Singularity Sky by Charles Stross (3 stars)

This book was just good enough to continue to the next book. There's a lot of setup to essentially deliver a space opera version of "information wants to be free":

Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”

According to Wikipedia Stross was looking for something to symbolize a society being invaded by something they completely didn't understand. He ended up using Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for inspiration - hence "The Festival" and mimes featuring prominently...

The Mimes moved slowly, frequently fighting an invisible wind or trying to feel their way around intangible buildings, but they were remorseless. Mimes never slept, or blinked, or stopped moving.

I liked the cornucopia machines, and Rachel's escape from the court martial was particularly entertaining. Also I liked the creativity in the original singularity: that humanity was somewhat randomly just transported all over the galaxy through wormholes such that the most distant settlements were sent many centuries into the past, and thus advanced well beyond Earth's technology level.

3 stars

Railsea: A Novel by China Meiville (2.5 stars)

I'm a huge Meiville fan, but I've been putting off reading this one because it sounded boring. It was.

Take Moby Dick, turn the ocean into dirt, ships into trains, whales into giant moles. That's pretty much it. The Railsea was ridiculous, but I was willing to look past that for a good story. It feels like Meiville has dialed down his usual dark and dirty world-building to make this YA, and I think that's what I missed the most.

I didn't care about any of the characters. The world building was light and unconvincing compared to New Crobuzon. Some people found all the replacing 'and' with ampersands infuriating, I didn't really care, but it was a silly gimmick. While it's third-person the narrator often addresses the reader, which makes it feel a bit more campfire-tale, and often addresses exactly what I was thinking, which was mostly:

TIME FOR THE SHROAKES? Not yet.

I guess some English teacher will enjoy assigning this to compare and contrast with Moby Dick, but it has nothing on the rest of his books.

2.5 stars

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2 stars)

I had no idea what I was getting myself into here, well that's not entirely true, I had some vague trepidation about it being very literary and a bit slow. If I'd seen the length of the physical book I may never have picked it up, so I guess I have the kindle to thank there. Some spoilers ahead.

So I hopped on board. Murakami is obviously a gifted writer, and I had no trouble getting interested in the story. Something is amiss with the world after The Taxi, and I start speculating about what Fuka-Eri is: alien? robot?

It seemed like just adding Tengo as a co-author would have been a whole lot simpler, but whatever, I'll allow it. Why does Tengo never say his girlfriend's name, does she even exist? What's up with Aomame and head shapes for random sexual partners? I go and listen to Janáček’s Sinfonietta.

Then HOLY CRAP there's little people crawling out of someone's mouth, but the story just continues on as before. OK that was nuts, now I'm really hooked what's going to happen?

Every now and then there's a literary gem dropped, I loved the suspense built by this single line:

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.” 

At about page 500 the Tengo and Aomame threads are linked for the first time! Ah-hah!

At page 545 I wrote "Good god, is anything ever going to happen in this book?" and I lost heart.

“Tell me,” he said, “how much of Air Chrysalis is real? How much of it really happened?” “What does ‘real’ mean,” Fuka-Eri asked without a question mark.

Some more people get killed which is renews my interest, but I have no idea who is a real person or a doha anymore. And I don't really care.

“Ho ho,” said the keeper of the beat.

OK that's creepy and cool, do more of that. Please scare me, at least it will keep me interested.

By the time I'm living through Aomame spending a few months looking at a playgound in what feels like real time when she has a perfectly good private investigator that could find Tengo with a few phonecalls I just wanted it to end. There's only so much time I can spend inside someone's head staring at a slide in a playground. Just make it stop.

Random new characters of no importance are introduced at page 1000. I couldn't care less.

“It’s so detailed and beautifully written, and I feel like I can grasp the structure of that lonely little planet. But I can’t seem to go forward. It’s like I’m in a boat, paddling upstream. I row for a while, but then when I take a rest and am thinking about something, I find myself back where I started.

Yep, where are we going here? Will this ever end?

“Ho, ho,” one of the Little People intoned from somewhere.

So here it is, a vast dreamscape with some occasional weird moments but really mostly just a lot of sitting around and reflecting, rehashing a single hand-holding incident over and over, and describing lots of intricate boring detail, for 1,300 pages. Murakami is a great writer, but the only possible way I could of enjoyed this was if it was at least 600 pages shorter and some of the weird shit actually went somewhere.

2 stars.

Artemis: A Novel by Andy Weir (1 star)

Andy Weir can write a mean engineer, I mean, like a 5 star engineer that keeps me reading all night. Imagine my surprise to be giving his next book one star.

I thought Weir really knew engineers, but it turns out he really knows male engineers, he has no idea how to write a female character. As a male, I probably also have no idea, but I'm 100% certain that the internal monologue of his female protagonist Jazz was much more like a horny male teenager than a woman. At one point "boobs" are mentioned 5 times in 10 pages. There's an over-the-top focus on her sex life, including a whole side plot about a re-usable condom, which seems imagined direct from the brain of a 18 year old boy.

They only come about once a week. The next one wouldn’t be for three days. Thank God. There’s nothing more annoying than trust-fund boys looking for “moon poon.”

Apart from the cringeworthy gender caricature there's the dumb heist, which is implausible on many levels (spoilers):

• Business model for optic fiber that apparently has to be manufactured on the moon. There's no way this is profitable.
• Jazz being a genius at pretty much everything, but basically is a lowlife smuggler wasting her time on a implausible act of sabotage for which the motivations also seem ridiculous
• Not being punished when it's found out she was a saboteur/terrorist
• The whole climax - both the getting into that situation and getting out of it with few deaths

And you have to read dialogue like this:

“He’s right, Dad. I am an asshole. But Artemis needs an asshole right now and I got drafted.”

Could he save it with the technology? That was amazing in the Martian. No. It's space welding all the way down, nothing else. The brief for this book was "make a space welding textbook sexy so 18 year olds will want to read it".

1 star.

The Stone Sky by N.K Jemisin (3.5 stars)

What's more impressive than winning the Hugo twice in a row? How about three consecutive years for the same book series? It's been too long since I read this so reviewing is hard, but from my notes:

Nassun is supposed to be what, 10 years old? She is written like a 40 year old, which dropped me out of suspending disbelief a few times.

If it's so easy for Hoa to travel underground, why isn't he just transporting the whole comm instead of having them die on the journey?

This miles-long staircase down into the earth is all very dramatic, but there is no society with automatic lights and doors capable of surviving an apocalypse that wouldn't use a vehicle of some kind to travel those distances, which doesn't work on a staircase. Not to mention building a staircase that big would be a giant PITA.

My favorite quote:

“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

Overall I felt the pace was slower than necessary, and I enjoyed it less than the first two, but it was a decent conclusion to the series.

3.5 stars

The Obelisk Gate by N.K Jemisin (4 stars)

What's more amazing than winning the Hugo? Also winning the Hugo for the sequel. It's a great read.

There's plenty of minor things that annoyed me, like (spoilers) how Jija gave up his whole way of life to save Nassun, but then continues to consider killing her. I just didn't buy that he would be that deeply anti-orogene he'd be willing to kill yet another of his own children. Make your bed and lie in it.

But at the same time, it was incredibly powerful showing how part of Nassun's childhood was killed because she had to learn how to manipulate her father:

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

I also didn't buy Essun marrying this guy. She obviously knew he was incredibly anti-orogene and she and her children would be in incredible danger. Why him? Was she so desperate that was the best she could do? There wasn't any mention of that, or explanation for how they came together.

The weird second-person narration continues, acknowledged by the author:

I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

And not only that but it will occasionally switch between third-person and second-person, which has to be explained in the text.

There also seemed to be a lot of weaknesses and contradictions in how Nassun chooses to exercise her power in the battle for Castrima-over:

“That army fills both Castrima-over and the forest basin,” you say. “You’ll pass out before you can ice half of a circle that big.”

So just ice the doorway where they have to come in? It makes no sense. I did like those crazy bugs though.

Very entertaining series.

4 stars

Best of 2017 as read by G

A pretty underwhelming year of reading...

The best (5 stars):

• None! :(

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
• Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson