Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

A book with a huge twist that makes you re-think the whole novel after the reveal. Stop reading now if you don't want to be spoiled.

The novel has two plot lines, one moving forward in time, and one moving backwards. The reveal comes when we find out that Zakalwe as we know him is actually Elethiomel, and that the fear of chairs that 'Zakalwe' has is due to the huge weight of guilt he has for making Zakalwe's sister into a chair. Literally a chair, he made a chair out of her bones covered with her skin and sent it to Zakalwe. The ploy was to send the command of the opposing army (the real Zakalwe) into disarray and confusion due to the horror of the act just as Elethiomel's forces mounted a breakout attempt from the Staberinde.

The problem with the twist was that I couldn't reconcile the ability to perform this horrendous act with E's later guilt and multi-century attempt at atonement by doing the bidding of the Culture, who he hopes are the good guys. This twist, while an interesting idea and a fairly spectacular reveal, didn't gel with me at all. In the following quote, during his 'retirement', he doesn't sound like the sort of person willing to win at all costs, even if it requires turning his girlfriend into furniture to distract his childhood friend:

He told her about a man, a warrior, who'd worked for the wizards doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to - and even the wizards had not discovered - he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.

This also begs the question, could the Culture really not have known who they were dealing with? Zakalwe seems to think they didn't, and certainly Sma and the drone didn't seem to know until the reveal, but it would be such a trivial thing for a Culture Mind to find out that it strikes me as unbelievable they wouldn't have such basic background on someone they place in critical roles on many occasions. So, if they did know, it feels more ruthless than I expected from the Culture, but perhaps someone that will try to win at all costs and who can be manipulated by his past is exactly the weapon they need. That's certainly Zakalwe's impression:

You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognized that.

There's some great stuff about the nature, necessity, and futility of war throughout the novel. Here's a few choice quotes to end with:

...in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

"I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing."

"So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile...arguing stuff?"

"Agree to disagree," he said. "Or fight."

4 stars.

PS. My favourite ship names from this one: "What Are the Civilian Applications?" and "Very Little Gravitas Indeed".

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

My second culture book, and much much better than Consider Phlebas. In this novel we get a deeper insight into the Culture itself: a galaxy-spanning highly evolved human civilisation where no-one wants for anything. Our protagonist Gurgeh has gotten sick of being a super-leet game player and winning at basically every game he takes an interest in, so reaches out, in response to gentle prodding, to Contact (the part of the culture that interacts with aliens) for something new. Incidentally, there was something about Banks' use of slight mis-pronounciations of Gurgeh's name by aliens that added a special bit of polish to his interactions with aliens of the Empire.

The Empire is held together, and a governing class chosen, via an extremely complex series of games called Azad. I loved the dig at chess, one of the more complex games humanity has come up with to-date:

Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly', such as grid, Prallian scope 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies...As a work of intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Spoiler time.

Most disappointing in the early part of the novel was the blackmail scheme from Mawhrin-Skel. It was completely implausible that Gurgeh wouldn't see obvious blackmail underneath an offer to help with cheating from Mawhrin-Skel, a drone that Gurgeh knows loves digging up trouble. I like the implication that Mawhrin-Skel/Flere-Imsaho/our-narrator was working for Special Circumstances all along, and that blackmail was just part of the plan to get Gurgeh on board, but Banks could have come up with a much more sneaky entrapment than just "hey, wanna cheat?". Banks uses the Empire as a foil for commentary on our own society:

Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. "What's that?" he asked Pequil. "That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers." "Driven off the land," Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, "by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus."

Although it was unclear to me what point he was making with the game of Azad that is the focus of the Empire. One theory I had was that Azad was supposed to be an allegory for the complex game-like system of politics/elections/government on Earth. I think Banks very cleverly didn't try to describe Azad in great detail, since it would be very difficult to portray something as complex as he built it up to be without being boring.

I was a big fan of the planet Echronedal: an entire planet with flora and fauna evolved to survive, and even depend on, a constant raging inferno working its way around the globe.

I'm still not sure if I liked the ending. It's better than Gurgeh winning outright, exposing the faked propaganda about him losing, and becoming Emperor himself, which I thought was where it might be heading. It was a little reminiscent of Ender's Game or The Last Starfighter: finding out he was playing for the world after the fact. Winning at Azad seemed to be the low-force first option for the Culture, a little nudge to destroy the Empire, something that seems to gel very nicely with what I know of the Culture so far.

Onto the next one!

4 stars.

Shift Omnibus and Dust by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

Wow, what a ride. I read Shift and Dust back to back so I'm going to review them together since it is hard to separate them in my head. I re-read First Shift since it had been a while, and now having finished all the books I think the explanation for the creation of the silos, and the story of the Democratic convention is the weakest part of the whole series, you can read more of why in my original review of First Shift.

Shift is chock full of revelations and surprises. I loved getting Solo's back-story, his poem scrawled on a blackboard in the dead silo is a deliciously creepy moment:

The ghosts are watching. The ghosts are watching. They watch me stroll alone. corpses are laughing. The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them. parents are missing. My parents are missing. They are waiting for me to come home.

SUPER DOOPER GIANT MEGA SPOILERS.

Anna's subversive action to pump good nanobots into Silo 17 when it was supposed to be shut down with the killing kind was a brilliant twist, and a great explanation for the mystery of how Solo survived that I'd been pondering for a few books.

Donald waking up as Thurman was a stroke of genius from Howey, exploiting the drugged caretakers of Silo 1's complete trust in the system and power hierarchy. Donald's misguided murder of Anna wasn't a complete surprise, but it was still shocking, and made me want to yell STOP! DON'T DO IT! as I was reading. And Thurman rises from the dead! So many great ideas in this book.

I found Mission's story fairly uninteresting, but I think Howey made an excellent point with the Crow: just one person off the drugs who actually remembers is a very powerful thing, and a seed for revolution.

Donald's despair and frustration is palpable as he struggles to discover the secret of the silos.

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.

The ending felt a little rushed, but I think it was actually quite fitting, the survivors needed to do something drastic. The prospect of fighting for survival in a decrepit silo was understandably horrifying. Howey didn't attempt to tie off all the loose ends, like the other dark silos, or whether Juliette and crew would go back and try to rescue others, but I think that was fine.

Easily one of the consistently strongest sci-fi series I've ever read. Kudos for finishing strongly and not dragging things on into mediocrity. I look forward to seeing what Howey does next.

4.5 stars.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (3.5 stars)

Banks creates a universe for epic-scope space opera, which is great, but this novel is actually fairly weak.

The protagonist Horza, a shapeshifter, stumbles from one seemingly random experience to another: a laser fight in a temple, an ill-fated looting mission on a soon-to-be-destroyed orbital, an escape from a fat cannibal who is slowly eating his religious followers to death, among many others. Don't get me wrong, there were great feats of imagination here, but the almost complete lack of any thread tying it all together meant I just didn't really care about any of the characters, especially true during the obviously pointless and stupid temple mission.

Horza has sided with the Idirans, who we know are barbaric and brutal, but we never see any evidence or rationale for why Horza is so anti-Culture, or get an explanation for his violent hate of their society. This ambiguity and weakness in Horza's character might be deliberate, but it didn't help me empathize with him at all. Perosteck Balveda, the Culture agent, is obviously using Horza to get access to the planet, but I couldn't tell in some places if Banks was portraying Horza as unbelievably naive to not realise this, or trying to assure himself (Horza) that he still had the upper hand and was in control of the situation:

As for Perosteck Balveda, she was his prisoner; it was as simple as that.

Fal 'Ngeestra, mountaineer and Culture Referrer (basically a highly evolved soothsayer), seemed interesting to start with, but I soon grew bored of her semi-mystical, too-much-peyote passages:

We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

Having slogged through this crap, it was all the more annoying to have her storyline just die.

Banks manages a few very well-placed digs at religion. Horza gets pissed off that someone with religion interprets the impressive engineering achievement of a Culture-built orbital as a triumphant testimony to the power of God:

...genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

The action sequence of Horza blasting his way out of a giant GSV while swearing at an annoying drone couldn't have been more like Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon, and C-3PO, so much so that it felt formulaic to me. Maybe I've just seen too much Star Wars.

Speaking of movie plots, there is a jarring passage about three-quarters through the book that seems to imply this is all a training simulation - Matrix red-pill style. Perhaps this will become clear in later novels:

"Just a moment," Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw colored lights across his broad gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and siad, "Oh, Sorry!" and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the..

While the final sequence underground was entertaining, it was fairly mindless action-novel stuff, with a poor ending. Banks is obviously talented, and has a great imagination, this just isn't his best book. I've already started reading The Player of Games set in the same universe and it is far far superior.

3.5 stars.

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey (1 star)

This was recommended by a friend a long time ago, and I decided not to read it at the time, but I recently saw it on the NPR top 100 sci-fi fantasy list along with many of my all-time favourites, which got me curious enough to give it a chance. I wish I hadn't, since it is basically GRRM romance fan fiction. The same people that put this on the NPR list probably made 50 Shades of Grey a #1 bestseller.

Carey has created a complex world that has some of the feel, but none of the actual talent, of GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire, and turned it into a romance novel with a twist: the main character and single POV is a woman, Phedre, apparently predisposed from birth to BDSM who trains as a high class prostitute. She works for a self-styled spymaster, Delaunay, who we're supposed to believe is a master of information sources, but is really just a pimp for two high-class prostitutes. Delaunay is obviously intended to be Varys, he's even called 'the spider' in case you missed it, but shows none of Varys' talents for extracting information. He isn't ruthless or devious enough to be a spymaster, use sources against each other, or apply blackmail liberally, and he appears to have little to no underworld contacts. In fact, his whole information gathering strategy seems to be pimping out his two prostitutes to his enemies and hoping they say something interesting.

And if you need more convincing that it's trying to be the Song of Ice and Fire, how about this:

Barquiel L'Envers rested his chin on one fist. "Will you teach me to play the game of thrones?".

OK, so maybe the plot is silly and the characters are unconvincing, how about the writing? Carey can certainly churn out the words, the novel is about 900 pages. And she wants to create a complex world. She really wants it to be complex, but she doesn't know how to create it without just dumping vast boring swathes of geography and history:

...Also to the south went Shemhazai, westerly to the mountainous borders of Aragonia, with whom our long peace still stands. Siovale is the name of this provice, and it is a prosperous one with a great tradition for learning, for Shemazai ever treasured knowledge. Inland to the north of Siovale is L'Agnace...

And just so you know all this boring background isn't pointless (it is), there's plenty of heavy-handed foreshadowing along the lines of "if I had only known that going to the Valerian House would have had such an important consequence".

Carey also felt the need to re-use Christianity as a religion in this kinda-Europe, with some bits re-named. I'm not sure why this annoyed me so much, perhaps just because it felt lazy because she missed the opportunity to build something new and interesting in favour of a shallow copy of Christian beliefs and rituals.

It came then to the One God that his persuasion held no sway over Elua, in whose veins ran the red wine of his mother Earth, through the womb she gave him and the tears of the Magdelene.

The real problem here is that Phedre's POV is boring and far from the centre of the action, and its the only POV. Most of the first half of the novel is like this: Phedre is told to go on an 'assignation' (one of many fancy words to dress up what is actually going on, if you read 'trick' for assignation and BJ for languisement it seems a lot less like a semi-religious occupation and a lot more like old-fashioned whoring), patron (john) drops some tidbit of information in fairly implausible manner since they know exactly why Phedre is there, Phedre gives information to Delaunay. Delaunay keeps Phedre in the dark about everything. Repeat. Through the whole novel Phedre is very passive, does little more interesting than pick a sexual partner every now and then, and happens to be in the right place at the right time to hear and pass on crucial information.

But I'm tired of writing, so I'll just dump a list of other miscellaneous things that annoyed me:

• "In the City's Great Temple...flowers and weeds alike are lovingly tended." This is ridiculous. I can't wait to see a temple overrun with 10ft high thistles and kudzu grass, it sounds beautiful.
• Everything about Melisande being more beautiful than all the other already highly praised beautiful people and her effect on Phedre: going weak at the knees, seeing red, complete submission, was entirely unconvincing.
• Delaunay enacted an elaborate plot to get Phedre to surprise Duc Barquiel L'Envers and use her body as bait to get L'Envers to meet with Delaunay. Because, you know, Delaunay knowing who killed his sister wasn't enough to get a 5 minute meeting without this elaborate setup.
• Phedre constantly talks up how smart she is but never shows any glimmer of smarts or cunning outside the bedroom "...made of me what I was, a courtesan equipped to match wits with the deadliest of courtiers."
• Not only does Phedre have an over-inflated opinion of her intelligence, she's also a bigot "It was a strange thing, to mark the presence of so many D'Angelines among foreigners, honed features shining like cut gems among unpolished stone." and "earthborn and bred, with none of the odd outcroppings of gift or beauty that marked even the lowest-born of D'Angeline peasantry".
• Phedre's Boys made me cringe every time they were mentioned. It's like the cast of HMS Pinafore picked a BDSM prostitute as their figurehead and waltzed around singing merry little songs in her name.
• No-one really important dies, ever. GRRM this is not.

Don't read it.

1 star.

Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel by Richard K. Morgan (5 stars)

Fans of Chandler and sci-fi rejoice! Your dreams are answered in this noir sci-fi detective novel set in future San Francisco (now known as Bay City), where bodies are just 'sleeves' to insert your cortical stack into, and, for enough money, you can live forever. One of the super-rich elite known as 'meths' (after Methuselah longevity) forcefully enlists the help of Takeshi Kovacs, a futuristic detective with grit, to figure out who murdered him recently, after the meth was 're-sleeved' and lost 48 hours of memory since his last stack backup.

The writing is impressive. I loved this novel from very early on, purely based on the Chandler-esque descriptions. Here's a few examples, I've never so vividly imagined a nose breaking before.

Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath the single sheet.

...it's like trying to throw a net over smoke.

My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery, and blood flooded down over my mouth

But its not just the writing that makes this a great novel: you have a gritty detective, hard-boiled humour, a fascinating almost-dystopian world chock-full of amazing technology, and a cast of misfit characters. Most of whom constantly teeter on the brink of 'good' or 'bad'.

Kovacs pursues a line of investigation for quite some time, only to have it abruptly dead-end, requiring him to throw away most of his assumptions and cast around for a new investigative thread to pull. I found this section of the novel jarring and disheartening, but I think this was actually quite clever writing: detective work must often face obstacles like this, and I was empathising with Takeshi who was experiencing the same emotions. I think Morgan's solution to this problem, and a number of others, was use of the 'screw a woman who will then give you a vital clue' plot device, which tended to be a little heavy handed since Takeshi gets almost all his leads this way.

I'll leave you with a few random observations.

Kovacs' tour of PsychaSec on Alcatraz reminded me of just about every data-centre tour I've ever been on:

We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the seven to eleven degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at the racks of the big thirty-centimeter expanded-format disks, and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. "It's a duplex system", Nyman said proudly....I made polite noises.

Reileen (Ray) Kawahara's HQ is a ridiculous bond villian lair, it might as well have been inside a volcano:

I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross, and whose ceiling was lost in the gloom above us...I saw that the roof here was vaulted with the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords...

Overall, great book, highly recommend, unless you don't like violence, sex, or Catholic bashing:

Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They've been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They've been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won't even let their adherents practice birth control, and they've stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries.

5 stars

Old Man's War by John Scalzi (4.5 stars)

There's a great premise here: at 75, people living on Earth can optionally enlist in the Colonial Defence Force, get some advanced medical treatment, and hop on a one-way flight into space to defend far-flung human colonies. Sclazi writes a ripping military Sci-Fi space opera, with significant influence from Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but with less moral, political, and thematic depth and more fast-paced action. That may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

That's not to say the characters are shallow, Perry is well-rounded, intelligent, and desperately misses his wife, who dies a number of years before he joins the CDF.

For as much as I hate the cemetary, I've been grateful it's here, too. I miss my wife. It's easier to miss her at a cemetary, where she's never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.

The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another - it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.

The medical treatment, it's outcomes, and the old people's reactions to their new fitness was fascinating reading. The BrianPals felt a lot like Google Glass plus 20 years.

I hated the section with Master Sergeant Ruiz as the cliched drill instructor. Scalzi acknowledged that he was writing a cliche drill instructor and tries to address it head on:

"You're under the impression that I'm talking like this because this is just something drill instructors are supposed to do. You're under the impression that after a few weeks of training, my gruff but fair facade will begin to slip and I will show some inkling of being impressed with the lot of you, and that at the end of your training, you'll have earned my grudging respect...You're impression, ladies and gentlemen, is completely and irrevocably fucked."

But the scenario described is exactly what happens.

Battles are had, aliens and humans die in creative ways, and it's all very entertaining (the Consu reminded me of Dr. Who's Sontarans in their war-like temperament). However, the human-led massacre of Lilliputian aliens is ridiculous (stomping? really? even today's weapons could easily destroy a tiny city more efficiently) and a bizarre way to introduce Perry's moral conflict.

All that aside, it is a great thriller which is impossible to put down. That's so rare I'm willing to forgive much.

4.5 stars