Object Dart

Indescribably awful.

The story starts out with a semi-retired former-special-ops guy who’s disaffected and has lost his love for his nation because the regime has changed. He’s given a chance to get back into the action with what is most probably a trap. So, he sets out to some other world somewhere to snatch a female of some species and bring it back to a remarkably Baron Harkonnenesque evil dictator.

OK. So we’re pretty high on the cheese factor already, right? Then, he crash-lands on the planet he’s heading to, surprise surprise, and just happens to have the female wander into the near-crash zone. WTF? Nice concidence.

And naturally she’s up for a shag.

I quit not long after.

Pulp.

Pedestrian. Really seriously pedestrian.

I had high hopes after The January Dancer, but was disappointed and bored.

Sent it back despite only reading to p.193. Life is too short for tedious scifi.

WTF!! A space opera with a plot, and intrigue!

The January Dancer is a great little novel set around the events following the discovery of an artifact, the Dancer, by a ship captain named January. Largely taking the form of a narrative by a scarred man to a harpist (in a pub), the story weaves its way across one of the spiral arms.

Perhaps what I liked best is that Flynn has a huge back-story woven into the narrative, but it’s subtly written and doesn’t occupy the reader’s attention. Instead, it unfolds gracefully, and draws you in. Very nice indeed, and combined with the believable and likeable characters makes for a compelling read.

This book is very highly recommended, and could be one of the best reads of last year.

Basically a murder-mystery-cum-space-opera.

And… that’s about it. To Hold Infinity was a good read, and 1998 was relatively early for the idea, but humans-enhanced-virtual-minds is well-covered ground and Meaney hasn’t really taken this one anywhere particularly new or interesting.

Read it on a holiday  nice and lite.

Interesting but ultimately disappointing.

My first impression was bad (a glossary… the next worse thing is a freaking map), but it livened up once I got used the author’s rhythmn. One character in particular kept in interested (Horvil, happy-go-lucky geek, a laugh a minute), while others where a tiny bit one-dimensional.

But, the story just fails to deliver. Plots fall over, a major plot is obviously a device left for the sequel, and the entire book reads as if the author simply ran out of space (or the editor said “enough!” and it was all bumped into another novel).

Single word review – Average.

This was, quite simply, the most fun I’ve had reading scifi in a fair old while.

Brasyl is a tale in three parts, set in three different time periods, in… Brazil (surprise surprise).

Something I read in the Guardian awhile back was a review of a detective novel that stated, categorically, that we need a little more escapism in our reading. The idea being that we can take something of a metaphorical holiday while we take our metaphorical holiday in print. Brasyl fulfils that by immersing the reader in a fictional Sao Paulo, the deep Amazonian rainforest, and modern Rio De Janerio.

And that’s all I’m saying. This book as a few spinners bounced at you, just to keep you on your toes, but is generally straight down the line. But in mentioning the spinners, they aren’t enough to put you off the reading altogether, unlike another scifi read recently finished, 2012, the most god-awful book imaginable.

The trouble with 2012 was that it took everyday Judeo-Christian mythology, mixed it up with every freaking X-Files cliché you can imagine, threw in an alarming amount of rape-fetishism, and spewed it out, half-digested, into print. The mythology of Brasyl is plainly there to see, but it sits just to the side of your vision, a reminder.

Awesome.

My initial impulse after reading a few dozen pages was to put this one back on the shelf, and almost entirely because it is written in a style that can only be described as ‘juvenile’. The book feels very much like it was written for young teens, and involves pirates. What more can you say that that?

The concept of Sun of Suns is pretty interesting though. The universe is “Virga” is in effect a hollow earth, a massive balloon filled with air and elements out in space somewhere. Within this terrarium live a number of nations all competing for space and light, the latter provided by artificial “suns”.

And I found the concept pretty interesting, so stuck with it.

Virga is full of what amount to fan-propelled wooden men-of-war, operating in zero-g, and fighting it out with rockets!

I put aside my doubts, embraced the simplicity of the whole thing, and knocked if off in a couple of nights.

Well, I think the romance of New Crobuzon is broken for me. I was suspicious that Mieville jumped the shark on the concept as early as The Scar, and Iron Council confirmed it for me. Perhaps, had Mieville stuck to his knitting on the wonder that was the urban fantasy of Perdido Street Station he might have kept my attention, but the last two books I’ve read have been somewhat in the conventional fantasy mould, with a little steampunk thrown in there to bring them up to date.

So, not so great.

The one redeeming feature of Iron Council is the consistent use of golems by one character, in increasingly imaginative ways. I’m used to the concept of golems, but see them as a creature made of a specific matter. For instance, earth golem, iron golem, clay golem etc. But Mieville really pushes out the imaginative boundaries of this one fantasy creature in some pretty amazing ways. I’m almost tempted to issue a few spoilers in order to mention them…

As I say, the problem with Iron Council is that Mieville loses the awesomely dark, Babylonian mood of Perdido Street Station in favour of a more conventional travel-quest-fantasy. A frankly, these are boring. While there was enough action set in New Crobuzon for me to realise the city is a fantasization of London (one set of characters called Quillers, all of whom are dressed in suits and Bowlers…), the dark underbelly that makes the best urban fantasy was laid open too wide, and undermined the dramatic tension.

Likewise the premise of the iron council itself. The ‘iron council’ is a anarchist utopia Mieville introduces that is supposed to serve as some sort of counterpoint to the authoritarian-liberalism of New Crobuzon (and yes, the oxymoron is deliberate). And while I can see the vision, it’s a well-hashed idea leading all the way back to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Perhaps what Mieville is doing is exploring the increasing surveillance and control he is experiencing in a liberal demomcracy like British London.

My recommendation is: maybe as a holiday read. It is a whopping 500 pages after all.

I wasn’t sure about this bit of science fiction when I first started it, having read a tweet that it “was weird”, but once I was a few pages in and starting to get Marusek’s style it became a good fun read.

Counting Heads is set on a future Earth, one that is strangely – utopian, distopian, post-apocalyptic, and about to colonise space all in the same breath. And what I found interesting is that Marusek introduces all these elements breathlessly, while also writing in undertones of social hierarchy and exploitation (affluent immortals and ‘the rest’ of humanity? how will different social cultures c0-exist in a highly technology-dependent world?), a subtle treatise on the prejudice and the nature of humanity (are clones like everyone else? ), the ultimate surveillance society, and the rights of AI.

Add to this mix a ubiquitous nanotechnology, unseen but remarked upon dangers, and unseen political manipulation driving the action? A relatively rich novel. I’m already looking foward to the next book in the series.