Inheritance by Christopher Paolini (2.5 stars)

Finally got around to finishing off this series. I read the penultimate novel back in 2009, and I apparently really enjoyed it at the time.  Since then I've read some great fantasy, so my perspective has changed, and although I can't really remember Brisngr I suspect this book is comparatively much weaker.

Many, many things annoyed me (warning, you're entering complainy-spoil-town). It was too predictable: the seemingly all-powerful invulnerable bad guy is vanquished, no-one important dies, and look under your seats...everyone gets a dragon! You get a dragon and you get a dragon! And I'm going to solve all the world's problems by holding the Olympics and everything will be perfect. Even Saphira gets laid.

But how did he defeat Galbatorix, the cardboard character of all-powerful evil magic? With deus ex machina of course! Need some eggs? Got some. It would also be handy if Galbatorix held off from attacking us for no real reason until we've had time to collect the deus ex machina. Need to escape the elaborate bond-style Ra'zac death trap? How about Angela gets a power upgrade and just kills everyone? Need to undo a ton of evil magic? Well, you know what is more powerful than magic? Magic magic. Done.

But don't let me give you the impression that this all happens quickly. In fact it happens at a horrendously slow pace with lots of boring detail. Paolini said he spent a lot of time researching language, naming objects etc. which gets incredibly annoying by the end of the novel. I don't care what the sword/ring/snail/toothbrush is called in the ancient language. You're not Tolkien, find a new angle.

Oh how I yearned for a GRRM-style main character kill shot.

So that came out pretty nasty, and it's not a great book, but I have to say it was still reasonably entertaining. If Paolini can stop combining derivative Tolkien with an RPG game where you just need to collect the right magic items to win, I think he is definitely capable of writing a really great novel.

2.5 stars

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (3.5 stars)

This was the perfect story for its 1974 publication date. It's a deeply critical anti-war book that presents the futility of war, it's impact on society, the struggles veterans have re-integrating, and the dubious motivations for conflict in the first place. While it is a well-written, strong novel, I doubt if it was published today it would have had a chance of creating the same deep resonance with readers or sweeping the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards as it did in 1975/1976.

Haldeman's world where the intellectual elite are forced into military service in a war with little relevance to the general population, apart from economic stimulus and justification for martial law, is a great contrast to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional - more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.

Haldeman also applies relativity in interesting ways. Imagine sending ships into space to travel a massive distance at close to the speed of light, then faster than light through a collapsar Stargate, then spend a few weeks at 2 gravities decelerating to the battlefield. By the time the starship gets to the enemy, they may have had hundreds of years to develop their technology and prepare defences. But the same applies in reverse if they want to attack a human base.

You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

You could imagine the social disconnect of returning to Earth after several hundred years have passed. Haldeman uses relativity to create an exaggerated allegory to the disconnect Vietnam vets felt on returning to the US as it was undergoing a period of significant social change.

Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

It's a powerful novel with a theme that will probably continue to be relevant forever, sadly. Haldeman could easily be talking about the war in Iraq in this passage:

You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans' having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unity humanity rather than dividing it.

3.5 stars.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (3 stars)

Slaughterhouse Five is a Sci-Fi classic: it was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula and often appears on top 100 novels lists. Its plot is non-linear. Billy Pilgrim has 'come unstuck in time' and jumps randomly around in his own lifetime. Vonnegut draws on his own personal experience of the Dresden bombings to write an absurdist, satirical account from Pigrim's point of view as an American POW in Dresden at the time of the bombings.

So you might be thinking that apart from the time travel, this doesn't sound very sci-fi. But don't worry, Billy is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore and spends his days having sex with a similarly-kidnapped porn star, which is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. The sex seems to be the most commonly cited reason for it being in the top 100 banned and challenged novels of the 20th century.

Is it funny? It actually is, and there are a lot of quotable quotes. Stylistically it felt a lot like Catch-22, but not as clever, and not as razor sharp with the satire. It's a short novel, written in simple language but touching on complex ideas, which means it is a part of the syllabus for many high-schools.

Honestly I was fairly underwhelmed. Perhaps the non-linear timeline was revolutionary in 1969, but there are plenty of modern novels that have used this device in more compelling ways. Vonnegut may have been trying to use Billy's inability to control his place in time as allegory for our ability to avoid all wars:

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

So definitely some credit for making me think. I'd place Slaughterhouse Five somewhere between Catch-22 and a Gene Wolfe novel. Not clearly anti-war, not clearly batshit insane.

I also watched the movie, which I'm frankly amazed got made in the first place.  I think some of the abrupt time flips work better in the movie than they do in the book, but I think almost all of the comedic value was lost in translation.  I bet most people watching the movie didn't even realise it was supposed to be a comedy.

I'll leave you with some of the great lines from the book.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

...

All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.

...

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

And so it goes. 3 stars.

Nexus by Ramez Naam (3.5 stars)

Ramez Naam is an ex-Microsoft project manager who has written a non-fiction book about the possibilities of biotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, and extended those ideas even further into the future as a fictional account in Nexus. The ideas are fascinating.

In his authors@google talk, Naam talks about the requirements for 'Google in your brain': data in, data out, encoding/decoding, multiple data types, safe/secure/deployable. He makes a convincing case that we have very primitive forms of data i/o, encoding/decoding and multiple data types (audio, video) today in the form of medical devices like the Cochlear implant and primitive computer-assisted vision for the blind. Advances in computing power, miniaturisation, and communications are going to enable even more powerful functionality in the future.

Naam explores the possibilities of networked, customisable human brains from many different angles. There's the cyberpunk crowd that wants to have raves where you experience the emotions of everyone around you, the Buddists who meditate for hours as a single focused mind, various governments who want to limit access to the technology but also use it to boost the capabilities of their soldiers and armies, cults whose leaders use it as a form of mind control, and all manner of other criminal/illegal/unethical things that are possible when you can control someone else's mind.

So the ideas are brilliant, the science is great, and Naam's technology background is present everywhere: I certainly can't think of another novel where 'stack trace' was used correctly, or a compiler hack described complete with a Ken Thompson reference.

Unfortunately the novel is weakened by an over-abundance of action fight scenes, guns, explosions, and just general Michael Bay-ness. The opening sequence when Kade uses a pick-up line program followed by a pornstar program was ridiculous, and read like a teenage programmer's fantasy: if only I could write a program to get girls! Just need some sleazy lines and some porno moves! I was more convinced by the Bruce Lee program as a sort-of crude predecessor to Keanu's "I know Kung-Fu" moment in the matrix in the more distant fictional future.

As a Bay Area resident I liked the local references, and the party in Hangar 3 at Moffett. The ability of multiple cooperating governments to suppress important information despite the massive connectivity and diversity of the Internet was also an interesting case study for the future.

Broad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it's a dystopia.

If you like action novels, you'll probably love this. Personally, I'd rather Naam and China Miéville took some Nexus 5, joined their minds, and re-wrote this as a dark techno underground thriller :)

3.5 stars

The Scar by China Miéville (3.5 stars)

Yep, more Miéville, but I'm reading something else after this one. The Scar is a return to the Bas-Lag world from Perdido Street Station: re-made, cactacae, vodyanoi etc. but set outside of New Crobuzon, mostly in a floating pirate city reminiscent of 'Waterworld' called Armada. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as good as PSS.

Armada annoyed me from the outset. How does a bunch of boats lashed together in the open ocean survive a big storm, let alone centuries worth of storms? Why don't they smash into each other and sink? Miéville tries to address this, but the explanation is lame:

Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada's waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves.

The world-building is there, and there's at least one very well-played casual reveal, but compared to PSS or Embassytown, it's nothing, and relies heavily on explanations from PSS. You can read this novel independently, but if you did you would probably wonder why he doesn't describe the fascinating races in more detail, it's because he did it in PSS. I actually think avoiding recapping was the right call.

Miéville does introduce some new races, the most interesting of which is the mosquito men and women. The descriptions of the mosquito women were amazing:

Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips. It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual.

A book set in the time when the world was plagued by these mosquitos would have been an amazing read, as would one based on Silas Fennec's spying on the grindylow, or one about the zombie city of High Cromlech. Instead we got just a taste of all of these and followed an improbable floating city to the edge of the known world, just for it to turn around and come back. It feels like Miéville realised he'd already hit 800 pages and didn't have the stomach to write the actual climax so he just turned the city around. Or did he? Maybe that's just one possibility and there is a different one where it doesn't suck. That might be clever but ruining the story to make a point about possibility mining is a huge cop out.

I've noticed a pattern in the Miéville novels I've read so far: he doesn't seem to like filling out the characters of his narrators. In this novel it is Bellis Coldwine. With that name I can only assume Miéville was attempting to head off criticism of her blandness by pointing out: 'yes, she is deliberately cold and whiny'. She is important in the plot at one point as a translator, but after that just bumps along, being basically useless but inexplicably often at the centre of the action, which is of course convenient for narration.

My final complaint is that the grindylow were way too powerful. There's no way New Crobuzon could be a threat to them, which undermines a major plot point.

Not a terrible book, but he has written much better.

3.5 stars.

Embassytown by China Miéville (5 stars)

I doubled down on Miéville and was dropped into the now-familiar confusion at the start of a new Miéville novel: an explosion of new terminology, gradual reveals, and complex world building. Some readers seem annoyed by this initial feeling of disorientation, but I love it, and I'm now so impressed by Miéville's skill with this style that I'm perfectly content to sit back and let him do his work. Language is also as you would expect from Miéville: why use 'rare' when you could use 'recherché'?

And in fact language is a central theme of the book. The Areikei, dual-winged insect-like aliens on whose planet Embassytown exists, speak with two mouths simultaneously. A complex means of communications using a pair of cloned humans linked by technology to be able to synchronise their speech has been devised, and a class structure has evolved around these sort-of-human 'Ambassadors' who communicate with the Areikei 'Hosts'. The disastrous conflict of the novel arises purely due the speech of a new Ambassador.

Miéville spends much of the book describing the Hosts's native tongue 'Language', and creates some interesting constraints such as a physical inability to lie, and a requirement that all phrases be constructed with similes, saying something is 'like' something else. Part philosophical, and part linguistic fantasy, I imagine it would appeal to students of those disciplines (although I did read one resounding criticism of the notion that a language could exist without the concept of 'that', which is a key part of the plot). I mostly enjoyed the forays into linguistics but occasionally found them boring, especially the meetings of the similes club. On the plus side I learnt some terms like 'cognate' and 'kenning'.

This is definitely an ideas and plot book, more than a characters book. We don't really get to know anyone deeply, even Avice our narrator. And there are times when the single point-of-view is quite painful, such as shortly after the turmoil is created by the Ambassador. Avice is basically hanging out at home and talking to other people who don't know what is going on, which makes for fairly tedious reading, while others desperately try to save their society. A second PoV at this point would have been great: Ez, Ra, Scile, or MagDa maybe. Ehrsul's character is and central to the story early on, but is barely mentioned as soon as the conflict starts, which seemed very strange. Perhaps Ehrsul's story is fodder for a sequel.

Speaking of sequels, there's plenty more that this (third!) universe has to offer: there's a great immer-travel beyond-the-final-frontier space-cowboy hunted-by-bremen-establishment novel begging to written. The concept of light-houses placed in the immer by unknown technologically advanced aliens is great.

My favourite part of the book was the description of the Hosts and their infrastructure battling addiction - it was fantastically imagined and described. I'd love to see this as a movie one day and watch a building grow ears to satisfy a heroin-like junkie craving.

5 stars!

The City & The City by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

If you haven't read The City & The City, just stop reading this and go read it. It is really hard to discuss the book without spoiling anything since even major concepts are only gradually revealed to the reader, so be warned I'm going to drop a bunch of spoilers.

Miéville's cities of Beszél (which incidentally means 'to speak' in Hungarian) and UI Quoma are fantastically created. They are reminiscent of East and West Berlin, but instead of a high concrete walls and guard towers, the walls between Miéville's two city-countries are seemingly purely psychological, built on a deep and pervasive fear of 'Breach'. Citizens of both cities learn to 'unsee', 'unsmell', and 'unhear' everything about the other city: it's traffic, people, buildings, and more.

The idea of two countries being in the same place but separated in the minds of their citizens is a barrier for the reader's suspension of disbelief, but it's a problem that is skillfully attacked by Miéville. He describes a number of challenges the two cities need to deal with such as 'foreign' traffic and emergency vehicles, traffic accidents involving 'foreign' vehicles, children who are inexperienced at 'unseeing', tourists, immigration, trade, and differing economic status of the two countries. His description of UI Qomatown in Beszél is a good example of how much thought he has put into this world:

The scents of Beszél UI Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries as disrespectful as rain ("Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities," the proverb has it.)...Very occasionally a young UI Qoman who does not know the area of their city that UI Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically UI Qoman Beszél-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected - there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm - and Breach are normally merciful.

To explore the interactions between the two co-located countries, Miéville uses a murder investigation that necessitates international cooperation between Beszél's Inspector Tyador Borlú and UI Qoma's Senior Detective Quissim Dhatt. We only really get to know the main protagonist Borlú, other characters remain quite undeveloped, and the dialogue is fairly sparse and intense.

As noir crime fiction I felt it was fairly weak, and the very neat resolution to the whodunnit has prompted criticism from some readers, but they miss the point. The crime and its investigation was really an excuse to have some, otherwise very rare, international collaboration between the two cities. I was interested in the murder but I was fascinated by the larger questions it inspired: Who/what/where is 'Breach'? Was 'The Cleavage', when the two cities were created, a joining or a splitting (cleave can imply either)? Is the mental barrier between the cities purely psychological, or is there an element of magic/fantasy/sci-fi i.e. is there a biological or technological reason why the citizens of the cities can 'unsee' their foreign counterparts? Is Orciny real, a synonym for Breach, or something else entirely?

Of these questions we only really get some resolution about Breach and Orciny. Breach is invisible, pervasive, extremely secretive and seems to possess limitless power when there is a 'breach': a failure to observe the city boundaries, which could be as simple as looking directly at a building in the other country.

I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn't? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes...Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don't mention the UI Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn't, from where you stand in Beszél, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.

After all of his experiences of travelling to UI Qoma and entering Breach I expected Borlú to question whether keeping the split between the cities was actually a good idea, whether Breach was morally in the right or just a brutal enforcement of a ridiculous and pointless segregation, or even just to voice some self doubt about becoming part of that enforcement. But he never does. I'm still not sure how I feel about that: to some extent it seems in keeping with his character, he shows no sympathy for the unificationists, and perhaps there is even some fantasy/sci-fi explanation (government brain modifications?) for this deficiency, but it is at odds with his willingness to break the rules to protect Yolanda Rodriguez.

Nonetheless, an intriguing concept well executed.

4.5 stars.