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.

Best of 2014 as read by G

Less sci-fi this year, and unfortunately a somewhat lacklustre set of books. I partly blame goodreads, which should know me fairly well after 220+ ratings, but it nonetheless kept recommending The Sunne in Splendour as basically the number one book I should read. That didn't work out well and it killed most of November and December. Goodreads also led me to Swan Song, which was closer to the mark but not great, so generous salt will be applied to future recommendations.

The best (5 stars):

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre (3 stars)

I knew from the first few pages of this book that Goldacre had done his homework and would back his arguments with facts and plenty of references. In fact, he tells us right up front:

So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.

Which is great, I wanted the facts, I wanted references, I wanted solid arguments, and this book definitely delivers. But it isn't particularly entertaining, and finishing it took quite a lot of determination. Honestly I'm not sure what Goldacre could have done to improve this: it's an incredibly important message that needs to be heard by, well, preferably everyone, but especially all members of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Judging by the contents of the afterword and the success of the alltrials campaign this has happened to some extent, which is great. But my 3 star ranking here reflects the view that just not that many lay people will be willing to trudge through this book.

Having said that, I'm incredibly glad that Ben Goldacre has written the book and launched the campaign, since it's a tragedy that (among many other problems) data from trials conducted in humans can be cherry-picked by companies to publish only favourable results. Everyone reading this should go sign the alltrials petition to help fix that.

In places I found the tone a little shrill and the recommendations, such as this one, somewhat impractical. What would patients think when confronted with such information stuck to the wall of a clinic without a 450-page accompanying novel to explain it?

All doctors should declare all payments, gifts, hospitality, free teaching and so on, to their patients, to colleagues, and to a central register. The conventional cut-off is for everything within the past three years, but we could consider making it longer. We should display the contents in our clinics, to our patients, and let them decide if such activities are acceptable.

More sensible than displaying it in clinics would be making that central register data available online. And I'm sure Goldacre is betting that sunlight shone on it like this will basically kill the entire practice of semi-bribes. Many people already shop for doctors on recommendation sites like yelp, having this data available to the patient as part of that interface when choosing a physician would be valuable.

For the most part though, the recommendations are sensible and practical. Since Goldacre basically wrote an abstract for the entire book in the first few pages I thought I'd just include it here, rather than summarising the problems and arguments further:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

3 stars.

Jupiter - Illusions of Faith by Kynan Waterford (3.5 stars)

Fans of Matthew Reilly will find a lot to like in this book. It's packed with intricate action scenes featuring "the most dangerous man in the solar system" Garen Maertikye deploying a dizzying array of body enhancement technology to move stealthily, outsmart, and when forced to, destroy his enemies. In fact, the body enhancement tech was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, with the highlight being the "type-seven augmented plantim" (i.e. plant matter) body. The description of the surgical implantation of a new occupant into this body and subsequent adaptation to the user was fantastic, as was seeing its capabilities tested through a number of violent encounters.

For me the piece that was missing here was a back-story on how Maertikye came by all of his amazing tech, especially since it is far more advanced than that available to the well-funded Coalition soldier elite. Presumably there's a thriving and dangerous black market for body enhancements, an exploration of which would make a great novel on its own. But we're given little insight into how Garen has survived all of these years - how is he funded? Being an emotionless badass might be a tactical advantage, but it doesn't fuel and repair a spacecraft, or make a stormsuit.

The body tech and fight scenes sit more towards the science end of the science-fantasy spectrum, but there are also elements of the story that are much more solidly at the fantasy end: energy transfer between heavangels and humans, direct manipulation of human emotions by heavangels, and a spontaneous complete body transformation. I found these aspects hard to reconcile with the preturnatural body tech and fight scenes that were full of much more realistic physics - I've never read the term "angular momentum" so many times in fight scenes before!

I'm not against science-fantasy, but my personal preference would have been for these aspects to have a pseudo-science grounding: like the heavangels are nano particles that move through the atmosphere in clouds but can inhabit humans as brain parasites. There's a great potential twist here if the humans try to stop killing them, only to be overtaken as hosts for an alien parasite. Garen's stormsuit could have been specially designed to harvest energy from a cooperative cloud of nano particles.

While I'm on my high-horse writing my wishlist, I also wished there was more ship slang, which is bound to develop on a closed ecosystem like the Golgotha, and less use of the word terrorist, which is cringe-worthy in a couple of cases. Like when a soldier is supposed to be verbally abusing a captured Maertikye, and the best he can muster is "You're in more trouble than you know, terrorist".

While the action has a Matthew Reilly flavour, it is far from being mindlessly dumb like those novels. A lot of thought has gone into the Coalition's economic stranglehold on the population and life on board the Golgotha. Character development isn't spectacularly deep, and having a main character with deliberately suppressed emotions doesn't help in this regard, but it isn't completely absent. To its credit, things don't get tied up in a neat bow at the end, it's suitably complicated, and suitably open for plenty of sequels.

Looking forward to the next one.

3.5 stars

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (2 stars)

Have you always been upset about Shakespear's portrayal and longed for a different perspective on Richard III? Are you ready to pick up minor inaccuracies about 15th century Catholic law, know your Plantagenet and Lancastrian family trees off by heart, sell white boar embroidery on etsy, and have your own extensive opinions on the various scenarios re the demise of the "princes in the tower"? Well, this is the book for you. There's apparently a lot of you, judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews this book has had on amazon.

If, like me, you forgot there was a Shakespeare play about Richard III, had never heard of the princes in the tower, thought plantagenet was something related to blood clotting, and thought The Tudors TV series would have been drastically improved without fighting the same stupid war with France and Spain every other episode, you should probably give this 1000 page tome a miss. How did I, terrible history student, get here? I blame goodreads recommendations.

This book is a very extensively researched and, as I now know, unusual perspective on Richard III (i.e. he's an insufferably good guy). By which I mean that it's perhaps the most entertaining history textbook ever written. It is however, a pretty ordinary novel.

It begins with lots of incredibly dry exposition, that's screaming "Look! Look at all the research I did!" Honestly I could not care less about why Edmund is a little bit sad at Christmas, it doesn't matter. I don't care how long it took to figure all this out, it's just boring.

After the July battle that had delivered the Kind into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months trying to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais. These Lancastrian lords...Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland...And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked...

The imagery and raw emotion of Marguerite d'Anjou sinking to her knees in the snow was a welcome break from all the wooden third-person exposition, and things get a little better from there, but it's still a tough slog.

In trying to paint Richard in such a positive light Penman goes too far and makes him unbelievable. He's such a beacon of principles, loving father, faithful husband and all round honour-bound we-could-never-accept-French-wine-when-we-could-die-in-battle caricature that I found myself wishing for his downfall, anticipating a spectacular fall from grace. Sadly Penman only allows a little incompetence and poor character judgement.

To combat the dryness, exactly halfway through Penman decides it is time for sex. All of a sudden it's all kirtles, and body parts "gleaming soft and wet", and "feeling desire start to quicken again". This made things a bit more interesting at the expense of making the history nerds angry. Why are you ruining a perfectly good textbook?

But it takes until about page 715 before I get the first "huh, THAT's interesting" moment when Dr. Stillington drops his bombshell. At this point things start to unravel and the long, long, long anticipated climax made for good reading. A nice payoff, but it wasn't worth all the pain.

The subject material certainly has all the ingredients for a fantastic story, but history is a terrible editor. It could be a far better novel if the author was willing to give up on some of her research and make the history nerds angry by taking more liberty with the facts.

2 stars.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey (4 stars)

This book has an interesting early reveal that if you come to the book in just the right way, i.e. without reading anything at all about it, is probably worth preserving. So I'm putting the spoiler warning right up front, since it's impossible to talk about otherwise. Consider yourself warned.

Having said that, I knew it was a zombie book before I started reading. I think it's actually very obvious before the reveal, but it's hard to judge that objectively. The start of the book is very strong. The idea of high-functioning zombie children being studied for clues to help a mostly-annihilated human population survive in the post-apocalyptic world is very novel. It feels more like a government-gone-crazy dystopia novel to begin with, especially as Melanie notices lots of little cracks appearing in the facade that the teachers and Sergeant Parks present.

After the Junkers storm the base in a brilliantly conceived attack, everything changes. The novel switches to Walking Dead mode, where survival means defending against attacks from both humans and zombies. This is definitely entertaining, and Melanie's encounter with a partially conscious zombie sitting on a bed, singing and leafing through photos is one of the creepier things I've ever read.

"The raven... croaked... as she sat... at her meal..."

It's so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he's not answering her, he's only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It's "The Woman Who Rode Double", an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type - exactly the sort of song she'd expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don't. Ever.

But the story seems to start losing its way, especially after entering London. Dr Caldwell goes somewhat nuts, and the madcap adventure with the armored vehicle bordered on slapstick with the car careening around through buildings with zombies attached. I get that this was supposed to be the last desperate actions of a species on the brink of extinction, but by this stage I felt like the book had lost almost all of its early promise.

The ending was fitting I think, and I liked the use of an actual zombie fungus as the basis for the infection. Overall there are great ideas here, the execution just wasn't that strong.

4 stars.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon (3.5 stars)

My first goodreads recommendation, it was certainly on-target with the post-apocalyptic genre, one of my favourites. The obvious comparison for Swan Song is with Stephen King's The Stand. On the face of it there are a number of similarities: there's an apocalypse and the survivors are caught up in a good versus evil struggle with a fantasy component, i.e. the devil has a real physical form and people are drawn to each other through dreams. Good and evil population centres form and come into conflict.

But there's lots of differences too. Swan Song is much more of an action/horror book, with modest effort spent on building characters, paling in comparison to the masterful character construction in The Stand.  It is also almost purely post-apocalyptic, not much time is spent before the apocalypse, and because it's nuclear the apocalypse itself plays out very quickly, in stark contrast to The Stand where both of those phases are very long.

Swan Song draws inspiration from TS Eliot's The Waste Land and quotes from it are used extensively throughout the book, including as the password prompts for the nuclear launch.  (Incidentally, using a well-known poem verbatim as challenge-response is a terrible choice of authentication strategy).

Minor spoilers ahead.

McCammon's devil is fairly supernaturally creepy in the early stages of the book as he sits in an untouched theatre in NYC amidst the nuclear wasteland, and during his first encounter with Sister Creep.  Later in the novel though he seems impotent when confronting Swan, for seemingly little reason.  Her ability to wield "forgiveness" had a deus ex machina smell to it.

On at least a couple of occasions this book crossed my gore and horror threshold.  This is when I stop enjoying the other-worldness and thought experiment of survival after an apocalypse, and start wondering why I'm reading about babies getting clubbed to death to assert a warlord's evil-ness.

Sans these sections I thought the evil side was fairly well imagined.  I liked the image of the people living in holes surrounding the camps with lights and guns, picking off survivors as they are attracted to the lights of the settlement.  Lord Alvin of the K-Mart was pretty well-done too, very Mad Max.

The character development was fairly weak, and we don't get a deep feeling of being inside the head of any character, but I have to give McCammon some credit.  He certainly picked interesting character trajectories.  A homeless lady turns into a strong township leader, and a teenager, Roland, gradually reveals a mad and utterly ruthless appetite for survival at all costs.

There's a few cringe-worthy moments, e.g. when Sister Creep is saved from a pack of wolves, not once, but twice, under increasingly improbable circumstances.  And Macklin's whole shadow-soldier business.  It should have been really creepy, but instead it just felt going through the motions to apply the obvious stereotype for a post-apocalyptic warlord: psychologically unstable war vet.

He blinked.  The Shadow Soldier was smiling thinly, his face streaked with camouflage paint under the brow of his helmet.

The other similarity this book shares with The Stand, is that the ending is pretty poor.  All of the supernatural struggle is cast aside for a very real, very improbable, and fairly Matthew Reilly action sequence (it even involves a bunker).  After which everything is pretty much fine and things are looking great for the human race.  *sigh*.

Definitely a page-turner, post-apocalyptic fans who were bored with the pace of The Stand with a high tolerance for gore would find lots to like.

3.5 stars.