Earth Made of Glass (1999)
by John Barnes
2nd Thousand Cultures novel
Two colonies on the same world feasting on perpetual hate for each other, slowly sliding toward a violent eruption that will annihilate both. This dissolution is mirrored on the personal level of the main characters, albeit with less violence and less clear-cut reasons, at least to Giraut, whose marriage seems to break at the seams with him unable to figure out the reason why.
Where One Million Open Doors was just an excellent, entertaining, smart read, Earth Made of Glass is this bit better that makes it brilliant. One warning up front, Barnes can be a mean bastard and here he is full on in bastard mode. This book is a gut-wrenching, painful yet incredible compelling read. Near the end some parts of it make you feel like walking over broken glass. Part of it is that everyone is trying, and the possibility of success always remains, even if you see Barnes setting everything up for a big fall. The outcome is never clear and the reader always hoping that the worst doesn’t come to pass. And then it gets even worse. At times it’s painful to go on, but hard to put down.
Rating: 5/5
A Million Open Doors (1992)
by John Barnes
1st Thousand Cultures novel
AMOD is a nice implementation of the unreliable narrator, a trick Barnes has often and to great effect deployed in his fiction. It’s about a young man leaving his world for a stupid reason, only to get a better view on his previous life and his own culture. It’s partly a coming-of-age novel, where the hero is forced to grow up and confront his own inadequacies.
On the not so personal level AMOD is often seen as an analogy to globalization and how this effects individual societies, but there are other questions raised that seem even more crucial than globalization to me. For example how AMOD and its sequels explore the nature of the concept culture and its significance to humans and the meta-civilization of the Thousand Cultures. If you aren’t even sure that the concept of culture has any meaning in a post-scarcity meta-civilization like the Thousand Cultures, then the effect of globalization on individual cultures becomes less significant. Which, at least to me, shows that the Thousand Cultures series is more than just a globalization analogy and about problems that have no (or not yet) a simile in our world. But that’s how all good SF is, not just a mirror of the present, but an attempt to trace the shape of the future.
Rating: 5/5
Gaudeamus (2004)
by John Barnes
Gaudeamus is a strange beast. It’s an extremely fun book that mixes science fiction with a light element of meta-fiction. The author John Barnes is one of the main characters, whose friend Travis Bismarck tells him a strange story about conspiracies, super-science and first contact. Each time Travis visits Barnes, he tells a piece of the story and each time it’s even more outrageous than the previous part.
In the hands of a lesser writers this may have turned into the worst kind of navel gazing. As it happens, Barnes description of his own fictional self is not too kind and thus makes everything more or less believable. It also makes it fun to play the game of comparing the real and the fictional Barnes. The juxtaposition of the mundane existence of Barnes and the amazing adventures of his friend makes Gaudeamus work. The mundane elements ground the whole book and the weird stuff Travis tells gives everything the extra kick of tension and adventure. While everything is told in a lightweight tone, there are serious elements to the story, like the analogy of native Americans selling their land and how they were still bound by something they barely understood or thought a joke in the first place. But above everything, it’s an entertaining read that enthralls you from first to the last page.
Rating: 5/5
Halting State (2007)
by Charles Stross
Halting State scratches the same itch as Accelerando and Glasshouse did, even if it’s so much near future that it feels like being right around the corner. Just blink for a second and its future will have arrived. It’s the novel Rainbows Ends wanted to be, but failed to be, or to say it another way, if William Gibson would be still writing science fiction, he might have written it. It’s the most relevant near future SF book I’ve read for some time.
It’s a world of heavily augmented realities and multiplayer online games invading everyday-reality to the point that both can’t be neatly separated anymore. Those technologies have changed the future as deeply as the internet and mobile phones have the present, even if those changes wouldn’t be apparent to some time traveler from an earlier century (the book explains this at some point very nicely) and thus makes an important observation. Real change is often not something big and flashy, like flying cars or strange clothes, but something that doesn’t look like much, but runs deep.
Apart from all the geek/high-tech buzzword bingo Stross rolls out to woe the audience that already liked Accelerando and Glasshouse, one of the main strengths is that he makes characters you can care about. Despite all the high-tech geekery, despite all the smart observation about change and brilliant ideas like tapping a ubiquitous source (multiplayer online games) for real world purposes, it’s the characters that make the heart of the novel and propel the reader from start to finish.
It’s also a SF novel where the transition from being immensely relevant to very much completely out-dated will happen sooner than later (compared to other SF). It’ll be fun to see how much he got right and how much he got wrong.
Rating: 5/5
Crescent City Rhapsody (2000)
by Kathleen Ann Goonan
1th novel of the Nanotech-Quartet
A rhapsody was a work of many pieces stitched together. This sentence on the last page of the novel explains so much about my reaction to the book. The whole narrative and theme of the nanotech-quartet is informed by Jazz, a form of music I can’t stand the least. In this particular case the book is also structured like a rhapsody, which I admit is, whether done consciously or nor, a clever trick. But it doesn’t mean it’s successful at making this a better book. But as I said, I can’t stand Jazz (I’m more a metal guy) and this might be the reason why I didn’t enjoy reading it as much. I wonder if people who like Jazz are better accustomed to appreciate the structure of the book.
Crescent City Rhapsody is a prequel, written after the first two books in the nanotech-jazz sequence, but set in the very beginning. It follows a wide cast of people who live through the onset of the nanotech-change that utterly transforms the world. It has some very fascinating and novel ideas, and it’s cool to see the world transformed by nanotech-plagues. It’s a postapocalpytic-nanotech-run-amok novel. That’s the good thing.
The start of the novel is perfect, one of the main (and more interesting) characters gets killed and soon revived. But after that the pacing slows down to a crawl and we have to follow the lives of too many different people, who always get cut short when it becomes interesting following their lives. Until around page 300 the book is rather tedious to follow, even if it’s well written. Then the really interesting things start to happen, which Kyoto infected by a nanotech-surge that makes people into zombies and events starting to spiral out of control. But even despite the plot becoming more interesting, the book lacks an emotional core, trying to make the reader invested in too many people and ending up with no one caring at all about any character. I really appreciated the setting and the nanocalypse, but would have liked a less-is-more approach on the character and subplot front.
Rating: 3/5
Spin State (2003)
by Chris Moriarty
The most irritating thing about Spin State is that everything about it tries to make you believe it’s hard SF, the title, the quotes, the reference section at the end of the book and some reviews on the net, but when you actually read it, you realize that the setting and the book is as much hard SF, as Simmon’s Hyperion/Endymion sequence is.
The second annoying thing about the book is that large sections of the book deal with mining that makes you feel like you’re reading a novel about mining in the 18th century. I’m aware that this doesn’t make it completely unbelievable, technology isn’t evenly distributed in any civilization, but assuming that what they dig out is the most important thing in this future setting, you’ll wonder why the UNSC (the major power) doesn’t just take over and installs a modern and secure mining operation, that uses remote-controlled robots instead of humans.
The third annoying thing is that the book is far too long, without providing an equal amount of content. A much tighter narrative could have helped make the story more focused and thus more concise.
Despite these gripes, it’s an interesting future, where baseline humans try to control and contain any activity of transhuman powers, be it biological constructs or artificial intelligences. The book starts out as a mystery, but at the end the mystery has become a side-plot to the conflict between baseline humans and transhuman powers. It’s far from perfect, but at times it’s a good read, sometimes, for a few moments, even passing into the domain of greatness. And it does provide what everyone is expecting from the beginning, the system frozen on the edge between the baseline past and a future with a multitude of transhuman beings, has been allowed to unfreeze and go forward.
Rating: 4/5
The Engine of Recall (2005)
by Karl Schroeder
This is a bit of a ho-hum collection for me. I expected it to be much more mindblowing, than what I got in the end, which was a collection of okay pieces that felt just a bit too generic and formulaic for my taste. Schroeder is known for his cool, cutting edge ideas and fascinating world building, but this seems mostly absent here.
The most interesting concept was the alien in Solitaire and even that story telegraphed the ending nearly from the first paragraph. That’s one of the problems I had with the stories, they felt like variations of the same old stuff I’ve read for years and I almost always knew what would happen. Best example, The Engine of Recall, which used the old and stale plot of an mysterious alien device that revels that the aliens are just like us in one major aspect. Richard Morgan did something similar in his novel Broken Angels, yet there it felt fresh and really like a revelation. It’s not that the ideas are nothing new, its how they are delivered. Schroeder’s prose is lacking.
For example in his introductions to the stories he talks about the unifying theme of his collection, the inaccessible places humans normally don’t visit. As can be expected, these place get visited in the stories, yet Schroeder’s writing makes these strange and alien places look quite boring and mundane. Another problem are characters and their motivations. Sometimes I felt like he used a checklist for every story ([x] explained the main trauma that motivates the character to the reader, [x] trauma rears its head and characters acts on it), which made most of his characters one-dimensional and simplistic.
All that makes it look worse than it really is. If you don’t expect mindblowing ideas or excellent prose, but just some reading material to pass the time, TEoR might do it.
Rating: 3/5
Embracing the Starlight (2003)
by Dave Smeds
This is nearly a flawless collection of short stories by an author I’ve never read before. The writing is excellent and couldn’t be much better, but not all of the stories were equally of interest to me. The two Vietnam inspired stories that close the collection, the alternate history about the aging musician and some of the others just didn’t capture me. And sometimes the endings felt too simplistic and convenient, for example the otherwise brilliant Suicidal Tendencies had a solution that just felt emotional unrealistic, the sudden revelation of the daughter not quite believable. The high point of the collection was IMHO Fearless, mixing virtual reality and karate in an interesting way. It somehow reminded me of the movie Best of the Best, because like it, instead of emphasizing the action aspect, it showed karate as a force of personal growth. For this story alone it was worth reading this collection. Another highpoint of the collection are the extensive introductions to each story, I’d like to see other authors follow Smeds’s example. Overall, well worth reading.
Rating: 4/5
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
by Ursula K. Le Guin
TLoH, my favorite LeGuin novel, is quite untypical for LeGuin and can be be allocated to the class of SF novels that take one idea to its logical extreme. It’s about a guy whose dreams become reality and who is used as a tool by his therapist to reshape reality. The main antagonist of the novel is actually trying to change the world for good, but alas it doesn’t work that well.
What I like is the deliberate way in which the plot is set up. Very small changes at first, that make the protagonist look like he’s just a bit crazy, even in the eyes of the reader, until everything falls together and you’ll wonder how things turn out. I also like the dynamic between protagonist (Orr) and antagonist (Haber). First Orr is the one who is a bit insane while Haber looks completely grounded and sane, but with each reality shift that balance changes until the end of the book sees the situation reversed.
Rating: 5/5
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Instead of trying to tell a story first, this book clobbers the reader repeatedly over the head with its obvious allegory on cultural and ecological rape through humans. This time the humans do their nasty deeds to an alien culture and LeGuin successfully repeats her standard theme of the evils that men can do.
What doesn’t work is that everyone in the book is a stereotype. None of the characters has more character than just the position the author has moved them into, playing out their destined role without ever showing a trace of being more than just a figurehead. Occasionally I like writers who can be a bit preachy. LeGuin is not one of them. YMMV.
Rating: 2/5
