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