The Martian by Andy Weir (5 stars)

There's some book openings that just give you a feeling.  Like this is going to be a good read.

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.

The author Andy Weir is a programmer and space nerd who spent a lot of time thinking about all of the engineering that has gone into space missions.  Especially all of the planning, technology, and redundancy to handle emergencies that never really gets exercised.  So he wrote a book where lots of stuff goes wrong, and put one of the world's best mechanical engineers/biologists with a MacGyver-esque flair for improvisation in the central role to exercise the shit out of everything.

But the real superstar here is the science and engineering.  No cutting corners, no deus-ex-machina, no dumbing down, just one man's spectacular brain against a million ways to die alone on Mars.

I don't want to give away any plot here because there are a lot of great surprises.  If you have a engineering, science, or computer science background you will be up until 4am reading this, and feel like high-fiving someone. A lot. It's hard to explain how excited I was about this sentence:

They want me to launch “hexedit” on the rover’s computer, then open the file /usr/lib/habcomm.so

Or when the ASCII man page plays a prominent role in Watney's design of a communications protocol with, shall we say, extremely limited design constraints.

Watney (and I assume Andy Weir himself) has a dry, sarcastic sense of humour that is actually pretty great.  It does a lot to keep the book entertaining. There are many times that the book seems headed for tedium, but Weir senses this and heads it off, often by switching perspectives back to Earth, or just making something else go wrong.  Be prepared to suspend your disbelief about how many things can go wrong, and how smart one human being can possibly be.

There is no character development in this book. At all. And I didn't care in the slightest. It's a nerd fantasy where all the information engineers have in their heads, usually only marginally useful in everyday life, all of a sudden becomes life-saving. So if you want a love story, or a deep emotional connection, read something else.

The ending could have been a little less action movie-like, it was one of the least plausible parts, but by that stage Weir probably could have done anything he liked and I still would have given it 5 stars.

Some of my favourite quotes:

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.

As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.

5 stars.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (4 stars)

This book is remarkably prescient given it was written in 1975. Some consider it to be the grandfather of cyberpunk. In it Brunner coins the term "worm" for a self replicating computer virus, and imagines a world where data connectivity is king and people can plug-in to the same lifestyle all over the world. Not only are jobs and houses frequently changed, but children are often loaned out and looked after by a series of different parents.

no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”

Our protagonist is Nicky Haflinger, who is a government trained computer hacker prodigy that can create new identities at will, and becomes a champion of transparency and free access to all information for all people. In Brunner's world it's access to privileged information that brings power and wealth.

In some ways this has always been true, but Brunner was forward thinking enough to imagine something like today's world where our governments, insurance companies, banks, supermarkets, hospitals, phones, coffee shops, book sellers, TV networks, and shopping malls are all collecting vast amounts of data about us and using it to their advantage.

"It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things are which they know."

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it.

This novel is definitely very thought-provoking, it's an ideas book, more than a character book. The only person we learn about in any depth is the protagonist, and even then it isn't clear if we're seeing the real character as it's all happening under the guise of an interrogation. Brunner spends lots of time on exposition and much of the action happens between chapters.

Nick's desire to free information has some real parallels with recent leaks and revelations about how governments, police, and companies are using surveillance to further their own ends:

"The idea came up that it took the advent of the H-bomb to bring about in human beings the response you see in other animals when confronted with bigger claws or teeth."...Well, if it’s true that our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus than you find among our four-legged cousins?”

The writing isn't easy reading, but it's incredibly thoughtful and full of memorable quotes. I'll leave you with some of my favourites.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

#1: That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must. #2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.

In this age of unprecedented information flow, people are haunted by the belief they’re actually ignorant. The stock excuse is that this is because there’s literally too much to be known.

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."

One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.

4 stars.

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Cory (3 stars)

4th in the expanse series.  Space Opera gets traded for planetary battle with bizarrely fanatical evil corporate villain.  This novel is definitely filler, but it was still entertaining. Although....killer slugs? Really?

I didn't really like any of the characters in the spotlight in this book. It felt like Basia was another cookie cut from the Melba flawed-bad-guy mold, which was quite tedious to read. Elvi's overplayed infatuation with Holden was cringeworthy, as was the resolution: got laid, fine now.

I have no idea if the biological terms Elvi used were accurate at all, but I suspect biologists reading about her analysis and breakthroughs would have been face-palming at the pseudo science.

3 stars.

Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey (3.5 stars)

Third in the Expanse series.  There's plenty of action and the plot progresses in this novel, but it isn't as strong as the first two.  There is a fairly unconvincing villian (mini Mao), and we see less of some of the best characters (Bobby, Avasarala, Miller).  Even the protomolecule doesn't do a whole lot compared with the previous two books.

This characterises the feel of the novel quite well:

Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.

Humanity is bumbling about, old religions are struggling to hold onto power and stay relevant in a much larger context, and everyone is confused and fighting each other for stupid reasons.  All of that sounds completely realistic, but it's fairly depressing to read, when what I really want to know is more about the protomolecule and what killed everything.

The highlight for me was Holden's time with Miller inside the center part of the ring.  Some great very dry humour from Miller:

“So, yeah. The most complex simulation in the history of your solar system is running right now so that we can pretend I’m here in the same room with you. The correct response is being flattered. Also, doing what the fuck I need you to do.” 

While the mutiny storyline wasn't the direction I was hoping the story would head, and especially not for so long, I was still fairly impressed with the whole epic battle sequence.  It was desperate, messy, and real characters die, which is something that is rare for this type of novel.

Anna also wasn't my favourite character, but she did have one of the best lines in the whole novel:

She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.

3.5 stars

Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey (4 stars)

Expanse book 2, following on from Leviathan Wakes.  Corey puts a little effort into filling out some of the accumulated characters at the start of this novel, which is well overdue.  Alex finally gets some colour and then Avasarala drops in with a storm of profanity.  This foul-mouthed incredibly intelligent diplomat quickly becomes one of my favourite characters, and if you can appreciate or put up with the swearing, she definitely has some of the best dialogue.  Here's some of my favourites:

It's not healthy having God sleeping right there where we can all watch him dream.  It scares the shit out of us.

My doctors said I probably had a good thirty years left in me.  Time to watch my grandkids grow up, maybe even see a great-grandchild or two.  But instead, I'm going to be killed by a limp-dick, whiny sonofabitch like Admiral Nguyen.

My last act in this universe isn't going to be fucking up everything I did right up to now.

There's some great space battles, that are really well thought out and described, including tactics for minimizing the times ships spend in range of each other's weapons.  Bobby, Avasarala, and Prax are all interesting characters that bring much needed depth with their fresh POVs.  The other members of Holden's crew still feel underdeveloped and verging on a collection of Mary Sue's to me: the solar system's best engineer/pilot/soldier are all represented.

While I've been able to overlook most of the tropes used so far, the stowaway scene as a carbon copy from the first alien movie made me cringe.  The book did give me at least one laugh though: at the ridiculous opulence of the space hotel where Avasarala and Holden are trapped:

The air recycling system pumped in subtle scents hand-crafted by the hotel's in-house perfumer.  That night's selection was called Windblown Grass.

Most importantly the plot arc continues in a fascinating direction, and there are more books.

4 stars

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (4.5 stars)

An epic space opera meets detective story written by a pair of authors under the pen name "James S.A. Corey".  It's a bit like Firefly meets Takeshi Kovacs, but without the beautiful grit and lyrical writing of Richard K. Morgan.  In fact the writing itself isn't really remarkable at all, but the world building is great, the plot is interesting, and the main characters are fairly well defined and far from perfect.

It also has a special quality that makes it stand out from many other space operas that start strong: it doesn't dissolve into tedium or get trapped on a single planet after one book.  I've read the four books (not counting side stories) published so far, and Corey has maintained an impressive tempo, continued to expand the world scale, and solidly kept my interest across all of the books.  This is actually more impressive than just considering the merits of each individual novel, so I gave it an extra half star.

In this book the two main characters are well developed and face a great and meaningful moral conflict about the merits of releasing potentially destructive information, with Holden and Miller taking opposing views.  The other characters were fairly underdeveloped, but this improves as the series moves on.

The protomolecule is badass and takes some genuinely surprising turns, and generates at least a couple of "woah" moments for me.  The scenes on Eros and on the ship seen through Julie's eyes reminded me of Event Horizon a little, stepping into the horror genre.  I think this section would have been vastly improved without the "vomit zombies" which dropped me out of a feeling of suspense into farce.

The science in the sci-fi mostly takes a back seat.  He's fairly vague about the "Epstein drive" which made travel in the solar system practical, but there's one thing Corey is very particular about: gravity.
We're constantly reminded about the effects of acceleration and deceleration on humans inside ships, how spin influenced space station (or planetery colony) design, how hard it is to move around in low G, how much "belters" struggle in Earth-like gravity, how magnetic boots work during EVAs, and many many more things gravity-related besides.  I actually liked all this: it adds a hard science element back into a world that would otherwise need very little explanation because most technology is fairly near future (sans Epstein drive).

Strong start to a strong series.

4.5 stars.

Ancillary Sword by Anne Leckie (4 stars)

This is the second novel in a trilogy, and the first was spectacularly good.  At this point you're already familiar with the whole gender weirdness, the unique perspective of Breq, and the stage has been set for an epic civil war space opera.  Great, lets dig in and see what she comes up with for this one!

If I said that Anaander Mianaai barely features, the civil war doesn't get much play, and the theme is mostly social justice on a single station and associated planet, would you be surprised?  I certainly was.  It's still a good novel, and the switch from epic space opera to smaller focus reminded me of the Fire Upon The Deep to A Deepness in the Sky transition, but it isn't nearly as strong as Deepness.

Leckie gives us deep insight into the tensions between various population dynamics, and this will obviously be important in the following novel, but there wasn't much here to be really excited about.  Breq seeks out basically every oppressed minority group she can find and tries to liberate them with the authority that comes with the rank of Fleet Captain, and last name Mianaai, pissing off everyone in the wealthy establishment.  Her visit to the planet's surface was full of Apartheid overtones.

It's definitely an interesting read, and the climax with the Presger gun getting a workout is thrilling.  But space opera it is not, so I can see why some people were disappointed.  Of course it is worth reading to be ready for the next book.

4 stars.