Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders (5 stars)

An amazing short story. What would society by like if we could make a perfect designer drug for almost every purpose? Drugs for truth, drugs for love, drugs for torture. And how would we test their effects on humans? Saunders says his main objective is to provide a wild ride:

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

And boy does he deliver. This short story is fascinating, intense, and brutal with its characters. Reading George's thoughts about they story is also interesting, he didn't intend it to be commentary about pharma testing or treatment of death row prisoners. This was the core:

It might not be the case that one character is purely good, but rather that good is lurking in that person, and the story is about whether the good gets to emerge. And likewise the evil: it sits inside a person, sort of latent, waiting for the right combination of circumstances. 

5 stars.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch (4 stars)

This is a powerful novel, but it is hard to like. Welch is Native American and writes a bleak story of a Native American man stumbling through life, clashing culturally as he moves between the nearby white town and his rural life on a farm. The writing reminded me of Cormac McCarthy:

On it were written the name, John First Raise, and a pair of dates between which he had managed to stay alive.

He has a series of surreal, dreamlike conversations in various seedy bars, and gets mixed up in multiple criminal dealings and fights for no obvious reason apart from feeling detached from life and alien inside this community.

Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men. But those Indians down at Gable's were no bargain either. I was a stranger to both and both had beaten me.

The narration is distant, so I never really felt like I knew the main (unnamed) character, I was mostly just left with a sense of a life with many permanent holes that were far from being filled by a series of sexual encounters with lonely women.

I struggled with rating this book, but I'm giving it 4 stars because I still remember the lost feeling it gave me.

4 stars

Accelerando by Charles Stross (3.5 stars)

This is a novel about post-singularity existence and post humanism, written by a computer scientist. It really shows. Apparently the initial inspiration came to Stross while working as a programmer during the dot com era, which is no more apparent than in this quote:

He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics.

and in this dig at religion that could only have come from a computer scientist:

Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

It feels nothing like the previous two books in the series, you can read it stand-alone. Some spoilers ahead.

Stross packs the novel with ideas, and there's an irreverence and whimsical cynicism that feels a little Douglas Adams at times. Like the AI based on uploaded brain scans of California spiny lobsters broadcast into space, later becoming the avatar for first contact inside an alien router with a race that essentially lurks near the router trying to scam new civilisations. 419 scams and pyramid schemes are alive and well post-singularity.

There's the matrioshka brain: a solar powered super computer that eventually grows to encase the sun to tap its energy for computation. And what I thought was a very novel solution to the Fermi paradox:

“I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get enough bandwidth—trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly,

Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.”

This is all very interesting stuff. Except the delivery is lacking. It's *lots* of exposition, very light characters, and generally missing a first person feel to anything. Lots of dense text like this makes for pretty boring reading, even if the ideas are interesting:

Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That’s not posthuman, that’s a travesty. I’m talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They’re not just better at cooperation—witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that—but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that’s been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us.

There's a political drama towards the end of the novel that is presented in the most boring way possible, essentially just people sitting around in a room talking about what is happening. No emotional connection to the story.

Bizarrely there's some action that livens things up right towards the end, but it turns out to be just a kid inside a VR environment with no morality boundaries, and is over swiftly.

I would love someone to take this new imagined reality, and make me believe it, give me a real 3 dimensional character, show me some real relationships and let me live them.

3.5 stars

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (3.5 stars)

I enjoyed this book, but it didn't leave me with much to remember. Rachel's terrorist negotiation was something straight out of an action movie. Wednesday was a badass, and I was constantly wondering what was actually being done to her by the bad guys, and what was being done by her 'friend' Herman to weaponize her for the Eschaton's purposes.

Honestly it's been too long and I don't have much to say.

3.5 stars.

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.