So Dark The Night (2008)
by Cliff Burns (Download)
So Dark the Night has a similar character dynamic as Conan Doyle’s famous duo, only that Sherlock is a woman and Watson hopelessly in love with her. The story is told from the viewpoint of the later one and shows their current case, a former, rather harmless gathering of occultists who have become a shade darker. I’m not sure what I expected a novel by Cliff would look like, since I’ve read only some of his shorter work, but I surely didn’t expected such an accessible and fun read. Furthermore, I’m addicted to books that mix elements of the fantastic with detective fiction, so this was right up my alley.
As I already said, the main character dynamic is drawn from a tried and true schema, but Evgeny Nightstalk (the Watson) and Cassandra Zinnea also have elements of hardboiled/noir. Evgeny is the typical hard shell but emphatic core private dick (who still loves to fight) and Cassandra is the unattainable beauty who loves to play with fire. But there’s more to both of them. While Evgeny is always talking about how smart Cassandra is, for example, the most memorable quality of her that we see is her unwavering moral code, always willing to do what is necessary to protect the weak and helpless. She is the heart and Evgeny the fist.
There’s also a host of other interesting characters that help the two, for example a Sherlock Holmes mini-me version (Burns captures the nature of the original Sherlock perfectly, but has also fun with turning the original upside-down by giving him an unexpected weakness).
Before I close this, I have to mention how much I liked the inclusion of real events, people and stuff in the book’s own secret occult history. More than once I went to wikipedia to look something up, only to find myself traversing wikipedia for hours.
This was all a bit over the map, but it all adds up to one book I can heartily recommend. It’s a great read and I hope I will one day hold a paper edition in my hands, because this one deserves it.
Rating: 5/5
The Sagan Diary (2007)
by John Scalzi (online)
2.5 Colonial Defense Forces novel
This slim book is exactly what the title lets you expect, a kind of Diary of the character Jane Sagan. It’s a novelette, a ongoing inner monologue that describes Jane’s thoughts and feeling about many things, how she became who she is today, what she fears, what she loves and so on. John Perry (main character of Old Man’s War and her love interest) is used to highlight the difference between normal humans and the lives of the members of the special forces.
Some of Janes ramblings made me remember the one scene of Blade Runner, in the abandoned house where Deckard is hunted down by the Replicant Roy and when Roy saves Deckard and comes to peace with what he is. Replicant and Special Forces are alike, very short lives, but packed to the limit full of living. TSD is, IMHO, a very fine piece of characterization that gives you a very good look into the mindset of Jane Sagan, I feel even a deeper look than you got at John Perry during Old Man’s War. It’s an impressive feat that makes you appreciate Jane as a character even more.
Rating: 5/5
Rainbows End (2006)
by Vernor Vinge (online)
This was a small disappointment. In some ways, I think it shows how much Vinge has matured as a writer. Compared to his early books and short stories, the writing is vastly superior, it draws you immediately into it, makes you want to read on just for its own sake. Also his characters are some of the best he has done in his career. And yet, it didn’t completely work for me.
I think it was a mistake to reveal from the beginning that the main plot device was mind control technology, if this would have been revealed much further into the plot it might have made a bigger impact. This also made nearly all plot developments predictable to a degree that it was uninteresting to discover just what would happen. Only the writing and the characters was what made me read on. Another thing. The future of the book feels far too mundane. On one hand we have to believe that most of the old people seem to live in a constant state of future shock, and yet nothing that exist in this near future feels remotely astonishing or shockingly (oddly his own novella Fast Times at Fairmont High that took place in the same setting implied more radical social changes brought by the same set of technologies). It’s a nice book, but if it wins the Hugo over Blindsight or Glasshouse, I really have to wonder.
Rating: 3/5
Star Maker (1937)
by Olaf Stapledon (online)
Stapledon’s two SF classics, Last and First Men and this one, have a very strong teleological streak. The science is dated or, with the intelligent stars in later chapters, it feels like Stapledon is leaving science completely behind and going the Cyrano the Bergerac route, where every celestial body has some form of life. And still it managed to impress me. It feels like a road map for every space opera thingy written in the in the last century. But Star Maker, a book written in 1937, has more chutzpa than most of them, and a much wider scope.
Last and First Men was a future history of Earth, Star Maker is a future history of the whole universe (and with the creation myth section at the end, even a future history of the whole sequence of multiple universes). The plot is, well, Star Maker could have easily been called The Quest for God. All endeavors, from the first isolated planetary civilizations to the galactic league of worlds or the united, awakened galactic minds, all strife to meet the Star Maker, to understand the big Why of everything. What they find isn’t very comforting. We are not just a speck of dust in the spatial and temporal dimensions of one universe, the same holds true for the whole sequence of creation.
As much as I like the scope of Star Maker, the many ideas that now have become so common in SF, I wouldn’t force the book on anyone. It’s a dense read, only a novel in the widest sense, and it is dated. Still, if someone reads through the whole thing, he will read one of the finest works of the last century, a bold trip through the realms of philosophy, imagination and speculation about the future.
Rating: 5/5
Last and First Men (1930)
(Great)
written by Olaf Stapledon
can be read online
I was tempted to categorize Last and First Men under non-fiction, since this is how it reads. It’s a speculative history of the future of mankind, and reads like a history book, with the difference that the arrow of time goes forward from the present, not forward from some point in our past. Reading Stapledon’s masterwork is both extremely exhausting and exhilarating. It’s not an easy read, information is densely packed into every page, yet somehow the writing still reads very poetic and lyrical. Some people suggest to skip the first chapters, since their speculations about the near future is so obviously wrong.
I advise not to do this. Not only seem the speculations about the near future wrong, most of the long future projections are equally quaint. And yet, despite how far Stapledon’s future history has diverged from the real history, and how much has changed in recent cosmology, I’m in awe at the deepness and richness of Stapledon’s vision. Exactly those events where his future diverged from our own created a strange and weird and fascinating near future. And while the far future has no technology comparable to computers and computer networks, his telepathy seems to works, at least on the social level, in a similar manner.
Unlike in recent SF, inspired by Vinge’s singularity concept, change and progress takes eons in Stapledon’s future. And it does not always go forward, not every new order of mankind is more enlightened than the previous. Men and with it civilizations strifes for great heights, only to be pulled down again and again, with civilization and even history completely lost. Sometimes even with men degraded to beings more like animals than men. All these seemingly endless cycles of strife and fall are told by one of the last men, the 18th order of beings that trace their lineage back to us, over a time span of 400 million years.
But Last and First Men isn’t just a future history, it was a way for Stapledon to contemplate or philosophize about the destiny of mankind and about our place in the universe, about the endless pain and misery, and also joy, created in the long history of mankind. Why does it matter being here, when in the end everything will die and disappear? And while Stapledon himself called his book a tragedy, the way he tackled and thought about and gave answer to these questions transcended the tragic nature of his book and made it something more. A thing of rare beauty, of rich imagination and deep thought.
Piercing A Veil (1999)
by Allen Varney
10th Earthdawn novel (online)
Take away everything a person has, from material wealth to his social connections, even his sense of self, and you expect to see a broken existence. Yet Varney does something unexpected, using the loss of everything to let the main hero come fully into himself, becoming a unstoppable force of nature due to his training. It’s a nice play with expectations, and very well done. The rest of the book is okay, writing, plot and the other stuff, but not on the same level as this ingenious twist. On one hand I wanted to applaud the author for what he did, on the other I was a bit disappointed that the rest of the book was so average. Still, it’s okay reading material and a good way to kill some time.
Rating: 3/5
Overclocked (2007)
(Great)
written by Cory Doctorow
can be read online
Overclocked is a collection that achieves something rare. While completely steeped into old SF, mining the nostalgia and concepts of classics, it also successful at placing itself at the cutting edge of SF. These are new riffs on old themes, like the mix of the post-apocalyptic with the myth that the internet would survive a nuclear war. The picture of spam endlessly replicating after most humans have died is both funny as hell, as it is scary in some ways. And yet, like Postman by Brin, it’s a post-apocalyptic story that is about remaking civilization, about hope for a better future. It goes into the face of every survivalist fiction that revels at the end of the world, by making you believe that it won’t take thousands of years for humanity to come back.
One big theme, noticeable in I, Robot and more openly in Printcrime and After the Siege is about how we deal with copyright. But if we go even more meta, the whole book is a statement about that. Most of the stories in Overclocked couldn’t have been written if those who want to enforce an ever more restrictive copyright aren’t stopped. Overclocked shows us what a rich field SF is by sharing and reusing the ideas of others, but going into a dialog with writers who are already dead, by building on those who came before us and by allowing those who will follow us do the same with our contributions. This collection shows us what sharing can give us, but also that it’s something we have to fight for (maybe not as hard as in After the Siege, hopefully this future can be avoided).
Printcrime
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Anda’s Game
I, Robot
I, Row-Boat
After the Siege
Missile Gap (2006)
by Charles Stross (online)
Imagine someone took the whole surface of Earth after the Cuba crisis and stuck it onto an Alderson Disk in another galaxy. Imagine that what humans see of the milky way shows visible signs of megascale engineering. This is the starting point of Stross’s novella. Humanity is at a loss to explain what happened, trying to cope with their situation, still in the throes of the Cold War. The first move on both sides is to play the old game of superpowers. But the game has changed.
Missile Gap has the same attraction his earlier story A Colder War had, and a bit of the same style. The more you read, the more hopeless the whole situation looks. You know something bad will happen to humanity, but you still want to know: How, Why and When. Funnily, Missile Gap doesn’t have much new ideas, some of the scary content can be found in countless other horror or SF novels, but the way Stross mixes the stuff with some new ideas makes for an astonishingly fresh read. This is chilling stuff, and in the tradition of SF that reaches back to Well’s War of the Worlds, humanity isn’t at the top of the foot chain and there’s no chance it can close the gap.
Rating: 4/5
Agent to the Stars (1997)
(Good)
written by John Scalzi
can be read online
Synopsis: The Yherajk, peaceful aliens that look unfortunately like slimy blobs, hire an agent to introduce them to humanity, since they fear humanity might be scared if they just drop out of the sky.
When I saw the cover and the title I expected to get something cheesy, which I did. What I didn’t expected was to get sucked into the story from the first chapter and not let go until I reached the end. AttS could be called fluff, but even fluff has to be well written to draw people in and make them read it, which Scalzi accomplished with seemingly ease. AttS is, even more so than his other SF books, the supreme gateway drug for SF. I takes place in the here and now, most characters are easy to relate to, it’s funny and doesn’t take itself too serious. The story may have been too smooth at times, some problems were too easily solved and the ending felt like a contrived Hollywood Happy Ending, but maybe that was intentional, after all it’s about Hollywood and movies. Overall AttS has a high huggability ratio, is one of those novels that can make you feel good if you allow yourself to get into a sentimental mood.
Starfish (1999)
(Great)
written by Peter Watts
1st novel of the Rifters series / can be read online
Synopsis: Lenie Clark works at Beebe Station, a station at the bottom of the ocean at the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Soon she realizes why she is down there, why the grid authority allows people like Lenie to work at the bottom of the ocean. She and others like her have a mental makeup that some would call crazy, but exactly this makes them ideal workers in the extreme environment under the sea. At least until you want to get rid of them.
The main virtue of Starfish is the evocation of how it must feel to live deep down in the ocean. The book takes you to a strange, dark place where everything is under pressure, where everything is different from above. And yet some people not only live and survive there, they thrive and learn that it’s something they never had above the ocean, a place to call home, where they belong. These characters are, as the someone in the book describes them, bent but not completely broken, so they can fit where normal people couldn’t live. Watts is very adept at making these bent people into characters you care for. Another strength of the book is how Watts slowly but steadily increases the pace, as if he has worked a narrative equivalent to increasing water pressure into the plot. A small detail about his future here, a plot twist there, until it all comes together into an apocalyptic showdown where the good guys survival is a bad thing, and the bad guys actions the last hope for humanity. For a first novel this is an impressive book, full of neat science fictional ideas combined with excellent characterization and great plotting.
