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.

Accelerando by Charles Stross (3.5 stars)

This is a novel about post-singularity existence and post humanism, written by a computer scientist. It really shows. Apparently the initial inspiration came to Stross while working as a programmer during the dot com era, which is no more apparent than in this quote:

He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics.

and in this dig at religion that could only have come from a computer scientist:

Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

It feels nothing like the previous two books in the series, you can read it stand-alone. Some spoilers ahead.

Stross packs the novel with ideas, and there's an irreverence and whimsical cynicism that feels a little Douglas Adams at times. Like the AI based on uploaded brain scans of California spiny lobsters broadcast into space, later becoming the avatar for first contact inside an alien router with a race that essentially lurks near the router trying to scam new civilisations. 419 scams and pyramid schemes are alive and well post-singularity.

There's the matrioshka brain: a solar powered super computer that eventually grows to encase the sun to tap its energy for computation. And what I thought was a very novel solution to the Fermi paradox:

“I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get enough bandwidth—trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly,

Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.”

This is all very interesting stuff. Except the delivery is lacking. It's *lots* of exposition, very light characters, and generally missing a first person feel to anything. Lots of dense text like this makes for pretty boring reading, even if the ideas are interesting:

Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That’s not posthuman, that’s a travesty. I’m talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They’re not just better at cooperation—witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that—but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that’s been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us.

There's a political drama towards the end of the novel that is presented in the most boring way possible, essentially just people sitting around in a room talking about what is happening. No emotional connection to the story.

Bizarrely there's some action that livens things up right towards the end, but it turns out to be just a kid inside a VR environment with no morality boundaries, and is over swiftly.

I would love someone to take this new imagined reality, and make me believe it, give me a real 3 dimensional character, show me some real relationships and let me live them.

3.5 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.