One Second After by William R. Forstchen (2.5 stars)

One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon

My initial reaction was....OK I'll bite.

After reading it I think there is definitely a real threat from an EMP attack but my trust level in the "science" behind this book is extremely low. I can see why Newt Gingrich endorsed this: it's very light on the actual science behind EMP, heavy on the need for guns, and with some climate change denial thrown in for good measure:

“Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn’t.

I guess writing a fictional book is the best way to get things done these days in congress. Presumably this will win over the same people that don't want Mars research funded because they believe Mark Watney already went there and look how that turned out.

If you're a me-and-mine-first gun-owning prepper climate change denier, and wish all those hippies would stop helping the homeless and go buy some AR-15s, this is the book for you:

“Once they run out of food, then the reality will set in, but by that point, anyone with a gun will tell them to kiss off if they come begging. And those poor kids, if they have food, the ones with guns will take it. They’re used to free clinics, homeless shelters when they need ’em, former hippie types smiling and giving them a few bucks. That’s all finished. They’ll die like flies...

If you're a congressperson looking for ways to send more money to the defense industrial base, this is also the book for you:

We were so damn vulnerable, so damn vulnerable, and no one did the right things to prepare, or prevent it. 

If, like me, you just like post-apocalyptic fiction, there's some entertainment and an interesting thought experiment here, but as a novel it is very weak. The Road or The Stand this is not.

It's hard to know whether to give Forstchen credit for creating a main character that is incredibly flawed: he essentially robs a pharmacy for insulin for his daughter but then holds others to a much higher moral standard and even executes some thieves, or if that was deliberately endorsed as sensible "looking out for your own".

The progression from "everything is normal" to "extrajudicial killings in the streets for stealing" was three days without electronics.  I'd say that's completely ridiculous, but a sad part of me thinks it may not be. Plenty of people will read this as an instruction manual where the only solution to a crisis is selfishness and violence.

2.5 stars.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (5 stars)

This is a spectacular book, mostly just because the approach is fascinating: it's a political/economic fantasy novel with a female accountant as the protagonist?! I've never read a book like this: imagine A Song of Ice and Fire but replace magic, dragons, and some of the violent battles with economics and trade. Dickinson moves quite quickly but with substance: if GRRM covered the same content it probably would have taken three books.

When conquering an enemy or building an alliance Baru studies the patterns of trade, money lending, and at times uses her position in control of the central bank to change the balance of power. It's a great demonstration of how trade, currency, and debt can be used as tools of political and social control. Sure the Masquerade has an army and a navy, a Nazi-like system of eugenics and secret police, but much of their power comes through the economics of trade.

and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

Baru becomes a cog in this giant wheel, initially hoping to change it from within, but she knows it will require her to be ruthless in the pursuit of power.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.

From day one in Aurdwynn she had to be the Masquerade:

You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

Where the novel is weak is in Baru herself. I had a hard time believing that this teenager was a) a mathematical savant, b) an applied economics genius c) a skilled negotiator and d) the most politically skilled operative of all time. Of those I think only a) and maybe b) are actually plausible, the rest are very people-oriented skills that typically don't exist in mathematical savants, and even if they do, they are the type of skills that are built through decades of experience and many failures. She basically only has a few years of formal learning from a frontier school.

So she is somewhat of a Mary Sue, but she isn't without weakness: she isn't a strong fighter, and she makes a number of real mistakes with grave consequences for the war. A bit of Deus Ex Machina does creep in since she never needs to struggle with a problem for more than a day before hitting upon an amazing solution.

Also we don't actually get to know Baru very personally, but Dickinson has good reason to hold this back. A lot of the intrigue for the reader is in trying to decipher where her loyalties truly lie, but this doesn't keep me from being disappointed that we didn't get below the surface of her next strategic actions or her attempts to decipher the web of loyalties surrounding her.

There is a very strong feminist (so refreshing to see so many women in positions of real power) and pro-gay thread through the entire novel. Homosexuality is one of the core social dynamics the Masquerade wants to stamp out, and Dickinson has many characters fighting against that as a core part of their resistance, many seeing it as a fundamental fact of human existence:

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

 A fascinating novel, couldn't put it down.

5 stars.

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (4.5 stars)

This is a "revisionist" western in the same class as Blood Meridian, i.e. it eschews romance for realism and recognition that the American west in 1870 was a very harsh place, "a reality which discredits our heroes". But unlike Blood Meridian, I actually liked it. It's a coming-of-age story for Andrews told within a Moby dick framework with Miller acting as the obsessive Ahab, consumed by his intense desire to hunt and collect hides.

Andrews knows that he wants something from the wilderness of the West, but he doesn't know what it is, he just knows it's out there and getting it will be hard and change him in the process.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. 

He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight. He looked at the river again. On this side is the city, he thought, and on that the wilderness; and though I must return, even that return is only another means I have of leaving it, more and more.

Nature doesn't disappoint, just getting to the Buffalo is a near-death experience. Once the hunt begins, Andrews finds himself a small cog in Miller's obsessive killing machine. All caution is thrown to the wind and Miller bathes them all in blood. Reading this section was intense, and incredibly sad. I desperately wanted the deaths of these amazing animals to matter more, be more difficult to achieve, and most of all for Andrews to realise he was forever destroying what he came to find.

While Andrews does feel some remorse:

On the ground, unmoving, it no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before.

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. 

it isn't anywhere near enough to force him to stop, or even be a small balance on Miller's wild abandon.

Miller's desperate desire to annihilate the entire herd gets the hunting party into serious trouble, which they barely survive (again). As the struggle to survive continues the interpersonal relationships completely break down and each man retreats into himself.

Small spoilers.

I struggled with the plausibility of them surviving the winter with absolutely no preparations, winter clothes or proper shelter. Many died in those times who were much better prepared, but I still gave it a pass. There was plenty more tragedy left, which was good, I was worried that this was going to turn into "happily ever after".

In fact the ending is far from that, it's crushing, but it doesn't stop Andrews from heading out into the wilderness again to continue seeking something he still can't define.

“Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”

It's a great western, but True Grit and Lonesome Dove remain my all-time favourites.

4.5 stars.

Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey (4 stars)

Fifth in the excellent Expanse series. This is essentially the origin story for all of the core crew members, something I've been looking forward to, and was becoming increasingly necessary for the continuation of the series. There's quite a long setup, but it eventually culminates in an incredibly intense action sequence happening simultaneously for every character POV.

Amos' story is the most unusual for the series, it's essentially The Road but a bit less gloomy. Naomi's is the most psychologically painful, although it eventually turns into an over-the-top but very fun space-MacGyver a la The Martian engineering survival epic.

On plausibility: I completely didn't buy that the huge numbers of missiles used in a cloud to protect the ship with the Martian President were: a) much smaller than the ship, b) faster, and c) had similar inter-planetary range. That's a pick-two situation.

Favourite quotes:

Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.

But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were. 

Good continuation of a great series, looking forward to the next one.

4 stars.

Existence by David Brin (4 stars)

There's lots of interesting ideas in this unconventional first contact story. The novel starts in near-singularity time: there's powerful AIs, lots of VR and augmented reality via wearables, some genetic modification, an autism plague, and America has been balkanized. The last is best summed up best like this:

It started upon stepping off the cruise zep, when a Darktide agent sent her to use a public shower, because her favorite body scent—legal in California—too closely matched a pheromonic allure-compound that New Mexico banned. Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.

One interesting idea/prediction I noted was that most large cities have moved the majority of billboard-style advertising into virtual layers, since physical signs can be automatically ad-blocked and erased from view by anyone wearing specs. In contrast, and a reversal of current reality, smaller towns where VR use is less common still have billboards at "layer one", i.e. reality, resulting in Time-square-like bombardment.

Though all this bustle kind of overwhelmed a poor city girl—with no volume settings or brightness sliders to tone it all down.

Spoilers ahead.

There are some great, dramatic plot reveals such as when Gerald puts his hand on the first artifact and sees the outline of a hand that's...thinner and has six fingers. Or slightly later with the dramatic proclamations of "JOIN US" and "Liars".

Though many, I thought most of the POVs contributed well to the story....except Hacker's. This weird Cast-Away magic dolphin rescue story was an annoyance when I just wanted to read about what was going on with the aliens.

And, slightly related, I really hated "twinned parrot brains" for communication encryption, since it seemed both incredibly unlikely and impractical, especially compared to the fairly convenient current methods of encryption that were supposedly replaced by this system. Key distribution is already an incredibly difficult problem when it is just bits, imagine how hard it is when it's a living breathing animal. A whole new dimension on key storage and maintenance...

But all of that pales in comparison to the hate I had for Prof. Fake Rasta Noozone. Reading him was infuriating:

No one is trying to be nasty space-zutopong, or out to vank de competition with bad-bwoy bizness.

Hey, I grok when a mon preten’ to be a ginnygog, in order to mess wit’ our heads. 

A large part of the novel is essentially an anthropological discussion of the effects on a society of first contact: the conflicts it creates, the motivations of both sides, and the common outcomes, i.e. the lower-technology side loses big time. At times Brin shifts into lecture exposition mode to deliver history lessons in this vein, which I found boring and rather unnecessary, duplicating information being delivered by the movement of the story.

It was especially poignant reading about the idea of "indignation junkies" in the era of Donald Trump's candidacy for president:

...gambling can be a genuine addiction, requiring as much effort to break as cocaine of kicx...and then there are the indignation junkies. People who regularly get high off self-righteousness and sanctimony. You know the kind—we all do. 

Yes, yes I do.

The novel spends the majority of it's time in this first-contact timeline, then there is an abrupt jolt forward to a time when Earth has built a number of large conventional space exploration craft and some chain-letter artifacts of its own. I think this move forward was a good idea to explore the later ramifications of how the contact played out, but it was rather poorly bolted onto the story. It probably would have made more sense to break it into the next book.

But once we are in this new time it's really interesting. The mechanics of the fractal-like size adjustment, creation of objects, and travel inside the artifact crystal itself were fantastically imagined and presented in a really interesting way. I also liked the ominous observations and vastness of scope as viewed through the Lurker, Seeker etc.

A very thought provoking read, a bit heavier on anthropology lectures than I would have liked.

4 stars.

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.