Love a bit of righteous anger from the true north. It’s a little too short to have proper impact but it’s very cool and has some extremely vivid imageLove a bit of righteous anger from the true north. It’s a little too short to have proper impact but it’s very cool and has some extremely vivid imagery re: giant war machines and psychological torture. ...more
Started and finished over the course of a slow work day, this was an absolute riot, a kind of negative image of This Is How You Lose The Time War.
I’mStarted and finished over the course of a slow work day, this was an absolute riot, a kind of negative image of This Is How You Lose The Time War.
I’m not used to seeing first person from Tchaikovsky, and it took a few pages to adjust, but there’s a scene right after our narrator has charmingly introduced us to his lovely little homestead at the end of time and his amiable pet Miffly (who has been trained to expect food at the ring of a bell…) that was such a devious little jolt that I almost laughed out loud and forgot any qualms I may have had.
Our hero is jaded, lonely, determined, perhaps a little mad. He refuses to compromise on his one moral: humans will not invent time travel again. We ruined it for everyone and now nobody gets to play. In effortless Tchaikovsky fashion we learn about the awful history of the causality wars and how humanity destroyed everything simply because nobody wanted to admit they were wrong.
Our narrator is funny and wry and only a little bit cold-blooded. He can enjoy a debauch as well as the next fellow, only the next fellow for him could be Byron, Archimedes, Achilles, Napoleon, or Osiris. There are some intensely funny scenes where he fucks with history because none of it matters: he teaches songs from Les Miserables to the 1834 Parisian revolutionaries and ends up changing the outcome of the revolution. He pits all the worst versions of the worst people from history against each other (accidentally, while trying to kill the woman he’s destined to fall in love with) and watches as two Stalins wrestle each other to the death and Hitler gets eaten by his pet allosaurus. He drops in on Agatha Christie at the moment she’s starting a new book and talks at her so that she gets a different set of inspiration every time.
It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s all tinged with an undercurrent of despair and hopelessness and hope, like all Tchaikovsky is.
I breezed through it and had an absolute blast. ...more
Impossible not to give this five stars. The ability of the man to combine limitless scientific facts and speculations with edge-of-your-seat excitemenImpossible not to give this five stars. The ability of the man to combine limitless scientific facts and speculations with edge-of-your-seat excitement and looming dread is astonishing.
The first two thirds of the book are just humanity circling the drain, one terrible thing after another, and the exploration of such indescribable despair is sort of like being on the other side of The Last Policeman's world.
The end of that sequence, with its revelation about the book's title, absolutely blew my mind. It's not like it was a secret, I suppose, and yet I never saw it coming even for a moment. My god, the man can write!
In contrast the final third, five thousand years later, was fascinating but a little bit of a letdown. A bit too speculative, a bit too full of description to bring us up to speed on how five thousand years of space living had influenced technology and humanity. Still unforgettable, but I don't think Stephenson's strong point is in imagining the sociological future so much as the technological one, and when you're talking about five thousand years of evolution, that shows a little too starkly....more
One of the good ones! Shades of Blade Runner and shockingly prescient in this era of sudden onset AI art raising questions of what our future as creatOne of the good ones! Shades of Blade Runner and shockingly prescient in this era of sudden onset AI art raising questions of what our future as creators and consumers and humans will look like.
Connie Willis writes stories about how technology impacts people, so it's never really mattered how realistic her technology has been. That being said, this one with its instantly accessible movies on fibre optic feeds was surprisingly accurate.
Typical Willis mayhem here, people running around trying to solve problems without really understanding them, throwing themselves headlong into situations and dealing with the fallout. The premise - that our heroes love the movies, but have to settle for working in a movie industry that no longer has any interest in making new ones - is charming, tragedy and comedy and farce all wrapped up together. The concept of a guy sitting at his computer, erasing all the alcohol from every movie in a back-catalogue is very funny, but unsettlingly close to the bone. There's genuine sadness in Alis wanting to dance in the movies and knowing that will never happen.
The ebook I read was only 125 pages, and that felt like the perfect novella length for this setting that largely moved between a glittering neon faux Hollywood downtown, several drunken parties, and various nebulous bedrooms and classrooms and subway stations. Just enough time to feel for these people and not enough time to ask too many questions about the premise. ...more
Read in the wake of my delight with Leviathan Wakes and The Expanse, trying to find other noir and detective voices in scifi settings.
Palace is so yoRead in the wake of my delight with Leviathan Wakes and The Expanse, trying to find other noir and detective voices in scifi settings.
Palace is so young and naive and intent on doing the right thing, and yet he so rarely gets anything right. In a different world he'd be a rookie, his colleagues ribbing him and not letting him run away with his fantasies or get sidetracked by investigative red herrings, but in this world he's only got his textbooks and his drive to solve the case.
There's a point for him where he actually does start getting things right: the leap from being led to doing the leading, where he stops thinking of his textbooks and the way an investigation is supposed to go, and he starts following the case the way it wants to be followed. His tragedy, everyone's tragedy in this world, is that he won't get to keep learning and growing and getting better.
A fascinating world, on the verge of being horrifying but still just teetering on the edge of despair. ...more
A pleasant surprise to discover that this is another novel set in the slightly differing multiverse of Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. I started readiA pleasant surprise to discover that this is another novel set in the slightly differing multiverse of Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. I started reading in bed on Saturday morning and finished two hours later. I'm pleased she didn't overthink her time travel, and it worked itself out neatly in the way all good time travel stories should: a circle. ...more
Such a disturbing and unsettling little piece of fiction. Tchaikovsky manages to keep up the space horror feel and tension, and despite being someone Such a disturbing and unsettling little piece of fiction. Tchaikovsky manages to keep up the space horror feel and tension, and despite being someone who routinely publishes 500+ page books, he has a great sense of how to pace and tell story in such a short form. I watched Pandorum straight after this to continue the vibe. ...more
I've wanted to read this since I read Grant's mermaid horror books - she has such a way of creating a monster-horror movie feel in words. When I workeI've wanted to read this since I read Grant's mermaid horror books - she has such a way of creating a monster-horror movie feel in words. When I worked in second hand bookstores this book was everywhere, you couldn't get rid of it, it was ubiquitous. And in the past few years is has clearly dropped out of circulation, replaced by endless copies of Twilight and 50 shades. Finding it in a new printing at Readings bookshop in Melbourne was a treat!
I had fun with this one, and it's never going to stop being amusing to me that in an alt-future novel set in a viral zombie apocalypse during a presidential campaign, the prediction that has aged the worst is the journalistic integrity of online news media. Reading books in 2021 is a trip!
A shade too much Seanan McGuire urban fantasy immediacy to it for me to have enjoyed it as much as the mermaid books that came later, but still a good ride. ...more
This is just the kind of Michael Crichton, adventure-disaster movie, sink-your-teeth-in scifi story I love. Comparisons with the Long Earth might be jThis is just the kind of Michael Crichton, adventure-disaster movie, sink-your-teeth-in scifi story I love. Comparisons with the Long Earth might be justified, but to me this is more like a kind of fun X-Files/Star Trek/Warren Ellis mashup where the characters and the plot balance each other out, neither overwhelming the other, both in service of furthering the kind of fascinating what-if scenario that Adrian Tchaikovsky is so good at.
Possibly it's a bit too long, and although I do get the reasons for including the interludes from the academic-style text of alternate earths and their evolutionary trajectory, I think there were a few too many and they were usually frustrating to encounter. They slowed down the pace of an otherwise very enjoyable story.
Mainly, I am removing a star for the five+ times a character chided themselves for being 'so British', because I have never read anything that made me question the author's nationality more. I spent most of this book assuming Tchaikovsky was American because this was so weird that I figured he just couldn't help himself. The fact that more than one character does this more than once is incredibly bizarre, and jarred me out of the story every time. Did an American editor insist on this being repeatedly inserted or something?...more
I can't help but love Connie Willis's blatant tropes: war on the home front, irritating romance connections, and constant aggravated misunderstandingsI can't help but love Connie Willis's blatant tropes: war on the home front, irritating romance connections, and constant aggravated misunderstandings. An alternate future from 1989 with a lot less cringe than you'd expect, a wartime spy thriller with a scifi twist, and a plucky heroine who is really too young to be involved but if she was any older the evacuee plot wouldn't have worked, and Connie Willis loves her some evacuees. Good fun and short enough not to pall. ...more
Like so much of Bendis, I sank into this really quickly and I'd like to keep going, thank you. A cool exploration of the opportunities we might have mLike so much of Bendis, I sank into this really quickly and I'd like to keep going, thank you. A cool exploration of the opportunities we might have missed, politically and socially. ...more
I like the way this is told as an account of the alternate final days of the war, notes on battles and deaths as points in a historical story. I thinkI like the way this is told as an account of the alternate final days of the war, notes on battles and deaths as points in a historical story. I think the gore factor is frankly silly. ...more
Not awful. A lot of fun post-disaster city stuff, some great gory monsters, only a little too ham on the 'I gotta find my brother' storyline. Would reNot awful. A lot of fun post-disaster city stuff, some great gory monsters, only a little too ham on the 'I gotta find my brother' storyline. Would read more....more
250 pages into this book, if you'd told me that before the end our heroes end up as espionage agents in space, a couple of weeks after being dramatica250 pages into this book, if you'd told me that before the end our heroes end up as espionage agents in space, a couple of weeks after being dramatically helicopter evacuated from an exploding volcano, a couple of weeks after having crossed the North Pole on foot, I would have thought you'd gotten your books confused.
Extremely slow going until about the 250 page mark, and only really got moving at about 300, but for some reason I stuck with it - it's Stephenson, after all, there must be a point to all this philosopher-physics, right?
Some few parts of this were interesting to read: Gibson's milieu is clearly the everyday people of cyberpunk, and that can be fun. Some of the near-fuSome few parts of this were interesting to read: Gibson's milieu is clearly the everyday people of cyberpunk, and that can be fun. Some of the near-future stuff is interesting speculation, and some is enjoyably outdated now.
But I have rarely met a book that was so bad at knowing where to start. We begin at the very beginning, it seems, with one character about to lose his job and another in the vicinity of stealing some sunglasses. It takes half the novel for these two stories to coincide, and it really isn't clear why. Action is minimal and sluggish, motivation is meagre, and most of the time this felt like a bit of a chore. ...more
This series just keeps getting better. Mycroft Canner, the world's most unreliable narrator, begins to disintegrate (except, as we hear later, MycroftThis series just keeps getting better. Mycroft Canner, the world's most unreliable narrator, begins to disintegrate (except, as we hear later, Mycroft was like this all along and the previous two books were edited for clarity by the ubiquitous 9A). It becomes increasingly apparently that, although they hold a special place in the lives of all the dignitaries in this story, Mycroft is not sane, and nor do any of them mistake it.
(I keep going to use 'him' and 'he' for Mycroft, but I tried to pay attention in this one and I'm less sure the more I think about it)
There is so little description in this book, despite its density. The overwhelming majority of words are given over to thought, speech, philosophy, speculation, history, false memory, to diverting the reader's attention away from one thing and towards another. We know where we are because people get into and out of cars, and sometimes they enter spaces that require a little context, but not for Ada Palmer the flowery descriptive paragraphs that could characterise such a work of futurism. All her focus is on how to tell this story of someone telling a story, while that someone is also experiencing a segment of the story some weeks further on. It becomes almost metafictional.
Comparisons to Neal Stephenson on the covers here are fairly accurate: while I was reading this one I was also thinking of Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters series, not because they're thematically similar, but more because they share a depth and breadth of vision and scope and unashamed glee in the full immersion into their worlds. And scenes set in Antarctica also had me thinking about Aurorarama, for the same reason. Sometimes there are authors who cannot really be classified, and Palmer headily falls into that category. This is phenomenal stuff, I want to go back and read it all again immediately....more
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