A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (4.5 stars)

Referred by a friend who said if I liked The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and I did, then I'd really like this one. He was right! In fact, I discovered a name for this genre of competent people doing great work that's usually invisible: bureaucracy porn. As Alexander von der Linden put it in an amazon review: "Give me competent people competently running a ship, or a government, or a military unit, or a trading house. Give me the minutiae. Let me see how the character interacts with other characters to solve problems." 

YES! This is what I want. The west wing in space, but not just politics and government, give me an industry I know nothing about and do a deep-dive within a fictional framework.

Anyway, this novel delivers a political game-of-thrones power struggle for an alien planet whose culture is significantly defined by poetry. There's some interesting alien tech, called an imago, but it comes with significant problems that mean our protagonist has to get by without it for a large part of the novel.

Martine delivers a great political maneuvering thriller between different factions as viewed by an outsider who needs to negotiate a complex geo-political and personal landscape from a weak position. There's a good amount of action in the form of assassinations and uprisings to keep things interesting, although it felt a little under-described in some places.

Apparently the author leaned heavily on her knowledge of Byzantine history and politics to build the plot and power struggle, of which I know nothing, but it certainly felt very real and plausible. Considerable effort went into world building: linguistics, naming, poetry, political factions.

Some minor quibbles and slight spoilers: 

• Mahit really should have lost the imago given how many knew where it was and were incentivized to steal it. 
• I wish we had some more time with both personalities in the same body, there was a lot of interesting potential for plot lines there that didn't get enough airtime. 
• The poetry encryption was ridiculous in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness, as was the physical USB-stick thingys with wax seals for communication in a very advanced space-travelling, AI-heavy society.
• The pronunciation guide is both incredibly detailed and useless. I don't want to figure out how to say things from first principles given the linguistic rules for each letter/syllable, just tell me how to pronounce Teixcalaanli and a handful of other common words.

Very deserving of the Hugo.

4.5 stars.

Double Star by Robert A Heinlein (3 stars)

Winner of the 1956 Hugo. It feels like an extended short story inspired by Heinlein's time hanging out with actors via his wife's work. It's partly homage to the skill of actors, and partly a thought experiment about what makes a person. 

If you can become a character, replicating their mannerisms, opinions and outlook on life so completely as to fool others at what point do you become that character? What if you did that daily for months or years? Where does the character stop and how do you keep yourself separate?

The story and concept isn't bad, but the plot twists and outcome are obvious.

3 stars.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (3 stars)

This novel won a bunch of awards (hugo, nebula, locus) and I can see why. It's unusual to get sci-fi set against a Thai cultural backdrop. The Thai references and setting I liked a lot: farang, Bangkok, Ayutthaya, takraw.

It's a dystopia where the climate has been destroyed and there is a fierce multi-national battle underway for access to seed banks to provide new genetic material for food. The wind-up part comes from everything being powered by animals that store energy into springs, even up to "spring guns". This part was pretty ridiculous, there's a large belief suspension required.

While this setup sounds interesting, I struggled to like it. I usually like grim dystopia's, but something about this one was very unsatisfying. There was no lack of grim-ness, perhaps I just couldn't buy into the spring thing. There's an awful lot of the novel devoted to Emiko overheating.

3 stars.

All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (5 stars)

I started reading this as I was going to sleep, then was up until 2am finishing it, as I couldn't put it down. It won all the awards in 2018 (Hugo, Nebula, Alex, Locus), with good reason. It's fantastic.

A SecUnit (powerful security robot artificial intelligence) has hacked it's govenor module and is now able to ignore commands from its human masters. It could go around killing everyone, but mostly it just wants to binge-watch TV and gets really annoyed when humans create work for it, or try to engage it in conversation.

I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

At least Mensah and Arada had overruled the ones who wanted to talk to me about it. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.

It calls itself MurderBot, and is wonderfully sarcastic, lazy, pessimistic and depressed.

...you may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.

Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

The story rips along full of action and sarcasm. The plot has twists, and while things end happily, it wasn't a clean path to get there, and the emancipation doesn't play out as I expected it to, which is great.

There's not a single thing I didn't love about it. It's really short (160 pages). I'm already well into the next one.

5 stars.

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin (3 stars)

The Dispossessed is very philosophical sci-fi. Effectively the aliens are just there to explore a large thought experiment about an anarchist utopia, just as left hand of darkness is an expose by contrast of the effect of gender differences we have created in our society.

There's a study guide at the back of the book, which I wish I'd read with each chapter, it would have given me a deeper understanding. One thing it points out is the historical context: following the dystopias popular in the mid 1900s, this novel was one of a few new utopias written in the mid 70s that attempted to be more realistic - not implausibly perfect and unattainable.

So in this novel Le Guin presents Anarres, where an anarchist society has succeeded in a very harsh environment, but is far from perfect. Rather than a government, policy, and military controlling the populace, the job of enforcing social norms and enacting any punishment for deviance from those norms is essentially left to your neighbours and colleagues. The stick they wield is removal of social approval and casting out of those who don't conform.

As well as exploring how an anarchist society could work, Le Guin continues a strong sexual equality discourse that was familiar from left hand. Shevek is shocked at the reactions he gets from people on Urras when discussing how men and women were effectively equal on Anarres:

“Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines?

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?” 

And there's a fairly profound portrayal of how messed up our way of speaking about sex is:

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. 

Shevek can't comprehend why the women of Urras put up with this situation:

“It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear your father’s name and the husband’s name. The men go to school and you don’t go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren’t they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don’t you do what you like?” 

It's all very thoughtful, the subject is important, and the premise is well constructed. I can see why it won tons of awards. But honestly I just didn't enjoy reading it so I can't give it a high rating. Too much sitting around philosophizing and reflecting on events, and not enough first-person experiencing of events. There's plenty of passages that feel like reading a philosophy textbook that I just found boring:

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.” “What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted. “But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

3 stars.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (5 stars)

I loved this one, originally published in 1972 it has held up well, sans some uncomfortable sexism. It won all the awards (Hugo, Nebula, and others). It's a fascinating exploration of an unknown alien object.

There's absolutely no character development. It could almost be a scientific journal article, but it's actually a really interesting discovery and exploration story. One of my favourite parts was the attention to detail about travel through the artifact, including mind games played on the explorers by low gravity in an enormous indoor space:

Too much thinking along these lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once again as a vertical cylinder, or well—but now he was at the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time he found this image creeping up on him, he needed all his will power not to cling to the ladder in mindless panic.

It's well written, but fairly cold and impersonal, with some rare more poetic moments like this:

Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the fires of the Sun. It may hatch at any moment.” The Chairman of the committee looked at the Ambassador from Mercury in frank astonishment.

Quibbles:

• It seems really unlikely to me that aliens would have similar body geometry to humans, but the explorers don't seem to find this remarkable at all. I was waiting to find out that it's actually a human artifact created by time-travelling humans...
• Space travel is more advanced than present day, but I found the amount of extra equipment lying around unused on a spaceship that wasn't built as an exploration vessel stupidly implausible. There's crates and crates of equipment brought into Rama, spare 20kW electric motors, and even a recreational plane-bike???

And on the sexism, it was sad to see how many times "men" was written in sentences like these, but also not surprising for the 70's:

...at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth, and had never seen the stars all around him, could endure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Norton told himself with grim determination, it would be the captain and crew of the Endeavour. He looked at his chronometer.

The reviews of the sequels are terrible, so I'll probably stop at this one.

5 stars.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (3.5 stars)

Since the other ones were so good I started on a full Okorafor binge. So the Binti series was next. The first is super short (98 pages) and won the Hugo and Nebula for best novella.

The strength of the novel is Binti and the desert culture she comes from. Especially her struggles with systemic racism on many fronts. It's written very simply, which I found a little annoying, but since it is YA I can't actually criticize for that.

Plot wise there's a literal deus ex machina, which was a bit of a cop out, and I also just didn't buy how easily this genocidal spaceship of jellyfish could be diverted from their original mission. Even more implausibly a young girl single-handedly negotiated a multi-planetary peace deal that ended happily ever after: real peace deals end with everyone at least slightly unhappy.

3.5 stars

The Stone Sky by N.K Jemisin (3.5 stars)

What's more impressive than winning the Hugo twice in a row? How about three consecutive years for the same book series? It's been too long since I read this so reviewing is hard, but from my notes:

Nassun is supposed to be what, 10 years old? She is written like a 40 year old, which dropped me out of suspending disbelief a few times.

If it's so easy for Hoa to travel underground, why isn't he just transporting the whole comm instead of having them die on the journey?

This miles-long staircase down into the earth is all very dramatic, but there is no society with automatic lights and doors capable of surviving an apocalypse that wouldn't use a vehicle of some kind to travel those distances, which doesn't work on a staircase. Not to mention building a staircase that big would be a giant PITA.

My favorite quote:

“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

Overall I felt the pace was slower than necessary, and I enjoyed it less than the first two, but it was a decent conclusion to the series.

3.5 stars

The Obelisk Gate by N.K Jemisin (4 stars)

What's more amazing than winning the Hugo? Also winning the Hugo for the sequel. It's a great read.

There's plenty of minor things that annoyed me, like (spoilers) how Jija gave up his whole way of life to save Nassun, but then continues to consider killing her. I just didn't buy that he would be that deeply anti-orogene he'd be willing to kill yet another of his own children. Make your bed and lie in it.

But at the same time, it was incredibly powerful showing how part of Nassun's childhood was killed because she had to learn how to manipulate her father:

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

I also didn't buy Essun marrying this guy. She obviously knew he was incredibly anti-orogene and she and her children would be in incredible danger. Why him? Was she so desperate that was the best she could do? There wasn't any mention of that, or explanation for how they came together.

The weird second-person narration continues, acknowledged by the author:

I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

And not only that but it will occasionally switch between third-person and second-person, which has to be explained in the text.

There also seemed to be a lot of weaknesses and contradictions in how Nassun chooses to exercise her power in the battle for Castrima-over:

“That army fills both Castrima-over and the forest basin,” you say. “You’ll pass out before you can ice half of a circle that big.”

So just ice the doorway where they have to come in? It makes no sense. I did like those crazy bugs though.

Very entertaining series.

4 stars

The Fifth Season by N.K Jemisin (4 stars)

Hugo winner! This is very unusual fantasy. The world building is complex, it's about as far from your standard medieval setting with elves, swords, and magic as possible. It's a very messy and believable world, no cardboard cutout characters - there's various gender identities and sexual orientations. There's racism, governmental oppression and desperate people surviving a hostile world.

The narration itself is highly unusual, the novel spends a large amount of time in a second-person POV. It's honestly pretty annoying to read:

For the past ten years you've lived as ordinary a life as possible. You came to Tirimo from elsewhere; the townsfolk don't really care where or why. Since you were obviously well educated, you became a teacher at the local creche for children aged ten to thirteen.

At times it feels much more like a puzzle with hints, than a regular novel:

There are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are missing, and conspicuous by their absence. Notice, for example, that no one in the Stillness speaks of islands.

I've waited too long to write this review, so I don't have too much to say.

4 stars.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (4 stars)

I can see how this was very groundbreaking in 1969. It is a well written thought experiment on gender and sex, and how it influences so much of society structure and behaviour. Amazingly it has stood the test of decades and much progression in our thinking about gender and sexuality to still be readable and relevant to the modern reader. There's plenty of old sci-fi that hasn't aged nearly as well, and shows it was definitely deserving of it's Hugo and Nebula awards.

We follow a human ambassdor's experience on the planet Winter where:

Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters.

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

Le Guin leads us through many facets of the society and ambassador Genly's realisation of just how different this gender neutral world really is to a human male:

The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

In addition to the gender thought experiment there's also plenty of other issues touched upon, including how damaging rabid nationalism can be.

If you're after a rollicking plot and scintillating adventure on another planet, this is not the book for you. It feels like reading a documentary about another planet, a super-interesting one, but the plot isn't the strongest part of the novel.

4 stars.

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.

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.