Best of 2016 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
• Golden Son (Book 2 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
• Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
• Morning Star (Book 3 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown
• Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

Regeneration by Pat Barker (2 stars)

Pat Barker says of the Regeneration trilogy that:

The trilogy is trying to tell something about the parts of war that don't get into the official accounts

It certainly does that. By accounts of people who know WWI history it is well-researched and the artistic license with actual facts seems to have been kept fairly minimal. But the what-happened-when and why isn't the focus of this novel at all. In fact, the view we get of the trenches through the eyes of mentally and emotionally damaged veterans is limited to just a few pages. The plot skirts around the details and raises questions that are much more vast and existential.

Should a doctor treat a patient, when the 'cure' sends them back into the final gasps of a war where they will very likely die? When is a soldier obliged to publicly object or defy their orders? Should the allies have negotiated a truce with Germany earlier, once they were in a strong position, to save further loss of lives?

Some of these questions are raised fairly directly through personal internal conflicts in the novel, others are left up to the reader to come up with on their own and mull over. This novel would be an excellent framework for a school discussion about war, but as a novel read for enjoyment I really did not find it at all interesting.

Towards the end, the novel shifts into describing the terrible electric shock treatments that were being used to 'cure' patients of mental conditions at the time. As described in the novel it was essentially producing a 'cure' through torture. This is a complete departure from the rest of the novel, and felt like 'well, I did a bunch of research, I need to stick this in somewhere'.

Since I'm not reading for a school assignment I'll be giving the rest of this trilogy a miss. Enjoy your essay writing, kids.

2 stars.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (4 stars)

An audacious concept for even a writer of Chabon's pedigree: alt-history Jewish noir. The alt-history part is a realisation of one of the many proposed alternatives to a Jewish state in Israel. In this novel Chabon builds a very convincing Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlement in Alaska (as apparently actually proposed by FDR) at a time of turmoil: it is about to revert to US sovereignty.

The Jewish noir part plays out through the eyes of our protagonist: a long-suffering despondent Jewish police detective living in a flea bag hotel which also is the site of a murder.

So it's a clever, and tricky, plot premise, but the superstar of this, and any other, Chabon novel is the writing. It's glorious. There's literary gems like this all over the place:

In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat. 

An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain 

Bringing that writing style to bear to Landsman's noir character produces this:

He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating

But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

The problem comes in the hours when he isn’t working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. 

But it's not all beautiful similes and metaphors. It's also chock-full of Yiddish slang, which adds a flavour of authenticity to the Alaskan settlement. It also adds a lot of reading complexity in the style of A Clockwork Orange, where you need to infer the meaning of Yiddish words from context and repetition.

Some reviewers suggest having a Yiddish dictionary handy, but I hate doing that. Interrupting the flow of prose to go look something up is a great way to turn a beautiful novel into a school assignment. So I didn't and I think my experience suffered somewhat: I remember thinking at one point: "is that phone or gun?" which is a fairly important difference when a character pulls it out of his pocket.

Like Kavalier and Clay, this is not a short novel. While I'm very happy to run my hands over the wood-grain and admire the fine joints and beautiful design of Chabon's craft, at some points I'd really just like the plot to move along. There were a number of times when my enthusiasm waned and I just wanted the pace to pick up.

When the pace does pick up and Landsman makes a one-man assault on the "bad" guys I was actually a little disappointed. The action and escape scenes seemed almost slapstick, and I felt like the novel lost it's gritty noir feel and traded it for Dan Brown-style secret hideout discoveries.

4 stars.

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B Williams (4 stars)

This book captures a lot of excellent geographic history that Seattle residents will find interesting. I'm not a big fan of reading history and this kept my interest for essentially the whole book. If you've ever wondered why a large part of Seattle is listed as "high liquefaction" risk in the event of an earthquake, this book explains why.

The drastic geographic modifications made by white settlers were quite shocking to this modern reader, long-used to complex and lengthy planning approvals for even small changes:

Changing the shape of the land and bodies of water was as natural to settlers, developers, and urban boosters as building houses, cutting trees, or ignoring the rights of Native peoples.

Between 1898 and 1930, Seattleites washed and scraped away more than 11 million cubic yards of Denny, reducing a double-peaked, 240-foot-high mound to a pancake-flat tabula rasa.

Linking freshwater with salt water lowered Lake Washington by nine feet and reduced the total amount of shoreline in the city by more than thirteen miles. 

Those geographic modifications are impressive both from their sheer audacity as well as the technological innovation they drove, such as self-dumping scows that dumped most of Denny hill into Elliott Bay automatically.

The book also considers the geological timescale, explaining the effect of lahar flows from Mt. Rainier and delivering some chilling warnings:

We will do our best to counter those forces with good engineering and planning, but ultimately our lives will be changed the next time Mount Rainier sends a lahar our way or the Seattle Fault shifts the ground by twenty feet.

 4 stars.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky (4.5 stars)

This is a fascinating first-contact story as seen through the perspective of a Russian smuggler. The contact itself is entirely unusual: aliens have come and gone, and left humanity a bunch of alien artifacts in a series of 'Zones'.

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras . . . A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about . . . Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp . . . and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow . . .” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

The artifacts are both incredibly useful and, more often than not, inexplicably deadly.

These suits are completely safe from the burning fuzz, for example. And from Satan’s blossom and its spit...

The government and smugglers (stalkers) are all intent on finding and extracting these artifacts for their own gain. The story follows a stalker, Red Schuhart, initially in the first person, then somewhat surprisingly in the third-person with more POVs added. Red's character feels very Russian, he has a fairly bleak world outlook, a very dry sense of humour, and there's a LOT of drinking involved. His monologue was one strengths of the novel:

I take out the flask, unscrew it, and attach myself to it like a leech

I'll walk on my teeth, never mind my hands. I'm no novice. 

This is an amazing thing, by the way: anytime you come in, these barmen are always wiping glasses, as if their salvation depended on it.

At times it heads into fairly dense philosophy, and I felt my attention straying somewhat.

It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

I appreciated the complexity, and getting a taste for the Russian-ness, of the characters.  But what I really wanted was people to go back into the Zone and do more exploring. What calamity would befall the next adventurer! Instead we are left with only a couple of very small tastes of such a fascinating concept.

4.5 stars.

One Second After by William R. Forstchen (2.5 stars)

One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon

My initial reaction was....OK I'll bite.

After reading it I think there is definitely a real threat from an EMP attack but my trust level in the "science" behind this book is extremely low. I can see why Newt Gingrich endorsed this: it's very light on the actual science behind EMP, heavy on the need for guns, and with some climate change denial thrown in for good measure:

“Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn’t.

I guess writing a fictional book is the best way to get things done these days in congress. Presumably this will win over the same people that don't want Mars research funded because they believe Mark Watney already went there and look how that turned out.

If you're a me-and-mine-first gun-owning prepper climate change denier, and wish all those hippies would stop helping the homeless and go buy some AR-15s, this is the book for you:

“Once they run out of food, then the reality will set in, but by that point, anyone with a gun will tell them to kiss off if they come begging. And those poor kids, if they have food, the ones with guns will take it. They’re used to free clinics, homeless shelters when they need ’em, former hippie types smiling and giving them a few bucks. That’s all finished. They’ll die like flies...

If you're a congressperson looking for ways to send more money to the defense industrial base, this is also the book for you:

We were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it. 

If, like me, you just like post-apocalyptic fiction, there's some entertainment and an interesting thought experiment here, but as a novel it is very weak. The Road or The Stand this is not.

It's hard to know whether to give Forstchen credit for creating a main character that is incredibly flawed: he essentially robs a pharmacy for insulin for his daughter but then holds others to a much higher moral standard and even executes some thieves, or if that was deliberately endorsed as sensible "looking out for your own".

The progression from "everything is normal" to "extrajudicial killings in the streets for stealing" was three days without electronics.  I'd say that's completely ridiculous, but a sad part of me thinks it may not be. Plenty of people will read this as an instruction manual where the only solution to a crisis is selfishness and violence.

2.5 stars.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (5 stars)

This is a spectacular book, mostly just because the approach is fascinating: it's a political/economic fantasy novel with a female accountant as the protagonist?! I've never read a book like this: imagine A Song of Ice and Fire but replace magic, dragons, and some of the violent battles with economics and trade. Dickinson moves quite quickly but with substance: if GRRM covered the same content it probably would have taken three books.

When conquering an enemy or building an alliance Baru studies the patterns of trade, money lending, and at times uses her position in control of the central bank to change the balance of power. It's a great demonstration of how trade, currency, and debt can be used as tools of political and social control. Sure the Masquerade has an army and a navy, a Nazi-like system of eugenics and secret police, but much of their power comes through the economics of trade.

and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

Baru becomes a cog in this giant wheel, initially hoping to change it from within, but she knows it will require her to be ruthless in the pursuit of power.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.

From day one in Aurdwynn she had to be the Masquerade:

You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

Where the novel is weak is in Baru herself. I had a hard time believing that this teenager was a) a mathematical savant, b) an applied economics genius c) a skilled negotiator and d) the most politically skilled operative of all time. Of those I think only a) and maybe b) are actually plausible, the rest are very people-oriented skills that typically don't exist in mathematical savants, and even if they do, they are the type of skills that are built through decades of experience and many failures. She basically only has a few years of formal learning from a frontier school.

So she is somewhat of a Mary Sue, but she isn't without weakness: she isn't a strong fighter, and she makes a number of real mistakes with grave consequences for the war. A bit of Deus Ex Machina does creep in since she never needs to struggle with a problem for more than a day before hitting upon an amazing solution.

Also we don't actually get to know Baru very personally, but Dickinson has good reason to hold this back. A lot of the intrigue for the reader is in trying to decipher where her loyalties truly lie, but this doesn't keep me from being disappointed that we didn't get below the surface of her next strategic actions or her attempts to decipher the web of loyalties surrounding her.

There is a very strong feminist (so refreshing to see so many women in positions of real power) and pro-gay thread through the entire novel. Homosexuality is one of the core social dynamics the Masquerade wants to stamp out, and Dickinson has many characters fighting against that as a core part of their resistance, many seeing it as a fundamental fact of human existence:

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

 A fascinating novel, couldn't put it down.

5 stars.

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (4.5 stars)

This is a "revisionist" western in the same class as Blood Meridian, i.e. it eschews romance for realism and recognition that the American west in 1870 was a very harsh place, "a reality which discredits our heroes". But unlike Blood Meridian, I actually liked it. It's a coming-of-age story for Andrews told within a Moby dick framework with Miller acting as the obsessive Ahab, consumed by his intense desire to hunt and collect hides.

Andrews knows that he wants something from the wilderness of the West, but he doesn't know what it is, he just knows it's out there and getting it will be hard and change him in the process.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. 

He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight. He looked at the river again. On this side is the city, he thought, and on that the wilderness; and though I must return, even that return is only another means I have of leaving it, more and more.

Nature doesn't disappoint, just getting to the Buffalo is a near-death experience. Once the hunt begins, Andrews finds himself a small cog in Miller's obsessive killing machine. All caution is thrown to the wind and Miller bathes them all in blood. Reading this section was intense, and incredibly sad. I desperately wanted the deaths of these amazing animals to matter more, be more difficult to achieve, and most of all for Andrews to realise he was forever destroying what he came to find.

While Andrews does feel some remorse:

On the ground, unmoving, it no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before.

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. 

it isn't anywhere near enough to force him to stop, or even be a small balance on Miller's wild abandon.

Miller's desperate desire to annihilate the entire herd gets the hunting party into serious trouble, which they barely survive (again). As the struggle to survive continues the interpersonal relationships completely break down and each man retreats into himself.

Small spoilers.

I struggled with the plausibility of them surviving the winter with absolutely no preparations, winter clothes or proper shelter. Many died in those times who were much better prepared, but I still gave it a pass. There was plenty more tragedy left, which was good, I was worried that this was going to turn into "happily ever after".

In fact the ending is far from that, it's crushing, but it doesn't stop Andrews from heading out into the wilderness again to continue seeking something he still can't define.

“Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”

It's a great western, but True Grit and Lonesome Dove remain my all-time favourites.

4.5 stars.

Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey (4 stars)

Fifth in the excellent Expanse series. This is essentially the origin story for all of the core crew members, something I've been looking forward to, and was becoming increasingly necessary for the continuation of the series. There's quite a long setup, but it eventually culminates in an incredibly intense action sequence happening simultaneously for every character POV.

Amos' story is the most unusual for the series, it's essentially The Road but a bit less gloomy. Naomi's is the most psychologically painful, although it eventually turns into an over-the-top but very fun space-MacGyver a la The Martian engineering survival epic.

On plausibility: I completely didn't buy that the huge numbers of missiles used in a cloud to protect the ship with the Martian President were: a) much smaller than the ship, b) faster, and c) had similar inter-planetary range. That's a pick-two situation.

Favourite quotes:

Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.

But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were. 

Good continuation of a great series, looking forward to the next one.

4 stars.

Existence by David Brin (4 stars)

There's lots of interesting ideas in this unconventional first contact story. The novel starts in near-singularity time: there's powerful AIs, lots of VR and augmented reality via wearables, some genetic modification, an autism plague, and America has been balkanized. The last is best summed up best like this:

It started upon stepping off the cruise zep, when a Darktide agent sent her to use a public shower, because her favorite body scent—legal in California—too closely matched a pheromonic allure-compound that New Mexico banned. Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.

One interesting idea/prediction I noted was that most large cities have moved the majority of billboard-style advertising into virtual layers, since physical signs can be automatically ad-blocked and erased from view by anyone wearing specs. In contrast, and a reversal of current reality, smaller towns where VR use is less common still have billboards at "layer one", i.e. reality, resulting in Time-square-like bombardment.

Though all this bustle kind of overwhelmed a poor city girl—with no volume settings or brightness sliders to tone it all down.

Spoilers ahead.

There are some great, dramatic plot reveals such as when Gerald puts his hand on the first artifact and sees the outline of a hand that's...thinner and has six fingers. Or slightly later with the dramatic proclamations of "JOIN US" and "Liars".

Though many, I thought most of the POVs contributed well to the story....except Hacker's. This weird Cast-Away magic dolphin rescue story was an annoyance when I just wanted to read about what was going on with the aliens.

And, slightly related, I really hated "twinned parrot brains" for communication encryption, since it seemed both incredibly unlikely and impractical, especially compared to the fairly convenient current methods of encryption that were supposedly replaced by this system. Key distribution is already an incredibly difficult problem when it is just bits, imagine how hard it is when it's a living breathing animal. A whole new dimension on key storage and maintenance...

But all of that pales in comparison to the hate I had for Prof. Fake Rasta Noozone. Reading him was infuriating:

No one is trying to be nasty space-zutopong, or out to vank de competition with bad-bwoy bizness.

Hey, I grok when a mon preten’ to be a ginnygog, in order to mess wit’ our heads. 

A large part of the novel is essentially an anthropological discussion of the effects on a society of first contact: the conflicts it creates, the motivations of both sides, and the common outcomes, i.e. the lower-technology side loses big time. At times Brin shifts into lecture exposition mode to deliver history lessons in this vein, which I found boring and rather unnecessary, duplicating information being delivered by the movement of the story.

It was especially poignant reading about the idea of "indignation junkies" in the era of Donald Trump's candidacy for president:

...gambling can be a genuine addiction, requiring as much effort to break as cocaine of kicx...and then there are the indignation junkies. People who regularly get high off self-righteousness and sanctimony. You know the kind—we all do. 

Yes, yes I do.

The novel spends the majority of it's time in this first-contact timeline, then there is an abrupt jolt forward to a time when Earth has built a number of large conventional space exploration craft and some chain-letter artifacts of its own. I think this move forward was a good idea to explore the later ramifications of how the contact played out, but it was rather poorly bolted onto the story. It probably would have made more sense to break it into the next book.

But once we are in this new time it's really interesting. The mechanics of the fractal-like size adjustment, creation of objects, and travel inside the artifact crystal itself were fantastically imagined and presented in a really interesting way. I also liked the ominous observations and vastness of scope as viewed through the Lurker, Seeker etc.

A very thought provoking read, a bit heavier on anthropology lectures than I would have liked.

4 stars.

Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (3 stars)

An excellent premise: a contagious and fatal insomnia epidemic is sweeping the world. Sleep donors are sought desperately to save lives, and the most valuable sleep of all comes from newborn baby donors who are sedated to have their grade A dreamless sleep extracted.

But is there a risk to donating? What effects will it have on the most prolific and famous donor "Baby A"? Is the donated sleep contaminated? Is there a black market for sleep?

There's such a wealth of ideas here, it would be easy to hang a whole series of novels off them, but this is a novella so we need to settle for less. Sadly, while the writing is strong none of the tension in these ideas is really brought to climax. The novel ends with basically none of those interesting questions answered, and left me with a feeling that it could have been so much more.

I get the impression that this was a literary author "slumming it" in sci-fi for a bit with an interesting idea, but not one she wanted to spend a whole lot of time on. I'd love to read a China Meiville or Robin McKinley rewrite of this novel.

3 stars.

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente (3 stars)

It's the adult version of Alice in Wonderland crossed with Miyazaki's Spirited Away. i.e. it's very weird in a dark and dreamlike way. I was not really a fan.

It's interesting to contrast with Mieville, who is no stranger to weird and dark. The differentiator is that Mieville has a stronger sense of plot and more defined characters. Valente forgoes these in favour of a LSD dreamscape populated by characters so shallow you need to be constantly reminded of their badges to remember whose POV this is: bee girl, blue hair train girl, crazy locksmith etc.

To enter this dreamscape you first need to catch the STD map from someone else who has it, then have sex with another map holder to enter the world of Palimpsest. At first I thought this was a very cheap plot device to soak up some more adventurous romance readers, but it quickly became clear that this was not a refuge for romance novel readers. The sex is often loveless, depressing, frequently homosexual, and void of any romance. For most of the Palimpsest travelers it is a necessary ordeal, just a ticket purchase price.

I was never really satisfied with the motivations for the characters to put themselves through this ordeal to visit Palimpsest. And I was completely unconvinced by any desire to immigrate and live there permanently, which is the premise and tensions of the whole novel.

Some reviewers say the world building was amazing. I was less impressed. There's plenty of fantastic ideas and imagery, but each visit is like a short film of a completely different world: there's very little consistent (apart from animal body parts grafted onto humans), so I never felt immersed in a world, more like thrust into a new crazy dreamscape each time.

3 stars.

Kraken by China Mieville (3.5 stars)

This is the least Mieville of all the Mieville's I've read, and that's a bad thing :( There's elements of the greatness from other novels, and an abundance of crazy ideas that make for points of interest, but I found it actually fairly tedious to read compared to how I have devoured his other books. The world building has nothing on the dark and dirty of New Cobuzon, the spectacularly alien Embassytown, or the mind fuckery of The City and The City. It's basically regular London with some weird knick knackery.

I come to Mieville with a thirst for weird, and don't get me wrong, there's plenty of very innovative weird. Goss and Subby are great, Tattoo is amazing, Wati and his original story are fantastic, squid bit zealots OMG, and the sea has an embassy! But it's not enough. These bright spots come and go from the story as interesting blips amongst a sea of less interesting characters. The world didn't feel immersive.

Occasionally it seems like a comedy (tiny little angel of memory made out of bottles?), but not really enough to actually be funny. And I think I was supposed to find Goss and Subby a lot more scary than I did, I thought the attempts to transfer a sense of horror for those immortal creative assassins fell a long way short. I was excited when they turned up (much less often than they should have), because I knew something interesting was going to happen.

An interesting read, but not in the same ballpark as his other novels.

Also, I barely needed the thesaurus! What's happening??? I only had to look up "autopoiesis".

Also, a ton of people on amazon think this is basically a worse version of Gaiman's Neverwhere. I should really go read that.

3.5 stars.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis (4 stars)

A very well-written account of the birth and rise of High Frequency Trading and how it has changed electronically traded markets forever, in a way that is bad for everybody except HFT itself. I've waited far too long to review this one, so that's all I have to say :)

4 stars

American Sniper by Chris Kyle (2 stars)

I was fairly sure I was going to dislike this book, and I was right, but I wanted to read what all the fuss was about. E.B. Sledge's amazing account of the war in the Pacific remains the best ever wartime autobiography I have read.

Of course the writing was weak, Kyle is not a gifted wordsmith, he's a SEAL. Most of the novel is a series of anecdotes that aren't particularly well connected, and they stretch very thin at some points. "We found barrels of chemical material", next paragraph, "One day we saw some things in the desert and thought they were IEDs" (it was an airplane), next paragraph a different anecdote. And so on.

I do give credit to Kyle for some humility, he could have talked up his record breaking number of kills a lot more, but he acknowledges that it was mostly a case of getting the most opportunities to shoot: i.e. a twisted kind of "luck". There are a number of times that other snipers bitch and moan about how Kyle always seems to get engaged by the enemy, and they aren't seeing any action.

But my high total and my so-called “legend” have much to do with the fact that I was in the shit a lot. In other words, I had more opportunities than most. I served back-to-back deployments from right before the Iraq War kicked off until the time I got out in 2009.

Kyle states that the majority of the actual shooting was about checking rules of engagement and taking shots quickly. The technical details of the business of shooting itself were actually fairly light, probably because there wasn't a whole lot more to say. Readers expecting to geek out on lots of gun and shooting details will be disappointed.

The meat of the novel: Kyle's training and deployments were interesting to me, as were his personal convictions and the sections written by his wife on her perspective from home. The impression I got from these sections were that Kyle was the perfect soldier from a mental perspective. Sure he was well-trained and obviously good with a gun, but he also had an incredible and unshakable belief that:

• He was fighting a "SAVAGE, DESPICABLE EVIL" in a very biblical sense. He's on the good side, the insurgents are the bad side. "I have a strong sense of justice. It's pretty much black-and-white. I don't see too much gray."
• Every single person he shot absolutely deserved to die, and they were "trying to harm Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government."
• This war and his commitment to his country were more important than anything else, including his wife and child. He made this very clear to his wife.

His genuine request to "be cleared hot to shoot anyone on a moped." and outrage when it was denied throws some doubt on the second point, or at least reinforces how important well-defined ROEs are. His general attitude to the rules of engagement and recording the circumstances of kills was "I’m pretty sure it was all CYA—cover your ass, or, in this case, cover the top guy’s ass."

The impression I got from him was that the job was killing bad guys, and nothing else. The blood red crusader cross tattoo and punisher logos painted on armor and vehicles would seem to agree, it doesn't exactly scream "hearts and minds" or "this isn't a religious war".

I didn't need any convincing that loved every minute of being deployed as a SEAL sniper:

I'm not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.

I wanted, more than anything, to experience the thrill of battle.

THE PACE WAS HOT AND HEAVY. IT MADE US WANT MORE. WE ached for it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into showing themselves so we could take them down. 

This last is why everyone should understand the motivations behind advice from the armed forces when debating whether to go to war. Who wouldn't want to go do what you've been training your whole life for?

2 stars

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (3 stars)

One of the most unusual post-apocalyptic novels I've read, which is saying something, because I have pretty good coverage of the genre :) But unfortunately it's not unusual in a good way.

If you're hoping to geek out on the best ways to defend against zombies/vampires/cannibals, fantasize about food and water collection ideas, foraging strategies, communications, travel etc. Forget about it. There's essentially none of that in this novel, and what is there doesn't hold up to critical scrutiny.

The novel actually spends a lot of time analysing the current-day activities and relationships of an actor, and then tracks the experiences of people who interacted with him as they live through the apocalypse. It uses a lot of different points of view, which dilutes most of the meaningful character development. I found the premise of a troupe of Shakespearean actors travelling the country "because survival is insufficient" intriguing, but it didn't really go anywhere interesting.

The author is a talented writer, but the novel meanders around without really getting anywhere plot-wise. Plenty of starkly beautiful scenes are created: an airport serving as a last human outpost, a technology museum created to show future generations marvels that were lost, people united by an obscure collection of art in a comic book across time and space. While I found all of that mildly interesting, and reasonably enjoyable to read, there was no spark.

I feel sorry for all the future English students that will be working on unpicking all the metaphors and weighty questions this novel poses in the absence of a compelling story.

3 stars.

Morning Star (Book 3 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown (4.5 stars)

Final installment in this impressive trilogy. It's certainly not perfect, but it's an impressive conclusion to a series that was so vast and planet spanning that it would have been difficult to write any sort of plausible ending. The fact that Brown produced this in just one year after Golden Son is astounding. In his words:

Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.

I'm not going to be particularly careful about spoilers, be warned.

Darrow's escape from his implausible prison (I really don't think your hands would work anymore if they were pinned behind your back for 9 months), is an action packed start to the novel. We learn the secret of how Darrow and Ares were betrayed, and it's well set up, a thoughtful and plausible treachery.

There's so much uncertainty in Darrow about how to proceed. I couldn't imagine it making sense any other way, but it's powerful writing to see Darrow scared and adrift:

“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear. 

But then comes the ridiculous part. Sure, the power dynamic is weird because Sevro had to take the helm while Darrow was gone. But inserting him as a junior member on a team for supply runs, sabotage missions etc. is just ridiculous. You don't put the heart and soul of your rebellion, who people just died to rescue, on high-risk low-reward supply runs. You just don't.

The worst part was that this all came with an incredibly tedious training montage complete with dumb initiation rituals (finish the bucket or get the box!). It would have been much more impressive to have the Reaper commanding in his emaciated state: he isn't going to win the war with his own muscles....ahem...

The scene where Reaper ends up accidentally fighting Mustang is dumb. He could have stopped it immediately by saying his name, but instead we get the silly:

Shout my name, something, if I had even half a second to breathe

But eventually we start to get somewhere interesting as Quicksilver comes into play:

“Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

And it seems like there is a clear path ahead again, so of course it's promptly destroyed in an incredibly brutal way. Offing Ragnar just at the point where he was incredibly important was fairly shocking. The obvious path forward is gone and Darrow has to do it the hard way. There's some great moments in this anguish:

When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.

And some silly ones, like most of the Way of Stains sequence. We then need to suspend disbelief that the sons of Ares could move an entire planet's population under Gold control without being noticed:

In twenty-four hours, they will move eight hundred thousand human beings in the greatest effort in Sons of Ares history. 

Thankfully Brown turns it around with an incredibly powerful parley scene between Roque and Darrow:

"This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy...this world, it is the best man can afford."
"And it's your right to decide that?"
“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”

The ending has some fairly obvious twists, and stretches the believable in some parts, but is generally well written and a solid conclusion to an impressive trilogy.

4.5 stars.

Golden Son (Book 2 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown (5 stars)

10% of the way into this book I thought I could see how this was going to play out. There'd be a training montage with Lorn au Arcos and Darrow would win the day with his characteristic mix of audacity and cunning. I was wrong. This is not a simple story.  It's complicated, with plenty of failures, characters evolving, lots of unexpected turns and main characters dying at incredibly inconvenient times. Not quite Game of Thrones character destruction, but it's close.

Which is a long-winded way to say it's great. In fact, it achieves what almost no sequel ever does, it's better than the first book. Brown completely breaks out of the Hunger Games world into a huge and complex space operatic rebellion spanning many planets.

Characters which were painted as purely evil are evolved into something much more: we realise that Augustus is a cunning player of political games and military strategy. He's capable of kindness but can be ruthless when he deems it necessary.

I'm only a monster when it is practical.

As the book goes on we are on a journey of discovery with the Darrow: he's discovering just how much responsibility he has taken on, and is gradually realising he has no practical plan to reach his goals. He's beginning to question what winning would even look like. Each time he seems to be closing in on a winning strategy there is a new problem to overcome. The weakness here is that it seems to fall into a bit of a pattern: betrayal causes failure, an unlikely rescue, and then a big audacious success.

Along the way there are actually some fascinating insights into power and strategy:

That is a slow power. Cleverly done on his part, if unfit for my name. Slow power can grind away any stagnant enemy. But fast power, one that can travel where you go, do what you wish it to as effectively as a hammer hitting a nail, that is the power that lops off heads and steals crowns.

And Brown keeps us guessing about who Ares is for basically the entire book. Darrow voiced exactly what I was thinking about Ares:

“What if it’s just a Gold trick? Someone pulling strings to make Society go the way they need it to go. What if it’s all a lie?” 

Vague spoilers ahead.

Just when it looks like the Reaper has a winning move things get turned on their head. I was particularly impressed with the outcome of the underwater battle, although the action itself had unbelievable elements like quite a few of the action scenes in the book. No-one holds their breath that long. It was brutal, due to the emotional attachment you have to the Reaper and a desperate desire to want him to succeed, but it was a clever plot direction.

The ending is shocking, in a Red Wedding kind of way. A brilliant dash of chaos that had me reaching for the next book. How can they possibly continue now?

5 stars.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown (4 stars)

This book is quite unusual in a number of ways. The first is that the opening paragraph is unusually, spectacularly terrible. This over-dramatic entrance is basically every "in a world" movie trailer:

I watch twelve hundred of their strongest sons and daughters. Listening to a pitiless Golden man speak between great marble pillars. Listening to the beast who brought the flame that gnaws at my heart.

I did not ride horses through meadows and eat meals of humming-bird tongues. I was forged in the bowels of this hard world. Sharpened by hate. Strengthened by love.

In a world....one man...driven by his desire for humming-bird tongues....

But it's also unusual in that the writing quality of the entire rest of the book is actually very high, it's just a really bad start.

This is the first novel of the trilogy and it can almost completely be described as the hunger games on mars (with elements of Ender's Game and Divergent), and yet, in a unusual twist, the series breaks this mold and gets much stronger, more interesting, and more complex in the subsequent books. Something neither the hunger games or ender achieved.

It's chock-full of violence and follows teenage underdogs from a stratified oppressed society outwitting a rigged, violent competition to win the day. Like I said, Hunger Games. It follows a very familiar formula, but is hugely entertaining, and I couldn't put it down.

Some spoilers ahead.

There's plenty of flaws, like how Darrow is the only solidly developed character, and Sevro should basically be called deus ex Sevro. And how no-one, including tons of random customers in a nightclub, thinks to sell out Darrow as he slowly gets carved into Gold. And how Darrow creates a ridiculous bond-villain-style trap for the Jackal, which he is obviously going to escape, instead of just killing his most dangerous rival.

The ending is also very pat and clean, which is completely implausible after the havoc Darrow creates. But never fear, everything gets very messy and much more interesting in the following books.

4 stars.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (3.5 stars)

After loving most of The Doomsday Book (but really hating some of it), I decided I'd back it up with some more Connie Willis.

Interestingly after reading this, the Doomsday Book makes a bit more sense. The humour in Doomsday seemed really out of place, and...terrible, but in this novel it is much much better and even got me to chuckle a few times.

I see now that the author was trying a similar thing in Doomsday, but it just completely flopped. The humour in this one, and the overall absurd tone, reminded me quite a lot of Catch-22. Especially with Lady Schrapnell's relentless pursuit of the historians to "fly" missions back in time for the damn birdstump:

A thought struck me. “Could I be admitted to Infirmary?” I said hopefully. If anyone could keep Lady Schrapnell out, it would be those Grand Inquisitors, the ward nurses. “Put in isolation or something?”

 Colonel Mering was far and away the most absurd and most hilarious of all the characters:

Twaddle!” Colonel Mering said, which pretty much completed the collection of explosive Victorian disclaimers.

And Professor Peddick was the worst. Because he was basically non-stop history in-jokes which I didn't get at all...

“It is the very image of the field of Blenheim,” Professor Peddick said. “Look, yonder the village of Sonderheim and beyond it Nebel Brook. It proves my point exactly. Blind forces! It was the Duke of Marlborough who won the day!

Some of my favourite funny bits:

“Terence St. Trewes, at your service,” Terence said and doffed his boater, which unfortunately still had a good deal of water in the brim. It sent a shower over Mrs. Mering.

“Ah,” Mrs. Chattisbourne said. “I am so pleased to meet you, Mr. Henry. Allow me to introduce my flower garden.” I had gotten so used to having people say nonsensical things to me in the last few days that it didn’t even faze me.

But this was Baine we were talking about, clearly the forerunner of Jeeves, and Jeeves had always known everything.

And as in Doomsday, I quite liked the idea that history had a protective mechanism that wouldn't let you modify important events. It's a pivotal part of this novel, and actually really clever:

So it must not have caused an incongruity, because if it would have, the net wouldn’t have opened. That’s what had happened the first ten times Leibowitz had tried to go back to assassinate Hitler. The eleventh he’d ended up in Bozeman, Montana in 1946. And nobody’s ever been able to get close to Ford’s Theater or Pearl Harbor or the Ides of March. Or Coventry. 

and it makes for a great ending.

3.5 stars.

PS. There are mobile phones!!! Where were they in Doomsday? It drove me nuts.

I stuck the handheld in my blazer pocket, picked up the bishop’s bird stump, and started down the stairs with it. The handheld rang.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (4 stars)

This is a book following two parallel story lines, split by time travel. One thread is set in the middle ages (the 1300s), and is incredible. A huge amount of research has gone into the descriptions of clothing, architecture, transport, medicine, religion, and Christmas traditions. But thankfully this isn't historical fiction so Willis presents this research cleverly as part of the story, often as the main character Kivrin's internal monologue as she tries to make sense of the medieval world she has been thrust into.

Some spoilers ahead.

Kivrin is an excellent character, and she takes us through an incredibly harrowing experience. Her desperate actions to save others with the help of Roche were very moving. In particular the scene where she has to keep pushing a cow out of the way to help the few remaining people who aren't dead will stay with me for a long time. The cow simply wanted to be fed and milked, but there was no-one to do it.

Willis did a sensational job of capturing what it would have been like to live through the Black Death and I stayed up to all hours to finish the book, which is always the sign of a great read.

But for every good thing I have to say about the medieval storyline, there are two bad things about the modern (2054) story. It's terrible. Willis seems to have designed it as some sort of British comedic relief from the incredibly sad experiences in the medieval section. It doesn't work.

Let's start with the thing that drove me absolutely crazy and then move on to the minor annoyances. 90% of the 2054 storyline is people trying to call other people on the phone, not being able to get through, or getting through and having no means to leave a message. And when I say phones I don't mean mobile phones, or some sort of futuristic implanted communications device, no, landline phones. IT'S 2054. Twenty. Fifty. Four. This novel was published in 1992.

Not only have we un-invented things that were in common use in 1992 (like pagers, radios, call waiting and answering machines), but there was a spectacular lack of foresight about mobile phones, which had been invented well before 1992 and were poised to enter the market as common consumer devices in just a few more years.

In fact, this is the least futuristic future I've ever imagined. There have been some advances: every landline now has video, effectively all common sickness has been cured, we have a weird past-only time travel that is mostly used for historical academia. But in 60 years no one has figured out how to leave someone a message apart from writing it down and handing it to them.

Actually the time-travel part I was mostly OK with. I thought the "time doesn't allow paradoxes" approach was actually quite a clever one for resolving lots of the inherent plot problems, and slippage as a inbuilt time-integrity protocol to avoid changing important events was especially good.

I was less convinced by the all-important need for a rendezvous time that couldn't be missed or you would be stuck there FOREVER, and this skepticism was born out by the plot resolution. What's to stop you just opening up the net and sending someone else in to go find you? Nothing, it would seem.

Here's more annoyances from 2054:

• They have lived through major, worldwide pandemics recently and can set up a flawless quarantine without hours. But they can't send through basic supplies like food, aspirin, and toilet paper. Why not? The quarantine is in a populated area where all of that is readily accessible.
• The nice lady who gives you shots before time travel is apparently also the most qualified doctor to run a major quarantine and lead the medical response that could save or lose the lives of a thousand people. Sure, I guess. Seems pretty unlikely though. If communications were really that bad they would bring in a quarantined command center.
• Finch being obsessed with toilet paper is supposed to be funny? It's just annoying. Similarly with Mrs. Gaddstone and the bell ringers. William's ability to seduce every woman around him just gets really silly.
• Gilchrist is a cringeworthy foil for Dunworth. He's a ridiculous cardboard cutout stuffy stickler-for-the-rules that is way overplayed and unbelievable.
• Days were wasted trying to get someone to "read the fix". So we can make a video call but we can't send a photo, or point a phone at the screen? Also we're told over and over that the only things that can go wrong are the coords and the slippage. So shouldn't those two things be obvious and readable by a layperson? Just how incredibly bad is time machine UI design?

So to sum up, the medieval story is amazing, the 2054 story is terrible. But it's still a great book and I'd recommend reading it. Just grit your teeth through 2054.

4 stars.

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (4 stars)

This was a great read, I particularly liked the extra menu item on the kindle where you could highlight a sentence and click "Send to the secret police for approval". This greatly improved my reading speed compared to the normal slow process of sending sentence-by-sentence approvals by post.

I would however caution readers to avoid the menu option below it "Request librarian visit". If fans of the novel are ever near the new library at 1st and 22nd, formerly my house, drop by and say hello.  I'm in the tent on the front lawn.

OK that's my contribution to the excellent amazon reviews for this book.

If you love a little weirdness, this novel is the place to soak in a whole tub of it. It's incredibly clever, funny, and even sweet in parts. But you've really got to be happy wallowing around in quirky sentences and getting sidetracked into descriptions of strange events without much plot progress.

This would have been a five star book if the plot had excited me more and helped turn the pages. As it was I had to be content with the beautifully weird world-building. I think this is actually the sci-fi version of literary fiction that is more about the beautiful prose than actually telling a story.

In defence of the authors I think the actual plot arc is very good, and they do an excellent job of introducing the world to people who haven't listened to the podcast. But there's a significant challenge in introducing tension and building a climax in a world where life-threatening danger and horror-movie themes are simply a part of day-to-day life. What is plot tension, and what is just another crazy Night Vale quirk that will be dismissed out of hand?

Some reviewers will tell you that if you haven't listened to the podcast you won't enjoy the book. This is untrue, I liked the book and hadn't listened to the podcast, but I love weirdness. You'll definitely miss some of the subtlety and nods to the podcast episodes.

Now I'm done with the book I started listening and I'm a few episodes into the podcast. I like it, but I'm not sure I love it. Cecil is actually much more deadpan than I imagined, which rubs me the wrong way. I read the novel imagining a fairly normal radio demeanor, just with crazy content.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes:

It also houses a boy, not quite a man. He’s fifteen. You know how it is. Imagine a fifteen-year-old boy. Nope. That was not right at all. Try again. No. No. Okay, stop.

Most people in Night Vale get by with a cobbled-together framework of lies and assumptions and conspiracy theories. Diane was like most people. Most people are.

The Night Vale PTA released a statement today saying that if the School Board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “We own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.”

“You develop a taste for it, like you do with scotch whiskey, or cilantro, or a salt lick.”

She drove home and grabbed the things she would need to check out a book: strong rope and a grappling hook, a compass, a flare gun, matches and a can of hair spray, a sharpened wooden spear, and, of course, her library card.

Having trouble sleeping? Are you awake at all hours? Do birds live in you? Are you crawling with insects? Is your skin jagged and hard? Are you covered in leaves and gently shaking in the gentle breeze? You sound like a tree. You are perfectly healthy.  

4 stars.

Best of 2015 as read by G

This year I followed a few series which showed great promise in the first book, but failed to live up to it in subsequent novels. In fact every book listed below, except The Martian, is in that category.

The Martian and Ancillary Justice were the easily the best books I read all year, head and shoulders above the rest.

The best (5 stars):

• The Martian by Andy Weir
• Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Hard Luck Hank: Screw The Galaxy by Steven Campbell
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A Corey

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson (4.5 stars)

This book is quite unlike anything else by Stephenson that I've read, especially in contrast to the epic world-building of The Diamond Age, but it is actually really refreshing. It's a self-contained eco-thriller that is apparently beloved by water quality engineers. Think on that a moment. It's approachable for pretty much anyone, although having some high school chemistry wouldn't hurt.

The main character Sangamon Taylor (S.T.) is fantastic. He's incredibly smart in some ways, i.e. analytical chemistry, zodiac piloting, dangerous and toxic environment diving, improvising pipeline-plugging hardware, working around FBI surveillance, and building an effective media circus. And in others he makes crazy decisions such as constant nitrous abuse and charging into incredibly dangerous situations with little or no plan.

Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level, cross-eyed stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a heavy-metal video on the TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag that took up half the kitchen. Once again, my roommate was using nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he didn’t have any eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly. Normally I never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn’t refuse Bart a thing in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My mouth tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an orgasm backfired in the middle of my brain. 

And he's really funny. S.T's dialogue is full of great one-liners and little pearls of wisdom.

When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics—my favorite carcinogen by a long shot.

“I’ll never understand why people give out directions, or ask for them. That’s what fucking road maps are for.” 

Because if you’ve put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe—to see you, and to give a fuck—you’ve already blown it.

Stephenson obviously knows Boston quite well, or has done extensive research. It's quite entertaining to see it through the eyes of a late 80's environmental activist who has intimate knowledge of sewer outfalls and other methods that corporations are using to dump toxic waste into the harbour.

The ending felt rushed and a little too simple an end. It also irked me that (minor spoiler) S.T. seems to have completely avoided getting arrested as a terrorist in the end, without any formal rescinding of that status. Officially marking someone as a terrorist isn't something that gets undone just because you do some good stuff that makes the TV news.

I also found some of the action scenes, and the military-style assassinations, supposedly enacted by large corporations as part of dumping operation cover-ups pretty far-fetched. But I'll allow it, certainly made for entertaining reading. It's a page turner.

4.5 stars