Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (3 stars)

The final book in a spectacular trilogy by Ann Leckie. Wait, what, final? There's nothing final about this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Oh, wait, lets have a cup of tea.

Some spoiler tea ahead.

Good, now back to the novel. Dear god, why are we still on this damn space station? I thought this was a space opera? Oh well, lets have another cup of tea and watch the Presger translator do something weird, hah it ate an oyster with the shell on. Oh Jar Jar, I mean, translator.

Oooh, Anaander is coming with her warships, here comes a battle. Ah...nope. Thank god we have a popgun-ex-machina to save us from those nasty action scenes. Lets have a cup of tea.

The bullets I had fired at them were so small that even if any of the ships’ sensors could have seen them—and they could not—they would not register as a danger.

Wait, here comes the climax, here it comes! Breq falls over, Jar Jar throws up, and the most powerful person in the galaxy was defeated. Presger-treaty-ex-machina for the win. Nothing to see here. Have some tea, sorry about the chipped enamel.

And don't complain about the ending, I see you already complaining about it, stop it. I'm going to preempt you all, so there:

Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

That may have been overly mean, but I was incredibly disappointed by this book. Leckie is a fantastic writer so she carries the story anyway, and I did enjoy reading it, but sadly the trilogy didn't come close to living up to the promise of the first novel.

Given how open the entire ending was, I assume, and hope, there will be more on what happens when AIs are recognized by the Presger and are no longer controlled by humans. And whether cloning will really work out for ancillaries, or if they will go back to kidnapping humans.

And I hope there will be less tea drinking.

3 stars.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

In The Diamond Age, Stephenson builds a fantastic world full of nano machines. The technology dominates all aspects of life: almost everything people need is built by a household matter compiler (think Star Trek replicator, or a really advanced version of current 3D printing).

The matter compiler in the corner of the kitchen came on automatically and began to create a pedomotive for Hackworth to take to work.

But it isn't all happy-useful machines. Advertising pervades almost everything, and humanity has split up into various tribes "phyles", largely along racial and socio-economic lines.

...it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

Sounds exactly right. And there's something great about reading a novel written by a computer scientist, so many in-jokes and clever ways of describing how computers work. "Castle Turing" may be the most surreal way to learn low-level programming I've ever imagined.

...the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses

In fact the majority of the novel is devoted to the description of how a young girl in poverty uses education gained from an incredibly advanced textbook "YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER a Propædeutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates.." to escape a dangerous home environment and drag herself out of poverty and into a position of power.

Nell is a wonderful character, and in fact this book was recommended to me as an example of a strong female lead character, of which I have encountered very few but want to find more of to recommend to my daughter.

Nell's early life is scary and full of danger. Her escape from her family was intense, and an excellent read. As a reader you desperately want Nell to succeed.

There are many other characters that are well fleshed out, but some are unceremoniously dropped without any real explanation (e.g. Judge Fang). And others I expected to play a larger role but never do (Miranda).

Something about describing the Seattle area like this with "software khans" I found very cute:

Much of the Seattle area was still sufficiently rich, civilized, and polite that New Atlantans did not object to living there, and little Victorian mini-claves were scattered about the place, particularly east of the lake, around the misty forest domains of the software khans

Things get surreal when the Drummers enter the story. It started to read like Being John Malkovich meets Eyes Wide Shut:

Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in brightly colored mediatronic condoms

The ending is just...terrible. I thought the concept was fine, the execution was just no good. Really rushed. Stephenson uses just a dozen pages to describe a war involving thousands of people that completely changes the entire world, which is completely inadequate when viewed in the light of the hundreds of pages he spent building the world and creating much less important plot threads.

But, ending aside, it's a great read. Here's my favourite quote:

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

4 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck by Steven Campbell (3.5 stars)

Even darker again. Belvaille is barely functional, socially chaotic, and falling apart. Hank is so dense he is effectively crippled and close to death. And yet somehow he is in charge of everything. Unfortunately, most of the humour was lost in the dark plot. It's getting close to sci-fi noir.

In a number of cases, it's actually fairly clever social commentary:

I don’t even think any of them had given their positions on issues. Stating your position might piss people off who disagreed with you. But attacking someone else only hurt them, especially if you did it through third parties

There's even a little to learn about free markets and how they are important to society. In this case the bankers are an alien race called the Ankh, who are very interested in Hank providing some stability.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Highly entertaining, not too much thinking required just like the first in the series, but with a darker bent. Hank takes some actions that gets lots of people killed and he shows very little remorse. There's still plenty of funny moments, but fewer laugh-out-loud situations than in the first. Hank's prodigious hunger after injury provides some of them:

But the ache in my stomach was primordial. It was twisting my mind. I was looking at doors and wondering if I could eat them. They looked so similar to large crackers. I wondered why the asses who had constructed this city hadn’t left great piles of food lying around. What if people got hungry? It seemed a massive oversight. There was all this metal and no food.

And many more from Hank's apparent cluelessness, hiring an army via newspaper ad, and, well stuff like this:

I heard you were walking around barefoot, killing people, leaving their bodies all over the city, while wearing a diaper.

4 stars.

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger (2.5 stars)

I got excited at the start of this novel as we were being introduced to Jack Crabb, our 111 year old narrator, mostly because of the fantastic visual descriptions Berger delivers:

He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.

But sadly, the rest of the novel is all Crabb, in a dialect that is too well-structured to match the character, and certainly with none of the beauty we get in the introduction. In fact, I didn't care about Crabb at all. He wasn't an interesting character personality-wise, and I just couldn't buy the tall-tale format where he's present at every major event (right beside Custer at his last stand), and knows everyone from wild west legend including Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane etc.

Old Lodge Skins the Indian chief was one of the most interesting characters in the whole novel. And while Crabb has some respect for him, Crabb's view of Indian's in general I think was probably fairly accurate for a white man of the time. This is very far from the Dances With Wolves noble savage romanticized view of Indians:

Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

As historical fiction it was fairly interesting to learn more about Custer's military actions, and how Indians were hounded from one place to the next as the trains made the west accessible. Honestly though, the tall-tale format detracted from the historical aspect, leaving me unsure if there was anything real to believe at all.

If you're looking for a western, True Grit and Lonesome Dove are far better reads.

2.5 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Screw The Galaxy by Steven Campbell (4.5 stars)

This is noir sci-fi comedy. Wrap your head around that, or "Eat suck, suckface". Hank is an amazing character, I loved him from the beginning. He's a self-described thug and a mutant with a superpower - he's very dense (heh), which makes him very hard to hurt. He has an offbeat, self-deprecating sense of humour that is just perfect. I can't remember the last time I liked a character so much.

 The story is exciting and ridiculous. Hank ends up negotiating on behalf of the human race with a vastly technologically superior race in a monogrammed pink bathrobe:

I looked at the robe for some time, wondering if I should get them to exchange it, but they had gone to the trouble to get it monogrammed. Besides, just because pink was a pansy color where I came from didn't mean anything out here. For all I knew it could be the galactic color of death and destruction.

The Colmarian world Campbell has built is hilarious in a dark way, and every bit as dysfunctional and contradictory as you'd expect a space station run by criminals to be.

The only thing Colmarians found more frightening than effective government was Ontakians: the race that had designed my very special plasma pistol.

I'll be reading more of this series.

4.5 stars

Son by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

This was the final novel in The Giver quartet, which I approached with much trepidation given the previous two were pretty awful. The start is a completely pleasant surprise.

We're back in the land of The Giver, seeing events from a different perspective. This section is moving, disturbing, and the reader grows to love Claire's determination to see her son. Great stuff, just like the original. The section describing her being forced to give birth with a mask on so as not to get attached to the "product" (i.e. baby) is horrifying.

The plot comes to same climax as in the first novel, except we're only one quarter of the way through. And then this novel completely loses itself. Claire ends up in a completely different community, with memory loss, and we endure a long boring account of her daily life that eventually firms up into a rock climbing training montage. The catch is that it's a 7 year training montage.

Once we're done with the lengthy rock climbing descriptions we step into the supernatural with our creepy friend from Trade Mart. And then we find out that Gabe, beautiful Gabe that Jonas risked his life for, and countless real-world parents named their real babies after, is actually kind of a little brat. Way to take the wind from the sails there.

So, there's an incredibly preachy biblical-parable-style end, and some closure to the whole series, but I'd be amazed if you're happy about how it turned out, I wasn't.

2 stars.