First Shift - Legacy by Hugh Howey (4 stars)

Part 6 (a prequel) to the Wool series 1-5. If you haven't read 1-5 you should probably stop reading now, and go pick up the omnibus, since a) it is awesome and b) I'm about to spoil some stuff for you.

The plot of First Shift is split into two parallel story lines, one in the year 2049 that explains how the silos came to be, and one in 2110 that follows the Mayor of Silo 1.

Howey spectacularly nails the 2110 section. We discover that those notionally 'in charge' of the whole mad scheme are as equally enslaved as everyone else, with a very 1984 feel. You really don't want to face the wrong way at lunch.

Maybe he wasn't there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

For some reason the notion of waking up out of cold sleep into a world where everything was exactly the same but older and more worn each time resonated with me, and I could imagine how uneasy it made Troy feel:

It was unnerving to note the signs of wear in the carpet and the patch of dull steel in the middle of the turnstile where thighs had rubbed against it over the years. These were years that didn't exist for Troy. This wear and tear had shown up as if by magic.

It was also strange to think of whole generations being born and dying between shifts in Silo 1. This was highlighted by Troy's interactions with other Silos becoming increasingly difficult as language diverged from the original English spoken in Silo 1.

Where the story is weakest is the explanation of how we got to the silos in the first place. I thought the general idea was OK, but not great: the US goes scorched earth first in the face of a possible nanotechnology attack. If you're talking crazy strategies, it seems like nuking and selectively nano-attacking every other country on the planet would make more sense. Sure, build your silos, but at least the outside isn't super-toxic.

I think Howey was arguing that once a nano-enabled weapon is released it is impossible to control and would destroy the world, but targeting nano machines to individual humans and races was observed to be possible in the book. It seems you could inoculate the US population with some sort of chemical/biological safety signal that the nanos would respect.

All that aside, the main problem with the 2049 story-flow was that it was too near-future to be plausible. The US government and society seems exactly as it is now in 2012.

So given 2012 norms: tens of thousands of workers, politicians, engineers and construction workers would have known exactly what was being built. Getting funding for the cover-story project would be impossible, and getting a politician with some architecture book-learning to design the whole thing because he's gullible and good at keeping a secret is simply farcical. Also, ensuring all the right people (only Democrats???) are present at the silos at the critical moment would have been impossible without leaking some parts of the plan.

I would have been much more happy with this whole plot line if it was further in the future where US society had become dysfunctional and the government was collapsing or defunct.

To address a nit I had from the first 5 books, Howey explains that the lack of a lift is a requirement pushed on the silos by the psyches, but I still don't buy that a technology and engineering savvy society is not going to come up with a custom solution that is better than a staircase. Blocking such improvements would be difficult without moving to a state of overt population control.

But hey, it's still a great book, and now I'm waiting for the next one :)

4 stars.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (2 stars)

The obvious comparison is with McCarthy's The Road, and it isn't a favourable one. Crace writes beautiful prose, but he knows it, and he doesn't feel like he needs a plot. While McCarthy writes emotionally charged, powerful dialogue where sentences speak volumes, Crace writes volumes of internal monologue that speak sentences.

In fact, we're 30% of the way through the novel before Franklin and Margaret find out about the landslide and gas poisoning that will start their journey from the Pesthouse. Yes, character development is important, but Crace goes about it with heavy internal monologue and personal reflection rather than actual interaction between characters.

There are some vaguely realised bad-guys that introduce some conflict, but here's the huge spoiler: nothing happens. Franklin and Margaret go to the coast and then go back again. Sure, you can say it's a journey of discovery, but I felt like my discovery was that I was more interested in everyone else's (the thieves, the priests with the withered arms, the abandoned wives turned to prostitution) story, than Franklin and Margaret's.

I think Crace was attempting some sort of fancy symbology with his pot of mint, but it was just ridiculous in the context of the survival fight-for-your-life story. Perhaps it was supposed to be a symbol of the hope Margaret and Franklin had for their love, but it was very clumsy.

I kept waiting for some grand twist, like the Baptist ark was a spaceship, and the alien Helpless Gentlemen had been responsible for the apocalypse and now needed human labour to construct a means to return to their homeworld. No such luck.

2 stars.

Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

This book caught my eye a while ago, since for some time it has been very near the top of Amazon's "Average Customer Review" book search - no mean feat with 1,391 reviews. Incidentally the current #1 book in that search is the excellent With The Old Breed. Our nascent sci-fi book club, yes you heard right, decided that was a good enough reason to put it on the list, and I'm glad we did.

Howey self-published the first novella, but you wouldn't know it. The writing is high quality, and the ending of the first section is spectacular. Howey builds a brilliant post-apocalyptic world with all of the known world living underground as a giant 'seed bank' ready to re-populate the Earth someday.

Queue the nit-picking.

Servers, generators, electricity, but no fricking lift in a 138-level underground metropolis? Seriously? As an aside, the porters with muscular legs charging up and down the worn metal steps reminded me of Ted Chiang's short story The Tower of Babylon. Apparently the lack of a lift is patched up as a population-control measure in the prequel First Shift - Legacy, which I just found out about and will go read next.

Along the same lines, the lens-cleaning seems a little contrived. A technologically advanced society with engineers and mechanics is going to realise pretty quickly that the lenses could be cleaned with wipers, not sacrificial humans. I get that it is ritualised punishment to keep control of the population, but it seems like just kicking them out the airlock would do the same job.

Spoilers ahead.

I thought poisoning the mayor was a pretty cheap trick. It seems unlikely that Bernard, evil head of IT, would play his hand so obviously when he knows that one misstep can easily destroy the silo. I also had trouble swallowing both Juliette's lackadaisical approach to investigating the mayor's assassination, and the public's acceptance of this approach by their new sheriff. Sure, maybe Juliette recognised Bernard had the upper hand, but the mayor was well liked by the public - why weren't they clamouring for justice?

Overall I liked Juliette as a character, the super-smart MacGyver of the silo, but could have done without the Romeo and Juliette references. Her foil, Lukas, starts out as a mysterious and intelligent stranger, and while I liked that he didn't turn out to be the perfect long-distance-cross-silo boyfriend, it was also pretty hard not to get sick of his point of view. It didn't help that Bernard's complete trust in Lukas was implausible. Why would Bernard give every tightly-held secret to somebody who publicly organised a petition for Juliette's release?

And speaking of IT, what the hell are the servers for exactly? Perhaps this will be revealed later. My immediate thought was that if they are for storing long-term human history, they should be on tape rather than spinning disk. But not enough has been revealed about the servers: maybe they have much more reliable online storage in this version of the future. Presumably some of the servers run silo equipment, although this seemed to be largely the domain of Mechanical, and there are apparently dozens of racks. Do the IT flunkies know what the servers are for?

But that's enough complaining, it really is a great book, and I couldn't put it down, especially during Juliette's underwater adventure.

One line of dialogue from Bernard did make me put it down, but only long enough to issue a Keanu-Reeves-style whoah.

"Silo one? This is silo eighteen."

4.5 stars

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3 stars)

A collection of short SF stories by Ted Chiang. Some great, some meh. As with all short stories, I found myself wishing the good ones were full novels.

Hard to give an overall score, but 3 stars seems about right.

Tower of Babylon

Great buildup, sucky ending. I felt like this could have gone somewhere very unusual, but just didn't. I loved the idea of people living their entire life on the tower, and everything being locally grown or imported via the month-long human-powered slog up the tower.

Understand

A riff on Flowers for Algernon: super-intelligence via medical operation. Despite overuse of the word 'gestalt' and a tendency to run at the mouth like an overenthusiastic philosophy student, I enjoyed this story. This made me laugh:

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all.

The idea of being able to reprogram your mind, and mount attacks on others using sensory inputs was pretty awesome. Also given essentially limitless intelligence, your comprehension is far beyond anyone else in the world. Do you help the 'normals' and their trivial problems, or do you work on really interesting problems they can't even comprehend?

Division by Zero

The idea of creating a proof that contradicts the most basic parts of mathematics is interesting but I felt like this should have gone somewhere more interesting than the personal impact on the mathematician who made the discovery.

Story of Your Life

Very clever use of story structure, and a great idea here. These aliens were everything I wished Vinge had brought to the Tines and Spiders. Rather than the very close-to-human language, history, and technological development of Spiders/Tines the heptapods have a completely different view of the universe, physics, and mathematics, that nevertheless describes the same concepts, just in a different way. Louise gradually comes to this understanding by analysing the complex and very foreign language structure of the heptapods, which should be interesting for anyone with a bent for linguistics.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently;

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

Spoilers ahead.

To me the idea of predestination where every person has an obligation to exercise their free will to bring about exactly the future outcome seems completely improbable. Could you exercise your free will to bring about the death of a loved one? What happens if you don't?

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Seventy-Two Letters

The idea of using different Golems for transport, mining, construction and as the basis of technology was interesting. As was the bizarre notion that all future generations are contained within an ova. The story itself didn't impress me.

The Evolution of Human Science

Super-short, but interesting idea. The human race is split in two by technology called Digital Neural Transfer, which could be a near-future version of the Internet. Those who have DNT are incomprehensible to those who don't, and all research and innovation is conducted over DNT.

human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser.

Hell is the Absence of God

The world is regularly visited by Angels which cause seemingly random miracles, gross disfigurement, death and natural disaster. People get regular glimpses of heaven and hell, and can see which direction their loved ones go. Fascinating world. Loved the story but I thought the ending should have been stronger.

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Fascinating meditation on the power and manipulation of physical beauty for personal and corporate gain. Brain modification technology allows people to disable their perception of beauty in a human face, with all sorts of interesting consequences. Reactions of those who have had 'calli' all their life and turn it off at 18, and those who turn it on later in life after living normally.

So calliagnosia by itself can't eliminate appearance-based discrimination. What it does, in a sense, is even up the odds; it takes away the innate predisposition, the tendency for such discrimination to arise in the first place.

I have to admit that when I read the following passage I immediately equated 'spex' to Google's Project Glass, which has the potential to change our world radically in good and not so good ways like this.

What prompted us to do this now was the release of a spex version of Visage. That's the software that, when you look at people through your spex, show you what they'd look like with cosmetic surgery. It became a form of entertainment among a certain crowd, and a lot of college students found it offensive.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2.5 stars)

Latest and suckiest in Vinge's Zones of Thought series. In terms of plot flow this is the follow-on to A Fire Upon the Deep, returning to the world of the Tines and a bunch of stranded human children.

Compared to the epic space opera and universal scale of Fire, and the smaller-scale but fascinating dynamic of the Spider's rise and the Emergent-Qeng Ho cold war in Deepness, this book feels trapped in an irrelevant and not particularly interesting corner of the universe.

The novel starts with Vinge setting Ravna up as being generally fairly incompetent and politically naive. It's very clumsily handled and written in fine-grained boring detail. By the time Ravna finally gets to giving her speech, after so much boring lead-up I was ready to quit if there wasn't some sort of conflict. Thanks Nevil, who I found particularly unbelievable. Apparently he is a political genius because his parents were?!? Speaking of unbelievable, Ravna's attempts to learn spycraft are beyond comical - looking up 'sneakiness' in the ship's library? I don't care how good the library is, that isn't going to work.

While not working on Ravna uselessness, Vinge is setting Joanna up as some sort of populist queen of the Tines in a similarly boring manner. Joanna's actions at the Fragmentarium turn out to be of minor importance to later events, but aren't worth the many pages devoted to the arrival of the Tropicals and the breakout.

Amdi, Ravna, and Jefri's escape and trek back to the Domain was probably the worst part of the novel. I was expecting daring raids for food, struggle for survival, some smart thinking and innovation from Amdi, but no. They make themselves into a circus and parade all over the country. Apart from being the worst way to travel undetected in enemy territory ever, it was just stupid and boring to read.

We learn some more about the Tines, but an opportunity to describe their struggles in bootstrapping their civilisation into the technological age is sorely missed. Tycoon has invented sweatshops and industrialised the tropical choir into a production machine - but it mostly happens outside of the view of the main characters.

Tycoon turns out to not be a bad guy at all, and vendacious just doesn't seem sinister enough, he's lost most of his power from the original novel. And the big-bad-guy-in-the-sky remains completely unrealised. So basically this book was just really boring filler waiting for the Blight to do something.

2.5 stars

The Red Tent: A Novel by Anita Diamant (1.5 stars)

I'm not sure how this got onto my to-read list. Sometimes I search for the most positive-reviewed books on Amazon, sometimes I get a recommendation from a friend. I'm glad I read this, but I have to admit I hated most of it.

Diamant has taken the perspective of Dinah, who plays a bit part in a bizarre parable from Genesis 34 (that's the bible you heathens). It's your basic rape, foreskin ransom, kill everyone, take women and children prisoner, and get rewarded by God kind-of story that you would expect from the Bible.

But OK, strange choice of subject matter aside. Can this novel stand on its own? Diamant says that was her intent, that it should appeal to someone with no knowledge of the bible. In a word, no.

The first 60% of the novel is basically filler leading up to the foreskin ransoming. Diamant attempts to paint a picture of women's life in biblical times, but it seems contrived. The notion that women gather together in a red tent to pass the time of their period eating sweet cakes, braiding each other's hair, and being waited on by pre-pubescent girls just seems ridiculous. I doubt any working class women, in this case shepherd's wives, had time for such largesse given the backbreaking work of their everyday lives, and their power inequality with men.

The character 'development' in the first half of the novel is filled with trivialities:

Zilpah saw Inna's appearance as a god omen. The midwife's presence lifted her spirits so much that later my aunt began to sing. It was nothing exalted, only a children's song about a fly who bothered a rabbit, who ate the insect but was eaten by a dog, who was in turn eaten by a jackal, who was hunted by a lion...

who was read by someone who doesn't give a shit. There are some Bible-y tidbits thrown in before the main event, which would gel nicely with the story if Dinah was into LSD. And it wouldn't be Genesis if there wasn't a boring, unimportant-to-the-story family tree spelled out every now and then.

But in spite of all this I did respect Diamant's writing, and there are some very poignant moments that resonated with me, such as when Dinah holds her son for the first time:

There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite.

Most people giving critical reviews of this novel are upset because Diamant didn't stick to the biblical 'facts', i.e. she made Dinah willing instead of raped, and 'disrespected' Jacob. She also offended a bunch of people producing and reading Jewish midrash - reinterpretations of biblical stories. I think Diamant's real mistake was picking a story of senseless violence and death and trying to build it into a beautiful story about life as a woman.

1.5 stars

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (5 stars)

The prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, can he pull it off? YES.  Pass Go, collect another Hugo.

Vinge introduces us to the Spiders, a civilisation defined by their on-again off-again star that plunges them into catastrophic winter with a periodicity of a century or so, forcing the entire population to hibernate in primitive frozen pools called 'deepnesses'.

 I loved the Spiders, but I began to think that they were a little too easy to identify with.  What are the chances that arachnid aliens turn out to think and act essentially like humans once you understand their language?  What are the chances that all their technology is developed in the same way: radio, computers, cars, aeroplanes, nuclear power (with a mini Manhattan project) etc.  Pretty low I would think. But there were super-cute little baby spiders climbing out of their Daddy's fur to go play in the jungle gym, so hey.

I thought the idea of having to wait (mostly in cold-sleep) for a civilisation to reach a technology age so they can repair the space-faring equivalent of a flat tyre was intruiging, and would encourage lots of meddling, and civilisation fast-tracking. The Qeng Ho and Emergents certainly don't have any Prime Directive-style hangups.

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilisation - a civilisation with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry.

And we find out that our old friend, and one of the few links to A Fire Upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is much more than reassembled body parts in this story.  In fact he is a superstar, I mean he invented smartdust.  Well, they call it 'localizers' but whatever.  Pham has a low-level backdoor into this system, which is kind of like having a backdoor built into libc:

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.  If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Vinge's dedication to science and passion for computer science continues to shine through.  Here he describes the code cruft that makes a spaceship run, and the inherent danger:

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support.  Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations.  Every so often the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents.  Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

The idea of 'Focus', a kind of virus-delivered autism that can be controlled with MRI was fascinating.  It was amazing to think of a civilisation whose 'automation' consisted of a large part of the populous enslaved to act as really really smart middleware to computers.  Here Trud explains why 'Focus' is so effective:

But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books?  As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life.  He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic.  A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard.  Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected.  See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race.  We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

The Anne Reynolt character was a brilliant opponent for Pham Nuwen: ruthless and amazingly talented.  I enjoyed watching their plotting and manipulation targeted at each other.

One more cute quote to leave with.  The Qeng Ho are irrepressible traders:

in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term "black market" existed, but only to denote "trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers."

Even though it was less epic than A Fire Upon the Deep, I think I enjoyed it more.  5 stars