Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (3 stars)

An excellent premise: a contagious and fatal insomnia epidemic is sweeping the world. Sleep donors are sought desperately to save lives, and the most valuable sleep of all comes from newborn baby donors who are sedated to have their grade A dreamless sleep extracted.

But is there a risk to donating? What effects will it have on the most prolific and famous donor "Baby A"? Is the donated sleep contaminated? Is there a black market for sleep?

There's such a wealth of ideas here, it would be easy to hang a whole series of novels off them, but this is a novella so we need to settle for less. Sadly, while the writing is strong none of the tension in these ideas is really brought to climax. The novel ends with basically none of those interesting questions answered, and left me with a feeling that it could have been so much more.

I get the impression that this was a literary author "slumming it" in sci-fi for a bit with an interesting idea, but not one she wanted to spend a whole lot of time on. I'd love to read a China Meiville or Robin McKinley rewrite of this novel.

3 stars.

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente (3 stars)

It's the adult version of Alice in Wonderland crossed with Miyazaki's Spirited Away. i.e. it's very weird in a dark and dreamlike way. I was not really a fan.

It's interesting to contrast with Mieville, who is no stranger to weird and dark. The differentiator is that Mieville has a stronger sense of plot and more defined characters. Valente forgoes these in favour of a LSD dreamscape populated by characters so shallow you need to be constantly reminded of their badges to remember whose POV this is: bee girl, blue hair train girl, crazy locksmith etc.

To enter this dreamscape you first need to catch the STD map from someone else who has it, then have sex with another map holder to enter the world of Palimpsest. At first I thought this was a very cheap plot device to soak up some more adventurous romance readers, but it quickly became clear that this was not a refuge for romance novel readers. The sex is often loveless, depressing, frequently homosexual, and void of any romance. For most of the Palimpsest travelers it is a necessary ordeal, just a ticket purchase price.

I was never really satisfied with the motivations for the characters to put themselves through this ordeal to visit Palimpsest. And I was completely unconvinced by any desire to immigrate and live there permanently, which is the premise and tensions of the whole novel.

Some reviewers say the world building was amazing. I was less impressed. There's plenty of fantastic ideas and imagery, but each visit is like a short film of a completely different world: there's very little consistent (apart from animal body parts grafted onto humans), so I never felt immersed in a world, more like thrust into a new crazy dreamscape each time.

3 stars.

Kraken by China Mieville (3.5 stars)

This is the least Mieville of all the Mieville's I've read, and that's a bad thing :( There's elements of the greatness from other novels, and an abundance of crazy ideas that make for points of interest, but I found it actually fairly tedious to read compared to how I have devoured his other books. The world building has nothing on the dark and dirty of New Cobuzon, the spectacularly alien Embassytown, or the mind fuckery of The City and The City. It's basically regular London with some weird knick knackery.

I come to Mieville with a thirst for weird, and don't get me wrong, there's plenty of very innovative weird. Goss and Subby are great, Tattoo is amazing, Wati and his original story are fantastic, squid bit zealots OMG, and the sea has an embassy! But it's not enough. These bright spots come and go from the story as interesting blips amongst a sea of less interesting characters. The world didn't feel immersive.

Occasionally it seems like a comedy (tiny little angel of memory made out of bottles?), but not really enough to actually be funny. And I think I was supposed to find Goss and Subby a lot more scary than I did, I thought the attempts to transfer a sense of horror for those immortal creative assassins fell a long way short. I was excited when they turned up (much less often than they should have), because I knew something interesting was going to happen.

An interesting read, but not in the same ballpark as his other novels.

Also, I barely needed the thesaurus! What's happening??? I only had to look up "autopoiesis".

Also, a ton of people on amazon think this is basically a worse version of Gaiman's Neverwhere. I should really go read that.

3.5 stars.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis (4 stars)

A very well-written account of the birth and rise of High Frequency Trading and how it has changed electronically traded markets forever, in a way that is bad for everybody except HFT itself. I've waited far too long to review this one, so that's all I have to say :)

4 stars

American Sniper by Chris Kyle (2 stars)

I was fairly sure I was going to dislike this book, and I was right, but I wanted to read what all the fuss was about. E.B. Sledge's amazing account of the war in the Pacific remains the best ever wartime autobiography I have read.

Of course the writing was weak, Kyle is not a gifted wordsmith, he's a SEAL. Most of the novel is a series of anecdotes that aren't particularly well connected, and they stretch very thin at some points. "We found barrels of chemical material", next paragraph, "One day we saw some things in the desert and thought they were IEDs" (it was an airplane), next paragraph a different anecdote. And so on.

I do give credit to Kyle for some humility, he could have talked up his record breaking number of kills a lot more, but he acknowledges that it was mostly a case of getting the most opportunities to shoot: i.e. a twisted kind of "luck". There are a number of times that other snipers bitch and moan about how Kyle always seems to get engaged by the enemy, and they aren't seeing any action.

But my high total and my so-called “legend” have much to do with the fact that I was in the shit a lot. In other words, I had more opportunities than most. I served back-to-back deployments from right before the Iraq War kicked off until the time I got out in 2009.

Kyle states that the majority of the actual shooting was about checking rules of engagement and taking shots quickly. The technical details of the business of shooting itself were actually fairly light, probably because there wasn't a whole lot more to say. Readers expecting to geek out on lots of gun and shooting details will be disappointed.

The meat of the novel: Kyle's training and deployments were interesting to me, as were his personal convictions and the sections written by his wife on her perspective from home. The impression I got from these sections were that Kyle was the perfect soldier from a mental perspective. Sure he was well-trained and obviously good with a gun, but he also had an incredible and unshakable belief that:

• He was fighting a "SAVAGE, DESPICABLE EVIL" in a very biblical sense. He's on the good side, the insurgents are the bad side. "I have a strong sense of justice. It's pretty much black-and-white. I don't see too much gray."
• Every single person he shot absolutely deserved to die, and they were "trying to harm Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government."
• This war and his commitment to his country were more important than anything else, including his wife and child. He made this very clear to his wife.

His genuine request to "be cleared hot to shoot anyone on a moped." and outrage when it was denied throws some doubt on the second point, or at least reinforces how important well-defined ROEs are. His general attitude to the rules of engagement and recording the circumstances of kills was "I’m pretty sure it was all CYA—cover your ass, or, in this case, cover the top guy’s ass."

The impression I got from him was that the job was killing bad guys, and nothing else. The blood red crusader cross tattoo and punisher logos painted on armor and vehicles would seem to agree, it doesn't exactly scream "hearts and minds" or "this isn't a religious war".

I didn't need any convincing that loved every minute of being deployed as a SEAL sniper:

I'm not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.

I wanted, more than anything, to experience the thrill of battle.

THE PACE WAS HOT AND HEAVY. IT MADE US WANT MORE. WE ached for it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into showing themselves so we could take them down. 

This last is why everyone should understand the motivations behind advice from the armed forces when debating whether to go to war. Who wouldn't want to go do what you've been training your whole life for?

2 stars

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (3 stars)

One of the most unusual post-apocalyptic novels I've read, which is saying something, because I have pretty good coverage of the genre :) But unfortunately it's not unusual in a good way.

If you're hoping to geek out on the best ways to defend against zombies/vampires/cannibals, fantasize about food and water collection ideas, foraging strategies, communications, travel etc. Forget about it. There's essentially none of that in this novel, and what is there doesn't hold up to critical scrutiny.

The novel actually spends a lot of time analysing the current-day activities and relationships of an actor, and then tracks the experiences of people who interacted with him as they live through the apocalypse. It uses a lot of different points of view, which dilutes most of the meaningful character development. I found the premise of a troupe of Shakespearean actors travelling the country "because survival is insufficient" intriguing, but it didn't really go anywhere interesting.

The author is a talented writer, but the novel meanders around without really getting anywhere plot-wise. Plenty of starkly beautiful scenes are created: an airport serving as a last human outpost, a technology museum created to show future generations marvels that were lost, people united by an obscure collection of art in a comic book across time and space. While I found all of that mildly interesting, and reasonably enjoyable to read, there was no spark.

I feel sorry for all the future English students that will be working on unpicking all the metaphors and weighty questions this novel poses in the absence of a compelling story.

3 stars.

Morning Star (Book 3 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown (4.5 stars)

Final installment in this impressive trilogy. It's certainly not perfect, but it's an impressive conclusion to a series that was so vast and planet spanning that it would have been difficult to write any sort of plausible ending. The fact that Brown produced this in just one year after Golden Son is astounding. In his words:

Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.

I'm not going to be particularly careful about spoilers, be warned.

Darrow's escape from his implausible prison (I really don't think your hands would work anymore if they were pinned behind your back for 9 months), is an action packed start to the novel. We learn the secret of how Darrow and Ares were betrayed, and it's well set up, a thoughtful and plausible treachery.

There's so much uncertainty in Darrow about how to proceed. I couldn't imagine it making sense any other way, but it's powerful writing to see Darrow scared and adrift:

“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear. 

But then comes the ridiculous part. Sure, the power dynamic is weird because Sevro had to take the helm while Darrow was gone. But inserting him as a junior member on a team for supply runs, sabotage missions etc. is just ridiculous. You don't put the heart and soul of your rebellion, who people just died to rescue, on high-risk low-reward supply runs. You just don't.

The worst part was that this all came with an incredibly tedious training montage complete with dumb initiation rituals (finish the bucket or get the box!). It would have been much more impressive to have the Reaper commanding in his emaciated state: he isn't going to win the war with his own muscles....ahem...

The scene where Reaper ends up accidentally fighting Mustang is dumb. He could have stopped it immediately by saying his name, but instead we get the silly:

Shout my name, something, if I had even half a second to breathe

But eventually we start to get somewhere interesting as Quicksilver comes into play:

“Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

And it seems like there is a clear path ahead again, so of course it's promptly destroyed in an incredibly brutal way. Offing Ragnar just at the point where he was incredibly important was fairly shocking. The obvious path forward is gone and Darrow has to do it the hard way. There's some great moments in this anguish:

When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.

And some silly ones, like most of the Way of Stains sequence. We then need to suspend disbelief that the sons of Ares could move an entire planet's population under Gold control without being noticed:

In twenty-four hours, they will move eight hundred thousand human beings in the greatest effort in Sons of Ares history. 

Thankfully Brown turns it around with an incredibly powerful parley scene between Roque and Darrow:

"This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy...this world, it is the best man can afford."
"And it's your right to decide that?"
“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”

The ending has some fairly obvious twists, and stretches the believable in some parts, but is generally well written and a solid conclusion to an impressive trilogy.

4.5 stars.