The Entropy Pump

The first of the Dresden files, where Harry Dresden and his world gets introduced. Well, the book is as good as the first time I read it. It doesn’t start slowly, instead it goes right for the action with some grisly murders and a new drug that allows its user to open their third eye. Some of the more famous characters are introduced, like Karrin Murphy, Susan Rodriguez and Johnny Marcone. It’s a fun and fast read that is perfect as the first book in a series, since you’re instantly hooked and want more.

One of the strength of the Dresden books is how they manage to incorporate very normal situations (trying to help someone, trying to be a good friend, disappointing good friends) into a life and death struggle. As a reader one can easily empathize with Dresden, despite his adventures and the horrors he endures. Butcher manages to synthesize Harry’s world into experiences we all had, which makes these books such addictive reads.

My favorite book about meme. It’s far more concise and analytical than other books with the same subject, starting with trying to get a grip on what meme are and how they function and then giving some explanations for various phenomena using the meme-concept. Unlike other books it’s very low on any of the hype about meme, instead it’s a serious exploration of the concept that tries to be more scientific-minded.

There’s one area where the book left me unsatisfied, when it smoothly gave a non-answer to the question what meme really are. So far, trying to pin-point meme physically has proven entirely futile, an exercise born from the gene-analogy. But analogies go only so far. I think approaching meme as some discrete, physical units isn’t very useful, instead one should approach them as abstract patterns, mental tools for modeling how certain kinds of information spread and their effect on our culture and individuals, something that the book itself does marvelously in its second half. Meme are a bit like mathematical concepts, not real (apart from those of us who are platonists), but still very useful for explaining certain things.

This slim little book was one of the best reads I’ve had for some time. It’s a fictionalized non-fiction book, which means it’s written as a dialog between different characters who are mostly talking heads for espousing what Jane Jacobs thinks the moral foundation of commerce and politics are. Nothing if not ambitious.

Initially I feared that it would be some didactic diatribe, but her approach reminds me more of behavioristic scientist, who doesn’t look at individuals but at behaviors of populations and records them. My second fear after I’ve got a little further into the book was that it’s another of these personality type theories that sort people into certain boxes. But I was also wrong on that account.

Jacobs theory goes as this: there are two types of behaviors that guide our live, one derived from trading and one derived from holding territories. Both have a set of rules, but these are contradictory. Both systems are needed for society to function, but organization should only adopt one set of rules. Adopting rules from both systems produces amoral hybrids that corrupt not only the institutions themselves but society at large.

The strength of the book is how utterly convincing her arguments are (there’s a brilliant explanation for why caste systems have existed throughout history). Once you’ve read it, it’s hard not to look at commerce and politics with a different perspective. There’s a consistency to her logic that is hard to refute. I have grown weary of overly simplistic explanations for anything, but despite that caution I can’t help but find myself convinced that she onto something.

When I started reading this monster of a book what I liked most was the world-building. While I felt that most characters were as believable as soap opera stars (soap operas being big in the future Commonwealth), the level of detail of Hamilton’s future is incredibly high and all of it is fascinating. The Commonwealth is a very conservative post-human culture that has beaten death and aging (they have both rejuvenation technology as well as Ndoli jewels (Learning to be Me, Greg Egan) aka mind stacks (Takeshi Kovacs, Richard Morgan) which record memories). There’s even the possibility to upload your memories into an artificial intelligence, but it’s not the same as existing as free uploads.

Still, embodied existence remains very much the norm. What concerns most people is the same as today: sex, money, power, fame and to an extend their social connections. But the rejuvenation technology has subtly changed humanity and Hamilton uses his big space opera as a canvas to explore how. Against that the threat of an alien power seems slightly mundane and less interesting. But while initially his character work and the alien threat seemed less interesting than the world-building, there came a point when I realized that the book had hooked me. Despite the enormous size it’s a speedy read. And the characterization, while initially too superficial for my taste, becomes more appealing with time. I especially liked how Hamilton managed to make inspector Paula Myo appear human after all at the end of the book.

My only gripe with the book is that due to the size and the number of plotlines it’s hard not to get bored when a less interesting plotline or character replaces the plotline/character you’re following momentarily. There’s also a certain amount of bloat, but it’s arguably a point in favor of the book if you like massive reads.

The accompanying collection to the Destiny’s Children trilogy covers similar ground as Vacuum Diagrams, the accompanying collection to the earlier Xeelee novels. It collects stories from the time of the Qax-occupation to the farthest future where the stars are dying and thus, instead of picking merely one slice of time of the tapestry of the Xeelee-sequence it tries to allow a panoramic view of Baxter’s future history. Like other Baxter collections the stories are all well written, full of engaging plots, characters and interesting ideas. At times the whole Xeelee-sequence begins to creak continuity-wise, as some elements seem to contradict each other and some stories seem to tries to retcon earlier depictions of events, but mostly the whole chronology still works more or less. There’s even a new angle on what happens in the farthest future, with Earth’s spacetime getting changed. A chronology on Baxter’s own site implies that there are stories still not collected, that depict what happens on that far future Earth. I hope there’s another collection down the line that will collect these and all the other remaining Xeelee-stories that weren’t in Resplendent and Vacuum Diagrams.

Wow, what a beast. The three books of the Destiny’s Children series were really something unique. All of them clocking in at around 500 pages, but due to the density of the content it felt like much more. The only thing that remains to be read is Resplendent, the obligatory and probably excellent collection to complement it.

I read a review about the book that complained about the implausibility of the near future scenario, which made me going WTF after reading it. How can you complain about something like that, when there’s the extremely outre idea of temporal finiteness and connectedness, which allows the Transcendence to change history by traveling as far as possible into the future to come out in the past again. Apart from the fact that the manipulation of the timeline and the whole concept of the Transcendence itself is described as vague as possible and feels more like magic than something that should turn up in SF, it makes you wonder why the Transcendence gets all up in a huffy about redemption but does nothing about the Xeelee.

Maybe you have to grow up with a Christian background to really feel the moral conflict that lies at the center of the whole book, the need for redemption, which I found completely grotesque. For me, the whole thing is a non-issue. So the Transcendence through its human origin had blood on its hands. So what, nobody’s perfect. Move on and create a better future, a finer world. That’s how you redeem the past. Instead, no, the Transcendence died off, which actually made it much worse, as the humans in the future could have needed someone who could talk to the Xeelee on the same level, who could have built a bridge to them.

The reason for the death of the Transcendence made as much sense as Padme dying from a broken heart in Return of the Sith. The plot called for it and nothing else. The constraint was always that humanity had to fall in a final conflict with the Xeelee, something that made sense in the context of the early Xeelee-series, as humanity had been described as waging a senseless war over eons. But since that war and that insanity had long been gone at the time of the Transcendence, the whole chronology of the Xeelee-series didn’t seem to make sense anymore. The only way how you could explain that was by letting the Transcendence die and by letting humanity relapse into their old Xeelee-hating pattern. Pretty stupid explanation, but at least the continuity of the series got preserved.

Now, all this might seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, which I did. But after the brilliant first two books in the series, I expected something more from this one, something that truly managed to transcend the whole chronology of the original series by reshaping to timeline to create a finer world. One were humanity and Xeelee managed to communicate. Instead we get an annoying search for redemption plot. Merely writing a good book didn’t cut it in this case, I wanted something better.

I was interested in reading this since it was announced by the new SF&F&H publisher Haikasoru. It’s about an unknown alien race that partly dismantles Mercury to build a ring around the sun with unfortunate consequences for humanity. One reason for my interest was because the set-up sounded like stuff I would really enjoy and second, because I wondered how Japanese SF, and Japanese hard SF in particular, would compare to similar stuff from the English speaking world. To be honest, I don’t see much of a difference, neither in style nor substance.

This doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s not in the same league as some of my favorite hard SF writers, like Egan or Watts or Baxter, but of equal quality as, say Mike Brotherton. Which means it’s a good read, but nothing extraordinary. While the SFnal aspects are quite fascinating, like the reason for the ring and the true nature of the aliens, the story lacks something in the characterization department. Aki, the main character, remains most of the time emotional closed to other characters and the reader as well. While she’s a staple of hard SF, the info-seeking and obsessive scientist with a cold exterior, other hard SF writers managed to convey the rich mental life of such characters much better. This, sadly makes the book not as compelling as it could have been.

One thing that strains credulity a bit is the belief of the aliens that their higher form of mind in combination with their level of technology has made them independent from the need to adapt to the physical universe. All they did was to ensure their own destruction, if something bigger and meaner would appear in their future lightcone. That’s not a complete fault of the book, as the author seems aware that the aliens talk hogwash, but it makes one question the intelligence of the aliens. Maybe they aren’t so different from humans after all, where stupidity comes hand in hand with intelligence most of the time.

When I read the first book of the Destiny’s Children trilogy I thought I had figured out where Baxter was going with this (using human hives to retcon and thus better explain the idiotic war against the Xeelee). I was wrong, but that’s not so bad, as this book provides a very rich and dense story in its own right. It’s about the final war between humanity and the Xeelee concerning the dominance over the Milky Way.

There’s so much about the book that I think merits mentioning that it’s hard to find a good starting point. Better than any previous attempts it manages to convey to horror and futility of the war against the Xeelee. At times it reminds me of Warhammer 40k, which is similar in that humanity is tied to wage an endless war all over our home galaxy. The main difference between the two settings is that at least in the Warhammer 40k universe there is a good justification for everything, whereupon there is none in the Xeelee universe, which makes Baxter’s setting even grimmer.

Another interesting aspect of Baxter’s future is that humanity has all the technology to go post-human, but hasn’t due to the dominant philosophy that has forged humanity into the war machine that it is. All divergence from the human baseline, all kinds of technological progress or social changes are greatly mistrusted and feared. Imagine Charles Stross’s Glasshouse, after the bad guys have won. That’s the kind of future that could have followed from there: xenophobic, hostile and repressive as hell.

Exultant also sheds some light on the background and evolution of the Xeelee, some of which tries very hard to crash your suspension of disbelief (cosmological inflation and the baryon asymmetry are consequences of live tinkering with the universe in its early stages). The depiction of the Xeelee also seems less forgiving than in previous novels of the sequence. Instead of the all-powerful technological gods that try their best not to harm humanity in its insane rage, they are shown as aloof, all-powerful technological gods who don’t really care for less developed races in the galaxy. In many ways, this harsher depiction of the Xeelee makes much more sense considering some of the actions (or actions not taken) from the earlier stories and novels.

Overall, another excellent entry in the Xeelee sequence. Very grim in places, but always an exciting read and the ending really is one of those big, satisfying finales that are extremely hard to do well.

Stephen Baxter is one of the few writers who manages to publish collections with a 100% hit rate and Vacuum Diagrams is no exception. It’s a companion volume to his early Xeelee sequence (Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring) and covers stories from the first time humanity ventures beyond the Earth up to the farthest future where the sad remnants of humanity try to escape a Xeelee-build pocket universe. The breadth of Baxter’s future history is truly astonishing and makes for some fascinating reading material. Each story is a little gem: engaging characters, marvelous settings and neat explorations of hard SFnal ideas.

Baxter isn’t for everyone, typically for British writers this is a far cry from the gung-ho optimism of American science fiction. His stories can be rather depressing at times (no wonder when you have a government that understands 1984 as a How To Guide), but at least there’s always a glimmer of hope. There are no Hollywood endings, but mere survival in the face of death or worse never felt sweeter.

This felt like a rewrite of Baxter’s first novel, in more than one way. I already tried reading this some years back, but stopped because the first pages were so dreary. Why a rewrite of Raft? Well, its a marvelous physical setting (artificially designed microscopic humans who have colonized parts of a neutron star), a generic Baxter typical social order (a repressive society with strong class lines like in Raft) and nearly the same plot as in Raft (outsiders enter the repressive society, have to overcome hardships only to save it later). It’s also part of the Xeelee sequence, but like Raft it’s more of a side story.

That said, the physical setting really compensates for the start of the book. Especially the biology of the humans and the general ecology of the neutron star is fascinating. And while the first part – the first hundred pages of the novel – are rather dreary, once the outside threat intervenes the story and the pacing becomes much better. While I already knew the purpose of the neutron star, for those who don’t know it’s a neat revelation. And finding out the relationship between the microscopic humans and the colonists and the nature of the core wars was also quite satisfying.

Overall one of the weaker novels by Baxter, but still worth reading if one can stomach the beginning.