Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (4.5 stars)

An epic space opera meets detective story written by a pair of authors under the pen name "James S.A. Corey".  It's a bit like Firefly meets Takeshi Kovacs, but without the beautiful grit and lyrical writing of Richard K. Morgan.  In fact the writing itself isn't really remarkable at all, but the world building is great, the plot is interesting, and the main characters are fairly well defined and far from perfect.

It also has a special quality that makes it stand out from many other space operas that start strong: it doesn't dissolve into tedium or get trapped on a single planet after one book.  I've read the four books (not counting side stories) published so far, and Corey has maintained an impressive tempo, continued to expand the world scale, and solidly kept my interest across all of the books.  This is actually more impressive than just considering the merits of each individual novel, so I gave it an extra half star.

In this book the two main characters are well developed and face a great and meaningful moral conflict about the merits of releasing potentially destructive information, with Holden and Miller taking opposing views.  The other characters were fairly underdeveloped, but this improves as the series moves on.

The protomolecule is badass and takes some genuinely surprising turns, and generates at least a couple of "woah" moments for me.  The scenes on Eros and on the ship seen through Julie's eyes reminded me of Event Horizon a little, stepping into the horror genre.  I think this section would have been vastly improved without the "vomit zombies" which dropped me out of a feeling of suspense into farce.

The science in the sci-fi mostly takes a back seat.  He's fairly vague about the "Epstein drive" which made travel in the solar system practical, but there's one thing Corey is very particular about: gravity.
We're constantly reminded about the effects of acceleration and deceleration on humans inside ships, how spin influenced space station (or planetery colony) design, how hard it is to move around in low G, how much "belters" struggle in Earth-like gravity, how magnetic boots work during EVAs, and many many more things gravity-related besides.  I actually liked all this: it adds a hard science element back into a world that would otherwise need very little explanation because most technology is fairly near future (sans Epstein drive).

Strong start to a strong series.

4.5 stars.

Ancillary Sword by Anne Leckie (4 stars)

This is the second novel in a trilogy, and the first was spectacularly good.  At this point you're already familiar with the whole gender weirdness, the unique perspective of Breq, and the stage has been set for an epic civil war space opera.  Great, lets dig in and see what she comes up with for this one!

If I said that Anaander Mianaai barely features, the civil war doesn't get much play, and the theme is mostly social justice on a single station and associated planet, would you be surprised?  I certainly was.  It's still a good novel, and the switch from epic space opera to smaller focus reminded me of the Fire Upon The Deep to A Deepness in the Sky transition, but it isn't nearly as strong as Deepness.

Leckie gives us deep insight into the tensions between various population dynamics, and this will obviously be important in the following novel, but there wasn't much here to be really excited about.  Breq seeks out basically every oppressed minority group she can find and tries to liberate them with the authority that comes with the rank of Fleet Captain, and last name Mianaai, pissing off everyone in the wealthy establishment.  Her visit to the planet's surface was full of Apartheid overtones.

It's definitely an interesting read, and the climax with the Presger gun getting a workout is thrilling.  But space opera it is not, so I can see why some people were disappointed.  Of course it is worth reading to be ready for the next book.

4 stars.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (5 stars)

After about four different personal recommendations, and finding out it had won the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, I had to read this. They weren't wrong, it is a spectacular debut.

Leckie does an impressive job of giving us an inside perspective of a spaceship-sized Artificial Intelligence (AI), with many different ancillaries/corpse-soldiers that make up its physical presence. This AI is our narrator, which allows Leckie to perform an impressive first-person narration without the usual limitation of the narrator being only in a single location at any time. When I read "that accounted for almost half of my twenty bodies" I knew this book was going to be fascinating.

As if that wasn't novel enough, Leckie chooses to make things even more interesting by messing with the reader's interpretation of gender. She does this by having most of the dialogue occur in Radchaai which doesn't have gendered pronouns, and from the perspective of Breq, the AI, who finds it difficult to interpret gender queues for various races anyway. In Breq's defence, this is not unusual since for many of the races gender is fairly unimportant and certainly not obvious. The end result of this is that I basically think of almost everyone in the novel as female, and was occasionally jarred out of my perceptions when other characters dropped a 'he' into the dialogue. It's amazing how much of my ability to visualise a character is rooted in gender.

So I have basically no idea what anyone looks like. This isn't helped by Leckie's fixation on memorial pin jewellery and gloves above all other features. I hope there's eventually some interesting explanation about the history of the gloves, since she makes such a big deal of them.

The start of the novel was very strong, with plenty of intrigue planted. What is this being? Why is he/she diminished? Leckie switches between flashbacks and current day to fill in the back story. There's a small amount of confusion for the reader as pieces of the world are filled in, but it's masterfully done and with minimal exposition. Just how I like it.

Not much science is explained, but there are some interesting ruminations on AI, such as emotions being essential for efficient decision making:

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

I thought it was also interesting that that author noted she had based the Radchaai somewhat on the roman empire, which explains a lot of the religious idol worship that is present throughout the book.

Overall this is an amazing space opera. It has a Hoth and a Degobah. It has armor implants, stealth weapons, intergalactic wars, and political intrigue. The early part of the novel felt a little like a western, Firefly even, with a robbery, a barely-though-out plan, and Breq's life hanging in the balance pretty much constantly.

All sci-fi fans should read it immediately.

5 stars.

Best of 2014 as read by G

Less sci-fi this year, and unfortunately a somewhat lacklustre set of books. I partly blame goodreads, which should know me fairly well after 220+ ratings, but it nonetheless kept recommending The Sunne in Splendour as basically the number one book I should read. That didn't work out well and it killed most of November and December. Goodreads also led me to Swan Song, which was closer to the mark but not great, so generous salt will be applied to future recommendations.

The best (5 stars):

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre (3 stars)

I knew from the first few pages of this book that Goldacre had done his homework and would back his arguments with facts and plenty of references. In fact, he tells us right up front:

So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.

Which is great, I wanted the facts, I wanted references, I wanted solid arguments, and this book definitely delivers. But it isn't particularly entertaining, and finishing it took quite a lot of determination. Honestly I'm not sure what Goldacre could have done to improve this: it's an incredibly important message that needs to be heard by, well, preferably everyone, but especially all members of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Judging by the contents of the afterword and the success of the alltrials campaign this has happened to some extent, which is great. But my 3 star ranking here reflects the view that just not that many lay people will be willing to trudge through this book.

Having said that, I'm incredibly glad that Ben Goldacre has written the book and launched the campaign, since it's a tragedy that (among many other problems) data from trials conducted in humans can be cherry-picked by companies to publish only favourable results. Everyone reading this should go sign the alltrials petition to help fix that.

In places I found the tone a little shrill and the recommendations, such as this one, somewhat impractical. What would patients think when confronted with such information stuck to the wall of a clinic without a 450-page accompanying novel to explain it?

All doctors should declare all payments, gifts, hospitality, free teaching and so on, to their patients, to colleagues, and to a central register. The conventional cut-off is for everything within the past three years, but we could consider making it longer. We should display the contents in our clinics, to our patients, and let them decide if such activities are acceptable.

More sensible than displaying it in clinics would be making that central register data available online. And I'm sure Goldacre is betting that sunlight shone on it like this will basically kill the entire practice of semi-bribes. Many people already shop for doctors on recommendation sites like yelp, having this data available to the patient as part of that interface when choosing a physician would be valuable.

For the most part though, the recommendations are sensible and practical. Since Goldacre basically wrote an abstract for the entire book in the first few pages I thought I'd just include it here, rather than summarising the problems and arguments further:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

3 stars.

Jupiter - Illusions of Faith by Kynan Waterford (3.5 stars)

Fans of Matthew Reilly will find a lot to like in this book. It's packed with intricate action scenes featuring "the most dangerous man in the solar system" Garen Maertikye deploying a dizzying array of body enhancement technology to move stealthily, outsmart, and when forced to, destroy his enemies. In fact, the body enhancement tech was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, with the highlight being the "type-seven augmented plantim" (i.e. plant matter) body. The description of the surgical implantation of a new occupant into this body and subsequent adaptation to the user was fantastic, as was seeing its capabilities tested through a number of violent encounters.

For me the piece that was missing here was a back-story on how Maertikye came by all of his amazing tech, especially since it is far more advanced than that available to the well-funded Coalition soldier elite. Presumably there's a thriving and dangerous black market for body enhancements, an exploration of which would make a great novel on its own. But we're given little insight into how Garen has survived all of these years - how is he funded? Being an emotionless badass might be a tactical advantage, but it doesn't fuel and repair a spacecraft, or make a stormsuit.

The body tech and fight scenes sit more towards the science end of the science-fantasy spectrum, but there are also elements of the story that are much more solidly at the fantasy end: energy transfer between heavangels and humans, direct manipulation of human emotions by heavangels, and a spontaneous complete body transformation. I found these aspects hard to reconcile with the preturnatural body tech and fight scenes that were full of much more realistic physics - I've never read the term "angular momentum" so many times in fight scenes before!

I'm not against science-fantasy, but my personal preference would have been for these aspects to have a pseudo-science grounding: like the heavangels are nano particles that move through the atmosphere in clouds but can inhabit humans as brain parasites. There's a great potential twist here if the humans try to stop killing them, only to be overtaken as hosts for an alien parasite. Garen's stormsuit could have been specially designed to harvest energy from a cooperative cloud of nano particles.

While I'm on my high-horse writing my wishlist, I also wished there was more ship slang, which is bound to develop on a closed ecosystem like the Golgotha, and less use of the word terrorist, which is cringe-worthy in a couple of cases. Like when a soldier is supposed to be verbally abusing a captured Maertikye, and the best he can muster is "You're in more trouble than you know, terrorist".

While the action has a Matthew Reilly flavour, it is far from being mindlessly dumb like those novels. A lot of thought has gone into the Coalition's economic stranglehold on the population and life on board the Golgotha. Character development isn't spectacularly deep, and having a main character with deliberately suppressed emotions doesn't help in this regard, but it isn't completely absent. To its credit, things don't get tied up in a neat bow at the end, it's suitably complicated, and suitably open for plenty of sequels.

Looking forward to the next one.

3.5 stars

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (2 stars)

Have you always been upset about Shakespear's portrayal and longed for a different perspective on Richard III? Are you ready to pick up minor inaccuracies about 15th century Catholic law, know your Plantagenet and Lancastrian family trees off by heart, sell white boar embroidery on etsy, and have your own extensive opinions on the various scenarios re the demise of the "princes in the tower"? Well, this is the book for you. There's apparently a lot of you, judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews this book has had on amazon.

If, like me, you forgot there was a Shakespeare play about Richard III, had never heard of the princes in the tower, thought plantagenet was something related to blood clotting, and thought The Tudors TV series would have been drastically improved without fighting the same stupid war with France and Spain every other episode, you should probably give this 1000 page tome a miss. How did I, terrible history student, get here? I blame goodreads recommendations.

This book is a very extensively researched and, as I now know, unusual perspective on Richard III (i.e. he's an insufferably good guy). By which I mean that it's perhaps the most entertaining history textbook ever written. It is however, a pretty ordinary novel.

It begins with lots of incredibly dry exposition, that's screaming "Look! Look at all the research I did!" Honestly I could not care less about why Edmund is a little bit sad at Christmas, it doesn't matter. I don't care how long it took to figure all this out, it's just boring.

After the July battle that had delivered the Kind into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months trying to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais. These Lancastrian lords...Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland...And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked...

The imagery and raw emotion of Marguerite d'Anjou sinking to her knees in the snow was a welcome break from all the wooden third-person exposition, and things get a little better from there, but it's still a tough slog.

In trying to paint Richard in such a positive light Penman goes too far and makes him unbelievable. He's such a beacon of principles, loving father, faithful husband and all round honour-bound we-could-never-accept-French-wine-when-we-could-die-in-battle caricature that I found myself wishing for his downfall, anticipating a spectacular fall from grace. Sadly Penman only allows a little incompetence and poor character judgement.

To combat the dryness, exactly halfway through Penman decides it is time for sex. All of a sudden it's all kirtles, and body parts "gleaming soft and wet", and "feeling desire start to quicken again". This made things a bit more interesting at the expense of making the history nerds angry. Why are you ruining a perfectly good textbook?

But it takes until about page 715 before I get the first "huh, THAT's interesting" moment when Dr. Stillington drops his bombshell. At this point things start to unravel and the long, long, long anticipated climax made for good reading. A nice payoff, but it wasn't worth all the pain.

The subject material certainly has all the ingredients for a fantastic story, but history is a terrible editor. It could be a far better novel if the author was willing to give up on some of her research and make the history nerds angry by taking more liberty with the facts.

2 stars.