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.