Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

This book caught my eye a while ago, since for some time it has been very near the top of Amazon's "Average Customer Review" book search - no mean feat with 1,391 reviews. Incidentally the current #1 book in that search is the excellent With The Old Breed. Our nascent sci-fi book club, yes you heard right, decided that was a good enough reason to put it on the list, and I'm glad we did.

Howey self-published the first novella, but you wouldn't know it. The writing is high quality, and the ending of the first section is spectacular. Howey builds a brilliant post-apocalyptic world with all of the known world living underground as a giant 'seed bank' ready to re-populate the Earth someday.

Queue the nit-picking.

Servers, generators, electricity, but no fricking lift in a 138-level underground metropolis? Seriously? As an aside, the porters with muscular legs charging up and down the worn metal steps reminded me of Ted Chiang's short story The Tower of Babylon. Apparently the lack of a lift is patched up as a population-control measure in the prequel First Shift - Legacy, which I just found out about and will go read next.

Along the same lines, the lens-cleaning seems a little contrived. A technologically advanced society with engineers and mechanics is going to realise pretty quickly that the lenses could be cleaned with wipers, not sacrificial humans. I get that it is ritualised punishment to keep control of the population, but it seems like just kicking them out the airlock would do the same job.

Spoilers ahead.

I thought poisoning the mayor was a pretty cheap trick. It seems unlikely that Bernard, evil head of IT, would play his hand so obviously when he knows that one misstep can easily destroy the silo. I also had trouble swallowing both Juliette's lackadaisical approach to investigating the mayor's assassination, and the public's acceptance of this approach by their new sheriff. Sure, maybe Juliette recognised Bernard had the upper hand, but the mayor was well liked by the public - why weren't they clamouring for justice?

Overall I liked Juliette as a character, the super-smart MacGyver of the silo, but could have done without the Romeo and Juliette references. Her foil, Lukas, starts out as a mysterious and intelligent stranger, and while I liked that he didn't turn out to be the perfect long-distance-cross-silo boyfriend, it was also pretty hard not to get sick of his point of view. It didn't help that Bernard's complete trust in Lukas was implausible. Why would Bernard give every tightly-held secret to somebody who publicly organised a petition for Juliette's release?

And speaking of IT, what the hell are the servers for exactly? Perhaps this will be revealed later. My immediate thought was that if they are for storing long-term human history, they should be on tape rather than spinning disk. But not enough has been revealed about the servers: maybe they have much more reliable online storage in this version of the future. Presumably some of the servers run silo equipment, although this seemed to be largely the domain of Mechanical, and there are apparently dozens of racks. Do the IT flunkies know what the servers are for?

But that's enough complaining, it really is a great book, and I couldn't put it down, especially during Juliette's underwater adventure.

One line of dialogue from Bernard did make me put it down, but only long enough to issue a Keanu-Reeves-style whoah.

"Silo one? This is silo eighteen."

4.5 stars

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3 stars)

A collection of short SF stories by Ted Chiang. Some great, some meh. As with all short stories, I found myself wishing the good ones were full novels.

Hard to give an overall score, but 3 stars seems about right.

Tower of Babylon

Great buildup, sucky ending. I felt like this could have gone somewhere very unusual, but just didn't. I loved the idea of people living their entire life on the tower, and everything being locally grown or imported via the month-long human-powered slog up the tower.

Understand

A riff on Flowers for Algernon: super-intelligence via medical operation. Despite overuse of the word 'gestalt' and a tendency to run at the mouth like an overenthusiastic philosophy student, I enjoyed this story. This made me laugh:

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all.

The idea of being able to reprogram your mind, and mount attacks on others using sensory inputs was pretty awesome. Also given essentially limitless intelligence, your comprehension is far beyond anyone else in the world. Do you help the 'normals' and their trivial problems, or do you work on really interesting problems they can't even comprehend?

Division by Zero

The idea of creating a proof that contradicts the most basic parts of mathematics is interesting but I felt like this should have gone somewhere more interesting than the personal impact on the mathematician who made the discovery.

Story of Your Life

Very clever use of story structure, and a great idea here. These aliens were everything I wished Vinge had brought to the Tines and Spiders. Rather than the very close-to-human language, history, and technological development of Spiders/Tines the heptapods have a completely different view of the universe, physics, and mathematics, that nevertheless describes the same concepts, just in a different way. Louise gradually comes to this understanding by analysing the complex and very foreign language structure of the heptapods, which should be interesting for anyone with a bent for linguistics.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently;

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

Spoilers ahead.

To me the idea of predestination where every person has an obligation to exercise their free will to bring about exactly the future outcome seems completely improbable. Could you exercise your free will to bring about the death of a loved one? What happens if you don't?

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Seventy-Two Letters

The idea of using different Golems for transport, mining, construction and as the basis of technology was interesting. As was the bizarre notion that all future generations are contained within an ova. The story itself didn't impress me.

The Evolution of Human Science

Super-short, but interesting idea. The human race is split in two by technology called Digital Neural Transfer, which could be a near-future version of the Internet. Those who have DNT are incomprehensible to those who don't, and all research and innovation is conducted over DNT.

human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser.

Hell is the Absence of God

The world is regularly visited by Angels which cause seemingly random miracles, gross disfigurement, death and natural disaster. People get regular glimpses of heaven and hell, and can see which direction their loved ones go. Fascinating world. Loved the story but I thought the ending should have been stronger.

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Fascinating meditation on the power and manipulation of physical beauty for personal and corporate gain. Brain modification technology allows people to disable their perception of beauty in a human face, with all sorts of interesting consequences. Reactions of those who have had 'calli' all their life and turn it off at 18, and those who turn it on later in life after living normally.

So calliagnosia by itself can't eliminate appearance-based discrimination. What it does, in a sense, is even up the odds; it takes away the innate predisposition, the tendency for such discrimination to arise in the first place.

I have to admit that when I read the following passage I immediately equated 'spex' to Google's Project Glass, which has the potential to change our world radically in good and not so good ways like this.

What prompted us to do this now was the release of a spex version of Visage. That's the software that, when you look at people through your spex, show you what they'd look like with cosmetic surgery. It became a form of entertainment among a certain crowd, and a lot of college students found it offensive.

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2.5 stars)

Latest and suckiest in Vinge's Zones of Thought series. In terms of plot flow this is the follow-on to A Fire Upon the Deep, returning to the world of the Tines and a bunch of stranded human children.

Compared to the epic space opera and universal scale of Fire, and the smaller-scale but fascinating dynamic of the Spider's rise and the Emergent-Qeng Ho cold war in Deepness, this book feels trapped in an irrelevant and not particularly interesting corner of the universe.

The novel starts with Vinge setting Ravna up as being generally fairly incompetent and politically naive. It's very clumsily handled and written in fine-grained boring detail. By the time Ravna finally gets to giving her speech, after so much boring lead-up I was ready to quit if there wasn't some sort of conflict. Thanks Nevil, who I found particularly unbelievable. Apparently he is a political genius because his parents were?!? Speaking of unbelievable, Ravna's attempts to learn spycraft are beyond comical - looking up 'sneakiness' in the ship's library? I don't care how good the library is, that isn't going to work.

While not working on Ravna uselessness, Vinge is setting Joanna up as some sort of populist queen of the Tines in a similarly boring manner. Joanna's actions at the Fragmentarium turn out to be of minor importance to later events, but aren't worth the many pages devoted to the arrival of the Tropicals and the breakout.

Amdi, Ravna, and Jefri's escape and trek back to the Domain was probably the worst part of the novel. I was expecting daring raids for food, struggle for survival, some smart thinking and innovation from Amdi, but no. They make themselves into a circus and parade all over the country. Apart from being the worst way to travel undetected in enemy territory ever, it was just stupid and boring to read.

We learn some more about the Tines, but an opportunity to describe their struggles in bootstrapping their civilisation into the technological age is sorely missed. Tycoon has invented sweatshops and industrialised the tropical choir into a production machine - but it mostly happens outside of the view of the main characters.

Tycoon turns out to not be a bad guy at all, and vendacious just doesn't seem sinister enough, he's lost most of his power from the original novel. And the big-bad-guy-in-the-sky remains completely unrealised. So basically this book was just really boring filler waiting for the Blight to do something.

2.5 stars

The Red Tent: A Novel by Anita Diamant (1.5 stars)

I'm not sure how this got onto my to-read list. Sometimes I search for the most positive-reviewed books on Amazon, sometimes I get a recommendation from a friend. I'm glad I read this, but I have to admit I hated most of it.

Diamant has taken the perspective of Dinah, who plays a bit part in a bizarre parable from Genesis 34 (that's the bible you heathens). It's your basic rape, foreskin ransom, kill everyone, take women and children prisoner, and get rewarded by God kind-of story that you would expect from the Bible.

But OK, strange choice of subject matter aside. Can this novel stand on its own? Diamant says that was her intent, that it should appeal to someone with no knowledge of the bible. In a word, no.

The first 60% of the novel is basically filler leading up to the foreskin ransoming. Diamant attempts to paint a picture of women's life in biblical times, but it seems contrived. The notion that women gather together in a red tent to pass the time of their period eating sweet cakes, braiding each other's hair, and being waited on by pre-pubescent girls just seems ridiculous. I doubt any working class women, in this case shepherd's wives, had time for such largesse given the backbreaking work of their everyday lives, and their power inequality with men.

The character 'development' in the first half of the novel is filled with trivialities:

Zilpah saw Inna's appearance as a god omen. The midwife's presence lifted her spirits so much that later my aunt began to sing. It was nothing exalted, only a children's song about a fly who bothered a rabbit, who ate the insect but was eaten by a dog, who was in turn eaten by a jackal, who was hunted by a lion...

who was read by someone who doesn't give a shit. There are some Bible-y tidbits thrown in before the main event, which would gel nicely with the story if Dinah was into LSD. And it wouldn't be Genesis if there wasn't a boring, unimportant-to-the-story family tree spelled out every now and then.

But in spite of all this I did respect Diamant's writing, and there are some very poignant moments that resonated with me, such as when Dinah holds her son for the first time:

There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite.

Most people giving critical reviews of this novel are upset because Diamant didn't stick to the biblical 'facts', i.e. she made Dinah willing instead of raped, and 'disrespected' Jacob. She also offended a bunch of people producing and reading Jewish midrash - reinterpretations of biblical stories. I think Diamant's real mistake was picking a story of senseless violence and death and trying to build it into a beautiful story about life as a woman.

1.5 stars

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (5 stars)

The prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, can he pull it off? YES.  Pass Go, collect another Hugo.

Vinge introduces us to the Spiders, a civilisation defined by their on-again off-again star that plunges them into catastrophic winter with a periodicity of a century or so, forcing the entire population to hibernate in primitive frozen pools called 'deepnesses'.

 I loved the Spiders, but I began to think that they were a little too easy to identify with.  What are the chances that arachnid aliens turn out to think and act essentially like humans once you understand their language?  What are the chances that all their technology is developed in the same way: radio, computers, cars, aeroplanes, nuclear power (with a mini Manhattan project) etc.  Pretty low I would think. But there were super-cute little baby spiders climbing out of their Daddy's fur to go play in the jungle gym, so hey.

I thought the idea of having to wait (mostly in cold-sleep) for a civilisation to reach a technology age so they can repair the space-faring equivalent of a flat tyre was intruiging, and would encourage lots of meddling, and civilisation fast-tracking. The Qeng Ho and Emergents certainly don't have any Prime Directive-style hangups.

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilisation - a civilisation with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry.

And we find out that our old friend, and one of the few links to A Fire Upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is much more than reassembled body parts in this story.  In fact he is a superstar, I mean he invented smartdust.  Well, they call it 'localizers' but whatever.  Pham has a low-level backdoor into this system, which is kind of like having a backdoor built into libc:

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.  If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Vinge's dedication to science and passion for computer science continues to shine through.  Here he describes the code cruft that makes a spaceship run, and the inherent danger:

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support.  Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations.  Every so often the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents.  Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

The idea of 'Focus', a kind of virus-delivered autism that can be controlled with MRI was fascinating.  It was amazing to think of a civilisation whose 'automation' consisted of a large part of the populous enslaved to act as really really smart middleware to computers.  Here Trud explains why 'Focus' is so effective:

But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books?  As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life.  He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic.  A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard.  Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected.  See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race.  We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

The Anne Reynolt character was a brilliant opponent for Pham Nuwen: ruthless and amazingly talented.  I enjoyed watching their plotting and manipulation targeted at each other.

One more cute quote to leave with.  The Qeng Ho are irrepressible traders:

in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term "black market" existed, but only to denote "trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers."

Even though it was less epic than A Fire Upon the Deep, I think I enjoyed it more.  5 stars

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (4.5 stars)

On page 19 I was already impressed.  It was at about that point that I realised I was seeing the world through an alien pack intelligence's eyes, which struck me both as a very innovative concept, and for the skill with which it was delivered.  I gradually learned more and more aspects of the Tines' anatomy, communication, social norms, and even reproduction, all starting with the sentence:

He brought up another member to get a parallax view.

 and more like these:

A few yards into the mob and Peregrine Wickrackrum could feel consciousness slipping from him.  If he concentrated really hard, he could remember who he was and that he must get to the other side of the meadow without attracting attention.

And the technology aspects are great.  You can see Vinge is a comp sci professor.  Relay struck me as sounding a little like Google, and the text is littered with references to one-time-pad crypto, and gems like this:

Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption....

...and the creature fell apart like some cheap, center-topology network. 

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience 

I was slightly weirded-out by Pham Nuwen being from Canberra - a once great civilisation fallen back to medieval times.  I lived for some time in Canberra, Australia.

For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian.  He had been born on a fallen colony world - Canberra he called it.

The silly humans awake an extremely advanced and deadly artificial intelligence 'a perversion', which is fascinating to anyone interested in computer security.  It is like they have unleashed a super-intelligent piece of malware that begins to take over the universe.  Even the defences suggested in the text parallel modern-day content sanitisation.  This sounds a little bit like converting between document formats to break any embedded malware:

...then there are obvious procedures that can give relative safety: Do not accept High Beyond protocol packets.  At the very least, route all communications through Middle Beyond sites, with translation down to, and then up from, local trade languages.

 Also, the 'Usenet' discussion was really entertaining, and captures the often farcical misunderstanding and miscommunication of computer security issues on the Internet, and the spirit of a mild flaming:

...Who is a fool? [probably obscenity]  [probably obscenity] Idiots who don't follow all the threads in developing news should not waste my precious ears with their [clear obscenity] garbage.  So you think the "Helper Symbiosis" is a fraud of Straumli Realm?  And what do you think cause the fall of Relay?  In case your head is totally stuck up your rear [<-probable insult], there was a Power allied with Relay...

Sadly we are still some way from voice activated controls that:

...responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang.

Slight spoilers ahead...

I was a little surprised by the ending.  I was expecting 'Old One' to turn out as a front for the Blight itself.  Also I completely agreed with this statement:

In some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.

Sticking a huge hunk of the galaxy into slowness, stranding millions of vessels forever.  Somehow, this didn't sound much like 'saving' the galaxy to me.

But overall, a fantastic book, I endorse the Hugo decision :)  4.5 stars

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin (3.5 stars)

Hooray! Back to all the good characters. Except not really. Tyrion has turned into some sort of ironic sideshow act, in the words of Kate Morris 'all he really manages to do is play a lot of Stratego, reminisce about a previously-unmentioned happy boyhood of gymnastics training in the art of dwarfish capering, and fall convincingly off a trained pig'.

But lets acknowledge some of the good bits, and thankfully there were more of those than in Feast. When Bran is ambushed by a bunch of wights in a scene straight out of Dead Snow I stopped reading just long enough to let out a 'Hells Yeah!'. His apprenticeship to the three-eyed-crow (btw I loved the idea of a half-man, half-weirwood tree, complete with a root growing out of his eye socket) is fascinating. Jon's chapters continued to be some of the best as he creates a fragile peace with the wildlings.

Arya's training with the faceless men finally gets interesting as they intentionally blind her and give her a face from the thousands of dead people they have skinned(!) We also get to watch an assassination through her eyes, complete with a con reminiscent of early locke days.

...faces full of greed and rage and lust, bald faces and faces bristling with hair. Masks, she told herself, it's only masks, but even as she thought the thought, she knew it wasn't so. They were skins.

But it just isn't enough. The story doesn't move as much as it should have, especially given GRRM had 1000+ pages to work with. Tyrion and Victarion are still travelling to meet Daenerys. She's mooning around with Daario while Tyrion is being a circus act, and the dragons barely feature. Neither Arya or Bran finish their training. Stannis doesn't reach Winterfell. The others don't attack the wall. Is there anything more boring than reading about someone being bored?

Life aboard the Selaesori Qhoran was nothing if not tedious, Tyrion had found. The most exciting part of his day was pricking his toes and fingers with a knife.

And just to make sure you know he has still got it, Martin kills off a major character. I felt like he was trying to make a point like 'see? In this world, one careless decision can kill you', and while I respect the 'nobody is safe' ruthlessness, this reeks of an ad-break cliffhanger that will end up with resurrection by magic or subterfuge a la Catelyn, Mance, Davos...

So, not as bad as Feast, but not as good as it could be. Here's hoping he actually finishes the series sometime in the next couple of decades. Getting overtaken by the HBO series might provide some motivation. I'll leave you with some of my favourite quotes.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one."

If this were a story, he would gallop up just as we reached the temple, to challenge Hizdahr for my hand...Four hours later, they emerged again as man and wife, bound together wrist and ankle with chains of yellow gold. [guess this isn't a story then]

The Lyseni took the table nearest to the fire and spoke quietly over cups of black tar rum, keeping their voices low so no one could overhear. But she was no one and she heard most every word.

"You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of your coming."
"And I seem to have prevented yours." Jaime smiled at the woman in the bed.

3.5 stars