I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (2 stars)

Like a number of other Sci-Fi classics I've read recently, it's an impressive piece of history and a testament to Asimov's imagination and foresight, but it isn't a fantastic read compared with modern Sci-Fi. I, Robot, is a series of meditations on the now famous 3 laws of robotics that are well-known to all Sci-Fi fans.

In each short story Asimov probes the edges of the rules, looks for cases of ambiguity, and establishes test cases where the laws are pushed to their limit. It's more thought-experiment and test suite for a set of rules to make robots safe than thrilling fiction. Those who enjoy critical thinking and attempting to poke holes in a hypothesis will probably enjoy the stories, those looking for something along the lines of the hollywood blockbuster should not bother.

I appreciated its place in history, and respect the imaginative talent, but it just isn't a particularly good read.

2 stars.

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (3 stars)

Explosion! Concussion! The vault doors burst open. And deep inside, the money is racked for pillage, rapine, loot. Who's that? Who's inside the vault? Oh God! The Man With No Face!

This opening made me cringe. It might be the first Hugo winner ever but the opening reads like a story written by a high-school kid, or the script for an old cheesy Batman episode: it's just missing a POW! and a SOCK! But it gets better, and the concept of a highly sophisticated pre-meditated murder in a society where crime doesn't exist because the police can read your mind is a great one. The telepathy, and the ESPers guild are interesting ideas, but I was most impressed with the mind-to-mind conversations between the espers that were written as a woven mesh of words with custom typography. Great stuff.

The novel builds to a fairly early mini-climax where the murder takes place, after which the rest of the novel is spent in a cat and mouse game. Powell, a 1st-class esper police detective, works to build physical evidence to prove the guilt of Reich that he already knows via ESP, but which is not admissible in court. While I initially enjoyed this thrust and parry between Reich and Powell, I got tired of waiting for Powell to prove something that everyone involved, including the reader, already knows to be true.

A couple of confusing things I noticed that didn't get explained: how does Barbara, stumbling around after the struggle with Reich make such an effective escape and how does she end up in a bizarre place like Chooka's? Why become part of a public 'psychic' show when the whole world is pursuing her? Why didn't she go to the police? Was she aware of who Reich was? Why did Reich's goon go to Chooka's with his wife and choose to get a lap dance from Barbara instead of killing her?

The ear-worm jingle that Reich uses as a simple defence against mind-reading is actually really catchy, despite not even knowing the tune:

Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.

Similar to The Stars My Destination I can see why this was an amazing novel for its time, and a deserving winner for the first Hugo.

3 stars.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (3.5 stars)

An absolutely astounding novel for 1956, for 2013 it's appeal is mainly as a piece of Sci-Fi history, although definitely enjoyable. This book laid a foundation for cyberpunk and features an anti-hero, something that was probably quite ground-breaking at the time. I liked the description of teleporting (jaunting) and using mazes to defend against jaunting intruders, and the idea of Gouffre Martel: a jaunte-proof prison. The opening sequence of Gully living breath-to-breath in a 'coffin' in space is absolutely brilliant.

I found a few flaws particularly grating. The escape from Gouffre Martel was particularly silly, where deus-ex-sledgehammer happens to open an entrance to convenient caverns, where stumbling around on an underground glacier and swimming underwater in the glacier-melt river doesn't give you hypothermia, capped off with a sex scene outside immediately after getting out of the freezing water. Right.

Inside the prison, with a few lessons via the contrived 'whisper-line', Gully is transformed from gutter-speaking idiot to evil genius, going on to construct an elaborate highly-successful circus team purely for the purpose of providing some cover for traveling around on his revenge quest. And a minor niggle: his facial tattoo re-appears when his blood gets pumping, but never the whopping great "NOMAD" that was plastered across his forehead by the same needle.

But, I still enjoyed it, and felt some echoes of ideas in other Sci-Fi novels that probably originated in this one. Kudos to Bester for being so radical.

3.5 stars

PS. For reasons unknown to me, the Canberra region features in the novel on at least two occasions. Fourmyle appears at a ball in Government House and later, in a series of teleports as the burning man, one of them is to "Jervis beach on the Australian coast", by which I think he means Jervis Bay.

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

A book with a huge twist that makes you re-think the whole novel after the reveal. Stop reading now if you don't want to be spoiled.

The novel has two plot lines, one moving forward in time, and one moving backwards. The reveal comes when we find out that Zakalwe as we know him is actually Elethiomel, and that the fear of chairs that 'Zakalwe' has is due to the huge weight of guilt he has for making Zakalwe's sister into a chair. Literally a chair, he made a chair out of her bones covered with her skin and sent it to Zakalwe. The ploy was to send the command of the opposing army (the real Zakalwe) into disarray and confusion due to the horror of the act just as Elethiomel's forces mounted a breakout attempt from the Staberinde.

The problem with the twist was that I couldn't reconcile the ability to perform this horrendous act with E's later guilt and multi-century attempt at atonement by doing the bidding of the Culture, who he hopes are the good guys. This twist, while an interesting idea and a fairly spectacular reveal, didn't gel with me at all. In the following quote, during his 'retirement', he doesn't sound like the sort of person willing to win at all costs, even if it requires turning his girlfriend into furniture to distract his childhood friend:

He told her about a man, a warrior, who'd worked for the wizards doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to - and even the wizards had not discovered - he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.

This also begs the question, could the Culture really not have known who they were dealing with? Zakalwe seems to think they didn't, and certainly Sma and the drone didn't seem to know until the reveal, but it would be such a trivial thing for a Culture Mind to find out that it strikes me as unbelievable they wouldn't have such basic background on someone they place in critical roles on many occasions. So, if they did know, it feels more ruthless than I expected from the Culture, but perhaps someone that will try to win at all costs and who can be manipulated by his past is exactly the weapon they need. That's certainly Zakalwe's impression:

You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognized that.

There's some great stuff about the nature, necessity, and futility of war throughout the novel. Here's a few choice quotes to end with:

...in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

"I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing."

"So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile...arguing stuff?"

"Agree to disagree," he said. "Or fight."

4 stars.

PS. My favourite ship names from this one: "What Are the Civilian Applications?" and "Very Little Gravitas Indeed".

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

My second culture book, and much much better than Consider Phlebas. In this novel we get a deeper insight into the Culture itself: a galaxy-spanning highly evolved human civilisation where no-one wants for anything. Our protagonist Gurgeh has gotten sick of being a super-leet game player and winning at basically every game he takes an interest in, so reaches out, in response to gentle prodding, to Contact (the part of the culture that interacts with aliens) for something new. Incidentally, there was something about Banks' use of slight mis-pronounciations of Gurgeh's name by aliens that added a special bit of polish to his interactions with aliens of the Empire.

The Empire is held together, and a governing class chosen, via an extremely complex series of games called Azad. I loved the dig at chess, one of the more complex games humanity has come up with to-date:

Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly', such as grid, Prallian scope 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies...As a work of intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Spoiler time.

Most disappointing in the early part of the novel was the blackmail scheme from Mawhrin-Skel. It was completely implausible that Gurgeh wouldn't see obvious blackmail underneath an offer to help with cheating from Mawhrin-Skel, a drone that Gurgeh knows loves digging up trouble. I like the implication that Mawhrin-Skel/Flere-Imsaho/our-narrator was working for Special Circumstances all along, and that blackmail was just part of the plan to get Gurgeh on board, but Banks could have come up with a much more sneaky entrapment than just "hey, wanna cheat?". Banks uses the Empire as a foil for commentary on our own society:

Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. "What's that?" he asked Pequil. "That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers." "Driven off the land," Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, "by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus."

Although it was unclear to me what point he was making with the game of Azad that is the focus of the Empire. One theory I had was that Azad was supposed to be an allegory for the complex game-like system of politics/elections/government on Earth. I think Banks very cleverly didn't try to describe Azad in great detail, since it would be very difficult to portray something as complex as he built it up to be without being boring.

I was a big fan of the planet Echronedal: an entire planet with flora and fauna evolved to survive, and even depend on, a constant raging inferno working its way around the globe.

I'm still not sure if I liked the ending. It's better than Gurgeh winning outright, exposing the faked propaganda about him losing, and becoming Emperor himself, which I thought was where it might be heading. It was a little reminiscent of Ender's Game or The Last Starfighter: finding out he was playing for the world after the fact. Winning at Azad seemed to be the low-force first option for the Culture, a little nudge to destroy the Empire, something that seems to gel very nicely with what I know of the Culture so far.

Onto the next one!

4 stars.

Shift Omnibus and Dust by Hugh Howey (4.5 stars)

Wow, what a ride. I read Shift and Dust back to back so I'm going to review them together since it is hard to separate them in my head. I re-read First Shift since it had been a while, and now having finished all the books I think the explanation for the creation of the silos, and the story of the Democratic convention is the weakest part of the whole series, you can read more of why in my original review of First Shift.

Shift is chock full of revelations and surprises. I loved getting Solo's back-story, his poem scrawled on a blackboard in the dead silo is a deliciously creepy moment:

The ghosts are watching. The ghosts are watching. They watch me stroll alone. corpses are laughing. The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them. parents are missing. My parents are missing. They are waiting for me to come home.

SUPER DOOPER GIANT MEGA SPOILERS.

Anna's subversive action to pump good nanobots into Silo 17 when it was supposed to be shut down with the killing kind was a brilliant twist, and a great explanation for the mystery of how Solo survived that I'd been pondering for a few books.

Donald waking up as Thurman was a stroke of genius from Howey, exploiting the drugged caretakers of Silo 1's complete trust in the system and power hierarchy. Donald's misguided murder of Anna wasn't a complete surprise, but it was still shocking, and made me want to yell STOP! DON'T DO IT! as I was reading. And Thurman rises from the dead! So many great ideas in this book.

I found Mission's story fairly uninteresting, but I think Howey made an excellent point with the Crow: just one person off the drugs who actually remembers is a very powerful thing, and a seed for revolution.

Donald's despair and frustration is palpable as he struggles to discover the secret of the silos.

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.

The ending felt a little rushed, but I think it was actually quite fitting, the survivors needed to do something drastic. The prospect of fighting for survival in a decrepit silo was understandably horrifying. Howey didn't attempt to tie off all the loose ends, like the other dark silos, or whether Juliette and crew would go back and try to rescue others, but I think that was fine.

Easily one of the consistently strongest sci-fi series I've ever read. Kudos for finishing strongly and not dragging things on into mediocrity. I look forward to seeing what Howey does next.

4.5 stars.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (3.5 stars)

Banks creates a universe for epic-scope space opera, which is great, but this novel is actually fairly weak.

The protagonist Horza, a shapeshifter, stumbles from one seemingly random experience to another: a laser fight in a temple, an ill-fated looting mission on a soon-to-be-destroyed orbital, an escape from a fat cannibal who is slowly eating his religious followers to death, among many others. Don't get me wrong, there were great feats of imagination here, but the almost complete lack of any thread tying it all together meant I just didn't really care about any of the characters, especially true during the obviously pointless and stupid temple mission.

Horza has sided with the Idirans, who we know are barbaric and brutal, but we never see any evidence or rationale for why Horza is so anti-Culture, or get an explanation for his violent hate of their society. This ambiguity and weakness in Horza's character might be deliberate, but it didn't help me empathize with him at all. Perosteck Balveda, the Culture agent, is obviously using Horza to get access to the planet, but I couldn't tell in some places if Banks was portraying Horza as unbelievably naive to not realise this, or trying to assure himself (Horza) that he still had the upper hand and was in control of the situation:

As for Perosteck Balveda, she was his prisoner; it was as simple as that.

Fal 'Ngeestra, mountaineer and Culture Referrer (basically a highly evolved soothsayer), seemed interesting to start with, but I soon grew bored of her semi-mystical, too-much-peyote passages:

We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

Having slogged through this crap, it was all the more annoying to have her storyline just die.

Banks manages a few very well-placed digs at religion. Horza gets pissed off that someone with religion interprets the impressive engineering achievement of a Culture-built orbital as a triumphant testimony to the power of God:

...genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

The action sequence of Horza blasting his way out of a giant GSV while swearing at an annoying drone couldn't have been more like Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon, and C-3PO, so much so that it felt formulaic to me. Maybe I've just seen too much Star Wars.

Speaking of movie plots, there is a jarring passage about three-quarters through the book that seems to imply this is all a training simulation - Matrix red-pill style. Perhaps this will become clear in later novels:

"Just a moment," Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw colored lights across his broad gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and siad, "Oh, Sorry!" and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the..

While the final sequence underground was entertaining, it was fairly mindless action-novel stuff, with a poor ending. Banks is obviously talented, and has a great imagination, this just isn't his best book. I've already started reading The Player of Games set in the same universe and it is far far superior.

3.5 stars.