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.