The Twelve by Justin Cronin (3 stars)

The Passage was a very strong book, what of its successor? Sadly disappointing.

I opened The Twelve to find myself back at year zero, immediately after the release of the virus. Sigh. Cronin intricately led us through the release of the virus in the first book, so I wasn't at all interested in taking two steps back.

Nevertheless, I dug in and was once again impressed with Cronin's character building: 'last stand in Denver' was brilliant, and PTSD-denial-Lily was quite well-drawn in the early novel. Although that's not to say I liked reading her passages, they were really annoying, and made me want to slap her, but that was the point. Here she is, in full-delusion mode, musing about where she could go for dinner, despite there being virals ready to eat her outside her front door:

They had a marvelous patio draped with vines of fragrant flowers, and the most wonderful chef - he had visited their table once - who had trained at Cordon Bleu. Pierre? Francois? The man could do the most amazing thing with sauces, teasing the deepest flavor from even the simples dishes...

And I thought the reasoning for her self-inflicted delusion was actually quite well constructed. Later in the book I thought she was also good in her mad queen of hearts role.

Danny the autistic busdriver I could have done without. Not only did it start to feel like the mentally ill survivors club, but Danny seemed to be copied from Tom Cullen in The Stand. In fact, I commented on the Passage being less mystical than The Stand as a good thing, but Cronin obviously read my review and took it as criticism because The Twelve is every bit as mystical as The Stand.

The worst part of this was that the storyline with Danny, 'last stand in Denver' and the pink-punk chick was unceremoniously dropped, presumably to reappear in the third book. It felt like pushing through a lot of packing material to find out someone sent you an empty box.

At least Danny was a real character. I have no idea what is up with Lore, whose character seems to be solely defined by who she is having sex with. I was assuming she was a spy for the homeland red-eyes, but it seems not, so I suspect she has some sinister Zero-related role to play in the final book.

One of my favourite parts of the book was the massacre in the field. The tension was unbelievable, it was obvious something was going to happen, but the actual events were quite unexpected and it felt like a return to form. Hardboxes, scary virals, eking out a living in the shadow of danger.

Unfortunately as the plot continues it makes less and less sense. Here come the spoilers.

After Amy visits Carter's lair, which was awesome, we descend into what feels like a screenplay sketch: there's little character development, the plot follows along in a predictable direction, and the sinister feel of the whole world just evaporates. Why did the 12 leave their armies of virals behind to join the humans for a drac convention? Sure they need a stable human population, but they have all the power, they can dictate the terms. It felt like Cronin just needed to get done with The Twelve to focus on Zero in the final book.

Don't expect to fully understand what is going on without re-reading The Passage. Despite re-reading my review, the wikipedia summary, and the clumsy biblical recap at the beginning, it wasn't enough for when Cronin finally got back to the original story 200 pages in. He expects you to recall a lot of the details and relationships from the previous novel.

I'll still read the next book, let's hope he can bring it home.

3 stars.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (4 stars)

Quick, movie's out, read the book again! Since Peter Jackson chose to stretch one small children's book into 3 long movies it turns out you can easily read the book chapters covered by the movie faster than you can watch the movie, and reading the whole book only takes a few hours.

As a children's book I think it is pretty damn good. You can see Tolkien building up ideas for Lord of the Rings: the easily-killed but numerous spiders are the building blocks for the much more sinister and powerful Shelob, the swords taken from the trolls were very reminiscent of the swords acquired from the Barrow-wight and used to kill the Nazgul, and the Battle of Five Armies is a smaller scale template for the epic battle of Helm's Deep.

On a less positive note, I found the foreshadowing fairly annoying, and I'm not sure why it is there. Maybe Tolkien thought kids needed to be reassured that everything was going to work out in the end, or needed all the dots explicitly connected?

...which shows he was a wise elf and wiser than the men of the town, though not quite right, as we shall see in the end.

...And the knotted ropes are too slender for my weight. Luckily for him that was not true, as you will see.

Great children's book, and I'm going to score it as such, I certainly loved it as a kid.

4 stars.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

Miéville drops you straight into a foot of New Crobuzon muck:

It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protuding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering...

Some people got sick of reading about how dirty New Crobuzon is, but when it is said like this, I could read it all day:

Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The scene-setting and the prose are simply fantastic. If you had to look up 'troglodytic', keep your dictionary close by for 'liminal, 'autopoiesis', 'deracinated', 'stygian', and 'etiolated'. I didn't know whether to be impressed by these, or annoyed, it felt like Miéville had lost a bet and had to include half a 'word a day' calendar in the novel.

But it's hard to stay mad at a dark, dirty steampunk world with insecto-humanoids, menancing mind controlling aliens, and mechanical super-intelligences. Miéville's city-world is fantastically imagined and described. Remaking, magic-come-bio-engineering-on-LSD, is particularly horrifying and grotesque, especially when used as punishment:

A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

And that's not even close to the most disturbing example, think about what remaking means for a red-light district. And yes, Miéville describes it.

Isaac I liked, although I had trouble imagining him and his voice - the many 'Yag, mate' phrases could have been cockney or even Australian. I got sick of the pseudo-scientific crisis theory discussions:

So I'm a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified...you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej's mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities....

But I'm totally with Isaac as regards to Palgolak:

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once....He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

And I have to admit the crisis engine as a power source for the Construct Council steampunk supercomputer (punch cards!) and its minions is a storyline I wish was followed more. Steampunk skynet:

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

I enjoyed the Aliens/Predator-style slake-moth hunt, but I felt a significant disconnect between the descriptive world-building of the early novel and the alien top-gun style dogfight battles.

So maybe the climax was a little silly, but it was definitely entertaining. The denouement was horrible though. A tacked-on boring sequence of events, a bizarre moral dilemma, and a walkout. Ending a book like this was always going to be tough, but this really detracted from the whole experience.

4.5 stars

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (4 stars)

Matter: what kinds of heaps its piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him.

Indeed, scoffing at the physical world, and disdainful of meatspace, Rajaniemi's post-singularity caper continues. Of course if you don't like how matter is piled up, having knowledge of some secret names will let you reshape this wildcode desert:

The Names are the names of the Aun, and by calling them you control the world, access the functionality built into the foglets in Earth's atmosphere, rock and water by the ancients.

Rajaniemi evokes Arabian Nights and biblical parables with passages like 'The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon':

Before the cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer's son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun - the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hears of men.

I've waited too long to write this review, but the overall vibe I got from this book is that it was designed to fill in the world in preparation for a grand finale. Rajaniemi adds more complexity and character to the world created in the Quantum Thief: there are interesting plot reveals, some twists, and we get to know Jean and Mieli better. But I was mostly left with a feeling of anticipation. I also found myself less interested in this desert being mined for gogols than the complex society of the Oubliette.

I await the next installment eagerly.

Oh, I can fake social niceties perfectly well, but it is just slave gogols moving my face, you understand. My emotions are outsourced. My private utility functions and pleasures are...quite different from yours.

4 stars

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (4.5 stars)

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.

While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.

I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.

I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory.

Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...

Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop.

All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.

So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.

4.5 stars

Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (3.5 stars)

Nooooooooo, more boring recaps!

It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony....

What is this, a dust jacket?

After explaining the history, Simmons goes around telling you that lots of pieces of the previous books were lies. Aenea destroys a carefully constructed and creative reveal of Core machinations between Ummon and the Keats cybrid in a previous book:

There were not and are not three camps in the TechnoCore...there are billions. The Core is the ultimate exercise in anarchy - hyperparasitism carried to its highest power.

Although I have to admit that it sounds more realistic than a very simple three-camps society. I did like Tom Ray being responsible for the creation of the TechnoCore, and the explanation of the cruciform and how it is now capable of proper resurrection without the severe mental and reproductive damage seen by Father Lenar Hoyt on Hyperion.

The failure of the symbiote was due to the simple demands of information storage and retrieval. In a human mind, there are neurons. In a human body, there are approximately 10^28 atoms.

Speaking of Hoyt, the image of Cardinal Lourdusamy killing Father Dure to bring back the Pope (Hoyt) was chilling and excellent.

Cardinal Lourdusamy's already thin lips tightened to the point of disappearance between florid jowls. "Do you have anything else to say before you return to hell, Antipope?"

Cybrid Frank Lloyd Wright teaches Aenea about architecture. OK. I guess. Apparently every messiah needs a trade? As an aside I was shocked to learn about the violent death of Wright's partner and her children via this novel.

Simmons tries a little too hard to make Aenea christ-like: going off into the desert on her own, giving communion of her blood, having a last supper, going off to face death by crucifiction. Aenea's vaguely Buddhist mysticism lecture circuit on T'ien Shan got tiring:

The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place - any place - is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is.

As did the 'instead of explaining that, let's have sex my mindless little unquestioning Raul' plot device, and the pages of descriptions of mountains:

Beyond our Sacred Mountain of the North, I know, rise the Four Mountains of Pilgrimage for the Buddhist faithful - O-mei Shan to the west; Chiu-hua Shan, "Nine Flower Mountain," to the south; Wu-t'ai Shan, the "Five Terrace mountain" with its welcoming Purple Palace to the north; and lowly but subtly beautiful P'u-t'o Shan in the far east.

Apparently Raul doesn't really listen to Aenea anyway, since he is surprised when they become lovers, despite her having told him on a number of occasions that it was their future:

Life has taken a turn that I had never anticipated, never imagined.

Despite the convenient 5-year time-debt to close the age gap, it still seems creepy. Especially since he still calls her 'kiddo'.

So, the ending. The two-year gap and father of Aenea's child was painfully obvious, but well written, and the identity of the 'Observer' was similarly obvious but very unsatisfying - nothing more about the 'Lions and Tigers and Bears'. Some reveals about the Shrike, but really no proper explanations, especially about how it went from pure-evil super villian in the early books to Aenea's dependable deus ex machina bodyguard in this one. But hey, not everything needs to be tied off neatly and explained.

I thought the concept of a Shared Moment being transmitted through the galaxy was very powerful. As for the connection to other people through the Void Which Binds, it was described in a very Utopian way, but having access to everyone's past or present thoughts sounds...terrible.

I loved Raul's death sentence in the Schrodinger cat box: such a classic elaborate bond death trap.

Overall I thought this was a pretty decent ending to the series, with some great ideas and an impressive plot arc.

3.5 stars.

Endymion by Dan Simmons (3.5 stars)

Book three in the Hyperion Cantos, set 274 years after The Fall. Fans of Simmons waited 7 years from the publication of Fall of Hyperion before starting on this one. I waited 5 minutes, which made me hate the nauseating recaps at the start of the novel.

In the 274 years you missed, the Pax (the catholic church, with the offer of immortality in the form of the cruciform) has expanded its power. But really the most important thing is that Aenea is about to step out of the time tombs. Some people seemed to be disappointed that the novels weren't continuous in time, but to me this seemed the perfectly logical progression within the time concepts of the novel.

Silenius is his usual self and kicks off the quest for Raul:

...A youth, by heavenly power loved and led,
Shall stand before him, whom he shall direct
How to consummate all. The youth elect
Must do the thing, or both will be destroyed."
"What?" I said. "I don't ..."
"Fuck it," rasped the poet. "Just get Aenea, take her to the Ousters, and get her back alive. It's not too complicated. Even a shepherd should be able to do it."

Unfortunately Raul sucks. He just never gains any depth. He charges around with little to no clue, never questioning Aenea, never questioning why he's risking his own life, and is generally just an empty bodyguard character. He also makes a foreshadowed and super-creepy father-figure-to-lover transition with Aenea.

Aenea herself never steps out of the shadows, she's completely mysterious, never gives a straight answer, and is putting out sentences like this at age 12:

Did you know, Raul, that Pan was the allegorical precursor to Christ?

I guess she is the messiah...but in any case she just seemed like a really important object to be carried around. Simmons might as well have made her a cup or a sword to be delivered to a place at the right time to fulfill a prophesy.

So with characters like these we basically end up with a thinking man's action novel. The plot is a cross between Sliders and Terminator 2. The Core's comically powerful soldiers pursue Aenea through a series of portals to different worlds where they are confronted with various difficult scenarios: trapped in ice caves, whole worlds that look as if they have been completely deserted just hours before, etc. Whenever the Core (Nemes and friends) catches up, the Shrike, deus ex machina extraordinaire, is there to save the day. Raul even acknowledges this at one stage:

"Well," I said, "It provided a pretty convenient deus ex machina for us on Hyperion, so I just thought that if it could ..."

Having said that, Sliders and T2 are awesome, I enjoyed the ride :)

I'll leave you with a quirk and a criticism. As soon as I read the following passage, I knew Simmons was describing Falling Water:

The most noticeable features of the house were the thin roofs and rectangular terraces that seemed to hang out over the stream and waterfall as if defying gravity.

I guess Simmons is a massive FLW fan, but unlike the Keats references which seem pervasive and integral to the novel, this reference seems like a shout-out dumped in as an afterthought. We'll see how it plays out in the next book I guess.

One last thing Mr. Simmons, just because you do the research doesn't mean you need to put it in the novel. The descriptions of the art and rooms of the Vatican were deadly boring:

Room V explores the lives of the saints through fresco and statuary, yet has a stylized, inhuman feel to it, which de Soya associates with old pictures he has seen of Old Earth Egyptian art. Room VI, the Pope's dining room...

3.5 stars

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons (3.5 stars)

Stupendous beginning. Time for the tough second album. I'm not going to be careful about spoilers so you might want to bail out now.

The plot arc is great, fantastic ideas brought to a stunning finish. The idea of the Core leeching brain power from humanity to create a giant biological supercomputer during farcaster transport is inspired. Gladstone's play against the Core and destruction of the farcaster network was thrilling. Simmons describes the implications of unplugging such a connected society in fascinating detail: imagine families torn apart and people dying because Dad happened to be in the toilet on Mare Infinitus when the network was torn down. Entire city-worlds collapsing because there's no locally produced food. People trapped in penthouse apartments in skyscrapers with no way to get out apart from a now-dead farcaster.

But if you had asked me what I thought during the first half of the novel I would have said GET ON WITH IT ALREADY. I was sick of the pilgrims stumbling around the Time Tombs, sick of hearing about Joseph Severn who I cared nothing about, and sick of the dream-style narration that was cut off whenever anything interesting was about to happen so Severn could go sit in a meeting with Gladstone or hang out at a party.  And you know what would be great?  If the Consul could go on a boring quest to retrieve the ship over exactly the same territory we covered in the first book.

There are some poignant moments, quite a few actually.  Like this one, where Dure describes the effect on his faith of years of continuous death and resurrection while nailed to a Tesla tree:

"And that made you lose your faith?"
Dure looked at Sol. "On the contrary, it made me feel that faith is all the more essential. Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level...that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

In fact, Dure's experience of a future where the Labyrinthine worlds have been crammed with all of humanity is one of the most chilling passages I've ever read. In this future, humans were convinced to shelter in the Labyrinths while the doomsday deathwand device created by the Core was detonated, ostensibly to defeat the Ousters. Dure sees the reality of this Core plot that would kill humans en masse, with the Shrike tending to a graveyard of billions lit with the eerie glow of millions of cruciforms.

Hair remained as tendrils of dusty tar, stiff as varnished fiberplastic. Blackness stared out from under opened eyelids, between teeth...If there were tens of thousands of corpses in this small stretch of tunnel, Hyperion's labyrinth must contain billions. More. The nine labyrinthine worlds together must be a crypt for trillions.

There's some cuteness that comes from being able to write the future. Apparently Japan is the first to Mars and claims it:

...unchanged from the time the first human set foot on that world, proclaimed it for a nation called Japan, and snapped a photograph.

I also thought the AI Ummon was really well conceived. Contemptuous of Severn, speaking in koans, super-annoying to read, but brilliant. It just went on a tad too long.

- Why Ummon? Why did you Stables wish to preserve Old Earth?
[Sansho once said
If someone comes
I go out to meet him
but not for his sake
Koke said
If someone comes
I don't go out
If I do go out
I go out for his sake]

Great ideas, with some aggressive editing I would have given it almost 5 stars.

3.5 stars.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (4 stars)

Holy 80s batman!

You know when you get a bunch of nerds together and you run out of things to talk about and then someone mentions an old video game or computer they saw recently, or a mame console they just built, and it triggers a rush of "the first computer game I ever played...", and "my first computer was a...", in a game of one-upmanship for who loves the machine the most, and who began the love affair the earliest? Well, here's an entire book of that. If just reading this post makes you want to talk about old computer games, you'll probably love the book.

I'm a nerd and born within a decade of Ernie Cline, so I was perfectly poised to enjoy this mega-buffet of computer game and geek nostalgia from the 80s. That's where I was, a few paragraphs in, rolling around in glorious appeals to nostalgia. But by the time I'd read the very detailed and thorough explanation of the easter egg and Halliday's quest, I was mad. Despite being immensely appealing to children of the 70s and 80s the book is written for 13 year-olds.

If only Cline could STOP EXPLAINING EVERYTHING IN GREAT BORING DETAIL. Seriously. You don't need to spell out every aspect of the quest at the start of the book, you are treating your readers like dribbling idiots. The book should have started with Wade climbing out of his trailer and going to his secret OASIS-enabled lair. Everything else you could figure out from context, in fact, doing the figuring-out is one of the best parts of reading.

So the beginning is just a bit weak, but the rest is OK right? No. Cline goes around hitting everything with the explanation hammer. What's the point of geek references if you explain them all? They should be fewer and subtle so that regular readers aren't bothered by them, but people in the know get a kick out of them. Instead the story flow is often destroyed with mini Wikipedia-like entries. This reference was already pretty lame but the explanation makes it worse:

I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd. I kept at it. I burned the midnight oil. Did you know that Midnight Oil was an Australian band, with a 1987 hit titled "Beds Are Burning"?

At one point Cline (via Wade) goes on a bizarre rant about all the things he wishes he'd been told in (I assume) some sort of hard-knocks atheist parenting school where every kid gets a lump of coal carved with a likeness of Charles Darwin for Christmas:

Here's the deal Wade. You're something called a 'human being'. That's a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet we're descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you'll learn more about it later. But trust me, that's really how we all got here. There's proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Oh, and by the way...there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

Of course the whole thing is very meta: a novel about an easter egg and a videogame quest that itself contains an easter egg and a videogame quest, with a real-world DeLorean as a prize that Wade drives in the novel...

But enough complaining, and time to own up: I actually really liked it. There were plenty of annoyances, but I was still up at all hours reading to see how the quest for the next gate would play out. Any novel that grabs your attention like that is pretty special, so I'm giving it a high score despite all the flaws.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite geek culture references. I felt like high-fiving someone when Wade speaks his OASIS pass-phrase to log in, which was:

You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

I was also happy about my second-favourite piece from the Star Wars score (behind the Cantina) getting a place as the victory music for completing the first challenge:

I recognized the music. It was the last track from John Williams' original Star Wars score, used in the scene where Princess Leia gives Luke and Han their medals (and Chewbacca, as you may recall, get the shaft).

4 stars.

Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos) by Dan Simmons (5 stars)

"The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his battle line was about two hundred and fifty meters from the French. He knew from the experience of the past week that this was within longbow range, but he also knew that he would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to hold the pull."

That's an excerpt from Kassad's story as he goes through immersive virtual reality military training by actually fighting in all the major battles of human history. That one was his experience as an English archer at the battle of Agincourt. Cool stuff.

Kassad is one of seven people converging on a mysterious, deadly, and seemingly infinitely powerful creature called the Shrike, located on the world of Hyperion. Simmons breaks the novel into one story for each traveller, a structure that annoyed me at first since it turned the novel into a collection of seven novellas.

It's a difficult structure to pull off. Character development and scene-setting needs to be done in a compressed timeframe, and drawing all the threads together for a meaningful conclusion is tough. Simmons delivers an astonishing collection of short stories - I kept thinking he couldn't top the last one, and that the next one was going to be boring, but he delivered on every single one. In fact, they were so ingenious that each could easily stand on their own as a novel.

Of course I don't get to judge him on the joining-the-threads piece, since it ends on a cliffhanger once we've heard all the individual stories. The strength of the rest of the series will depend on how the subsequent books tie those threads together.

Kassad's story was brilliant, and reminded me a lot of the training scenes in Ender's Game. My hunch was that his in-simulation lover was just a tool to keep cadets interested in training, and a pretty effective one at that, but it seems it was something more mysterious. I loved the idea that the universe's civilian population was so fed up with military leaders getting entire civilisations killed, that warfare devolved to:

...Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.

Although we later find out that neither the Shrike nor the Ousters play by such rules.

When we got to Martin Silenus' story, I started to get worried that Simmons was about to let out his inner, wordy self that inspired him to reference Keats so heavily in the first place:

From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be-should be-a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race's thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.

But amazingly, Silenus' story is one of the best, full of irony, and downright funny in places. After his mother puts him in cryogenic fugue on a spaceship journey for 167 years to make him rich on bank deposit interest, which incidentally doesn't work, Silenus wakes up brain-damaged with a vocabulary consisting of 9 swearwords, the least bad of which are "asshole, peepee, and poopoo". He makes the best of the situation though:

A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for devine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased. All in all, it was enough.

Silenus is a great character, with some brilliant moments:

Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Sol Weintraub's story was deeply philosophical. When AIs are almost infinitely powerful, what differentiates them from Gods?

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

The image of Father Paul Dure self-crucifying himself to a Tesla tree and being kept alive by the parasitic cruciform is one that will stick with me for a very long time.

Simmons' world is fantastic, and full of innovative ideas. AIs have given humans the ability to teleport (farcast) seemingly infinite distances instantaneously. Imagine what humans living day-to-day could, and would, do with that technology. Simmons has:

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds...The huge sleeping room Helenda and I share rocks gently in the boughs of a three-hundred-meter Worldtree on the Templar world of God's Grove and connects to a solarium which sits alone on the arid saltflats of Hebron.

This review is way too long. Just go read it. 5 stars.

First Shift - Legacy by Hugh Howey (4 stars)

Part 6 (a prequel) to the Wool series 1-5. If you haven't read 1-5 you should probably stop reading now, and go pick up the omnibus, since a) it is awesome and b) I'm about to spoil some stuff for you.

The plot of First Shift is split into two parallel story lines, one in the year 2049 that explains how the silos came to be, and one in 2110 that follows the Mayor of Silo 1.

Howey spectacularly nails the 2110 section. We discover that those notionally 'in charge' of the whole mad scheme are as equally enslaved as everyone else, with a very 1984 feel. You really don't want to face the wrong way at lunch.

Maybe he wasn't there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

For some reason the notion of waking up out of cold sleep into a world where everything was exactly the same but older and more worn each time resonated with me, and I could imagine how uneasy it made Troy feel:

It was unnerving to note the signs of wear in the carpet and the patch of dull steel in the middle of the turnstile where thighs had rubbed against it over the years. These were years that didn't exist for Troy. This wear and tear had shown up as if by magic.

It was also strange to think of whole generations being born and dying between shifts in Silo 1. This was highlighted by Troy's interactions with other Silos becoming increasingly difficult as language diverged from the original English spoken in Silo 1.

Where the story is weakest is the explanation of how we got to the silos in the first place. I thought the general idea was OK, but not great: the US goes scorched earth first in the face of a possible nanotechnology attack. If you're talking crazy strategies, it seems like nuking and selectively nano-attacking every other country on the planet would make more sense. Sure, build your silos, but at least the outside isn't super-toxic.

I think Howey was arguing that once a nano-enabled weapon is released it is impossible to control and would destroy the world, but targeting nano machines to individual humans and races was observed to be possible in the book. It seems you could inoculate the US population with some sort of chemical/biological safety signal that the nanos would respect.

All that aside, the main problem with the 2049 story-flow was that it was too near-future to be plausible. The US government and society seems exactly as it is now in 2012.

So given 2012 norms: tens of thousands of workers, politicians, engineers and construction workers would have known exactly what was being built. Getting funding for the cover-story project would be impossible, and getting a politician with some architecture book-learning to design the whole thing because he's gullible and good at keeping a secret is simply farcical. Also, ensuring all the right people (only Democrats???) are present at the silos at the critical moment would have been impossible without leaking some parts of the plan.

I would have been much more happy with this whole plot line if it was further in the future where US society had become dysfunctional and the government was collapsing or defunct.

To address a nit I had from the first 5 books, Howey explains that the lack of a lift is a requirement pushed on the silos by the psyches, but I still don't buy that a technology and engineering savvy society is not going to come up with a custom solution that is better than a staircase. Blocking such improvements would be difficult without moving to a state of overt population control.

But hey, it's still a great book, and now I'm waiting for the next one :)

4 stars.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (2 stars)

The obvious comparison is with McCarthy's The Road, and it isn't a favourable one. Crace writes beautiful prose, but he knows it, and he doesn't feel like he needs a plot. While McCarthy writes emotionally charged, powerful dialogue where sentences speak volumes, Crace writes volumes of internal monologue that speak sentences.

In fact, we're 30% of the way through the novel before Franklin and Margaret find out about the landslide and gas poisoning that will start their journey from the Pesthouse. Yes, character development is important, but Crace goes about it with heavy internal monologue and personal reflection rather than actual interaction between characters.

There are some vaguely realised bad-guys that introduce some conflict, but here's the huge spoiler: nothing happens. Franklin and Margaret go to the coast and then go back again. Sure, you can say it's a journey of discovery, but I felt like my discovery was that I was more interested in everyone else's (the thieves, the priests with the withered arms, the abandoned wives turned to prostitution) story, than Franklin and Margaret's.

I think Crace was attempting some sort of fancy symbology with his pot of mint, but it was just ridiculous in the context of the survival fight-for-your-life story. Perhaps it was supposed to be a symbol of the hope Margaret and Franklin had for their love, but it was very clumsy.

I kept waiting for some grand twist, like the Baptist ark was a spaceship, and the alien Helpless Gentlemen had been responsible for the apocalypse and now needed human labour to construct a means to return to their homeworld. No such luck.

2 stars.

Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

This book caught my eye a while ago, since for some time it has been very near the top of Amazon's "Average Customer Review" book search - no mean feat with 1,391 reviews. Incidentally the current #1 book in that search is the excellent With The Old Breed. Our nascent sci-fi book club, yes you heard right, decided that was a good enough reason to put it on the list, and I'm glad we did.

Howey self-published the first novella, but you wouldn't know it. The writing is high quality, and the ending of the first section is spectacular. Howey builds a brilliant post-apocalyptic world with all of the known world living underground as a giant 'seed bank' ready to re-populate the Earth someday.

Queue the nit-picking.

Servers, generators, electricity, but no fricking lift in a 138-level underground metropolis? Seriously? As an aside, the porters with muscular legs charging up and down the worn metal steps reminded me of Ted Chiang's short story The Tower of Babylon. Apparently the lack of a lift is patched up as a population-control measure in the prequel First Shift - Legacy, which I just found out about and will go read next.

Along the same lines, the lens-cleaning seems a little contrived. A technologically advanced society with engineers and mechanics is going to realise pretty quickly that the lenses could be cleaned with wipers, not sacrificial humans. I get that it is ritualised punishment to keep control of the population, but it seems like just kicking them out the airlock would do the same job.

Spoilers ahead.

I thought poisoning the mayor was a pretty cheap trick. It seems unlikely that Bernard, evil head of IT, would play his hand so obviously when he knows that one misstep can easily destroy the silo. I also had trouble swallowing both Juliette's lackadaisical approach to investigating the mayor's assassination, and the public's acceptance of this approach by their new sheriff. Sure, maybe Juliette recognised Bernard had the upper hand, but the mayor was well liked by the public - why weren't they clamouring for justice?

Overall I liked Juliette as a character, the super-smart MacGyver of the silo, but could have done without the Romeo and Juliette references. Her foil, Lukas, starts out as a mysterious and intelligent stranger, and while I liked that he didn't turn out to be the perfect long-distance-cross-silo boyfriend, it was also pretty hard not to get sick of his point of view. It didn't help that Bernard's complete trust in Lukas was implausible. Why would Bernard give every tightly-held secret to somebody who publicly organised a petition for Juliette's release?

And speaking of IT, what the hell are the servers for exactly? Perhaps this will be revealed later. My immediate thought was that if they are for storing long-term human history, they should be on tape rather than spinning disk. But not enough has been revealed about the servers: maybe they have much more reliable online storage in this version of the future. Presumably some of the servers run silo equipment, although this seemed to be largely the domain of Mechanical, and there are apparently dozens of racks. Do the IT flunkies know what the servers are for?

But that's enough complaining, it really is a great book, and I couldn't put it down, especially during Juliette's underwater adventure.

One line of dialogue from Bernard did make me put it down, but only long enough to issue a Keanu-Reeves-style whoah.

"Silo one? This is silo eighteen."

4.5 stars

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3 stars)

A collection of short SF stories by Ted Chiang. Some great, some meh. As with all short stories, I found myself wishing the good ones were full novels.

Hard to give an overall score, but 3 stars seems about right.

Tower of Babylon

Great buildup, sucky ending. I felt like this could have gone somewhere very unusual, but just didn't. I loved the idea of people living their entire life on the tower, and everything being locally grown or imported via the month-long human-powered slog up the tower.

Understand

A riff on Flowers for Algernon: super-intelligence via medical operation. Despite overuse of the word 'gestalt' and a tendency to run at the mouth like an overenthusiastic philosophy student, I enjoyed this story. This made me laugh:

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all.

The idea of being able to reprogram your mind, and mount attacks on others using sensory inputs was pretty awesome. Also given essentially limitless intelligence, your comprehension is far beyond anyone else in the world. Do you help the 'normals' and their trivial problems, or do you work on really interesting problems they can't even comprehend?

Division by Zero

The idea of creating a proof that contradicts the most basic parts of mathematics is interesting but I felt like this should have gone somewhere more interesting than the personal impact on the mathematician who made the discovery.

Story of Your Life

Very clever use of story structure, and a great idea here. These aliens were everything I wished Vinge had brought to the Tines and Spiders. Rather than the very close-to-human language, history, and technological development of Spiders/Tines the heptapods have a completely different view of the universe, physics, and mathematics, that nevertheless describes the same concepts, just in a different way. Louise gradually comes to this understanding by analysing the complex and very foreign language structure of the heptapods, which should be interesting for anyone with a bent for linguistics.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently;

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

Spoilers ahead.

To me the idea of predestination where every person has an obligation to exercise their free will to bring about exactly the future outcome seems completely improbable. Could you exercise your free will to bring about the death of a loved one? What happens if you don't?

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Seventy-Two Letters

The idea of using different Golems for transport, mining, construction and as the basis of technology was interesting. As was the bizarre notion that all future generations are contained within an ova. The story itself didn't impress me.

The Evolution of Human Science

Super-short, but interesting idea. The human race is split in two by technology called Digital Neural Transfer, which could be a near-future version of the Internet. Those who have DNT are incomprehensible to those who don't, and all research and innovation is conducted over DNT.

human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser.

Hell is the Absence of God

The world is regularly visited by Angels which cause seemingly random miracles, gross disfigurement, death and natural disaster. People get regular glimpses of heaven and hell, and can see which direction their loved ones go. Fascinating world. Loved the story but I thought the ending should have been stronger.

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Fascinating meditation on the power and manipulation of physical beauty for personal and corporate gain. Brain modification technology allows people to disable their perception of beauty in a human face, with all sorts of interesting consequences. Reactions of those who have had 'calli' all their life and turn it off at 18, and those who turn it on later in life after living normally.

So calliagnosia by itself can't eliminate appearance-based discrimination. What it does, in a sense, is even up the odds; it takes away the innate predisposition, the tendency for such discrimination to arise in the first place.

I have to admit that when I read the following passage I immediately equated 'spex' to Google's Project Glass, which has the potential to change our world radically in good and not so good ways like this.

What prompted us to do this now was the release of a spex version of Visage. That's the software that, when you look at people through your spex, show you what they'd look like with cosmetic surgery. It became a form of entertainment among a certain crowd, and a lot of college students found it offensive.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2.5 stars)

Latest and suckiest in Vinge's Zones of Thought series. In terms of plot flow this is the follow-on to A Fire Upon the Deep, returning to the world of the Tines and a bunch of stranded human children.

Compared to the epic space opera and universal scale of Fire, and the smaller-scale but fascinating dynamic of the Spider's rise and the Emergent-Qeng Ho cold war in Deepness, this book feels trapped in an irrelevant and not particularly interesting corner of the universe.

The novel starts with Vinge setting Ravna up as being generally fairly incompetent and politically naive. It's very clumsily handled and written in fine-grained boring detail. By the time Ravna finally gets to giving her speech, after so much boring lead-up I was ready to quit if there wasn't some sort of conflict. Thanks Nevil, who I found particularly unbelievable. Apparently he is a political genius because his parents were?!? Speaking of unbelievable, Ravna's attempts to learn spycraft are beyond comical - looking up 'sneakiness' in the ship's library? I don't care how good the library is, that isn't going to work.

While not working on Ravna uselessness, Vinge is setting Joanna up as some sort of populist queen of the Tines in a similarly boring manner. Joanna's actions at the Fragmentarium turn out to be of minor importance to later events, but aren't worth the many pages devoted to the arrival of the Tropicals and the breakout.

Amdi, Ravna, and Jefri's escape and trek back to the Domain was probably the worst part of the novel. I was expecting daring raids for food, struggle for survival, some smart thinking and innovation from Amdi, but no. They make themselves into a circus and parade all over the country. Apart from being the worst way to travel undetected in enemy territory ever, it was just stupid and boring to read.

We learn some more about the Tines, but an opportunity to describe their struggles in bootstrapping their civilisation into the technological age is sorely missed. Tycoon has invented sweatshops and industrialised the tropical choir into a production machine - but it mostly happens outside of the view of the main characters.

Tycoon turns out to not be a bad guy at all, and vendacious just doesn't seem sinister enough, he's lost most of his power from the original novel. And the big-bad-guy-in-the-sky remains completely unrealised. So basically this book was just really boring filler waiting for the Blight to do something.

2.5 stars

The Red Tent: A Novel by Anita Diamant (1.5 stars)

I'm not sure how this got onto my to-read list. Sometimes I search for the most positive-reviewed books on Amazon, sometimes I get a recommendation from a friend. I'm glad I read this, but I have to admit I hated most of it.

Diamant has taken the perspective of Dinah, who plays a bit part in a bizarre parable from Genesis 34 (that's the bible you heathens). It's your basic rape, foreskin ransom, kill everyone, take women and children prisoner, and get rewarded by God kind-of story that you would expect from the Bible.

But OK, strange choice of subject matter aside. Can this novel stand on its own? Diamant says that was her intent, that it should appeal to someone with no knowledge of the bible. In a word, no.

The first 60% of the novel is basically filler leading up to the foreskin ransoming. Diamant attempts to paint a picture of women's life in biblical times, but it seems contrived. The notion that women gather together in a red tent to pass the time of their period eating sweet cakes, braiding each other's hair, and being waited on by pre-pubescent girls just seems ridiculous. I doubt any working class women, in this case shepherd's wives, had time for such largesse given the backbreaking work of their everyday lives, and their power inequality with men.

The character 'development' in the first half of the novel is filled with trivialities:

Zilpah saw Inna's appearance as a god omen. The midwife's presence lifted her spirits so much that later my aunt began to sing. It was nothing exalted, only a children's song about a fly who bothered a rabbit, who ate the insect but was eaten by a dog, who was in turn eaten by a jackal, who was hunted by a lion...

who was read by someone who doesn't give a shit. There are some Bible-y tidbits thrown in before the main event, which would gel nicely with the story if Dinah was into LSD. And it wouldn't be Genesis if there wasn't a boring, unimportant-to-the-story family tree spelled out every now and then.

But in spite of all this I did respect Diamant's writing, and there are some very poignant moments that resonated with me, such as when Dinah holds her son for the first time:

There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite.

Most people giving critical reviews of this novel are upset because Diamant didn't stick to the biblical 'facts', i.e. she made Dinah willing instead of raped, and 'disrespected' Jacob. She also offended a bunch of people producing and reading Jewish midrash - reinterpretations of biblical stories. I think Diamant's real mistake was picking a story of senseless violence and death and trying to build it into a beautiful story about life as a woman.

1.5 stars

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (5 stars)

The prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, can he pull it off? YES.  Pass Go, collect another Hugo.

Vinge introduces us to the Spiders, a civilisation defined by their on-again off-again star that plunges them into catastrophic winter with a periodicity of a century or so, forcing the entire population to hibernate in primitive frozen pools called 'deepnesses'.

 I loved the Spiders, but I began to think that they were a little too easy to identify with.  What are the chances that arachnid aliens turn out to think and act essentially like humans once you understand their language?  What are the chances that all their technology is developed in the same way: radio, computers, cars, aeroplanes, nuclear power (with a mini Manhattan project) etc.  Pretty low I would think. But there were super-cute little baby spiders climbing out of their Daddy's fur to go play in the jungle gym, so hey.

I thought the idea of having to wait (mostly in cold-sleep) for a civilisation to reach a technology age so they can repair the space-faring equivalent of a flat tyre was intruiging, and would encourage lots of meddling, and civilisation fast-tracking. The Qeng Ho and Emergents certainly don't have any Prime Directive-style hangups.

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilisation - a civilisation with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry.

And we find out that our old friend, and one of the few links to A Fire Upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is much more than reassembled body parts in this story.  In fact he is a superstar, I mean he invented smartdust.  Well, they call it 'localizers' but whatever.  Pham has a low-level backdoor into this system, which is kind of like having a backdoor built into libc:

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.  If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Vinge's dedication to science and passion for computer science continues to shine through.  Here he describes the code cruft that makes a spaceship run, and the inherent danger:

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support.  Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations.  Every so often the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents.  Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

The idea of 'Focus', a kind of virus-delivered autism that can be controlled with MRI was fascinating.  It was amazing to think of a civilisation whose 'automation' consisted of a large part of the populous enslaved to act as really really smart middleware to computers.  Here Trud explains why 'Focus' is so effective:

But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books?  As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life.  He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic.  A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard.  Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected.  See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race.  We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

The Anne Reynolt character was a brilliant opponent for Pham Nuwen: ruthless and amazingly talented.  I enjoyed watching their plotting and manipulation targeted at each other.

One more cute quote to leave with.  The Qeng Ho are irrepressible traders:

in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term "black market" existed, but only to denote "trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers."

Even though it was less epic than A Fire Upon the Deep, I think I enjoyed it more.  5 stars

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (4.5 stars)

On page 19 I was already impressed.  It was at about that point that I realised I was seeing the world through an alien pack intelligence's eyes, which struck me both as a very innovative concept, and for the skill with which it was delivered.  I gradually learned more and more aspects of the Tines' anatomy, communication, social norms, and even reproduction, all starting with the sentence:

He brought up another member to get a parallax view.

 and more like these:

A few yards into the mob and Peregrine Wickrackrum could feel consciousness slipping from him.  If he concentrated really hard, he could remember who he was and that he must get to the other side of the meadow without attracting attention.

And the technology aspects are great.  You can see Vinge is a comp sci professor.  Relay struck me as sounding a little like Google, and the text is littered with references to one-time-pad crypto, and gems like this:

Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption....

...and the creature fell apart like some cheap, center-topology network. 

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience 

I was slightly weirded-out by Pham Nuwen being from Canberra - a once great civilisation fallen back to medieval times.  I lived for some time in Canberra, Australia.

For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian.  He had been born on a fallen colony world - Canberra he called it.

The silly humans awake an extremely advanced and deadly artificial intelligence 'a perversion', which is fascinating to anyone interested in computer security.  It is like they have unleashed a super-intelligent piece of malware that begins to take over the universe.  Even the defences suggested in the text parallel modern-day content sanitisation.  This sounds a little bit like converting between document formats to break any embedded malware:

...then there are obvious procedures that can give relative safety: Do not accept High Beyond protocol packets.  At the very least, route all communications through Middle Beyond sites, with translation down to, and then up from, local trade languages.

 Also, the 'Usenet' discussion was really entertaining, and captures the often farcical misunderstanding and miscommunication of computer security issues on the Internet, and the spirit of a mild flaming:

...Who is a fool? [probably obscenity]  [probably obscenity] Idiots who don't follow all the threads in developing news should not waste my precious ears with their [clear obscenity] garbage.  So you think the "Helper Symbiosis" is a fraud of Straumli Realm?  And what do you think cause the fall of Relay?  In case your head is totally stuck up your rear [<-probable insult], there was a Power allied with Relay...

Sadly we are still some way from voice activated controls that:

...responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang.

Slight spoilers ahead...

I was a little surprised by the ending.  I was expecting 'Old One' to turn out as a front for the Blight itself.  Also I completely agreed with this statement:

In some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.

Sticking a huge hunk of the galaxy into slowness, stranding millions of vessels forever.  Somehow, this didn't sound much like 'saving' the galaxy to me.

But overall, a fantastic book, I endorse the Hugo decision :)  4.5 stars

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin (3.5 stars)

Hooray! Back to all the good characters. Except not really. Tyrion has turned into some sort of ironic sideshow act, in the words of Kate Morris 'all he really manages to do is play a lot of Stratego, reminisce about a previously-unmentioned happy boyhood of gymnastics training in the art of dwarfish capering, and fall convincingly off a trained pig'.

But lets acknowledge some of the good bits, and thankfully there were more of those than in Feast. When Bran is ambushed by a bunch of wights in a scene straight out of Dead Snow I stopped reading just long enough to let out a 'Hells Yeah!'. His apprenticeship to the three-eyed-crow (btw I loved the idea of a half-man, half-weirwood tree, complete with a root growing out of his eye socket) is fascinating. Jon's chapters continued to be some of the best as he creates a fragile peace with the wildlings.

Arya's training with the faceless men finally gets interesting as they intentionally blind her and give her a face from the thousands of dead people they have skinned(!) We also get to watch an assassination through her eyes, complete with a con reminiscent of early locke days.

...faces full of greed and rage and lust, bald faces and faces bristling with hair. Masks, she told herself, it's only masks, but even as she thought the thought, she knew it wasn't so. They were skins.

But it just isn't enough. The story doesn't move as much as it should have, especially given GRRM had 1000+ pages to work with. Tyrion and Victarion are still travelling to meet Daenerys. She's mooning around with Daario while Tyrion is being a circus act, and the dragons barely feature. Neither Arya or Bran finish their training. Stannis doesn't reach Winterfell. The others don't attack the wall. Is there anything more boring than reading about someone being bored?

Life aboard the Selaesori Qhoran was nothing if not tedious, Tyrion had found. The most exciting part of his day was pricking his toes and fingers with a knife.

And just to make sure you know he has still got it, Martin kills off a major character. I felt like he was trying to make a point like 'see? In this world, one careless decision can kill you', and while I respect the 'nobody is safe' ruthlessness, this reeks of an ad-break cliffhanger that will end up with resurrection by magic or subterfuge a la Catelyn, Mance, Davos...

So, not as bad as Feast, but not as good as it could be. Here's hoping he actually finishes the series sometime in the next couple of decades. Getting overtaken by the HBO series might provide some motivation. I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one."

If this were a story, he would gallop up just as we reached the temple, to challenge Hizdahr for my hand...Four hours later, they emerged again as man and wife, bound together wrist and ankle with chains of yellow gold. [guess this isn't a story then]

The Lyseni took the table nearest to the fire and spoke quietly over cups of black tar rum, keeping their voices low so no one could overhear. But she was no one and she heard most every word.

"You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of your coming."
"And I seem to have prevented yours." Jaime smiled at the woman in the bed.

3.5 stars

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (2.5 stars)

Wow, what a let down. After finishing A Storm of Swords I immediately began this one, which is a luxury real fans wouldn't have had since there was a five year wait in-between. Martin made a decision to cut the too-long fourth book in half, not chronologically, but geographically, so in A Feast for Crows he gives us all the boring characters bumping around for 1000 pages with nothing interesting happening.

In fact, here is a summary of the entire book:

• Cersei ad nauseum. Making one stupid decision after another in Kings Landing. Not interesting stupid, just boring, incompetent stupid.
• Brienne on a completely pointless quest for Sansa, never coming within 1000 miles of her. Her story ends on a lame made-for-tv cliffhanger.
• Jaime mopes around wishing he had two hands and being mad at Cersei. He starts training with his left hand but doesn't get any good.
  
• Sam is on a boat. There's a storm. He gets laid. He also apparently can't tell one baby from another since Aemon has to tell him about the baby swap.
• Sansa continues her compliant relationship in the Eyrie with Petyr and his creepy mother-daughter fetish. Their trip down the mountain is described in such intricate detail I was sure Sansa was going to crack it and push Robert off the edge (I wanted to), but instead, surprise! Nothing happens.
• Arya picks up what promised to be an awesome new training montage with the Faceless men, but, amazingly, it also turns out to be boring.
• Arianne of Dorne has a gutsy plan to start a war. It doesn't work.
• A bunch of minor characters you don't care about get their own one-off point of view chapter to do something that is of minor importance to the story.

The tragedy of this book is that it is brilliantly written, and could have been amazing if there had been some significant plot developments. Sure the iron men needed a new king, and the church's rise to power was important to the story, but those points and more could have been covered in a lot less than 1000 pages. I initially hated the chapters about the ironborn, since it was a bunch of new characters I didn't care about. However, I was won over to some extent by Aeron Damphair's character and his drowned men, literally drowned and resuscitated, and I hope we see him again in the story. My favourite quote from this part of the book was from Lord Rodrik 'The Reader':

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

Looking back over the rest of my notes, they were all complaining about stuff so I'll skip listing them all here and leave with one final whinge. In the first couple of books I loved the use of 'much and more', but it has been so overused I'd now give much and more to never read it again.

2.5 stars

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (5 stars)

Geez, give the good guys a break! Being brave and taking the moral high ground in a Martin novel is like donning the Star Trek Red Shirt. While I like Martin's gritty reality, it seems that there are no characters on the lighter side of the fuzzy moral divide who won't bravely and stubbornly chart a course for their own death, usually by trusting in the good character of others who are obviously untrustworthy. A few examples spring to mind: Catelyn releases Jaime then trusts the Freys, Robb releases Theon, and Sansa trusts absolutely anyone on the face of the Earth. I can only assume that Brienne's downfall is imminent, with a sword called Oathkeeper, and an already pigheaded attitude to keeping now-irrelevant promises to dead people.

I expected Sansa to continue to be lame and stupid, and she was, but I have been surprised by Arya. She seems to be trying to be held captive by every single character in the novel, something which simultaneously annoyed me, and impressed me. I don't think I've ever read of a character going through such an intensive training montage to be consistently beaten and captured at almost every opportunity. At the end of the first book I wrote that I'd be impressed if Martin killed her off - I think I'm more impressed that he made her so helpless.

Spoilers ahead.

And speaking of killing off characters, Martin does it with great relish in this book. The 'Red Wedding' is fantastically written: if you don't pick up earlier signals, Catelyn's naive faith in the sanctity of 'guest rite' is almost comical foreshadowing:

Catelyn tasted the wine and nibbled at some bread, and felt much better for it. Now we should be safe, she thought.

The wedding marks a great turning point in this novel, when all of a sudden all the story lines get awesome at once. Jon is with, then against, the wildlings in a series of epic battles. Daenerys acquires an army, frees a bunch of slaves, and becomes a military strategic genius. Jaime, Tyrion and the Night's Watch take some completely unexpected actions, and the novel ends with a bunch of surprising character deaths.

If only Martin had compressed some of the build-up in the first half of the novel I think it would be pretty much perfect. I won't say I was bored, but with each new character introduction, and each discussion of who should be wedded to who I despaired of the plot getting anywhere.

Having said that I am very impressed with this series. I've never read anything so epic, so complex, with so many different stories that could quite easily be novels in their own right. It was nice to see Martin made a conscious effort to insert small re-caps and memory triggers - I guess it was important given the novels were released a number of years apart.

And now for a bunch of nits, observations, and predictions:

• I really hope 'Hodor' ends up having some profound meaning and some key part to play. It seems more than a little strange that he understands everyone's speech perfectly but can only say one word...
• I assumed Tryion was being manipulated through Shae by Varys, but Tyrion removed that plot line in this book, so perhaps not.
• I liked hearing about Robb's interesting military tactics, that were screwed up by an overzealous Tully.
• The creatures of the north seemed fairly ridiculous in an otherwise fairly 'normal' world - giants, mammoths, and:
  

  Varamyr Sixskins, a small mouse of a man whose steed was a savage white snow bear that stood thirteen feet tall on its hind legs. And wherever the bear and Varamyr went, three wolves and a shadowcat came following.

• One of the trade items Daenerys is bargaining with for the Unsullied is 'a cask of pitted olives stuff with maggots'. And this is apparently worth money?
  
• What is with Martin and his need for female characters to stick perfume in weird places. First Daenerys, now Sansa is at it:
  

  The maid dabbed some on her finger and touched Sansa behind each ear, and under her chin, and then lightly on her nipples.




• Sandor Clegane rips the fairly ridiculous 'Forgotten Fellowship' to shreds with verbal disdain:
  

  "Dondarrion's a knight, but the rest of you are the sorriest lot of outlaws and broken men I've ever seen. I shit better men than you."
  "Any knight can make a knight," said the scarecrow that was Beric Dondarrion, "and every man you see before you has felt a sword upon his shoulder. We are the forgotten fellowship."
  "Send me on my way and I'll forget you too," Clegane rasped.




• What is it with people eating swan all the time? Tyrion even mentions it, maybe because Martin's editors complained:
  

  ("Not swan again," Tyrion muttered, remembering his supper with his sister on the eve of battle.)



• I'm getting a little sick of the constant cliffhangers - every time the story gets really interesting Martin switches to another point of view. Sometimes this is great because it saves on unnecessary detail and gives a different perspective on events, but I think it is tending towards being over-used.
  

Many and more pages have been read (about 3,000), many and more to go (about 2,000 currently published).

5 stars.

Best of 2011 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Seabiscuit: an American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
• The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

This year turned out to be a quite a bit of fantasy reading, especially since I climbed aboard the multi-thousand-page epic A Song of Ice and Fire series in November. Once I'm done with that series I think I'll head back towards some sci-fi. I broke my "There are too many interesting books to re-read anything" motto this year for Catch-22, which was hard work, but worth it.

I only had one really terrible reading experience this year that resulted in another book getting 0 stars. On another sad note I also read less books than last year, although I have some decent excuses having had a baby, moved countries, and started a new job.

Speaking of changes, the way I read has changed dramatically. This year marks the beginning of my move to digital. I love the convenience of snatching time to read books on my phone at every opportunity, such as standing in line for a coffee, or riding the bus to work, and then picking up the kindle for longer reading sessions. I paid US$9-$14 for each book (from Amazon's kindle store), which is the price and convenience point at which I decided to abandon public libraries. Having previously been a huge supporter of public libraries it concerns me what this direction means for the medium to long term future of libraries worldwide.