Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (3.5 stars)

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes". Such a great title. More dark fantasy than horror, I was put off early in the novel when Bradbury tries way too hard to make sure you know the carnival is evil, and really scary....mmmmmkay?

So the maze waited, its cold gaze ready, for so much as a bird to come look, see, and fly away shrieking. But no bird came.

NO BIRD CAME. But anyway, it actually recovers and does get creepy, once some events have caught up with all the foreshadowing. Bradbury's writing is often poetic:

Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites.

quite surrealist:

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

and occasionally I just found it nonsensical:

Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar's lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

WAT? I dig weirdness and don't mind being confused while reading, but this type of thing broke the flow of the story for me a few times.

The father, Charles Halloway, has all of the best dialogue, which is not surprising since the two protagonists are children. His heart-to-heart with Will in the library where he tries to impart some wisdom in terms the kids will understand was quite moving, and my favourite part of the whole novel:

Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn't it?

My favourite creepy moment was Will's encounter with the Dust Witch's balloon over his house:

...he saw her squinched blind-sewn eyes, the ears with moss in them, the pale wrinkled apricot mouth mummifying the air it drew in, trying to taste what was wrong with his act, his thought.

Overall, creepy carnival just seemed a bit too cliche to me: perhaps if I'd read this in 1962 I wouldn't be quite so jaded. I also took issue with Jim and Will's first encounter with the carnival: they 'killed' Cooger and got away far too easily given how powerful Dark and the Dust Witch are later in the novel.

A couple of reviewers mentioned they thought the movie (screenplay also written by Bradbury) was actually much more impressive than the novel. I'll have to check it out.

3.5 stars.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (4.5 stars)

Unbroken has been on my reading list ever since I was completely surprised by how much I loved Seabiscuit, not to mention it is also one of the all-time highest rated books on amazon. In fact, it was Hillenbrand's research for Seabiscuit that led her to discover Louie Zamperini, whose story was all over the 1950s newspapers she was reading for Seabiscuit.

Zamperini's story is simply amazing. I was expecting a fairly normal life story before getting to the piece about flying in a bomber in WWII, but Louie's story is fascinating even from childhood. He stages a mind-boggling number of practical jokes and pranks in his youth, goes on to break a series of running records, and competes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics where he meets Hitler and steals a German flag off the Reich Chancellery! All of this before we even get to the main part of the story.

A standout for me from the section about Louie's pranks and criminal activities during his youth was when Hillenbrand mentions eugenics and Louie's realisation that he was in danger of sterilization or worse:

Louie was never more than an inch from juvenile hall or jail, and as a serial troublemaker, a failing student, and a suspect Italian, he was just the sort of rogue that eugenicists wanted to cull. Suddenly understanding what he was risking, he felt deeply shaken.

I found this deeply shocking as I was completely unaware of America's extensive eugenics movement, sterilization laws, and influence on Nazi eugenics.

Another section that fascinated me was the description of WWII defences in San Francisco. Having lived in the area for a number of years it is amazing to think of mines at the entrance to the bay, a submarine net, and trenches along the coast.

In America, invasion was expected at any moment. Less than an hour after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, mines were being laid in San Francisco Bay....In coming days, trenches were dug along the California coast, and schools in Oakland were closed.

Also surprising was hearing about the significance of Nauru in WWII, known recently to all Australians as a hell-hole of an immigration detention centre. The Japanese took it in August 1942, mined the rich phosphate for munitions, and used it as a base to launch air strikes. Louie has a miraculous escape after bombing Nauru, returning to land with 594 holes in his airplane, some larger than his head.

No less astonishing is Louie's tale of survival on a life raft adrift in the Pacific. He survives simultaneous attacks from sharks and strafing from a Japanese fighter by diving under the raft and punching the sharks. No kidding. They also beat off sharks with the raft's oars and stab one in the eye with a pair of pliers.

Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed.

Honestly there were a number of moments in this book where I felt like it may have been exaggerated a little, the above is one of them. While I think the book was very well researched, large parts would have been based solely on Louie's descriptions and essentially impossible to verify.

But overall it is a fantastic read, and one of the most amazing stories to emerge from WWII. Louie's treatment in various POW camps is beyond horrible and yet he, somehow, remains unbroken.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.

4.5 stars

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (2 stars)

Like a number of other Sci-Fi classics I've read recently, it's an impressive piece of history and a testament to Asimov's imagination and foresight, but it isn't a fantastic read compared with modern Sci-Fi. I, Robot, is a series of meditations on the now famous 3 laws of robotics that are well-known to all Sci-Fi fans.

In each short story Asimov probes the edges of the rules, looks for cases of ambiguity, and establishes test cases where the laws are pushed to their limit. It's more thought-experiment and test suite for a set of rules to make robots safe than thrilling fiction. Those who enjoy critical thinking and attempting to poke holes in a hypothesis will probably enjoy the stories, those looking for something along the lines of the hollywood blockbuster should not bother.

I appreciated its place in history, and respect the imaginative talent, but it just isn't a particularly good read.

2 stars.

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (3 stars)

Explosion! Concussion! The vault doors burst open. And deep inside, the money is racked for pillage, rapine, loot. Who's that? Who's inside the vault? Oh God! The Man With No Face!

This opening made me cringe. It might be the first Hugo winner ever but the opening reads like a story written by a high-school kid, or the script for an old cheesy Batman episode: it's just missing a POW! and a SOCK! But it gets better, and the concept of a highly sophisticated pre-meditated murder in a society where crime doesn't exist because the police can read your mind is a great one. The telepathy, and the ESPers guild are interesting ideas, but I was most impressed with the mind-to-mind conversations between the espers that were written as a woven mesh of words with custom typography. Great stuff.

The novel builds to a fairly early mini-climax where the murder takes place, after which the rest of the novel is spent in a cat and mouse game. Powell, a 1st-class esper police detective, works to build physical evidence to prove the guilt of Reich that he already knows via ESP, but which is not admissible in court. While I initially enjoyed this thrust and parry between Reich and Powell, I got tired of waiting for Powell to prove something that everyone involved, including the reader, already knows to be true.

A couple of confusing things I noticed that didn't get explained: how does Barbara, stumbling around after the struggle with Reich make such an effective escape and how does she end up in a bizarre place like Chooka's? Why become part of a public 'psychic' show when the whole world is pursuing her? Why didn't she go to the police? Was she aware of who Reich was? Why did Reich's goon go to Chooka's with his wife and choose to get a lap dance from Barbara instead of killing her?

The ear-worm jingle that Reich uses as a simple defence against mind-reading is actually really catchy, despite not even knowing the tune:

Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.

Similar to The Stars My Destination I can see why this was an amazing novel for its time, and a deserving winner for the first Hugo.

3 stars.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (3.5 stars)

An absolutely astounding novel for 1956, for 2013 it's appeal is mainly as a piece of Sci-Fi history, although definitely enjoyable. This book laid a foundation for cyberpunk and features an anti-hero, something that was probably quite ground-breaking at the time. I liked the description of teleporting (jaunting) and using mazes to defend against jaunting intruders, and the idea of Gouffre Martel: a jaunte-proof prison. The opening sequence of Gully living breath-to-breath in a 'coffin' in space is absolutely brilliant.

I found a few flaws particularly grating. The escape from Gouffre Martel was particularly silly, where deus-ex-sledgehammer happens to open an entrance to convenient caverns, where stumbling around on an underground glacier and swimming underwater in the glacier-melt river doesn't give you hypothermia, capped off with a sex scene outside immediately after getting out of the freezing water. Right.

Inside the prison, with a few lessons via the contrived 'whisper-line', Gully is transformed from gutter-speaking idiot to evil genius, going on to construct an elaborate highly-successful circus team purely for the purpose of providing some cover for traveling around on his revenge quest. And a minor niggle: his facial tattoo re-appears when his blood gets pumping, but never the whopping great "NOMAD" that was plastered across his forehead by the same needle.

But, I still enjoyed it, and felt some echoes of ideas in other Sci-Fi novels that probably originated in this one. Kudos to Bester for being so radical.

3.5 stars

PS. For reasons unknown to me, the Canberra region features in the novel on at least two occasions. Fourmyle appears at a ball in Government House and later, in a series of teleports as the burning man, one of them is to "Jervis beach on the Australian coast", by which I think he means Jervis Bay.

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

A book with a huge twist that makes you re-think the whole novel after the reveal. Stop reading now if you don't want to be spoiled.

The novel has two plot lines, one moving forward in time, and one moving backwards. The reveal comes when we find out that Zakalwe as we know him is actually Elethiomel, and that the fear of chairs that 'Zakalwe' has is due to the huge weight of guilt he has for making Zakalwe's sister into a chair. Literally a chair, he made a chair out of her bones covered with her skin and sent it to Zakalwe. The ploy was to send the command of the opposing army (the real Zakalwe) into disarray and confusion due to the horror of the act just as Elethiomel's forces mounted a breakout attempt from the Staberinde.

The problem with the twist was that I couldn't reconcile the ability to perform this horrendous act with E's later guilt and multi-century attempt at atonement by doing the bidding of the Culture, who he hopes are the good guys. This twist, while an interesting idea and a fairly spectacular reveal, didn't gel with me at all. In the following quote, during his 'retirement', he doesn't sound like the sort of person willing to win at all costs, even if it requires turning his girlfriend into furniture to distract his childhood friend:

He told her about a man, a warrior, who'd worked for the wizards doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to - and even the wizards had not discovered - he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.

This also begs the question, could the Culture really not have known who they were dealing with? Zakalwe seems to think they didn't, and certainly Sma and the drone didn't seem to know until the reveal, but it would be such a trivial thing for a Culture Mind to find out that it strikes me as unbelievable they wouldn't have such basic background on someone they place in critical roles on many occasions. So, if they did know, it feels more ruthless than I expected from the Culture, but perhaps someone that will try to win at all costs and who can be manipulated by his past is exactly the weapon they need. That's certainly Zakalwe's impression:

You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognized that.

There's some great stuff about the nature, necessity, and futility of war throughout the novel. Here's a few choice quotes to end with:

...in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

"I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing."

"So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile...arguing stuff?"

"Agree to disagree," he said. "Or fight."

4 stars.

PS. My favourite ship names from this one: "What Are the Civilian Applications?" and "Very Little Gravitas Indeed".

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

My second culture book, and much much better than Consider Phlebas. In this novel we get a deeper insight into the Culture itself: a galaxy-spanning highly evolved human civilisation where no-one wants for anything. Our protagonist Gurgeh has gotten sick of being a super-leet game player and winning at basically every game he takes an interest in, so reaches out, in response to gentle prodding, to Contact (the part of the culture that interacts with aliens) for something new. Incidentally, there was something about Banks' use of slight mis-pronounciations of Gurgeh's name by aliens that added a special bit of polish to his interactions with aliens of the Empire.

The Empire is held together, and a governing class chosen, via an extremely complex series of games called Azad. I loved the dig at chess, one of the more complex games humanity has come up with to-date:

Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly', such as grid, Prallian scope 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies...As a work of intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Spoiler time.

Most disappointing in the early part of the novel was the blackmail scheme from Mawhrin-Skel. It was completely implausible that Gurgeh wouldn't see obvious blackmail underneath an offer to help with cheating from Mawhrin-Skel, a drone that Gurgeh knows loves digging up trouble. I like the implication that Mawhrin-Skel/Flere-Imsaho/our-narrator was working for Special Circumstances all along, and that blackmail was just part of the plan to get Gurgeh on board, but Banks could have come up with a much more sneaky entrapment than just "hey, wanna cheat?". Banks uses the Empire as a foil for commentary on our own society:

Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. "What's that?" he asked Pequil. "That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers." "Driven off the land," Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, "by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus."

Although it was unclear to me what point he was making with the game of Azad that is the focus of the Empire. One theory I had was that Azad was supposed to be an allegory for the complex game-like system of politics/elections/government on Earth. I think Banks very cleverly didn't try to describe Azad in great detail, since it would be very difficult to portray something as complex as he built it up to be without being boring.

I was a big fan of the planet Echronedal: an entire planet with flora and fauna evolved to survive, and even depend on, a constant raging inferno working its way around the globe.

I'm still not sure if I liked the ending. It's better than Gurgeh winning outright, exposing the faked propaganda about him losing, and becoming Emperor himself, which I thought was where it might be heading. It was a little reminiscent of Ender's Game or The Last Starfighter: finding out he was playing for the world after the fact. Winning at Azad seemed to be the low-force first option for the Culture, a little nudge to destroy the Empire, something that seems to gel very nicely with what I know of the Culture so far.

Onto the next one!

4 stars.

Shift Omnibus and Dust by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

Wow, what a ride. I read Shift and Dust back to back so I'm going to review them together since it is hard to separate them in my head. I re-read First Shift since it had been a while, and now having finished all the books I think the explanation for the creation of the silos, and the story of the Democratic convention is the weakest part of the whole series, you can read more of why in my original review of First Shift.

Shift is chock full of revelations and surprises. I loved getting Solo's back-story, his poem scrawled on a blackboard in the dead silo is a deliciously creepy moment:

The ghosts are watching. The ghosts are watching. They watch me stroll alone. corpses are laughing. The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them. parents are missing. My parents are missing. They are waiting for me to come home.

SUPER DOOPER GIANT MEGA SPOILERS.

Anna's subversive action to pump good nanobots into Silo 17 when it was supposed to be shut down with the killing kind was a brilliant twist, and a great explanation for the mystery of how Solo survived that I'd been pondering for a few books.

Donald waking up as Thurman was a stroke of genius from Howey, exploiting the drugged caretakers of Silo 1's complete trust in the system and power hierarchy. Donald's misguided murder of Anna wasn't a complete surprise, but it was still shocking, and made me want to yell STOP! DON'T DO IT! as I was reading. And Thurman rises from the dead! So many great ideas in this book.

I found Mission's story fairly uninteresting, but I think Howey made an excellent point with the Crow: just one person off the drugs who actually remembers is a very powerful thing, and a seed for revolution.

Donald's despair and frustration is palpable as he struggles to discover the secret of the silos.

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.

The ending felt a little rushed, but I think it was actually quite fitting, the survivors needed to do something drastic. The prospect of fighting for survival in a decrepit silo was understandably horrifying. Howey didn't attempt to tie off all the loose ends, like the other dark silos, or whether Juliette and crew would go back and try to rescue others, but I think that was fine.

Easily one of the consistently strongest sci-fi series I've ever read. Kudos for finishing strongly and not dragging things on into mediocrity. I look forward to seeing what Howey does next.

4.5 stars.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (3.5 stars)

Banks creates a universe for epic-scope space opera, which is great, but this novel is actually fairly weak.

The protagonist Horza, a shapeshifter, stumbles from one seemingly random experience to another: a laser fight in a temple, an ill-fated looting mission on a soon-to-be-destroyed orbital, an escape from a fat cannibal who is slowly eating his religious followers to death, among many others. Don't get me wrong, there were great feats of imagination here, but the almost complete lack of any thread tying it all together meant I just didn't really care about any of the characters, especially true during the obviously pointless and stupid temple mission.

Horza has sided with the Idirans, who we know are barbaric and brutal, but we never see any evidence or rationale for why Horza is so anti-Culture, or get an explanation for his violent hate of their society. This ambiguity and weakness in Horza's character might be deliberate, but it didn't help me empathize with him at all. Perosteck Balveda, the Culture agent, is obviously using Horza to get access to the planet, but I couldn't tell in some places if Banks was portraying Horza as unbelievably naive to not realise this, or trying to assure himself (Horza) that he still had the upper hand and was in control of the situation:

As for Perosteck Balveda, she was his prisoner; it was as simple as that.

Fal 'Ngeestra, mountaineer and Culture Referrer (basically a highly evolved soothsayer), seemed interesting to start with, but I soon grew bored of her semi-mystical, too-much-peyote passages:

We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

Having slogged through this crap, it was all the more annoying to have her storyline just die.

Banks manages a few very well-placed digs at religion. Horza gets pissed off that someone with religion interprets the impressive engineering achievement of a Culture-built orbital as a triumphant testimony to the power of God:

...genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

The action sequence of Horza blasting his way out of a giant GSV while swearing at an annoying drone couldn't have been more like Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon, and C-3PO, so much so that it felt formulaic to me. Maybe I've just seen too much Star Wars.

Speaking of movie plots, there is a jarring passage about three-quarters through the book that seems to imply this is all a training simulation - Matrix red-pill style. Perhaps this will become clear in later novels:

"Just a moment," Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw colored lights across his broad gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and siad, "Oh, Sorry!" and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the..

While the final sequence underground was entertaining, it was fairly mindless action-novel stuff, with a poor ending. Banks is obviously talented, and has a great imagination, this just isn't his best book. I've already started reading The Player of Games set in the same universe and it is far far superior.

3.5 stars.

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey (1 star)

This was recommended by a friend a long time ago, and I decided not to read it at the time, but I recently saw it on the NPR top 100 sci-fi fantasy list along with many of my all-time favourites, which got me curious enough to give it a chance. I wish I hadn't, since it is basically GRRM romance fan fiction. The same people that put this on the NPR list probably made 50 Shades of Grey a #1 bestseller.

Carey has created a complex world that has some of the feel, but none of the actual talent, of GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire, and turned it into a romance novel with a twist: the main character and single POV is a woman, Phedre, apparently predisposed from birth to BDSM who trains as a high class prostitute. She works for a self-styled spymaster, Delaunay, who we're supposed to believe is a master of information sources, but is really just a pimp for two high-class prostitutes. Delaunay is obviously intended to be Varys, he's even called 'the spider' in case you missed it, but shows none of Varys' talents for extracting information. He isn't ruthless or devious enough to be a spymaster, use sources against each other, or apply blackmail liberally, and he appears to have little to no underworld contacts. In fact, his whole information gathering strategy seems to be pimping out his two prostitutes to his enemies and hoping they say something interesting.

And if you need more convincing that it's trying to be the Song of Ice and Fire, how about this:

Barquiel L'Envers rested his chin on one fist. "Will you teach me to play the game of thrones?".

OK, so maybe the plot is silly and the characters are unconvincing, how about the writing? Carey can certainly churn out the words, the novel is about 900 pages. And she wants to create a complex world. She really wants it to be complex, but she doesn't know how to create it without just dumping vast boring swathes of geography and history:

...Also to the south went Shemhazai, westerly to the mountainous borders of Aragonia, with whom our long peace still stands. Siovale is the name of this provice, and it is a prosperous one with a great tradition for learning, for Shemazai ever treasured knowledge. Inland to the north of Siovale is L'Agnace...

And just so you know all this boring background isn't pointless (it is), there's plenty of heavy-handed foreshadowing along the lines of "if I had only known that going to the Valerian House would have had such an important consequence".

Carey also felt the need to re-use Christianity as a religion in this kinda-Europe, with some bits re-named. I'm not sure why this annoyed me so much, perhaps just because it felt lazy because she missed the opportunity to build something new and interesting in favour of a shallow copy of Christian beliefs and rituals.

It came then to the One God that his persuasion held no sway over Elua, in whose veins ran the red wine of his mother Earth, through the womb she gave him and the tears of the Magdelene.

The real problem here is that Phedre's POV is boring and far from the centre of the action, and its the only POV. Most of the first half of the novel is like this: Phedre is told to go on an 'assignation' (one of many fancy words to dress up what is actually going on, if you read 'trick' for assignation and BJ for languisement it seems a lot less like a semi-religious occupation and a lot more like old-fashioned whoring), patron (john) drops some tidbit of information in fairly implausible manner since they know exactly why Phedre is there, Phedre gives information to Delaunay. Delaunay keeps Phedre in the dark about everything. Repeat. Through the whole novel Phedre is very passive, does little more interesting than pick a sexual partner every now and then, and happens to be in the right place at the right time to hear and pass on crucial information.

But I'm tired of writing, so I'll just dump a list of other miscellaneous things that annoyed me:

• "In the City's Great Temple...flowers and weeds alike are lovingly tended." This is ridiculous. I can't wait to see a temple overrun with 10ft high thistles and kudzu grass, it sounds beautiful.
• Everything about Melisande being more beautiful than all the other already highly praised beautiful people and her effect on Phedre: going weak at the knees, seeing red, complete submission, was entirely unconvincing.
• Delaunay enacted an elaborate plot to get Phedre to surprise Duc Barquiel L'Envers and use her body as bait to get L'Envers to meet with Delaunay. Because, you know, Delaunay knowing who killed his sister wasn't enough to get a 5 minute meeting without this elaborate setup.
• Phedre constantly talks up how smart she is but never shows any glimmer of smarts or cunning outside the bedroom "...made of me what I was, a courtesan equipped to match wits with the deadliest of courtiers."
• Not only does Phedre have an over-inflated opinion of her intelligence, she's also a bigot "It was a strange thing, to mark the presence of so many D'Angelines among foreigners, honed features shining like cut gems among unpolished stone." and "earthborn and bred, with none of the odd outcroppings of gift or beauty that marked even the lowest-born of D'Angeline peasantry".
• Phedre's Boys made me cringe every time they were mentioned. It's like the cast of HMS Pinafore picked a BDSM prostitute as their figurehead and waltzed around singing merry little songs in her name.
• No-one really important dies, ever. GRRM this is not.

Don't read it.

1 star.

Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel by Richard K. Morgan (5 stars)

Fans of Chandler and sci-fi rejoice! Your dreams are answered in this noir sci-fi detective novel set in future San Francisco (now known as Bay City), where bodies are just 'sleeves' to insert your cortical stack into, and, for enough money, you can live forever. One of the super-rich elite known as 'meths' (after Methuselah longevity) forcefully enlists the help of Takeshi Kovacs, a futuristic detective with grit, to figure out who murdered him recently, after the meth was 're-sleeved' and lost 48 hours of memory since his last stack backup.

The writing is impressive. I loved this novel from very early on, purely based on the Chandler-esque descriptions. Here's a few examples, I've never so vividly imagined a nose breaking before.

Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath the single sheet.

...it's like trying to throw a net over smoke.

My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery, and blood flooded down over my mouth

But its not just the writing that makes this a great novel: you have a gritty detective, hard-boiled humour, a fascinating almost-dystopian world chock-full of amazing technology, and a cast of misfit characters. Most of whom constantly teeter on the brink of 'good' or 'bad'.

Kovacs pursues a line of investigation for quite some time, only to have it abruptly dead-end, requiring him to throw away most of his assumptions and cast around for a new investigative thread to pull. I found this section of the novel jarring and disheartening, but I think this was actually quite clever writing: detective work must often face obstacles like this, and I was empathising with Takeshi who was experiencing the same emotions. I think Morgan's solution to this problem, and a number of others, was use of the 'screw a woman who will then give you a vital clue' plot device, which tended to be a little heavy handed since Takeshi gets almost all his leads this way.

I'll leave you with a few random observations.

Kovacs' tour of PsychaSec on Alcatraz reminded me of just about every data-centre tour I've ever been on:

We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the seven to eleven degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at the racks of the big thirty-centimeter expanded-format disks, and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. "It's a duplex system", Nyman said proudly....I made polite noises.

Reileen (Ray) Kawahara's HQ is a ridiculous bond villian lair, it might as well have been inside a volcano:

I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross, and whose ceiling was lost in the gloom above us...I saw that the roof here was vaulted with the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords...

Overall, great book, highly recommend, unless you don't like violence, sex, or Catholic bashing:

Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They've been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They've been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won't even let their adherents practice birth control, and they've stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries.

5 stars

Old Man's War by John Scalzi (4.5 stars)

There's a great premise here: at 75, people living on Earth can optionally enlist in the Colonial Defence Force, get some advanced medical treatment, and hop on a one-way flight into space to defend far-flung human colonies. Sclazi writes a ripping military Sci-Fi space opera, with significant influence from Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but with less moral, political, and thematic depth and more fast-paced action. That may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

That's not to say the characters are shallow, Perry is well-rounded, intelligent, and desperately misses his wife, who dies a number of years before he joins the CDF.

For as much as I hate the cemetary, I've been grateful it's here, too. I miss my wife. It's easier to miss her at a cemetary, where she's never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.

The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another - it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.

The medical treatment, it's outcomes, and the old people's reactions to their new fitness was fascinating reading. The BrianPals felt a lot like Google Glass plus 20 years.

I hated the section with Master Sergeant Ruiz as the cliched drill instructor. Scalzi acknowledged that he was writing a cliche drill instructor and tries to address it head on:

"You're under the impression that I'm talking like this because this is just something drill instructors are supposed to do. You're under the impression that after a few weeks of training, my gruff but fair facade will begin to slip and I will show some inkling of being impressed with the lot of you, and that at the end of your training, you'll have earned my grudging respect...You're impression, ladies and gentlemen, is completely and irrevocably fucked."

But the scenario described is exactly what happens.

Battles are had, aliens and humans die in creative ways, and it's all very entertaining (the Consu reminded me of Dr. Who's Sontarans in their war-like temperament). However, the human-led massacre of Lilliputian aliens is ridiculous (stomping? really? even today's weapons could easily destroy a tiny city more efficiently) and a bizarre way to introduce Perry's moral conflict.

All that aside, it is a great thriller which is impossible to put down. That's so rare I'm willing to forgive much.

4.5 stars

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (4.5 stars)

This has been on my to-read list for a long time, although I've been somewhat loathe to pick it up due to its sheer bulk (900-ish pages). Apart from a vague notion that it was popular amongst security people, and presumably had something to do with crypto, I started reading without any preconceptions. Well, that's not entirely true, I was expecting something similar to Snow Crash, so imagine my surprise when I landed in a Bletchley park history lesson.

Honestly after reading a fair bit of non-fiction about Bletchley, enigma and code breaking, I found found these early sections fairly tedious, but for someone new to the subject it should be very interesting. I could have done without the efforts to dumb down cryptomaths concepts with analogies, like the multi-page epic about the bike chain. I was familiar with the maths on a deeper level so found it boring, and I imagine people who don't care about the maths were also bored, so lose-lose.

Randy's description of Silicon Valley startups, writing templated business plans, machinations by venture capitalists, and socially inept millionaires wearing medic alert bracelets with cryogenic freezing instructions, was great. Here's a business plan template, should you need it:

INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the (proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an increase in value to $ [an even larger number] unless [hell freezes over in midsummer].

I also really enjoyed Shaftoe's belligerence at future President Ronald Reagan's attempts to romanticize his combat experience for the purpose of propaganda (interestingly Reagan was actually assigned to PR for Army Air Force in WWII).

As the novel moved away from the familiar Bletchley Park territory I found myself enjoying it more and more, and the technical cred is impressive (with a couple of minor exceptions that irked me). Bruce Schneier wrote the Solitaire crypto algorithm, used by Enoch Root in the novel, as a genuine attempt to provide the world with a method of encryption that can be used without any incriminating tools. Apparently there is some bias, but you could do a lot worse. There's even a perl implementation in the novel text.

Stephenson does a great job of portraying crypto and network nerds with different character traits, most of which fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. This is Shaftoe realising that crypto-genius Waterhouse is a third category of man that doesn't fit into his talker/do-er model of the world.

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way form men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge - how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip - from the latter type of man....but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in.

and this is very true:

What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

and more from the book of nerd:

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

Lots of reviewers complained about the ending, and multitude of plot dead-ends, but I think both were fine. The dead-ends are hardly unexpected in a work this large, and tidying them all up would be incredibly tedious. So I was won over, great read. I'll leave you with this public service announcement:

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

4.5 stars

Inheritance by Christopher Paolini (2.5 stars)

Finally got around to finishing off this series. I read the penultimate novel back in 2009, and I apparently really enjoyed it at the time.  Since then I've read some great fantasy, so my perspective has changed, and although I can't really remember Brisngr I suspect this book is comparatively much weaker.

Many, many things annoyed me (warning, you're entering complainy-spoil-town). It was too predictable: the seemingly all-powerful invulnerable bad guy is vanquished, no-one important dies, and look under your seats...everyone gets a dragon! You get a dragon and you get a dragon! And I'm going to solve all the world's problems by holding the Olympics and everything will be perfect. Even Saphira gets laid.

But how did he defeat Galbatorix, the cardboard character of all-powerful evil magic? With deus ex machina of course! Need some eggs? Got some. It would also be handy if Galbatorix held off from attacking us for no real reason until we've had time to collect the deus ex machina. Need to escape the elaborate bond-style Ra'zac death trap? How about Angela gets a power upgrade and just kills everyone? Need to undo a ton of evil magic? Well, you know what is more powerful than magic? Magic magic. Done.

But don't let me give you the impression that this all happens quickly. In fact it happens at a horrendously slow pace with lots of boring detail. Paolini said he spent a lot of time researching language, naming objects etc. which gets incredibly annoying by the end of the novel. I don't care what the sword/ring/snail/toothbrush is called in the ancient language. You're not Tolkien, find a new angle.

Oh how I yearned for a GRRM-style main character kill shot.

So that came out pretty nasty, and it's not a great book, but I have to say it was still reasonably entertaining. If Paolini can stop combining derivative Tolkien with an RPG game where you just need to collect the right magic items to win, I think he is definitely capable of writing a really great novel.

2.5 stars

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (3.5 stars)

This was the perfect story for its 1974 publication date. It's a deeply critical anti-war book that presents the futility of war, it's impact on society, the struggles veterans have re-integrating, and the dubious motivations for conflict in the first place. While it is a well-written, strong novel, I doubt if it was published today it would have had a chance of creating the same deep resonance with readers or sweeping the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards as it did in 1975/1976.

Haldeman's world where the intellectual elite are forced into military service in a war with little relevance to the general population, apart from economic stimulus and justification for martial law, is a great contrast to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional - more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.

Haldeman also applies relativity in interesting ways. Imagine sending ships into space to travel a massive distance at close to the speed of light, then faster than light through a collapsar Stargate, then spend a few weeks at 2 gravities decelerating to the battlefield. By the time the starship gets to the enemy, they may have had hundreds of years to develop their technology and prepare defences. But the same applies in reverse if they want to attack a human base.

You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

You could imagine the social disconnect of returning to Earth after several hundred years have passed. Haldeman uses relativity to create an exaggerated allegory to the disconnect Vietnam vets felt on returning to the US as it was undergoing a period of significant social change.

Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

It's a powerful novel with a theme that will probably continue to be relevant forever, sadly. Haldeman could easily be talking about the war in Iraq in this passage:

You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans' having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unity humanity rather than dividing it.

3.5 stars.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (3 stars)

Slaughterhouse Five is a Sci-Fi classic: it was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula and often appears on top 100 novels lists. Its plot is non-linear. Billy Pilgrim has 'come unstuck in time' and jumps randomly around in his own lifetime. Vonnegut draws on his own personal experience of the Dresden bombings to write an absurdist, satirical account from Pigrim's point of view as an American POW in Dresden at the time of the bombings.

So you might be thinking that apart from the time travel, this doesn't sound very sci-fi. But don't worry, Billy is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore and spends his days having sex with a similarly-kidnapped porn star, which is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. The sex seems to be the most commonly cited reason for it being in the top 100 banned and challenged novels of the 20th century.

Is it funny? It actually is, and there are a lot of quotable quotes. Stylistically it felt a lot like Catch-22, but not as clever, and not as razor sharp with the satire. It's a short novel, written in simple language but touching on complex ideas, which means it is a part of the syllabus for many high-schools.

Honestly I was fairly underwhelmed. Perhaps the non-linear timeline was revolutionary in 1969, but there are plenty of modern novels that have used this device in more compelling ways. Vonnegut may have been trying to use Billy's inability to control his place in time as allegory for our ability to avoid all wars:

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

So definitely some credit for making me think. I'd place Slaughterhouse Five somewhere between Catch-22 and a Gene Wolfe novel. Not clearly anti-war, not clearly batshit insane.

I also watched the movie, which I'm frankly amazed got made in the first place.  I think some of the abrupt time flips work better in the movie than they do in the book, but I think almost all of the comedic value was lost in translation.  I bet most people watching the movie didn't even realise it was supposed to be a comedy.

I'll leave you with some of the great lines from the book.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

...

All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.

...

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

And so it goes. 3 stars.

Nexus by Ramez Naam (3.5 stars)

Ramez Naam is an ex-Microsoft project manager who has written a non-fiction book about the possibilities of biotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, and extended those ideas even further into the future as a fictional account in Nexus. The ideas are fascinating.

In his authors@google talk, Naam talks about the requirements for 'Google in your brain': data in, data out, encoding/decoding, multiple data types, safe/secure/deployable. He makes a convincing case that we have very primitive forms of data i/o, encoding/decoding and multiple data types (audio, video) today in the form of medical devices like the Cochlear implant and primitive computer-assisted vision for the blind. Advances in computing power, miniaturisation, and communications are going to enable even more powerful functionality in the future.

Naam explores the possibilities of networked, customisable human brains from many different angles. There's the cyberpunk crowd that wants to have raves where you experience the emotions of everyone around you, the Buddists who meditate for hours as a single focused mind, various governments who want to limit access to the technology but also use it to boost the capabilities of their soldiers and armies, cults whose leaders use it as a form of mind control, and all manner of other criminal/illegal/unethical things that are possible when you can control someone else's mind.

So the ideas are brilliant, the science is great, and Naam's technology background is present everywhere: I certainly can't think of another novel where 'stack trace' was used correctly, or a compiler hack described complete with a Ken Thompson reference.

Unfortunately the novel is weakened by an over-abundance of action fight scenes, guns, explosions, and just general Michael Bay-ness. The opening sequence when Kade uses a pick-up line program followed by a pornstar program was ridiculous, and read like a teenage programmer's fantasy: if only I could write a program to get girls! Just need some sleazy lines and some porno moves! I was more convinced by the Bruce Lee program as a sort-of crude predecessor to Keanu's "I know Kung-Fu" moment in the matrix in the more distant fictional future.

As a Bay Area resident I liked the local references, and the party in Hangar 3 at Moffett. The ability of multiple cooperating governments to suppress important information despite the massive connectivity and diversity of the Internet was also an interesting case study for the future.

Broad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it's a dystopia.

If you like action novels, you'll probably love this. Personally, I'd rather Naam and China Miéville took some Nexus 5, joined their minds, and re-wrote this as a dark techno underground thriller :)

3.5 stars

The Scar by China Miéville (3.5 stars)

Yep, more Miéville, but I'm reading something else after this one. The Scar is a return to the Bas-Lag world from Perdido Street Station: re-made, cactacae, vodyanoi etc. but set outside of New Crobuzon, mostly in a floating pirate city reminiscent of 'Waterworld' called Armada. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as good as PSS.

Armada annoyed me from the outset. How does a bunch of boats lashed together in the open ocean survive a big storm, let alone centuries worth of storms? Why don't they smash into each other and sink? Miéville tries to address this, but the explanation is lame:

Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada's waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves.

The world-building is there, and there's at least one very well-played casual reveal, but compared to PSS or Embassytown, it's nothing, and relies heavily on explanations from PSS. You can read this novel independently, but if you did you would probably wonder why he doesn't describe the fascinating races in more detail, it's because he did it in PSS. I actually think avoiding recapping was the right call.

Miéville does introduce some new races, the most interesting of which is the mosquito men and women. The descriptions of the mosquito women were amazing:

Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips. It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual.

A book set in the time when the world was plagued by these mosquitos would have been an amazing read, as would one based on Silas Fennec's spying on the grindylow, or one about the zombie city of High Cromlech. Instead we got just a taste of all of these and followed an improbable floating city to the edge of the known world, just for it to turn around and come back. It feels like Miéville realised he'd already hit 800 pages and didn't have the stomach to write the actual climax so he just turned the city around. Or did he? Maybe that's just one possibility and there is a different one where it doesn't suck. That might be clever but ruining the story to make a point about possibility mining is a huge cop out.

I've noticed a pattern in the Miéville novels I've read so far: he doesn't seem to like filling out the characters of his narrators. In this novel it is Bellis Coldwine. With that name I can only assume Miéville was attempting to head off criticism of her blandness by pointing out: 'yes, she is deliberately cold and whiny'. She is important in the plot at one point as a translator, but after that just bumps along, being basically useless but inexplicably often at the centre of the action, which is of course convenient for narration.

My final complaint is that the grindylow were way too powerful. There's no way New Crobuzon could be a threat to them, which undermines a major plot point.

Not a terrible book, but he has written much better.

3.5 stars.

Embassytown by China Miéville (5 stars)

I doubled down on Miéville and was dropped into the now-familiar confusion at the start of a new Miéville novel: an explosion of new terminology, gradual reveals, and complex world building. Some readers seem annoyed by this initial feeling of disorientation, but I love it, and I'm now so impressed by Miéville's skill with this style that I'm perfectly content to sit back and let him do his work. Language is also as you would expect from Miéville: why use 'rare' when you could use 'recherché'?

And in fact language is a central theme of the book. The Areikei, dual-winged insect-like aliens on whose planet Embassytown exists, speak with two mouths simultaneously. A complex means of communications using a pair of cloned humans linked by technology to be able to synchronise their speech has been devised, and a class structure has evolved around these sort-of-human 'Ambassadors' who communicate with the Areikei 'Hosts'. The disastrous conflict of the novel arises purely due the speech of a new Ambassador.

Miéville spends much of the book describing the Hosts's native tongue 'Language', and creates some interesting constraints such as a physical inability to lie, and a requirement that all phrases be constructed with similes, saying something is 'like' something else. Part philosophical, and part linguistic fantasy, I imagine it would appeal to students of those disciplines (although I did read one resounding criticism of the notion that a language could exist without the concept of 'that', which is a key part of the plot). I mostly enjoyed the forays into linguistics but occasionally found them boring, especially the meetings of the similes club. On the plus side I learnt some terms like 'cognate' and 'kenning'.

This is definitely an ideas and plot book, more than a characters book. We don't really get to know anyone deeply, even Avice our narrator. And there are times when the single point-of-view is quite painful, such as shortly after the turmoil is created by the Ambassador. Avice is basically hanging out at home and talking to other people who don't know what is going on, which makes for fairly tedious reading, while others desperately try to save their society. A second PoV at this point would have been great: Ez, Ra, Scile, or MagDa maybe. Ehrsul's character is and central to the story early on, but is barely mentioned as soon as the conflict starts, which seemed very strange. Perhaps Ehrsul's story is fodder for a sequel.

Speaking of sequels, there's plenty more that this (third!) universe has to offer: there's a great immer-travel beyond-the-final-frontier space-cowboy hunted-by-bremen-establishment novel begging to written. The concept of light-houses placed in the immer by unknown technologically advanced aliens is great.

My favourite part of the book was the description of the Hosts and their infrastructure battling addiction - it was fantastically imagined and described. I'd love to see this as a movie one day and watch a building grow ears to satisfy a heroin-like junkie craving.

5 stars!

The City & The City by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

If you haven't read The City & The City, just stop reading this and go read it. It is really hard to discuss the book without spoiling anything since even major concepts are only gradually revealed to the reader, so be warned I'm going to drop a bunch of spoilers.

Miéville's cities of Beszél (which incidentally means 'to speak' in Hungarian) and UI Quoma are fantastically created. They are reminiscent of East and West Berlin, but instead of a high concrete walls and guard towers, the walls between Miéville's two city-countries are seemingly purely psychological, built on a deep and pervasive fear of 'Breach'. Citizens of both cities learn to 'unsee', 'unsmell', and 'unhear' everything about the other city: it's traffic, people, buildings, and more.

The idea of two countries being in the same place but separated in the minds of their citizens is a barrier for the reader's suspension of disbelief, but it's a problem that is skillfully attacked by Miéville. He describes a number of challenges the two cities need to deal with such as 'foreign' traffic and emergency vehicles, traffic accidents involving 'foreign' vehicles, children who are inexperienced at 'unseeing', tourists, immigration, trade, and differing economic status of the two countries. His description of UI Qomatown in Beszél is a good example of how much thought he has put into this world:

The scents of Beszél UI Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries as disrespectful as rain ("Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities," the proverb has it.)...Very occasionally a young UI Qoman who does not know the area of their city that UI Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically UI Qoman Beszél-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected - there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm - and Breach are normally merciful.

To explore the interactions between the two co-located countries, Miéville uses a murder investigation that necessitates international cooperation between Beszél's Inspector Tyador Borlú and UI Qoma's Senior Detective Quissim Dhatt. We only really get to know the main protagonist Borlú, other characters remain quite undeveloped, and the dialogue is fairly sparse and intense.

As noir crime fiction I felt it was fairly weak, and the very neat resolution to the whodunnit has prompted criticism from some readers, but they miss the point. The crime and its investigation was really an excuse to have some, otherwise very rare, international collaboration between the two cities. I was interested in the murder but I was fascinated by the larger questions it inspired: Who/what/where is 'Breach'? Was 'The Cleavage', when the two cities were created, a joining or a splitting (cleave can imply either)? Is the mental barrier between the cities purely psychological, or is there an element of magic/fantasy/sci-fi i.e. is there a biological or technological reason why the citizens of the cities can 'unsee' their foreign counterparts? Is Orciny real, a synonym for Breach, or something else entirely?

Of these questions we only really get some resolution about Breach and Orciny. Breach is invisible, pervasive, extremely secretive and seems to possess limitless power when there is a 'breach': a failure to observe the city boundaries, which could be as simple as looking directly at a building in the other country.

I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn't? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes...Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don't mention the UI Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn't, from where you stand in Beszél, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.

After all of his experiences of travelling to UI Qoma and entering Breach I expected Borlú to question whether keeping the split between the cities was actually a good idea, whether Breach was morally in the right or just a brutal enforcement of a ridiculous and pointless segregation, or even just to voice some self doubt about becoming part of that enforcement. But he never does. I'm still not sure how I feel about that: to some extent it seems in keeping with his character, he shows no sympathy for the unificationists, and perhaps there is even some fantasy/sci-fi explanation (government brain modifications?) for this deficiency, but it is at odds with his willingness to break the rules to protect Yolanda Rodriguez.

Nonetheless, an intriguing concept well executed.

4.5 stars.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (3.5 stars)

Zafón certainly has some talent, and this is an impressive debut. I have a soft spot for books that love books:

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

The Shadow of the Wind is a complex gothic love story that tended a little more towards soap opera than I would have liked. The improbable coincidences are, for the most part, carried by Zafón's strong writing. He creates some downright creepy scenes in the abandoned Aldaya mansion, and I loved his descriptions of Barcelona (you can see all the places he mentions on a Google map compiled by a fan).

I found it impossible not to love Fermin's character, the cheeky old soul, but like many other improbable things in the novel, the way Daniel decides to risk his father's business by offering him a job based on one encounter when Fermin was a drunk homeless person seems silly.

Early in the novel I was also annoyed by what seemed to be lackadaisical intimidation by the mysterious man with the scarred face - does he care about destroying these books or doesn't he? He appears to have years to spend just hanging outside the bookshop, and creating an occasional creepy encounter. This actually gets explained reasonably well at the end of the novel, so I relinquish the objection :)

But the biggest weakness of the book is the large amounts of exposition that are unceremoniously dumped into the flow of the story. These sections felt like very lazy background filling. On a number of occasions Zafón essentially writes a biography of the character and delivers it on thin pretext in a large chunk, instead of letting us learn about the character through experience, or meting out the necessary history more naturally. The meeting with Father Fernando Ramos was a particularly jarring example where Ramos exposes Daniel and Fermin as frauds pretending to be related to Carax, but then proceeds to tell them his entire life history and very personal details over dozens of pages anyway.

Despite these problems I did enjoy the novel, and was surprised by most of the (many) twists, but I would have loved it with less exposition and a darker, less Bold and the Beautiful, ending.

3.5 stars.

Sword and Citadel by Gene Wolfe (2.5 stars)

I have to admit to being slightly lost for words about what to say of the third and fourth Books of the New Sun. I'm apparently not the only one. After reading a few reviews of these novels, it seems there's little substance between enraptured "this justifies the existence of science fiction" and "it's confusing and boring". Those who sing high praises certainly don't try and interpret what is going on, they are content to talk of "staggering scope" and Wolfe's unique genius.

The true analysis and discussion has been happening on urth.net since 1997 (and presumably elsewhere before that since the books were published in the 80s) by a dedicated group of fans who have each read the book many times. I poked around in the archives for a few hours, and there's a lot of interesting stuff there, the theory that Nessus is Buenos Aires was interesting, and rang true to me. Dorcas being a vampire I decided I didn't buy, but there was much interesting discussion about blood bats....If it's in the book, it has probably been discussed there.

At the end of Shadow and Claw I was full of questions, and although I didn't enjoy the read, I have to admit I was intrigued. This was a complex puzzle with many twisty passageways. By the end of the fourth book some of that feeling of intrigue remained, but I honestly just didn't care that much what happened anymore.

Here's a collection of 'ends' of sorts that may or may not be correct (sort of spoilers watch out). So Baldanders is like a reverse Frankenstein who created his own doctor, the Claw is a thorn, or maybe nothing special at all, and whenever you go up or down, or through a corridor there is probably time travel involved. Oh and maybe there are two Severians, or at least a complex time-travel relationship with himself. Great. I understand approximately nothing more.

If I was to read it at least two more times I might have a chance. Even Severian/Wolfe tells me to:

Have I told you all I promised? I am aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that this or that should be made clear in the knitting up of the store. I remember them all, I am sure, but then I remember so much else. Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again.

At least this time I was very aware of what I was getting into. There continued to be plenty of 'autochthons', 'zoanthrops', 'cultelarri', 'deodands' and 'remontados': i.e. ancient english words sprinkled throughout the text that the kindle dictionary was woefully ill-equipped to handle. And the alzabo makes a real-life appearance in a chilling experience where Severian fights it as it speaks with the voices of the family it has just consumed:

More hideous than the speaking of a corpse could ever be, I heard the voice that had called "Open, darling," at the door. It said: "Yes, I am injured. But the pain is nothing much, and I can stand and move as before. You cannot bar me from my family forever." From the mouth of a beast, it was the voice of a stern, stamping, honest man.

I had a little chuckle at the blatant Deus Ex Machina call-out of Master Malrubius in a spaceship:

None but the poor playwrights do it, they say, but those who say so forget that it is better to have a power lowered on a rope, and a play that ends well, than to have nothing, and a play that ends badly. Here is our rope - many ropes, and a stout ship too. Will you come aboard?

Another favourite passage of mine was storytime with the Ascian in the field hospital. It seemed straight out of Catch-22.

If Wolfe deliberately placed all the clever plot points and hidden references attributed to him by fans, it is an amazing piece of work. Even if he didn't, and his intention was just to create a story that was sufficiently complex and open to interpretation that fans would be analysing it frame by frame like the Zapruder film for decades to come, that's certainly impressive in its own way. Unfortunately it is still a pretty horrible read.

2.5 stars.

Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe (3 stars)

Boy did I not know what I was getting myself into. The first two books of The Book of the New Sun, an award-laden series by Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, were a present from a friend and I jumped in with naive gusto.

I'm really not going to be careful with spoilers, so if that bothers you stop reading now.

I loved Wolfe's description of the Citadel, and his excellent portrayal of the professionalism and dedication of the torturers to their guild, where the flaying of skin to the bone of a 'client' is discussed by master torturers in a professional and passionate manner akin to computer science professors at a top university debating the merits of a particularly interesting algorithm.

They might be intensely interested in their art, but they completely distance themselves from the justice of the essentially random and senseless punishments they are carrying out. It is explained that 'clients' arrive carrying:

...his or her papers and thus his or her fate. All of them had broken the seals and read those papers, of course; and some had destroyed them or exchanged them for another's. Those who arrived without papers would be held until some further word concerning their disposition was received - probably for the remainder of their lives. Those who had exchanged papers with someone else had exchanged fates; they would be held or released, tortured or executed, in another's stead.

Gradually hints are dropped and you come to the realisation that this society is not medieval, but set in the far far distant future on Earth as our Sun is dying and technology has peaked. Society has fallen back to a feudal level ruled by an upper class with some control over high technology, while most of the populace cannot distinguish such technology from magic. Wolfe has been called the master of the casual reveal, and I felt that many times, here's a casual line dropped by Severian:

The lights of the oubliette are of that ancient kind that is said to burn forever, though some have now gone out.

Just as I was starting to feel comfortable in this world, and ready to learn more about the Torturers, Witches and follow Severian as a journeyman, the book lurches into a series of increasingly mad, and seemingly disconnected adventures. What's going on? Here's a mini summary:

Someone in armor gives you a seed and suddenly you jump in a cab and steal the most important artifact of a religion, on the way to Hunter S. Thompson's Botanic Gardens where you wander through a desert and a naked jungle hut discussion before coming to a lake full of bodies, get collected by a guy who is searching for his dead wife with a row boat and a grappling hook for well, possibly forever, and pick the nastiest, deadliest piece of flora which will be your weapon in an upcoming fight to the death that you somehow agreed to.

So this is why you should probably read the Wolfe hints for beginners, and Neil Gaiman's advice. It feels like you're trying to solve a puzzle being described by a narrator who is fond of LSD and lying.

Now I could no longer be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me, and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.

And it is a beautifully crafted and complex puzzle, which has hooked me into buying the next two books. But I have many questions in my troubled, troubled mind:

What is the nature of Severian's allegiance to Vodalus? When asked about it he says 'I saved him once' and that symbols 'invent us', with reference to the coin given to him by Vodalus. He says he 'backs into the throne', which I assume means he becomes the Autarch? Does the Autarch actually exist at present, or was this business about mirrors and light 'creating' something mean that the Autarch doesn't yet exist? Severian met the androgynous Autarch in the house of Secrets, but I really don't know what to make of that, does taking the Autarch's life mean killing him/it or something else? (note the contradiction in the meaning of the word Autarch and its use as a monarch-like figure) Or is Severian Vodalus? Oh wait, the coin has a 'worn, serene, androgynous face on its obverse' so perhaps the Autarch is real but Vodalus is a construct created by the Autarch? Dorcas and Severian are described as innocence and death, but it seems like it should be the other way around? Did Dorcas kill Jolenta?

But despite all this deep thought-provoking analysis, the truth is I definitely didn't enjoy large parts of this book. It is very very wordy, and difficult to read: it's been called the Odyssey of Science Fiction. And while there is a lot of depth and mystery, and little secrets to unlock, I'm sure not every boring and diversionary little anecdote was essential to the story:

Must it not be then that in darkness order grows ever less, flowers leaping from nothingness into a girl's fingers just as by light in spring they leap from mere filthiness into the air? Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes-set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable-to be the real world.

Perhaps indeed, it is such passages that detract from an otherwise 5 star novel? It feels like much of the book is padding to provide nooks and crannies for Wolfe to stash his secrets. I found reading Dr. Talos's play especially painful, possibly since it reminded me of boring English classes that sucked all the enjoyment out of Shakespeare.

I've heard the books are best on your second or third re-read, but if this novel was truly great, as many claim it is, it would be great the first time. It's a remarkably interesting and complex puzzle, but not a great novel.

3 stars.

Best of 2012 as read by G

In 2012 I attempted to improve my sci-fi education. Some progress made, but still lots to do. I also upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite and frickin love it: the light, smaller size, time to read and x-ray, in that order.

The best (5 stars):

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
• A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
• A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge