The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (3.5 stars)

The final in the trilogy started by the fantastic Quantum Thief. Unfortunately neither of the subsequent books could match the first, and this is the weakest of the three. My view is somewhat coloured by having 3 years in between the Fractal Prince and my reading of this book, and I hate re-reading.  So I went into the complicated Hannu-verse cold...and it's not the sort of book you want to do that with.

Nonetheless, I pushed on and remembered most of the important points, but I'm sure I missed plenty of references. The book is full of action, is incredibly complicated, and has zero exposition. I'm a big fan of this style of book in general, but I felt like Hannu lost control of his ability to put the ideas in his head down on paper in a way that someone else can actually comprehend. I'll admit to being completely confused about what is a simulation, who has a body, what weapons are physical/virtual, what is happening in the physical universe, and even if this entire story is part of a larger simulation.

Partly this is the point, that the physical universe matters less than the virtual. But when characters and copies of characters are constantly shifting around in, and creating, nested virtual realities it is really, really confusing, to the point where I essentially stopped caring.

There's some nods to physics nerds and sci-fi fans, which are entertaining:

And it seems some people can’t tell their Fitzgerald from their Lovecraft. So don’t be surprised if you see a few flapper Deep Ones tonight.

It was an idea they already thought of in the twentieth century, that spacetime could compute. They tested it, in the last days of the Large Hadron Collider, when they learned how to make tiny black holes. Encode computations into their event horizons, then probe the information paradox by smashing them together, see if quantum gravity is more powerful than Turing Machines or their quantum cousins. Something to do for the humming LHC, still warm from finding the first Higgs. 

Gene Wolfe-level of unexplained complexity, but with more physics.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Suck My Cosmos by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Campbell has managed something impressive with the Hank series, he's 4 books in and the humour is actually still really good. In fact, this one was stronger than the last. Belvaille has undergone another drastic transformation and is now only affordable for the ultra-ultra-rich, i.e. you need to own a few other planets before buying an apartment on Belvaille.

Hank's new butler Cliston is an incredible character whose objectives are completely at odds with Hank's, which produces some great humour. I also loved the cabbie Zzho in his deathtrap.

Still not as good as the first in the series, but definitely continues to entertain. Some of my favourite quotes:

This lady, if she sold her coat, her damn coat, could hire enough people to kill me, invent a device to bring me back to life, then kill me again. Her husband was one of the six most powerful people on Belvaille. He had whole solar systems at his disposal.

Garm and I had very different motivations, especially in recent years. I was never fond of assassinations and whatever else she did. She was never fond of poverty and whatever else I did.

She was pretty and had a pleasant voice and was a living organism, but that was the extent of her abilities. 

4 stars.

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (3 stars)

The final book in a spectacular trilogy by Ann Leckie. Wait, what, final? There's nothing final about this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Oh, wait, lets have a cup of tea.

Some spoiler tea ahead.

Good, now back to the novel. Dear god, why are we still on this damn space station? I thought this was a space opera? Oh well, lets have another cup of tea and watch the Presger translator do something weird, hah it ate an oyster with the shell on. Oh Jar Jar, I mean, translator.

Oooh, Anaander is coming with her warships, here comes a battle. Ah...nope. Thank god we have a popgun-ex-machina to save us from those nasty action scenes. Lets have a cup of tea.

The bullets I had fired at them were so small that even if any of the ships’ sensors could have seen them—and they could not—they would not register as a danger.

Wait, here comes the climax, here it comes! Breq falls over, Jar Jar throws up, and the most powerful person in the galaxy was defeated. Presger-treaty-ex-machina for the win. Nothing to see here. Have some tea, sorry about the chipped enamel.

And don't complain about the ending, I see you already complaining about it, stop it. I'm going to preempt you all, so there:

Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

That may have been overly mean, but I was incredibly disappointed by this book. Leckie is a fantastic writer so she carries the story anyway, and I did enjoy reading it, but sadly the trilogy didn't come close to living up to the promise of the first novel.

Given how open the entire ending was, I assume, and hope, there will be more on what happens when AIs are recognized by the Presger and are no longer controlled by humans. And whether cloning will really work out for ancillaries, or if they will go back to kidnapping humans.

And I hope there will be less tea drinking.

3 stars.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

In The Diamond Age, Stephenson builds a fantastic world full of nano machines. The technology dominates all aspects of life: almost everything people need is built by a household matter compiler (think Star Trek replicator, or a really advanced version of current 3D printing).

The matter compiler in the corner of the kitchen came on automatically and began to create a pedomotive for Hackworth to take to work.

But it isn't all happy-useful machines. Advertising pervades almost everything, and humanity has split up into various tribes "phyles", largely along racial and socio-economic lines.

...it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

Sounds exactly right. And there's something great about reading a novel written by a computer scientist, so many in-jokes and clever ways of describing how computers work. "Castle Turing" may be the most surreal way to learn low-level programming I've ever imagined.

...the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses

In fact the majority of the novel is devoted to the description of how a young girl in poverty uses education gained from an incredibly advanced textbook "YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER a Propædeutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates.." to escape a dangerous home environment and drag herself out of poverty and into a position of power.

Nell is a wonderful character, and in fact this book was recommended to me as an example of a strong female lead character, of which I have encountered very few but want to find more of to recommend to my daughter.

Nell's early life is scary and full of danger. Her escape from her family was intense, and an excellent read. As a reader you desperately want Nell to succeed.

There are many other characters that are well fleshed out, but some are unceremoniously dropped without any real explanation (e.g. Judge Fang). And others I expected to play a larger role but never do (Miranda).

Something about describing the Seattle area like this with "software khans" I found very cute:

Much of the Seattle area was still sufficiently rich, civilized, and polite that New Atlantans did not object to living there, and little Victorian mini-claves were scattered about the place, particularly east of the lake, around the misty forest domains of the software khans

Things get surreal when the Drummers enter the story. It started to read like Being John Malkovich meets Eyes Wide Shut:

Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in brightly colored mediatronic condoms

The ending is just...terrible. I thought the concept was fine, the execution was just no good. Really rushed. Stephenson uses just a dozen pages to describe a war involving thousands of people that completely changes the entire world, which is completely inadequate when viewed in the light of the hundreds of pages he spent building the world and creating much less important plot threads.

But, ending aside, it's a great read. Here's my favourite quote:

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

4 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck by Steven Campbell (3.5 stars)

Even darker again. Belvaille is barely functional, socially chaotic, and falling apart. Hank is so dense he is effectively crippled and close to death. And yet somehow he is in charge of everything. Unfortunately, most of the humour was lost in the dark plot. It's getting close to sci-fi noir.

In a number of cases, it's actually fairly clever social commentary:

I don’t even think any of them had given their positions on issues. Stating your position might piss people off who disagreed with you. But attacking someone else only hurt them, especially if you did it through third parties

There's even a little to learn about free markets and how they are important to society. In this case the bankers are an alien race called the Ankh, who are very interested in Hank providing some stability.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Highly entertaining, not too much thinking required just like the first in the series, but with a darker bent. Hank takes some actions that gets lots of people killed and he shows very little remorse. There's still plenty of funny moments, but fewer laugh-out-loud situations than in the first. Hank's prodigious hunger after injury provides some of them:

But the ache in my stomach was primordial. It was twisting my mind. I was looking at doors and wondering if I could eat them. They looked so similar to large crackers. I wondered why the asses who had constructed this city hadn’t left great piles of food lying around. What if people got hungry? It seemed a massive oversight. There was all this metal and no food.

And many more from Hank's apparent cluelessness, hiring an army via newspaper ad, and, well stuff like this:

I heard you were walking around barefoot, killing people, leaving their bodies all over the city, while wearing a diaper.

4 stars.

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger (2.5 stars)

I got excited at the start of this novel as we were being introduced to Jack Crabb, our 111 year old narrator, mostly because of the fantastic visual descriptions Berger delivers:

He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.

But sadly, the rest of the novel is all Crabb, in a dialect that is too well-structured to match the character, and certainly with none of the beauty we get in the introduction. In fact, I didn't care about Crabb at all. He wasn't an interesting character personality-wise, and I just couldn't buy the tall-tale format where he's present at every major event (right beside Custer at his last stand), and knows everyone from wild west legend including Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane etc.

Old Lodge Skins the Indian chief was one of the most interesting characters in the whole novel. And while Crabb has some respect for him, Crabb's view of Indian's in general I think was probably fairly accurate for a white man of the time. This is very far from the Dances With Wolves noble savage romanticized view of Indians:

Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

As historical fiction it was fairly interesting to learn more about Custer's military actions, and how Indians were hounded from one place to the next as the trains made the west accessible. Honestly though, the tall-tale format detracted from the historical aspect, leaving me unsure if there was anything real to believe at all.

If you're looking for a western, True Grit and Lonesome Dove are far better reads.

2.5 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Screw The Galaxy by Steven Campbell (4.5 stars)

This is noir sci-fi comedy. Wrap your head around that, or "Eat suck, suckface". Hank is an amazing character, I loved him from the beginning. He's a self-described thug and a mutant with a superpower - he's very dense (heh), which makes him very hard to hurt. He has an offbeat, self-deprecating sense of humour that is just perfect. I can't remember the last time I liked a character so much.

 The story is exciting and ridiculous. Hank ends up negotiating on behalf of the human race with a vastly technologically superior race in a monogrammed pink bathrobe:

I looked at the robe for some time, wondering if I should get them to exchange it, but they had gone to the trouble to get it monogrammed. Besides, just because pink was a pansy color where I came from didn't mean anything out here. For all I knew it could be the galactic color of death and destruction.

The Colmarian world Campbell has built is hilarious in a dark way, and every bit as dysfunctional and contradictory as you'd expect a space station run by criminals to be.

The only thing Colmarians found more frightening than effective government was Ontakians: the race that had designed my very special plasma pistol.

I'll be reading more of this series.

4.5 stars

Son by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

This was the final novel in The Giver quartet, which I approached with much trepidation given the previous two were pretty awful. The start is a completely pleasant surprise.

We're back in the land of The Giver, seeing events from a different perspective. This section is moving, disturbing, and the reader grows to love Claire's determination to see her son. Great stuff, just like the original. The section describing her being forced to give birth with a mask on so as not to get attached to the "product" (i.e. baby) is horrifying.

The plot comes to same climax as in the first novel, except we're only one quarter of the way through. And then this novel completely loses itself. Claire ends up in a completely different community, with memory loss, and we endure a long boring account of her daily life that eventually firms up into a rock climbing training montage. The catch is that it's a 7 year training montage.

Once we're done with the lengthy rock climbing descriptions we step into the supernatural with our creepy friend from Trade Mart. And then we find out that Gabe, beautiful Gabe that Jonas risked his life for, and countless real-world parents named their real babies after, is actually kind of a little brat. Way to take the wind from the sails there.

So, there's an incredibly preachy biblical-parable-style end, and some closure to the whole series, but I'd be amazed if you're happy about how it turned out, I wasn't.

2 stars.

Messenger by Lois Lowry (2.5 stars)

The Giver quartet continues. This one steps well out of the norms of the previous two books and adds lots of fantasy. People can see the future, the forest comes alive to trap and kill you etc.

By far the strangest thing that happens is that the high technology world of The Giver, the medieval sew-fest of Gathering Blue, and Village (where Jonas ends up) are all linked. As in, they are all within multi-day walking distance and set in the same time period.

This is incredibly jarring. A technology discrepancy between rich and poor is common in the real world, but it seems implausible that the rich from Gathering Blue's medieval society wouldn't have gained more technology via trade or force given how close they are.

This book followed the formula from Gathering Blue: heavy on the symbolism, light on the plot. This time the former is about what we give up in pursuit of material possessions and physical perfection.

At least Trade Mart was an interesting, ominous side-bar. I wish the story had developed more in that direction.

2.5 stars.

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

I was so impressed by The Giver that I resolved to read the whole quartet. Having done so, my advice is don't bother, none of the others are nearly as strong. Gathering Blue may actually be the worst. Or perhaps it's just that the contrast with The Giver is still so fresh.

In any case, Gathering Blue is that incredibly boring book you're forced to read in English class so you can explain all of the vague symbolism and wax lyrical about how Kira was going to change and revitalise society through the power of art.

But if you ignore the deeper meaning and just look at plot: a girl with a bad leg in a medieval society survives her mother's death, gets a somewhat sinister government patron, learns how to dye threads, fixes a dress, and might add some new stuff to the dress one day. Note that I said might.

On top of being weak on its own, the novel doesn't even have the benefit of providing resolution of the events from the end of The Giver, or even obvious relationship to them.

2 stars.

The Giver by Lois Lowry (4.5 stars)

From the foreword it's obvious that this is quite an extraordinary book. Here's just some of the things that people have said to Lowry about it in letters over the years:

One couple wrote to me about their autistic, selectively mute teenager, who had recently spoken to them for the first time—about The Giver, urging them to read it. A teacher from South Carolina wrote that the most disruptive, difficult student in her eighth grade class had called her at home on a no-school day and begged her to read him the next chapter over the phone...A Trappist monk wrote to me and said he considered the book a sacred text. A man who had, as an adult, fled the cult in which he had been raised, told me that his psychiatrist had recommended The Giver to him. Countless new parents have written to explain why their babies have been named Gabriel.

I didn't read it in school, but I could tell by the end that this must be an English curriculum book, and sure enough, it is. It's a fantastic and thought provoking Young-Adult read, but definitely for older kids, there's enough adult concepts in here to make some schools nervous enough to ban it.

Many reviews casually spoil some of the great reveals in the book. I want to mention some of them now, so stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled...

Lowry does a masterful job of easing us into this dystopian future. We see a safe and orderly society with a sinister undercurrent gradually become more and more disturbing as Jonas and the reader gain awareness of how it functions.

Despite it being expected for some time, the reveal of the infanticide is both shocking and disturbing. But the moment I was moved by most was a more unexpected plot reveal.  That is, when you realise that not only are these people denied choice of almost any form, but they are even denied colour. It's amazing how much emotion this revelation brings, and how it is delivered with a simple sentence:

You're beginning to see the color red.

This part was inspired by a painter that Lowry met that she says clearly had a much deeper ability to experience colour than she did. She wished that he could have somehow magically given her the ability to see colour in the same way. His picture is on the front of the book.

Some people complain about the ending, but those are always the same people who complain when everything isn't neatly tied up.

4.5 stars.

Sand Omnibus by Hugh Howey (3.5 stars)

Hugh Howey creates another intriguing post-apocalyptic world, this time modern civilisation has been completely covered in sand, and "sand diving" to retrieve artifacts from the time of high technology is a lucrative but extremely dangerous occupation. I loved the sand divers: Howey delivered a light technology explanation, and great construction of the divers' society with its own rules, indoctrination, and language. The multiple different names for types of sand was a nice touch.

While I didn't get hooked as strongly as I did with Wool, I felt like Sand was a more measured and mature series. There weren't books I hated or incredibly implausible plot devices required. Having said that, there seemed to be some puzzling incongruities with technology: they had mechanical pumps powered by generators to bring up water from wells, but were still using a bucket brigade to move accumulated sand away from the wells...?

This is a society that is brutally oppressed and is steadily being crushed by remote actions we never really find out about. The dumping of sand that rules this future Colorado seems to be deliberate, but in a completely dispassionate and careless way.

I would have had a lot more respect for the novel if the protagonist had died in the desert. A willingness to kill off a major character to prevent the need for an unlikely rescue shows author's grit.

Good read for those who liked Wool.

3.5 stars

Messenger's Legacy (Demon Cycle side story) by Peter V. Brett (2 stars)

This is a side-story character background filler for Briar Damaj who just appears and plays a crucial role in The Skull Throne. His background was rightly cut from the main novel. This will be slightly interesting for fans of the main series, but you aren't actually missing anything if you don't read it. The bog where he lives is an interesting place, with some newly described demons and a new defence against them.

2 stars

The Skull Throne (Book 4 of the Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (3 stars)

This book is actually about the daylight war, i.e. the war between humans, whereas The Daylight War was mostly about the war with the demons, go figure. Minor spoilers ahead.

Brett obviously wanted to explore the political implications of Arlen and Jardir being out of picture while working on their pet project. He intends for any travel to the core to be the subject of the final book, and I assume the climax. But taking two of the most important characters essentially completely out of the story made it sag.

Having said that, full credit to Brett for killing off a major character and some secondary but still important characters. Some people are speculating that the major character isn't really dead. I really hope that isn't true since the story would lose any credibility it currently has.

While the addition of Inerva's POV in the third book was powerful for the story, Ashia's POV that we get in this one was....meh. It felt very formulaic, and it seems unlikely to be important. But hey, what do I know, maybe it will be. In fact, while some interesting things happened, it was mostly setting the scene and putting the pieces in place for the final book. Necessary perhaps but it won't be the book that people rave about from the series.

3 stars.

The Daylight War (Book 3 of the Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (3.5 stars)

Brett continues with his formula, adding another deep POV via a long series of flashbacks, this time for Inerva. Some people resented this and just wanted the story to move forward more. I think it was actually quite well done, bringing a lot of depth and another interesting perspective on the events we are now familiar with. It's very rare to have a three-dimensional picture of a story through such carefully constructed backstory.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

At some point Inerva is forced to draw on the power of her dice, destroying them in the process. Because of the backstory we know just how desperate this act is, and what it costs her. Inerva's political success looks effortless from Jardir's perspective, but Inerva's own perspective shows us just how tenuous her hold on authority is, and the risks of each of her daring power plays.

Inerva's story starts out as the female equivalent of Jardir's: plenty of physical and emotional violence, and a streak of ruthlessness needed to survive and lead the others. It gets more interesting as it moves from physical violence into political machinations and magic.

There's still plenty of cringeworthy portrayal-of-women moments that range from the amount of pages devoted to "pillow dancing" (i.e. the masters course in porn-star techniques that is mandatory for Dama'ting), and just the term "pillow dancing" in general, to silly impracticalities like having to walk down into the basement and unwind 10 feet of silk to go to the bathroom. Between Inerva displaying her pillow dancing skills for Jardir, and Renna and Arlen going at it:

He had thought their consumation would be gentle, but his bride had pounced like an animal the moment the flap fell, her aura lit up with lust.

it felt a little too much like a romance novel for my liking.

By this stage Leesha, Arlen and many others have gained lots of knowledge about how to create powerful warded weapons, many defensive techniques, and even use demon bone to power things. But they haven't released this knowledge at any sort of scale, it's one special shield here, a bit of bone there, mostly to give advantages to their friends. If they really cared about the populace why isn't every warder in the country supervising the creation of hundreds of cloaks of unsight? Sure some of this ward-tech is too dangerous for wide availability, but there are some wards every man, woman, and child should be wearing every day.

In this novel we get some insight into the mind demons, and a few POV sections which is good, although they remain fairly mysterious for now. Arlen goes around introducing himself to everyone and playing up his hick accent like some sort of reluctant politician who has been told they need to be more approachable.

The epic battles with the demons were great, LOTR-scale fights. But there was lots of bizarre decisions and inconsistencies. Like Rojer deciding the most dangerous part of a risky recon mission was a good time to take a piss. And Arlen sending his friends out to their probable deaths, on said recon mission, then, when they get back, just deciding to just teleport up in the air and take a look for himself. Either he's dumb or he's trying to get his friends killed? And why isn't every single person who is fighting wearing wards? At least the archers should have the damn wardsight wards, surely?

“Shoot the windies!” she cried. The Haveners lifted their bows to comply, but their fear was palpable, shaking hands that needed to be steady. Even with the light of the greatward, the night sky was dark, and they could not see the demons glowing as Renna did.

I really wish Brett would kill off a main character. None of the main cast dies and it's improbable given the constant life-threatening danger they face. There's this point where Jardir is dodging boulders thrown by demons that crossed the line into improbability:

Every demon on the field was focused on him now...Jardir leapt aside, but was struck even as he landed by another stone dropped from above...He was given no respite, as rocks the size of melons began to fall like rain around him. But as fast as the stones fell, Jardir was faster, dodging them like lazily drifting bubbles of soap. Even as he dodged the barrage from above, the rock and wood demons on the ground continued to hurl whatever they could grasp in their talons at him: rocks, trees, even a few of his own men.

No matter how awesome an athletic ninja you are, when enough demons throw rocks at you, you will die. Which is what should have happened in that scene. There's also a fair bit of "deus ex Crown-of-Kaji" going on, like when he needs to bust through some wards himself.

Still providing lots of entertainment.

3.5 stars.

The Desert Spear (Book 2 of The Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (3 stars)

This series continues to be very entertaining and highly cringeworthy for all of its female characters. Some mild spoilers ahead.

I accepted the annoyance of being thrown into a lengthy character development, this time for Jardir, rather than getting back to the well-known ones and the cliffhanger from book one. But by the time he has brought Jardir back to the present day, I actually appreciated the additional insight into the story. It was quite well done. It gets a little formulaic as he does the same for every novel: i.e. picking a single character for a lengthy retrospective character development. But the extra detailed POVs reveal nuances of the story you were unaware of before.

While I liked the additional deep perspective, the substance of Jardir's background story wasn't appealing. It read like an overdone parody of the Spartan warrior training montage. Starvation, fighting, and beatings. Krasia has an obvious Islamic culture (minarets, call to prayer, clothing) that is taken to extremism that Muslims will likely find offensive.

Brett adds mimics and mind demons to the mix which add some more dimensions to the evil opponents, but at the same time he incongruously weakens the regular demons (now "drones") to the point where Arlen is telling senior citizens in a village to drop their canes, pick up spears, and kill some wood demons. The wood demons of book one would have destroyed anyone so foolish.

This weakening paves the way for everyone to be a Mary Sue. Arlen essentially now has super powers including teleportation, he gets a new girlfriend who instantly becomes a super-powerful warrior:

Renna charged at one, grabbing its wrist and setting her feet, twisting her hips to turn the force of the demon’s attack against it. It was almost effortless...

and Leesha becomes queen of everything. She's the best warder, the best healer, the best new-language learner, the best lover, the best leader, the prettiest of the pretty....ugh. And she falls in love with the guy who's been raping and pillaging his way across her country.

The Hollow was in good hands with Leesha, at least until the Krasians advanced. She was brilliant and a natural leader, respected by all and governed by a pure heart and good common sense.

Oh and when I say healer, she's not just grinding up a few herbs anymore, she's also doing blood transfusions and surgery now:

“I need a blood donor!” Leesha cried as Gared kicked in the hospit door. They laid Kendall on a bed, and apprentices ran for Leesha’s instruments.

A number of characters all of a sudden get an accent. And it's maddening.

3 stars.

The Warded Man (Book 1 of The Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (4 stars)

I'm giving this 4 stars because it was highly entertaining and kept me wanting more. It's pretty trashy though. Some spoilers ahead.

Brett brings us to a post-apocalyptic Earth where demons (corelings) rise up from the earth every night and kill any humans that aren't shielded by magic runes (wards). Here begins my first beef. The demons are smart enough to systematically test a ward net for weaknesses, but not smart enough to kick some dust or mud onto the wards, rendering them useless? This would surely happen accidentally, and they display capability to learn - one coreling tracks Arlen across vast distances and maintains a vigil outside the city walls. So how have they not crushed this flimsy defensive system? Also, how have people been using wards for generations but never thought to put them on clothes or weapons?

But, suspending my disbelief about the wards, the world is very interesting, and I wanted to find out more about the demons. They remain one-dimensional purely evil beings through the whole book, which is kind of a shame, but this is addressed in the later books.

The characters are good, and the development is significant, in fact most of this first book is character development. The exception is Leesha, and the treatment of women in general.

I get that this is essentially the dark ages, which wasn't exactly a great time for women's rights, but Leesha's POV is 80% about who is trying to rape her today. And when something serious does actually happen, she brushes it off and has sex with a stranger a couple of days later in the least plausible sequence of the entire novel. I don't think there's a single female character that escapes the clumsy sexual descriptions.

4 stars.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (3 stars)

This Booker prize winner attempts to give us a satire on American life using a teenage narrator whose language is full of four letter words and malapropisms, "skate goat" being one of the most well-used. Vernon is a naive Texas teenager caught up in a mass murder-suicide by his best friend Jesus.

The satire is dark and grating, but never actually got me laughing. Vernon's character is well constructed and full of age-appropriate naive fantasies about escaping to Mexico with the hot girl from school, and a ridiculous (but completely in-character) willingness to ruin his life rather than own up to bowel problems. I felt sorry for him, and frustrated by him, but I never enjoyed reading through his eyes. The refrigerator obsessed mother, Bar-B-Chew-Barn-addicted mothers-friend, and TV-repairman/reporter/super-villain were exaggerated caricatures that should have been funny, but just weren't.

Many people have compared this novel to a Confederacy of Dunces, but it isn't remotely in the same league. Ignatius was a spectacular character, made me laugh out loud a number of times, and is so memorable I find myself recalling him completely out of context. Vernon is completely forgettable, but certainly realistic. Honestly though I think an overly-educated character acting in a ridiculous way has more appeal to me than an idiot being an idiot, so perhaps Pierre just picked a tougher assignment.

The biggest contradiction in Vernon's character is the occasional poetic phrase that will slip out. DBC Pierre is obviously an impressive writer and manages to maintain the dumb teenager voice but apparently couldn't resist pulling back the veil occasionally:

A strip of buffalo leather scrapes into the room, tacked around the soul of Sheriff Porkorney.

A receptionist with spiky teeth, and a voicebox made from bees trapped in tracing paper, sits behind a desk in the waiting room.

I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I’d since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that.

3 stars.

Bossypants by Tina Fey (3.5 stars)

It's funny, but I wish I'd gone for the audio book instead, apparently it's really good. So much of comedy is in the delivery and body language that even the best stuff can usually only get me to 'heh' whereas seeing the same thing in a sketch could have been a belly laugh. Some of my favourite quotes:

Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable—a two-week transatlantic crossing—seem bearable. There’s no need to do it now. There are planes. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you have an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You might take a vacation where you ride on a camel for two days if they gave you those animal towels wearing your sunglasses.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me.

3.5 stars.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss (3 stars)

This is a side story to the Kingkiller chronicles, that Rothfuss actually says you may not want to read. Talk about an intriguing hook to get people to read it :)

It is in fact, one of the most unusual books I've ever read. It's pure character development for Auri, and it's amazing that it got published at all. Not because it's bad, but because most people picking it up probably won't like it. In fact, Rothfuss' account of how it came to be published is quite an interesting insight into the publishing process itself.

If you don't read it, you're not really missing out in terms of the broader series. But if you were always curious about Auri and are prepared for a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of story with lyrical 3rd-person prose, then go for it, but don't expect it to be an easy read.

Better still, the slow regard of silent things had wafted off the moisture in the air.

Auri is an obsessive compulsive vigilante repair-girl, sewer beachcomber, and monk rolled into one:

And if you were careful, if you were a proper part of things, then you could help. You mended what was cracked. You tended to the things you found askew. And you trusted that the world in turn would brush you up against the chance to eat. It was the only graceful way to move. All else was vanity and pride.

3 stars

The Martian by Andy Weir (5 stars)

There's some book openings that just give you a feeling.  Like this is going to be a good read.

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.

The author Andy Weir is a programmer and space nerd who spent a lot of time thinking about all of the engineering that has gone into space missions.  Especially all of the planning, technology, and redundancy to handle emergencies that never really gets exercised.  So he wrote a book where lots of stuff goes wrong, and put one of the world's best mechanical engineers/biologists with a MacGyver-esque flair for improvisation in the central role to exercise the shit out of everything.

But the real superstar here is the science and engineering.  No cutting corners, no deus-ex-machina, no dumbing down, just one man's spectacular brain against a million ways to die alone on Mars.

I don't want to give away any plot here because there are a lot of great surprises.  If you have a engineering, science, or computer science background you will be up until 4am reading this, and feel like high-fiving someone. A lot. It's hard to explain how excited I was about this sentence:

They want me to launch “hexedit” on the rover’s computer, then open the file /usr/lib/habcomm.so

Or when the ASCII man page plays a prominent role in Watney's design of a communications protocol with, shall we say, extremely limited design constraints.

Watney (and I assume Andy Weir himself) has a dry, sarcastic sense of humour that is actually pretty great.  It does a lot to keep the book entertaining. There are many times that the book seems headed for tedium, but Weir senses this and heads it off, often by switching perspectives back to Earth, or just making something else go wrong.  Be prepared to suspend your disbelief about how many things can go wrong, and how smart one human being can possibly be.

There is no character development in this book. At all. And I didn't care in the slightest. It's a nerd fantasy where all the information engineers have in their heads, usually only marginally useful in everyday life, all of a sudden becomes life-saving. So if you want a love story, or a deep emotional connection, read something else.

The ending could have been a little less action movie-like, it was one of the least plausible parts, but by that stage Weir probably could have done anything he liked and I still would have given it 5 stars.

Some of my favourite quotes:

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.

As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.

5 stars.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (4 stars)

This book is remarkably prescient given it was written in 1975. Some consider it to be the grandfather of cyberpunk. In it Brunner coins the term "worm" for a self replicating computer virus, and imagines a world where data connectivity is king and people can plug-in to the same lifestyle all over the world. Not only are jobs and houses frequently changed, but children are often loaned out and looked after by a series of different parents.

no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”

Our protagonist is Nicky Haflinger, who is a government trained computer hacker prodigy that can create new identities at will, and becomes a champion of transparency and free access to all information for all people. In Brunner's world it's access to privileged information that brings power and wealth.

In some ways this has always been true, but Brunner was forward thinking enough to imagine something like today's world where our governments, insurance companies, banks, supermarkets, hospitals, phones, coffee shops, book sellers, TV networks, and shopping malls are all collecting vast amounts of data about us and using it to their advantage.

"It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things are which they know."

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it.

This novel is definitely very thought-provoking, it's an ideas book, more than a character book. The only person we learn about in any depth is the protagonist, and even then it isn't clear if we're seeing the real character as it's all happening under the guise of an interrogation. Brunner spends lots of time on exposition and much of the action happens between chapters.

Nick's desire to free information has some real parallels with recent leaks and revelations about how governments, police, and companies are using surveillance to further their own ends:

"The idea came up that it took the advent of the H-bomb to bring about in human beings the response you see in other animals when confronted with bigger claws or teeth."...Well, if it’s true that our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus than you find among our four-legged cousins?”

The writing isn't easy reading, but it's incredibly thoughtful and full of memorable quotes. I'll leave you with some of my favourites.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

#1: That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must. #2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.

In this age of unprecedented information flow, people are haunted by the belief they’re actually ignorant. The stock excuse is that this is because there’s literally too much to be known.

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."

One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.

4 stars.

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Cory (3 stars)

4th in the expanse series.  Space Opera gets traded for planetary battle with bizarrely fanatical evil corporate villain.  This novel is definitely filler, but it was still entertaining. Although....killer slugs? Really?

I didn't really like any of the characters in the spotlight in this book. It felt like Basia was another cookie cut from the Melba flawed-bad-guy mold, which was quite tedious to read. Elvi's overplayed infatuation with Holden was cringeworthy, as was the resolution: got laid, fine now.

I have no idea if the biological terms Elvi used were accurate at all, but I suspect biologists reading about her analysis and breakthroughs would have been face-palming at the pseudo science.

3 stars.

Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey (3.5 stars)

Third in the Expanse series.  There's plenty of action and the plot progresses in this novel, but it isn't as strong as the first two.  There is a fairly unconvincing villian (mini Mao), and we see less of some of the best characters (Bobby, Avasarala, Miller).  Even the protomolecule doesn't do a whole lot compared with the previous two books.

This characterises the feel of the novel quite well:

Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.

Humanity is bumbling about, old religions are struggling to hold onto power and stay relevant in a much larger context, and everyone is confused and fighting each other for stupid reasons.  All of that sounds completely realistic, but it's fairly depressing to read, when what I really want to know is more about the protomolecule and what killed everything.

The highlight for me was Holden's time with Miller inside the center part of the ring.  Some great very dry humour from Miller:

“So, yeah. The most complex simulation in the history of your solar system is running right now so that we can pretend I’m here in the same room with you. The correct response is being flattered. Also, doing what the fuck I need you to do.” 

While the mutiny storyline wasn't the direction I was hoping the story would head, and especially not for so long, I was still fairly impressed with the whole epic battle sequence.  It was desperate, messy, and real characters die, which is something that is rare for this type of novel.

Anna also wasn't my favourite character, but she did have one of the best lines in the whole novel:

She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.

3.5 stars

Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey (4 stars)

Expanse book 2, following on from Leviathan Wakes.  Corey puts a little effort into filling out some of the accumulated characters at the start of this novel, which is well overdue.  Alex finally gets some colour and then Avasarala drops in with a storm of profanity.  This foul-mouthed incredibly intelligent diplomat quickly becomes one of my favourite characters, and if you can appreciate or put up with the swearing, she definitely has some of the best dialogue.  Here's some of my favourites:

It's not healthy having God sleeping right there where we can all watch him dream.  It scares the shit out of us.

My doctors said I probably had a good thirty years left in me.  Time to watch my grandkids grow up, maybe even see a great-grandchild or two.  But instead, I'm going to be killed by a limp-dick, whiny sonofabitch like Admiral Nguyen.

My last act in this universe isn't going to be fucking up everything I did right up to now.

There's some great space battles, that are really well thought out and described, including tactics for minimizing the times ships spend in range of each other's weapons.  Bobby, Avasarala, and Prax are all interesting characters that bring much needed depth with their fresh POVs.  The other members of Holden's crew still feel underdeveloped and verging on a collection of Mary Sue's to me: the solar system's best engineer/pilot/soldier are all represented.

While I've been able to overlook most of the tropes used so far, the stowaway scene as a carbon copy from the first alien movie made me cringe.  The book did give me at least one laugh though: at the ridiculous opulence of the space hotel where Avasarala and Holden are trapped:

The air recycling system pumped in subtle scents hand-crafted by the hotel's in-house perfumer.  That night's selection was called Windblown Grass.

Most importantly the plot arc continues in a fascinating direction, and there are more books.

4 stars

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (4.5 stars)

An epic space opera meets detective story written by a pair of authors under the pen name "James S.A. Corey".  It's a bit like Firefly meets Takeshi Kovacs, but without the beautiful grit and lyrical writing of Richard K. Morgan.  In fact the writing itself isn't really remarkable at all, but the world building is great, the plot is interesting, and the main characters are fairly well defined and far from perfect.

It also has a special quality that makes it stand out from many other space operas that start strong: it doesn't dissolve into tedium or get trapped on a single planet after one book.  I've read the four books (not counting side stories) published so far, and Corey has maintained an impressive tempo, continued to expand the world scale, and solidly kept my interest across all of the books.  This is actually more impressive than just considering the merits of each individual novel, so I gave it an extra half star.

In this book the two main characters are well developed and face a great and meaningful moral conflict about the merits of releasing potentially destructive information, with Holden and Miller taking opposing views.  The other characters were fairly underdeveloped, but this improves as the series moves on.

The protomolecule is badass and takes some genuinely surprising turns, and generates at least a couple of "woah" moments for me.  The scenes on Eros and on the ship seen through Julie's eyes reminded me of Event Horizon a little, stepping into the horror genre.  I think this section would have been vastly improved without the "vomit zombies" which dropped me out of a feeling of suspense into farce.

The science in the sci-fi mostly takes a back seat.  He's fairly vague about the "Epstein drive" which made travel in the solar system practical, but there's one thing Corey is very particular about: gravity.
We're constantly reminded about the effects of acceleration and deceleration on humans inside ships, how spin influenced space station (or planetery colony) design, how hard it is to move around in low G, how much "belters" struggle in Earth-like gravity, how magnetic boots work during EVAs, and many many more things gravity-related besides.  I actually liked all this: it adds a hard science element back into a world that would otherwise need very little explanation because most technology is fairly near future (sans Epstein drive).

Strong start to a strong series.

4.5 stars.

Ancillary Sword by Anne Leckie (4 stars)

This is the second novel in a trilogy, and the first was spectacularly good.  At this point you're already familiar with the whole gender weirdness, the unique perspective of Breq, and the stage has been set for an epic civil war space opera.  Great, lets dig in and see what she comes up with for this one!

If I said that Anaander Mianaai barely features, the civil war doesn't get much play, and the theme is mostly social justice on a single station and associated planet, would you be surprised?  I certainly was.  It's still a good novel, and the switch from epic space opera to smaller focus reminded me of the Fire Upon The Deep to A Deepness in the Sky transition, but it isn't nearly as strong as Deepness.

Leckie gives us deep insight into the tensions between various population dynamics, and this will obviously be important in the following novel, but there wasn't much here to be really excited about.  Breq seeks out basically every oppressed minority group she can find and tries to liberate them with the authority that comes with the rank of Fleet Captain, and last name Mianaai, pissing off everyone in the wealthy establishment.  Her visit to the planet's surface was full of Apartheid overtones.

It's definitely an interesting read, and the climax with the Presger gun getting a workout is thrilling.  But space opera it is not, so I can see why some people were disappointed.  Of course it is worth reading to be ready for the next book.

4 stars.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (5 stars)

After about four different personal recommendations, and finding out it had won the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, I had to read this. They weren't wrong, it is a spectacular debut.

Leckie does an impressive job of giving us an inside perspective of a spaceship-sized Artificial Intelligence (AI), with many different ancillaries/corpse-soldiers that make up its physical presence. This AI is our narrator, which allows Leckie to perform an impressive first-person narration without the usual limitation of the narrator being only in a single location at any time. When I read "that accounted for almost half of my twenty bodies" I knew this book was going to be fascinating.

As if that wasn't novel enough, Leckie chooses to make things even more interesting by messing with the reader's interpretation of gender. She does this by having most of the dialogue occur in Radchaai which doesn't have gendered pronouns, and from the perspective of Breq, the AI, who finds it difficult to interpret gender queues for various races anyway. In Breq's defence, this is not unusual since for many of the races gender is fairly unimportant and certainly not obvious. The end result of this is that I basically think of almost everyone in the novel as female, and was occasionally jarred out of my perceptions when other characters dropped a 'he' into the dialogue. It's amazing how much of my ability to visualise a character is rooted in gender.

So I have basically no idea what anyone looks like. This isn't helped by Leckie's fixation on memorial pin jewellery and gloves above all other features. I hope there's eventually some interesting explanation about the history of the gloves, since she makes such a big deal of them.

The start of the novel was very strong, with plenty of intrigue planted. What is this being? Why is he/she diminished? Leckie switches between flashbacks and current day to fill in the back story. There's a small amount of confusion for the reader as pieces of the world are filled in, but it's masterfully done and with minimal exposition. Just how I like it.

Not much science is explained, but there are some interesting ruminations on AI, such as emotions being essential for efficient decision making:

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

I thought it was also interesting that that author noted she had based the Radchaai somewhat on the roman empire, which explains a lot of the religious idol worship that is present throughout the book.

Overall this is an amazing space opera. It has a Hoth and a Degobah. It has armor implants, stealth weapons, intergalactic wars, and political intrigue. The early part of the novel felt a little like a western, Firefly even, with a robbery, a barely-though-out plan, and Breq's life hanging in the balance pretty much constantly.

All sci-fi fans should read it immediately.

5 stars.

Best of 2014 as read by G

Less sci-fi this year, and unfortunately a somewhat lacklustre set of books. I partly blame goodreads, which should know me fairly well after 220+ ratings, but it nonetheless kept recommending The Sunne in Splendour as basically the number one book I should read. That didn't work out well and it killed most of November and December. Goodreads also led me to Swan Song, which was closer to the mark but not great, so generous salt will be applied to future recommendations.

The best (5 stars):

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn