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.