The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (3.5 stars)

The final in the trilogy started by the fantastic Quantum Thief. Unfortunately neither of the subsequent books could match the first, and this is the weakest of the three. My view is somewhat coloured by having 3 years in between the Fractal Prince and my reading of this book, and I hate re-reading.  So I went into the complicated Hannu-verse cold...and it's not the sort of book you want to do that with.

Nonetheless, I pushed on and remembered most of the important points, but I'm sure I missed plenty of references. The book is full of action, is incredibly complicated, and has zero exposition. I'm a big fan of this style of book in general, but I felt like Hannu lost control of his ability to put the ideas in his head down on paper in a way that someone else can actually comprehend. I'll admit to being completely confused about what is a simulation, who has a body, what weapons are physical/virtual, what is happening in the physical universe, and even if this entire story is part of a larger simulation.

Partly this is the point, that the physical universe matters less than the virtual. But when characters and copies of characters are constantly shifting around in, and creating, nested virtual realities it is really, really confusing, to the point where I essentially stopped caring.

There's some nods to physics nerds and sci-fi fans, which are entertaining:

And it seems some people can’t tell their Fitzgerald from their Lovecraft. So don’t be surprised if you see a few flapper Deep Ones tonight.

It was an idea they already thought of in the twentieth century, that spacetime could compute. They tested it, in the last days of the Large Hadron Collider, when they learned how to make tiny black holes. Encode computations into their event horizons, then probe the information paradox by smashing them together, see if quantum gravity is more powerful than Turing Machines or their quantum cousins. Something to do for the humming LHC, still warm from finding the first Higgs. 

Gene Wolfe-level of unexplained complexity, but with more physics.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Suck My Cosmos by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Campbell has managed something impressive with the Hank series, he's 4 books in and the humour is actually still really good. In fact, this one was stronger than the last. Belvaille has undergone another drastic transformation and is now only affordable for the ultra-ultra-rich, i.e. you need to own a few other planets before buying an apartment on Belvaille.

Hank's new butler Cliston is an incredible character whose objectives are completely at odds with Hank's, which produces some great humour. I also loved the cabbie Zzho in his deathtrap.

Still not as good as the first in the series, but definitely continues to entertain. Some of my favourite quotes:

This lady, if she sold her coat, her damn coat, could hire enough people to kill me, invent a device to bring me back to life, then kill me again. Her husband was one of the six most powerful people on Belvaille. He had whole solar systems at his disposal.

Garm and I had very different motivations, especially in recent years. I was never fond of assassinations and whatever else she did. She was never fond of poverty and whatever else I did.

She was pretty and had a pleasant voice and was a living organism, but that was the extent of her abilities. 

4 stars.

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (3 stars)

The final book in a spectacular trilogy by Ann Leckie. Wait, what, final? There's nothing final about this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Oh, wait, lets have a cup of tea.

Some spoiler tea ahead.

Good, now back to the novel. Dear god, why are we still on this damn space station? I thought this was a space opera? Oh well, lets have another cup of tea and watch the Presger translator do something weird, hah it ate an oyster with the shell on. Oh Jar Jar, I mean, translator.

Oooh, Anaander is coming with her warships, here comes a battle. Ah...nope. Thank god we have a popgun-ex-machina to save us from those nasty action scenes. Lets have a cup of tea.

The bullets I had fired at them were so small that even if any of the ships’ sensors could have seen them—and they could not—they would not register as a danger.

Wait, here comes the climax, here it comes! Breq falls over, Jar Jar throws up, and the most powerful person in the galaxy was defeated. Presger-treaty-ex-machina for the win. Nothing to see here. Have some tea, sorry about the chipped enamel.

And don't complain about the ending, I see you already complaining about it, stop it. I'm going to preempt you all, so there:

Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

That may have been overly mean, but I was incredibly disappointed by this book. Leckie is a fantastic writer so she carries the story anyway, and I did enjoy reading it, but sadly the trilogy didn't come close to living up to the promise of the first novel.

Given how open the entire ending was, I assume, and hope, there will be more on what happens when AIs are recognized by the Presger and are no longer controlled by humans. And whether cloning will really work out for ancillaries, or if they will go back to kidnapping humans.

And I hope there will be less tea drinking.

3 stars.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

In The Diamond Age, Stephenson builds a fantastic world full of nano machines. The technology dominates all aspects of life: almost everything people need is built by a household matter compiler (think Star Trek replicator, or a really advanced version of current 3D printing).

The matter compiler in the corner of the kitchen came on automatically and began to create a pedomotive for Hackworth to take to work.

But it isn't all happy-useful machines. Advertising pervades almost everything, and humanity has split up into various tribes "phyles", largely along racial and socio-economic lines.

...it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

Sounds exactly right. And there's something great about reading a novel written by a computer scientist, so many in-jokes and clever ways of describing how computers work. "Castle Turing" may be the most surreal way to learn low-level programming I've ever imagined.

...the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses

In fact the majority of the novel is devoted to the description of how a young girl in poverty uses education gained from an incredibly advanced textbook "YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER a Propædeutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates.." to escape a dangerous home environment and drag herself out of poverty and into a position of power.

Nell is a wonderful character, and in fact this book was recommended to me as an example of a strong female lead character, of which I have encountered very few but want to find more of to recommend to my daughter.

Nell's early life is scary and full of danger. Her escape from her family was intense, and an excellent read. As a reader you desperately want Nell to succeed.

There are many other characters that are well fleshed out, but some are unceremoniously dropped without any real explanation (e.g. Judge Fang). And others I expected to play a larger role but never do (Miranda).

Something about describing the Seattle area like this with "software khans" I found very cute:

Much of the Seattle area was still sufficiently rich, civilized, and polite that New Atlantans did not object to living there, and little Victorian mini-claves were scattered about the place, particularly east of the lake, around the misty forest domains of the software khans

Things get surreal when the Drummers enter the story. It started to read like Being John Malkovich meets Eyes Wide Shut:

Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in brightly colored mediatronic condoms

The ending is just...terrible. I thought the concept was fine, the execution was just no good. Really rushed. Stephenson uses just a dozen pages to describe a war involving thousands of people that completely changes the entire world, which is completely inadequate when viewed in the light of the hundreds of pages he spent building the world and creating much less important plot threads.

But, ending aside, it's a great read. Here's my favourite quote:

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

4 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck by Steven Campbell (3.5 stars)

Even darker again. Belvaille is barely functional, socially chaotic, and falling apart. Hank is so dense he is effectively crippled and close to death. And yet somehow he is in charge of everything. Unfortunately, most of the humour was lost in the dark plot. It's getting close to sci-fi noir.

In a number of cases, it's actually fairly clever social commentary:

I don’t even think any of them had given their positions on issues. Stating your position might piss people off who disagreed with you. But attacking someone else only hurt them, especially if you did it through third parties

There's even a little to learn about free markets and how they are important to society. In this case the bankers are an alien race called the Ankh, who are very interested in Hank providing some stability.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Highly entertaining, not too much thinking required just like the first in the series, but with a darker bent. Hank takes some actions that gets lots of people killed and he shows very little remorse. There's still plenty of funny moments, but fewer laugh-out-loud situations than in the first. Hank's prodigious hunger after injury provides some of them:

But the ache in my stomach was primordial. It was twisting my mind. I was looking at doors and wondering if I could eat them. They looked so similar to large crackers. I wondered why the asses who had constructed this city hadn’t left great piles of food lying around. What if people got hungry? It seemed a massive oversight. There was all this metal and no food.

And many more from Hank's apparent cluelessness, hiring an army via newspaper ad, and, well stuff like this:

I heard you were walking around barefoot, killing people, leaving their bodies all over the city, while wearing a diaper.

4 stars.

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger (2.5 stars)

I got excited at the start of this novel as we were being introduced to Jack Crabb, our 111 year old narrator, mostly because of the fantastic visual descriptions Berger delivers:

He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.

But sadly, the rest of the novel is all Crabb, in a dialect that is too well-structured to match the character, and certainly with none of the beauty we get in the introduction. In fact, I didn't care about Crabb at all. He wasn't an interesting character personality-wise, and I just couldn't buy the tall-tale format where he's present at every major event (right beside Custer at his last stand), and knows everyone from wild west legend including Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane etc.

Old Lodge Skins the Indian chief was one of the most interesting characters in the whole novel. And while Crabb has some respect for him, Crabb's view of Indian's in general I think was probably fairly accurate for a white man of the time. This is very far from the Dances With Wolves noble savage romanticized view of Indians:

Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

As historical fiction it was fairly interesting to learn more about Custer's military actions, and how Indians were hounded from one place to the next as the trains made the west accessible. Honestly though, the tall-tale format detracted from the historical aspect, leaving me unsure if there was anything real to believe at all.

If you're looking for a western, True Grit and Lonesome Dove are far better reads.

2.5 stars.