffhanger while still teasing something interesting enough to go back for the next book when it comes out.

Finally, I finished up another short story. This time a piece called To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. Ms. Chambers writes, hands-down, some of the most human and humanistic science fiction I've ever read and this is another fantastic example. The Lawki 6 Exoplanet expedition has just completed its basic mission and now has a question for the people back home on Earth. The book is their account of the mission, but not in a dry, factual way or even an exciting, thrill-a-minute kind of way. This is a story of small moments and daily lives. Those lives may be in a habitat module on a planet light-years away from Earth, but you really get into the hearts and minds of the four-person crew of the mission.

It's short, it'll handily fit into whatever spare reading time you have, but there will come a point where you know you're getting close, so you'll just rush through the end and when the book ends your heart is both full and content and the daily wonder of our world is more apparent. What more can you ask of a story? Go read it.

later
Tom

Hi,

  Been a while, but I do have some books to report on:

  First up:  Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle.  As you might guess this is an autobiography of one of the more interesting characters of early space exploration.  John "Jack" Parsons was the scion of a wealthy family who fell on hard times during the Depression.  Parsons read a lot of early sci-fi and got excited about the idea of space exploration and rockets.  Unable to afford collage, he started working for companies producing explosives for mining/construction and on the weekends would make different sorts of chemical rockets.  Although not formally schooled in chemistry, he had a very nimble mind and probably knew more about explosive chemicals than anyone at CalTech, where he managed to cobble together a small rocketry research program (at the time, rockets were considered nothing more than toys). 

  When WWII broke out, he created a rocket fuel formula to help large planes take off on short runways.  These rocket boosters were called JATO units (Jet Assisted Take-Off) -- note that they called them jets not rockets because jets were cool and rockets were dumb.  He formed a company to produce the JATO units called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and you probably know it toady as an integral part of NASA.  Those boosters he produced in WWII became the template for solid fuel rockets such as the boosters for the Space Shuttle.

  All of this is interesting enough but when you add in the fact that he got inspired by Alistair Crowley and set up an OTO temple in his house...well, you'd expect more but honestly there aren't a lot of records and most interviews are with people who were at the fringes of his crowd.  You want to hear about the rituals and the orgies and there's some of that, but there's a lot of stuff that's still quite opaque about the man and what he was doing.

  The general picture that you get from the book is that Jack Parsons was kind of a real life, low-budget Tony Stark, a bit of an asshole genius.  It's not clear if more funding or additional education would've helped, he clearly seemed to be the kind of person with his head in the clouds and a burning desire to achieve his goals.  It's too bad there's not more detail about his life, although I suspect frustration would factor large in it.

  It's a niche subject so I'm not recommending it to you unless you've got a real interest in this kind of stuff.

  So it's back to fiction with:  Edges by Linda Nagata.  Ms. Nagata is an author from Australia who wrote a series of transhuman sci-fi.  This is the start of a new series set in that universe.  I don't usually like dealing with coming into the middle, but this is a pretty good starting point and I never felt too lost so that's a point in it's favor.

  The basic premise is that transhuman society has spread throughout the galaxy.  However, around the fringes, a fleet of ancient war machines search out technically advanced civilizations and then crushes them.  Near a weird machine/neutron star called Deception Well, humans have found a refuge from the machines.  Towards the interior of human space, the oldest settlements eventually created Dyson spheres and other high-tech stellar engineering.  But they've got silent and from Deception Well people can see those megastructures are breaking up and they're not sure why.  It doesn't seem to be the war machine's fault but there's no way they can reach it.

 Until Urban, a human sent out from Deception Well as part of a team trying to beat the war machines returns in control of one of the warships.  He offers his old lover and a few others from Deception Well a chance to upload to his ship and come with him to go exploring into the core to find out what happened.

  They almost immediately run into transhuman trouble.

  I enjoyed the heck out of this book.  The concept of an "inverted frontier" is fun and the book really stares down the barrel of the various ramifications that transhuman technologies would produce.  I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.  Recommended, especially for fans of Ian Banks and the like.

   Let's roll back to a bit of fantasy.  The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey is set in a not-quite-steampunk world trying to recover from a devastating war, in particular, we focus on the city of Lower Proszawa.  Berlin during the Weimar Republic is the obvious analog and the german words for streets and slang really helps orient you.  Largo is, for now, a bicycle messenger with a famous theatrical girlfriend and just a *teensy* morphine hobby.  One day, the chief messenger at the company is hauled away by the secret police and Largo gets a promotion, thanks in large part to his photographic memory of the city and its layout.  From high-class mansions to abandoned factories, Largo delivers packages and takes signatures and then comes back to the office to be quizzed about the day by his boss Herr Branca.

  Largo's deliveries get more and more strange and as rumors of war start to swirl, Largo is going to have to wise up about who he is and what he's doing.

  Another really solid book.  I enjoyed the world-building (and learned a bit of German too).  Largo is head-smackingly naive but once he starts to realize what's going on, well, he's still out of his depth but he knows he has to do something.  Very much a "so now I'm an adult, now what?" kind of journey for him.  I would say this is a slightly better fantasy LeCarr than the Amberlough series touted itself as (though that series really had a different idea in mind vs. it's ad copy).  A fun read.

  Back to space with The Outside by Ada Hoffmann.  When humans hit the Singularity, the Singularity decided that humans just couldn't be trusted with advanced science and technology so...they took it over.  Now AI Gods control and watch over human development.  They allow some level of experimentation but generally keep them firmly sandboxed.  Yasira Shien is a scientist working on an interesting new piece of science and the AIs are letting her have a go at it, but the new tech promptly unravels the space laboratory she's working on and the Gods scoop her up.  Branded a heretic and a murderer, the Gods are giving her a shot at redeeming herself by tracking down her mentor, a woman who has big plans to upend the gods and reality itself.

  A fun book that explores a theme I think is more likely in a transhuman future -- AIs who simply keep humans like...well, not like pets exactly, but more like toddlers who keep grabbing for things they shouldn't.  Banks's Culture novels sometimes touch on this a bit, but it's a theme that's front and center here and I kinda like it.

  I had one minor niggle.  Dr. Shein and her mentor are both described as having autism (it's suggested that this, in part, explains their scientific insights).  I realize that I don't think I've read any book, fiction book certainly, that has an autistic character at its center and really tries to get into their head.  My issue is that....Shien doesn't seem terribly different from a lot of other protagonists.  If she's freaking out about being abducted by AI gods and dragooned into a galaxy-wide hunt for a reality bending mad scientist -- that's an emotional crisis most people would have.  I didn't feel like her autism was something that came through on the page.  If it's deliberate, if it's a "autistic people are like everyone else", that's fine, but it's not like she's being ostracized because she's autistic, she's treated as a slightly eccentric genius and that's it, which seems like it really undercuts whatever sort of message they wanted to go with here.  Again, I can't recall a central autistic character in a book I've read in the past few years so perhaps I'm completely missing the point, but I don't feel like I got a sense of how her autism shapes her compared to any neurotypical character.

  Still, it's a pretty good book and I do recommend it.

  Finally, a new Max Gladstone book.  I've been eagerly devouring Max Gladstone's Craft series books since the first one.  A magic-fantasy take on modern finance that is *way* better than that description sounds.  His latest book, however, is a stand alone sci-fi novel called The Empress of Forever.  Here we have Vivian Liao -- entrepreneurial wunderkind whose made and lost fortunes in a near-future, ecologically failing Earth.  But now the Feds are closing in, ready to break her.  So Viv hatches a last-ditch plan to sneak in to an MIT server farm and...create a benign Skynet?  But in the process a glowing green woman suddenly appears, grabs her, and spirits her away to the far future.  

  With a little help, Viv escapes her prison and learns that here in the future there's The Cloud -- a digital mapping of...everything.  And the Empress (the green woman) basically rules and owns it.  If Viv wants to get home, she has to beat the Empress.  She also has to fend off the Mirrorfaith, techno-priests who try to study the Empress to learn her secrets, the Pride, war-toys of the Empress that she's discarded, and the Bleed, an alien species who show up when a civilization reaches a certain level of sophistication and....eat everything.  To prevent the Bleed, the Empress herself usually does this stunt.

  So...Viv gets the party together, a god-like space pirate, a techno-monk, a barbarian pilot, and a sentient blob of grey goo.  Together they go on adventures.

  Friends, Max Gladstone is a fantastic writer and this book is flat-out amazing.  Wonderful world-building and grand vistas, you can imagine how lush the movie would be.  Beyond that, the thing that really characterizes Gladstone's books is the human, emotional core a the center and how it addresses the numerous challenges we face here in the real world and how we attack those problems.

  Highly recommended, definitely check it out.

  OK, I think that covers it.  Happy reading everyone.

later
Tom

Hey,

  How's about I review the books I read in a more timely manner?

  First up, Luna:  Moon Rising by Ian McDonald.  This is the concluding volume of his Luna series.  The short version is that in the future the moon is run by five corporations and the families that own them.  The series primarily focuses on the Corta family who produce helium-3 for export to an energy-starved Earth.  But then their dome gets blown up in the first book, the Corta patriarch gets banished to Earth, but then returns with terrestrial allies to take over the moon in the second book, and now it's time for a showdown between the people of the moon and the people of Earth.  The story sprawls out over a fair number of Corta family members so you get to see the conflict from a few different angles.

  Overall, this book brought everything to a solid conclusion.  The writing in this series has always been quite good along with most of the hard science.  An easy recommendation if you're looking for intrigue, action and drama in a near-future setting.

  Next up:  Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker.  Mr. Parker has written a number of well-received fantasy novels most of which make liberal use of actual history to help flesh out the details.  This is a standalone novel about Orhan, leader of a regiment of Imperial Engineers.  He spends most of his time building bridges and tearing down or building up defensive works.  He returns to the Imperial City to discover unknown enemies have lured the defenders out into an ambush and they'll soon be bearing down on the city itself.  Orhan has to organize his forces and the people remaining in the city to stall the enemy long enough until help arrives.

  I stayed up waaayyy to late finishing this book off, which should probably be all the endorsement you need.  The chapters are short, punchy, and always make you want to "read just one more chapter".  The dialog is good, and Orhan is an active protagonist who is making plans, solving problems, and adapting to the enemy's efforts.  The plot suffers a bit from Orhan's interactions with the enemy commander (in the sense that the enemy deliberately does stupid things sometimes) and the end is a bit unsatisfying (but it's not an unreasonable or illogical ending and it's only the last 10 pages or so).  Still, this is a fun low-magic fantasy book which should make for some nice summer reading.

later
Tom

Hi,

Rattled through a few more books and they weren't too bad.

First up: The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. I'd seen this when it first came out about...five(!) years ago. Looked at the sample, wasn't blown away, but recently it was on offer for cheap so I took a flyer and decided to give it a whirl. Turned out to be quite a bit better than I remembered. You've got Loch, ex-Republic Scout and current thief looking to assemble a crew to sneak onto the flying capital of the Republic to reclaim her birthright. Things get a little complicated when she and her partner get captured and are forced to work on the underside of the capital cleaning the gems that keep it aloft. Loch engineers a break-out in short order and starts assembling a new crew to take another crack at the capital and the most secure vault modern magic can make.

Maybe I was a little burned out on fantasy caper novels when this first came out, but this is a really nice little take on the genre. In particular, Loch and her partners are active in their schemes instead of reactive and while there's a bit of "Loch is always one step ahead of you", it's doesn't entirely go her way and it never quite reaches Batman-levels of implausibility. The book sets a brisk, breezy pace and has fun with the various characters recruited to the cause. If you're looking for some easy beach reading this summer, you might want to check this out.

Next up, I read that book about walking the Keystone Pipeline last month and that prompted Amazon to suggest other long-hike books, including AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller. In 2003, Mr. Miller quit his job, left his family at home, and went on a walk from Georgia to Maine. The book talks about his experiences and includes photos of people and places he encountered on the way.

It's a pretty basic travel narrative and nothing especially stood out for me, but that's sort of the nature of thru-hiking in general, day after day of walking and sometimes you get a chance to stop and reflect or take in the wilderness around you. Still, it was interesting to read about the experiences of someone who's actually walked the trail end-to-end. The book was a perfectly good read, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless the subject matter really interested you as well.

Finally, I stumbled onto a real winner. Looking over the new releases this month, I came across Medusa Uploaded by Emily Davenport and the blurb grabbed me.  Oichi is a worm, a non-Executive member of the generation-ship Olympia who had been a servant to one of the Executive Clans, but then got tossed out an airlock for not putting out on demand.  Then she gets rescued and things get interesting.  Her savior is Medusa, an octopus-shaped AI companion designed to help humans collaborate with one another.  An important resource when colonizing an alien world but Medusa and her sisters were all presumed destroyed when Olympia's sister ship Titania blew up.  That explosion was no accident and Oichi and Medusa set about to break the Clan's stranglehold on the ship's population.  Part of that involves a plan to get the specialized implants needed to interface with Medusa-units into the heads of citizens and the other part involves quietly murdering Executives who stand in the way of that plan.

I enjoyed the hell out of this novel.  The characters are interesting, the dialog is pretty good, and the plot clips along and drags you along with it.  It is the first part in a duology? trilogy? but it ends at a pretty decent stopping point.  As you might expect, a fairly straight-forward plan is constantly being complicated with mysteries and surprises.  So there's lots to chew on as you read.  Well worth checking out and it name-drops a lot of classical music pieces which sent me to youtube for clips.  Always nice when a novel's enthusiasm's are catchy.  

later
Tom

Hi,

The first book I read in 2018 might very well be the best book I'll read in 2018.

That book is Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. I'm a bit of a fan of Mr. Harkaway ever since reading his first, amazing, book The Gone Away World, though I always considered his first book to be his best.  Well, that's no longer true.

Gnomon takes place in a near-future Britain where the government has been replaced by The System -- a massive neural network hooked up to a massive surveillance system.  Everything you do is watched, recorded, and analyzed by the System.  When decisions need to be made, the System selects an ad-hoc jury of citizens (sometimes with specialist members to answer questions) and they vote on the outcome.  When someone seems to be tending toward criminal behavior, or is suspected of having done so, they are interrogated -- their minds simply scanned and processed to determine guilt or innocence.  While all of this may seem a little creepy, to the citizens of Britain, the System is marvelous -- a perfectly transparent system that's always there keeping them safe and happy.

Meilikki Neith is a Witness Inspector, a police detective the System uses to do the legwork it can't and to investigate any odd crimes that require more than review of the CCTV footage.  She's called in to investigate the death of Diana Hunter -- a pleasantly crotchety old woman who willingly underwent interrogation and died on the table -- the first time that's ever happened.  When she goes to inspect Diana's house (with built in Faraday Cage to prevent System snooping), she's attacked by a strange person who was never seen entering or leaving the house -- which also shouldn't happen.

Neith tracks down suspects and questions them, but she also has access to Diana's mind, when Neith sleeps, she reviews/relives the interrogation as Diana.  Neith quickly discovers that Diana's memories aren't a simple auto-biography but contain the detailed histories of several other people:  a Greek financial whiz, an alchemist from antiquity, and an Ethiopian artist who regains his talent working on a project with his grand-daughter.  There's also a transhuman creature called Gnomon who should just be a memory but seems quite present in the real world as well.

Neith has a lot of questions and as she sifts through Diana's memories she arrives at the answer in the strangest way.

I don't want to get too much into this -- in part because the books is just loaded with delightful bits of prose and dialogue.  It's a book that encourages you to refer to a dictionary or wikipedia as it covers a range of interesting topics from technology to alchemy.  Obviously, it has a lot to say about the modern surveillance state, and touches on Britain's current nationalism fever, but it ranges far afield and all quite pleasantly too.

LIke most of Harkaway's novels, he leaves out a bunch of intriguing bits and pieces and then brings them all together in a fiery display of literary pyrotechnics.  The last quarter of the novel was a delight to read.

What more can I say?  Go out and give this book a spin, I think you'll really like it.

later
Tom

Hey,

A little late, but here are the last two books I read through for 2017. The second one I mostly finished in 2018 but I started it in 2017 so it still counts.

First up, Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone. This is the sixth novel in his Craft Sequence of fantasy novels and, as usual, it was a great read.  Generally, each of the stories in the Craft Sequence is stand-alone (much appreciated) but this book pulls in a couple of major characters from previous novels.

The city of Alikand is a city sitting on a magical battle site that makes reality a bit fluid.  Currently, the Iskari have moved in and are enforcing a specific reality to keep people from going mental.  To Alikand comes Kai Pohala (the offshore god creator from Full Fathom Five) searching for her sister who has sent a cryptic message suggesting she's in trouble.  Kai meets with her sister Ley, but she's fishing for a huge infusion of cash for some secret art project of hers.  Kai rebuffs her and then things go sideways.  In the process, Kai meets up with Tara Abernathy who's working for the Iskari but not necessarily with them.  Together they have to unravel a complex mystery while Ley goes off to rob a train traveling in a god-wracked wasteland.

I mean, it's a Craft Sequence book.  I love this series and the writing remains top-notch.  Great characters, quote-worthy dialogue, and a crisp plot, what can I say?  Go read this guy's work.

Next up, Barbary Station by R. E. Stearns.  Iridian is an ex-military mechanical engineer.  Adda is a computer programmer with a specialization in Systems Operations.  Together they have student debt they'll never be able to pay off -- legally.  So they decide to turn to piracy.  The most infamous pirate in the Solar System is Captain Sloane operating out of Barbary Station.  To join his crew, the two hijack a colony ship and deliver it to the station.  But instead of being hailed as competent new crew members, they discover that the pirates are trapped on the station.  The station's AI has classified them as threats and is slowly hunting them down one by one.  If they want to get off the station (never mind join the crew), Iridian and Adda will have to figure out a way to shut down the station's security system.

This was a pretty good book, though it had a bit of difficulty establishing a few of the ground-rules of the setting early on.  It didn't do anything inconsistent with the setting, there were just some statements by characters that weren't entirely clear about how the world works.  These got cleared up later, but they broke up the flow of the narrative a bit.  I realize you don't (and shouldn't) dump all the world-info whenever it gets introduced for the first time, but I feel like it could've been smoother.  

Once you get past that, things start picking up.  In particular, Adda's efforts to try and carefully poke the AI to gain an understanding of its decision processes was pretty neat.  When Iridian is given a chance to be kick-ass, you get some nice action sequences.  The book is quite well self-contained and if there is a follow-on book, I think it'll be interesting to see them tackle an actual piracy job.

And that wraps up 2017.  Next up, the traditional year-end review
Tom

Hey,

   I managed to pick up the pace on my reading so it hasn't been a month since the last review!

  First up Age of Assassins by RJ Barker.  As I've said, I prefer my heroes a bit on the older side these days because I am and I enjoy reading about characters who aren't driven by teenage emotions.  You Die When You Die was a pretty good book but the teenaged protagonist was a chore to read sometimes.  That said, here we are with another book about a young teenager trying to figure out this grown-up thing.  This is complicated by the fact that he's being raised and trained by Merela, a professional assassin.

  The book's setting has a Dark Sun vibe, people can use magic but it draws on life force so if you want to do a big magical spell, you can, but a huge section of land will become barren and lifeless.  Luckily, you can reverse that.  Unluckily, you reverse it by spilling blood onto the "sourlands" magic leaves behind.  So there's a pogrom out for people talented in magic and pretty rough existence for everyone else.

  Girton, our hero, and his master infiltrate a castle on a mysterious mission.  The mysterious mission is a set-up.  The local queen needs an assassin to prevent another assassin from killing her son.  The queen has plans for her son to take over not just the local kingdom but to marry into the High King's family and take over from there.  The son is a jerk and not terribly popular and the grandson of the previously deposed king is around.  So there's intrigue aplenty.

  Girton, of course, is just an apprentice so he winds up doing a lot of grunt work and even when he finds the important clues, he doesn't realize it until Merela puts it together.  That's not to say he's stupid or incompetent (he doesn't kill without reason, but he does kill), just that he's a teenager and there's a lot he still doesn't know.  It's a bit like a Nero Wolfe mystery in which Archie does a ton of running around and then Nero just looks up from his chair and tells you the solution.

  All in all, it was an ok book.  I'm curious to try the next one in the series, but I wasn't super blown away by it.  Certainly a good source for plots in a LARP or RPG.

  Next I read Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill and it's probably one of the better books of fiction I've read this year.  Not terribly literary, but It really sucked me in and held my attention with good characters, dialog, world-building, pacing, and even the deeper themes it touches on.

  In this book, the robots rose up and killed all of mankind (and most of the life on the planet).  The story follows Brittle, a service robot who used to work for humans and now scours the Sea of Rust, the upper Midwest of the US where the freebots try and eke out a living.  Freebots?  Oh yes, because after the robot uprising, the giant mainframe AIs said "download yourself to our servers and let us use your body.  join the One. resistance is futile".  For the most part, resistance has been pretty futile and robots who don't want to be part of one of the major mainframes are out in places like the Sea of Rust trying to keep their heads down and keep a supply of spare parts handy.

  Brittle does a lot of this -- she follows malfunctioning bots out into the wild and when they shut down, she loots them for parts -- either parts she needs or parts she can trade to get what she wants.  Coming home from a successful mission, she gets ambushed.  She survives but gets injured in the process and now she needs to secure a new core for her model or she'll go mental as well.  About this time one of the mainframes makes a major push into the Sea of Rust.

  The book alternates a bit between Brittle's narrative about what's going on and Brittle describing the rise of the AIs and their overthrow of the humans.  That sometimes annoys me (it seems like your padding the page count), but it was pretty well done here.  Although the book plays out like a robot Western or Noir, there are quieter moments where robots probe interesting philosophical questions that lead you down very different and very similar paths when your a robot and not a biological being.  Oh, and yeah, Brittle is a she and why that is so is one of the interesting questions they deal with.

  It was a solid book and I highly recommend it.

later
Tom

Hey,

  I"m way behind on reviews of the stuff I've been reading lately so let's try to fix that up.   

  To start with, I finished off the audiobook of Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome.  This is the last in his Swallows and Amazons series of books about plucky British children having adventures in various English countryside locations.  I've now read/listened to all the books in the series except for Peter Duck and Missy Lee because those books are stories the children made up about wild adventures they'd like to have (so sort of an in-series fan fiction?).  I was more interested in their "real" adventures over their imaginary ones.

  So in this book, the Walkers, the Blacketts, and the Callums are in the North Sea along with Uncle Jim who's borrowed the boat they're sailing around in (and providing a modicum of adult supervision).  Near the end of the trip, they put into a small cove on an island in order to scrub and paint the hull before returning the boat to its owner.  While the older kids work on that, the younger ones go exploring on the island and Dick makes an interesting discovery, a nesting pair of Great Northerns (loons) which aren't supposed to be found in that part of the world.

  That information falls into the hands of a Mr. Jemmeling who collects birds and their eggs and is most interested in acquiring such a rare set of specimens for his collection.  Horrified, Dick and the rest of the kids put a desperate plan into play to allow Dick to get photographic proof of the birds and to throw Mr. Jemmerling off the scent.  Scottish highlanders also make an appearance.

  The book gets a bit of flack because Mr. Jemmerling has a gun and firearms are pretty unusual in these books.  But the gun is for hunting birds and no one is ever threatened by a weapon so I'm not sure how it ranks as a bigger problem than casual English racism that crops up in the books.  Overall, I thought the book was pretty good, but there were far too many adults involved.  These books work best for me, when it's mostly the children deciding what they want to do and then going to do it.  Too many adults (or "natives") tends to disrupt the kids' natural inquisitiveness.

  On balance, I really enjoy the Swallows and Amazon series.  As I mentioned earlier, casual English racism is probably the biggest stumbling block for recommending the series to young readers.  It's not a constant thing, but every so often it really flares up (notably in Secret Waters where smearing yourself with black mud to camouflage people).  It's really too bad because in a lot of other respects, the books are well ahead of their times.  There's almost always an even split between boys and girls and the girls have at least as much agency as the boys.  The interactions between various groups of kids (especially when they first meet) is handled quite well as is the internal life of various characters when they are focused on in the story.

  I really enjoyed the series and had a lot of fun with it.  It's a product of it's times but it's also probably one of the best products of it's time and worth looking into if you want some classic YA.

later
Tom