Best of 2012 as read by G

In 2012 I attempted to improve my sci-fi education. Some progress made, but still lots to do. I also upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite and frickin love it: the light, smaller size, time to read and x-ray, in that order.

The best (5 stars):

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
• A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
• A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Twelve by Justin Cronin (3 stars)

The Passage was a very strong book, what of its successor? Sadly disappointing.

I opened The Twelve to find myself back at year zero, immediately after the release of the virus. Sigh. Cronin intricately led us through the release of the virus in the first book, so I wasn't at all interested in taking two steps back.

Nevertheless, I dug in and was once again impressed with Cronin's character building: 'last stand in Denver' was brilliant, and PTSD-denial-Lily was quite well-drawn in the early novel. Although that's not to say I liked reading her passages, they were really annoying, and made me want to slap her, but that was the point. Here she is, in full-delusion mode, musing about where she could go for dinner, despite there being virals ready to eat her outside her front door:

They had a marvelous patio draped with vines of fragrant flowers, and the most wonderful chef - he had visited their table once - who had trained at Cordon Bleu. Pierre? Francois? The man could do the most amazing thing with sauces, teasing the deepest flavor from even the simples dishes...

And I thought the reasoning for her self-inflicted delusion was actually quite well constructed. Later in the book I thought she was also good in her mad queen of hearts role.

Danny the autistic busdriver I could have done without. Not only did it start to feel like the mentally ill survivors club, but Danny seemed to be copied from Tom Cullen in The Stand. In fact, I commented on the Passage being less mystical than The Stand as a good thing, but Cronin obviously read my review and took it as criticism because The Twelve is every bit as mystical as The Stand.

The worst part of this was that the storyline with Danny, 'last stand in Denver' and the pink-punk chick was unceremoniously dropped, presumably to reappear in the third book. It felt like pushing through a lot of packing material to find out someone sent you an empty box.

At least Danny was a real character. I have no idea what is up with Lore, whose character seems to be solely defined by who she is having sex with. I was assuming she was a spy for the homeland red-eyes, but it seems not, so I suspect she has some sinister Zero-related role to play in the final book.

One of my favourite parts of the book was the massacre in the field. The tension was unbelievable, it was obvious something was going to happen, but the actual events were quite unexpected and it felt like a return to form. Hardboxes, scary virals, eking out a living in the shadow of danger.

Unfortunately as the plot continues it makes less and less sense. Here come the spoilers.

After Amy visits Carter's lair, which was awesome, we descend into what feels like a screenplay sketch: there's little character development, the plot follows along in a predictable direction, and the sinister feel of the whole world just evaporates. Why did the 12 leave their armies of virals behind to join the humans for a drac convention? Sure they need a stable human population, but they have all the power, they can dictate the terms. It felt like Cronin just needed to get done with The Twelve to focus on Zero in the final book.

Don't expect to fully understand what is going on without re-reading The Passage. Despite re-reading my review, the wikipedia summary, and the clumsy biblical recap at the beginning, it wasn't enough for when Cronin finally got back to the original story 200 pages in. He expects you to recall a lot of the details and relationships from the previous novel.

I'll still read the next book, let's hope he can bring it home.

3 stars.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (4 stars)

Quick, movie's out, read the book again! Since Peter Jackson chose to stretch one small children's book into 3 long movies it turns out you can easily read the book chapters covered by the movie faster than you can watch the movie, and reading the whole book only takes a few hours.

As a children's book I think it is pretty damn good. You can see Tolkien building up ideas for Lord of the Rings: the easily-killed but numerous spiders are the building blocks for the much more sinister and powerful Shelob, the swords taken from the trolls were very reminiscent of the swords acquired from the Barrow-wight and used to kill the Nazgul, and the Battle of Five Armies is a smaller scale template for the epic battle of Helm's Deep.

On a less positive note, I found the foreshadowing fairly annoying, and I'm not sure why it is there. Maybe Tolkien thought kids needed to be reassured that everything was going to work out in the end, or needed all the dots explicitly connected?

...which shows he was a wise elf and wiser than the men of the town, though not quite right, as we shall see in the end.

...And the knotted ropes are too slender for my weight. Luckily for him that was not true, as you will see.

Great children's book, and I'm going to score it as such, I certainly loved it as a kid.

4 stars.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

Miéville drops you straight into a foot of New Crobuzon muck:

It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protuding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering...

Some people got sick of reading about how dirty New Crobuzon is, but when it is said like this, I could read it all day:

Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The scene-setting and the prose are simply fantastic. If you had to look up 'troglodytic', keep your dictionary close by for 'liminal, 'autopoiesis', 'deracinated', 'stygian', and 'etiolated'. I didn't know whether to be impressed by these, or annoyed, it felt like Miéville had lost a bet and had to include half a 'word a day' calendar in the novel.

But it's hard to stay mad at a dark, dirty steampunk world with insecto-humanoids, menancing mind controlling aliens, and mechanical super-intelligences. Miéville's city-world is fantastically imagined and described. Remaking, magic-come-bio-engineering-on-LSD, is particularly horrifying and grotesque, especially when used as punishment:

A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

And that's not even close to the most disturbing example, think about what remaking means for a red-light district. And yes, Miéville describes it.

Isaac I liked, although I had trouble imagining him and his voice - the many 'Yag, mate' phrases could have been cockney or even Australian. I got sick of the pseudo-scientific crisis theory discussions:

So I'm a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified...you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej's mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities....

But I'm totally with Isaac as regards to Palgolak:

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once....He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

And I have to admit the crisis engine as a power source for the Construct Council steampunk supercomputer (punch cards!) and its minions is a storyline I wish was followed more. Steampunk skynet:

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

I enjoyed the Aliens/Predator-style slake-moth hunt, but I felt a significant disconnect between the descriptive world-building of the early novel and the alien top-gun style dogfight battles.

So maybe the climax was a little silly, but it was definitely entertaining. The denouement was horrible though. A tacked-on boring sequence of events, a bizarre moral dilemma, and a walkout. Ending a book like this was always going to be tough, but this really detracted from the whole experience.

4.5 stars

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (4 stars)

Matter: what kinds of heaps its piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him.

Indeed, scoffing at the physical world, and disdainful of meatspace, Rajaniemi's post-singularity caper continues. Of course if you don't like how matter is piled up, having knowledge of some secret names will let you reshape this wildcode desert:

The Names are the names of the Aun, and by calling them you control the world, access the functionality built into the foglets in Earth's atmosphere, rock and water by the ancients.

Rajaniemi evokes Arabian Nights and biblical parables with passages like 'The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon':

Before the cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer's son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun - the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hears of men.

I've waited too long to write this review, but the overall vibe I got from this book is that it was designed to fill in the world in preparation for a grand finale. Rajaniemi adds more complexity and character to the world created in the Quantum Thief: there are interesting plot reveals, some twists, and we get to know Jean and Mieli better. But I was mostly left with a feeling of anticipation. I also found myself less interested in this desert being mined for gogols than the complex society of the Oubliette.

I await the next installment eagerly.

Oh, I can fake social niceties perfectly well, but it is just slave gogols moving my face, you understand. My emotions are outsourced. My private utility functions and pleasures are...quite different from yours.

4 stars

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (4.5 stars)

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.

While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.

I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.

I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory.

Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...

Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop.

All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.

So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.

4.5 stars

Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (3.5 stars)

Nooooooooo, more boring recaps!

It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony....

What is this, a dust jacket?

After explaining the history, Simmons goes around telling you that lots of pieces of the previous books were lies. Aenea destroys a carefully constructed and creative reveal of Core machinations between Ummon and the Keats cybrid in a previous book:

There were not and are not three camps in the TechnoCore...there are billions. The Core is the ultimate exercise in anarchy - hyperparasitism carried to its highest power.

Although I have to admit that it sounds more realistic than a very simple three-camps society. I did like Tom Ray being responsible for the creation of the TechnoCore, and the explanation of the cruciform and how it is now capable of proper resurrection without the severe mental and reproductive damage seen by Father Lenar Hoyt on Hyperion.

The failure of the symbiote was due to the simple demands of information storage and retrieval. In a human mind, there are neurons. In a human body, there are approximately 10^28 atoms.

Speaking of Hoyt, the image of Cardinal Lourdusamy killing Father Dure to bring back the Pope (Hoyt) was chilling and excellent.

Cardinal Lourdusamy's already thin lips tightened to the point of disappearance between florid jowls. "Do you have anything else to say before you return to hell, Antipope?"

Cybrid Frank Lloyd Wright teaches Aenea about architecture. OK. I guess. Apparently every messiah needs a trade? As an aside I was shocked to learn about the violent death of Wright's partner and her children via this novel.

Simmons tries a little too hard to make Aenea christ-like: going off into the desert on her own, giving communion of her blood, having a last supper, going off to face death by crucifiction. Aenea's vaguely Buddhist mysticism lecture circuit on T'ien Shan got tiring:

The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place - any place - is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is.

As did the 'instead of explaining that, let's have sex my mindless little unquestioning Raul' plot device, and the pages of descriptions of mountains:

Beyond our Sacred Mountain of the North, I know, rise the Four Mountains of Pilgrimage for the Buddhist faithful - O-mei Shan to the west; Chiu-hua Shan, "Nine Flower Mountain," to the south; Wu-t'ai Shan, the "Five Terrace mountain" with its welcoming Purple Palace to the north; and lowly but subtly beautiful P'u-t'o Shan in the far east.

Apparently Raul doesn't really listen to Aenea anyway, since he is surprised when they become lovers, despite her having told him on a number of occasions that it was their future:

Life has taken a turn that I had never anticipated, never imagined.

Despite the convenient 5-year time-debt to close the age gap, it still seems creepy. Especially since he still calls her 'kiddo'.

So, the ending. The two-year gap and father of Aenea's child was painfully obvious, but well written, and the identity of the 'Observer' was similarly obvious but very unsatisfying - nothing more about the 'Lions and Tigers and Bears'. Some reveals about the Shrike, but really no proper explanations, especially about how it went from pure-evil super villian in the early books to Aenea's dependable deus ex machina bodyguard in this one. But hey, not everything needs to be tied off neatly and explained.

I thought the concept of a Shared Moment being transmitted through the galaxy was very powerful. As for the connection to other people through the Void Which Binds, it was described in a very Utopian way, but having access to everyone's past or present thoughts sounds...terrible.

I loved Raul's death sentence in the Schrodinger cat box: such a classic elaborate bond death trap.

Overall I thought this was a pretty decent ending to the series, with some great ideas and an impressive plot arc.

3.5 stars.