This and the other prison novel he wrote have both just depressed me too much to finish them. There was so little light at the end of this tunnel I juThis and the other prison novel he wrote have both just depressed me too much to finish them. There was so little light at the end of this tunnel I just couldn't continue on....more
Very different to Dogs of War, complex and engaging in completely distinct ways. Less heart-tugging, much grimmer and more horrifying.
A generation aftVery different to Dogs of War, complex and engaging in completely distinct ways. Less heart-tugging, much grimmer and more horrifying.
A generation after Rex and Honey and Bees and Dragon changed the world, Bioforms are uneasily part of everyday life, but everyday life includes a genuinely terrifying populist figure barrelling his way through politics and ethics with a singular goal: control. Of Bioforms, of people, of Earth, of Mars. Tchaikovsky has always been more of a biological sci-fi author than a technological one, and it's fascinating to see him pick up these cyberpunk threads and explore their potential in the physical realm as much as the mental and digital.
Jimmy, a Martian grunt who has been biomodded to be able to live without a suit in the thin terraforming Martian atmosphere, lives in a Johnny Mnemonic society where everyone has a vast amount of data storage in their headware and can rent it out to whoever to earn money for whatever passes for entertainment in this closed loop environment. Everyone in this capitalist worker's utopia has been kitted out the same, and told that it's because their entire network is run as cloud computing: no central servers, everyone contributing their small part towards ensuring that a clever, angry, completely inhuman entity like Bees can't shut down hugely necessary systems ever again. Distributed computing to battle distributed intelligence, a classic Tchaikovsky duality.
And yet, even with everything being run across the cloud of workers, there's still so much headspace left. What could its purpose possibly be? Combined with Honey's disbelief that the company ever intended to actually keep their promise of reversing the biomods, my guess was something like a Get Out situation: our workers became the bodies, but the brains would be taken over by the uploaded elites. And perhaps that might have been a promise made by the terrifying virus masquerading as human politician Thompson (or at least by his staff on his behalf), another chink in the armour of bioform freedom, a test case on a lawless planet that has no jurisdiction.
Thompson as virus, an inhuman monster dwelling in the skin of a human and feeding its insatiable desire to be obeyed and followed and copied, is another fascinating idea, one I think might have been explored better or more fully if the shape of these books didn't lean more towards relatively short and neatly resolved sci-fi action.
Given the space of something like Children of Time, I think Tchaikovsky could have really delved into his concepts of virus as biology/virus as digital and how both of those concepts related to populism in politics and human augmentation. As it is, there wasn't time, and Thompson made for such an unpleasant villain that it almost reached the point of being too much: things had to draw to a close right at the point where further exploration was warranted.
Nonetheless, I reached the finale and was almost moved to tears again at how incredibly important these characters had become. Clever old Honey, reluctantly proud Jimmy, embattled secretive HumOS, strange distant Bees, classic Western sheriff Rufus, Murder and Marmalade and weasels and dogs and cats and lizards, all the people and bioforms worn down by years of argument and legal battles and insincere politics. Drawing it to a satisfying conclusion was necessary, but as we all know from existing in the world as it currently is, there is no satisfying conclusion to be had to these agonisingly recognisable problems....more
Nobody does casual conversation better than Bendis. He can capture the rhythm and flow of a couple of tired traumatised detectives better than anyone Nobody does casual conversation better than Bendis. He can capture the rhythm and flow of a couple of tired traumatised detectives better than anyone I’ve come across in crime comics. Funny and dark and impactful....more
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
At first I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this: too much cultural observation, too much careful laying out of poetry and its place in Empire. But allAt first I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this: too much cultural observation, too much careful laying out of poetry and its place in Empire. But all of a sudden I was halfway through, engrossed in the immediacy of the expanding intricacy of plots and intrigues, swept up in story that objectively happened over a very short space of time and yet easily filled a whole novel and captured my attention.
I was reminded frequently of Ada Palmer’s Too Like The Lightning: an incredibly complex, fully realised futuristic world strongly grounded in ancient principles, complete with AI algorithms running public transport to suspicious ends. Enjoyed this one a lot, I’ll definitely read the next one. ...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
Possibly the most emotionally rounded Murderbot book yet. SecUnit is older, wiser, and more traumatised than ever, but it also understands itself morePossibly the most emotionally rounded Murderbot book yet. SecUnit is older, wiser, and more traumatised than ever, but it also understands itself more than it ever has, too. A situation like [redacted] might have wiped it out in earlier times, or sent it on an unstoppable spiral of anger and self loathing. But now it has friends, colleagues, associates: humans and bots and constructs who like it, respect it, and want to help it.
More than ever I note that these books are violently anti-capitalism, anti-slavery, anti-oppression. The work that ART and its crew and the Preservation team are doing is in direct, secret opposition to mightily powerful corporations who could threaten everything they value, but they are doing it together, better, and with help from constructs and bot intelligence that gives them a true edge over corporate greed and thoughtlessness.
So much fun to spend more time inside the head of the world's most neurodivergent construct!...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
Probably the hardest to get through of all the Expanse books I've read so far. There was something uncompelling about the structure here, something inProbably the hardest to get through of all the Expanse books I've read so far. There was something uncompelling about the structure here, something in the meandering despair of a post-terrorist attack that hit worse than any natural disaster, where we jump between survivors, scrambling politicians, angry rebels, uncertain freelancers, and none of it has a driving force.
I found the concept fascinating, I enjoyed Michio's family story and her consistent inconsistency, I thought Filip's thread was irritating and yet made a lot of sense for the story. But I think the execution leaves something to be desired, and it only really picked up in the final quarter where Naomi's background obsession with the disappearing ships finally pays off and we get a transcendent finale. And as always, Anna and Miller's old opposite viewpoints will get to the heart of it, and me: maybe the stars will be better off with us. ...more
Complex, interesting, emotional, not what I thought it was at all.
I thought it was going to be a fun kind of X-Filesy government alien coverup adventComplex, interesting, emotional, not what I thought it was at all.
I thought it was going to be a fun kind of X-Filesy government alien coverup adventure. But instead it was a story of a deepening relationship between two very different beings who had nothing in common except the ability to talk to one another.
Occasionally I got frustrated: I think it was certainly too long but I can't point to an easy place or section that could have used some trimming - rather maybe that there could have been less ruminating overall from Cora, a thing that I get very tired of in novels and that never really helps to illustrate the point that authors think it does.
The narrative was satisfying and complex, and what had originally been the motivation - Cora's Wikileaks father and his self-righteous family abandonment - turned out to be merely window dressing, a framing story for the much more interesting illustration of First Contact where the contacters form a deep and interesting bond. ...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
Something about Adrian Tchaikovsky's brain just gels so well with what I love to read. His ideas always ring so true to me, and he always manages to sSomething about Adrian Tchaikovsky's brain just gels so well with what I love to read. His ideas always ring so true to me, and he always manages to set up a beautiful, poignant, often tragic story that makes emotional sense as well as scientific and logical sense.
This novella brings together two characters on opposite sides of a planetary colonisation strategy, in much the same setup as Children of Time. One is a princess in a fully functioning medieval world, the other an anthropologist who knows that her entire world grew from an Earth colony thousands of years previously, a fact that has become a creation myth for Lynesse's people. To her, the anthropologist in his dormant mountaintop habitat is a sorcerer who sleeps for centuries and went to war with her great-grandmother. To him, she is a reminder of all the ways he and his society have failed in their scientific duty. Classic Tchaikovsky dualism - both sides are right, and neither can ever fully understand the other.
A tale about depression, failure, disappointment, despair, and destiny that somehow achieves hopefulness, satisfaction and joy in a very small page count. I am once again vindicated in my decision to buy an Adrian Tchaiovsky book every time I enter a bookstore that has any I haven't read....more
The best book since the first one, which is exactly how I felt about the TV season as well. The first time we really get to hear Naomi's voice, the fiThe best book since the first one, which is exactly how I felt about the TV season as well. The first time we really get to hear Naomi's voice, the first time all four of the Rocinante crew are the only points of view in any Expanse book, the first time they're all split up for the duration, and somehow the strongest in terms of characterisation of all of them.
My favourite parts, as always, hark back to Miller - Holden goes investigating, Alex pilots the Razorback, every now and then a little phrase pops up (doors and corners, can't take the Razorback, gone and gone and gone) that viscerally recalls the imagery of those early protomolecule days. I enjoy those threads being woven through now that even the construct/ghost of Miller is gone, ensuring that even though the world has changed dramatically between Leviathan Wakes and Nemesis Games, there are still narrative hints at the idea of where it all began....more
I really disliked the season of the TV show that was based on this book: it felt like a strange departure from the frenetic pace of the previous ones,I really disliked the season of the TV show that was based on this book: it felt like a strange departure from the frenetic pace of the previous ones, filled with annoying characters and bad decisions and opaque motivations.
A lot of those things also exist in the book, but here they're contextualised, given humanity and feeling and depth. Once again there are four viewpoints, which can feel like a lot, although the considerable length helps smooth that out. By the end the authors had managed to pull all their threads together into a wildly tense denouement and the change of viewpoints was agonising in where it chose to pause.
Havelock was a very interesting character; his understanding of his own propensity to mirror the behaviours of his peers didn't stop him from continuing to do it even when his peer was a complete psychopath whom Miller/not-Miller was absolutely spot-on about from the start.
And speaking of not-Miller, how did they manage to make even that half-real creature's death feel like the real man's final moments? A few gentle callbacks were all it took to have me on the verge of tears again. The Miller effect is strong!
I'm intrigued about the changing direction of the Expanse series, where the ring has opened thousands of new worlds to humanity. This fourth book/first of a new trilogy was a good turning point. What comes next will be fascinating. ...more
This book was such a rollercoaster! I started out in this mindset: I think the name is so silly, but the multiple pull quotes comparing it to Neal SteThis book was such a rollercoaster! I started out in this mindset: I think the name is so silly, but the multiple pull quotes comparing it to Neal Stephenson and that NYT quote calling it 'a standalone novel with material enough for six' captured me. The twin ideas of a) someone being able to reach even half the heights of Stephenson, and b) not holding anything back in terms of creativity were catnip to me.
And the first third or so proved me right. I told several people, look at this book, I really don't like the title but it's unfortunately SO GOOD. Isobel's voice was fantastic, the story truly felt Stephensonesque in its vaulting ambition and spiky humour and understanding of online culture, its revelry in the theories of communication and linguistics and information transferrence. I really loved the way he tackled pronouns, gender and race (ie, head on, matter-of-fact, unequivocal description without making a big point). It was shaping up so well.
And then... it petered off. This book stalled my reading mojo, for want of a better concept. The middle third felt so bogged down in exposition, giant chunks and chapters where one savvy character or another was describing in long, idea-heavy passages the way they approached a multiverse-level problem. It got heavy, in every metaphorical meaning of the word. I stopped reading it much more than a page at a time, and couldn't find anything else that sparked my interest. It took me a month to get through this.
But this afternoon I picked it back up, and I suppose reaching the final third brought action back into the mix, because I started stumbling across phrases and paragraphs that genuinely made me giggle again, just like in the beginning. There's that voice again! Here's a scene where people converse interestingly, and here's one where the action bursts through again. We're over Exposition Hill and charging down into the Valley of the Denouement! The final 100 pages were thrilling, exciting, challenging, a drawing-together of threads and a satisfying if somewhat rushed conclusion to this boggling story. It's almost enough to make me forgive the rest.
Moore's got such talent at writing action and voices, and in the initial stages of this book I was so taken with his method of attacking a novel (ie, like a playwright, completely out of left field and swinging for the fences) that I was comparing it to that other series of wildly exciting and uncategorisable speculative fiction novels, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Also written by a playwright, also in a style that didn't seem to be in conversation with anything else of its time.
But the dire middle lands of this, the mountains of exposition that were heaped upon us, were almost enough to stop me from finishing it. I really wish someone had pared this back, reduced the infodumps (Stephensonesque, perhaps, but somehow without the charm and vision of that master of infodumps), told him how uneven the book felt with all that weight dragging it downwards.
It remains to be seen whether it's the thrilling action, brilliant ideas, and excellent voice that sticks with me, or the heavy weight of the exposition. I'm rating it four stars because when it was good, it was really good, and it deserves a higher rating here. Either way, I'm going to give Moore plenty more chances....more
As interesting for Gibson's introduction as anything else: he was asked to write a screenplay for Alien 3 having never written or even seen a screenplAs interesting for Gibson's introduction as anything else: he was asked to write a screenplay for Alien 3 having never written or even seen a screenplay before. When he handed it in (after the writers' strike of I assume 1988?) and revised it once, he figured that was his on-spec work done. And he only learned later that they'd expected an unusable screenplay with some 'cyberpunk flash' that they could work into new revisions.
End product aside, this method of handling writers fascinates me. Did the producers think the best way to get genuine cyberpunk flash was to just ask Gibson for a script without any further information and let him work his magic? Had they had bad experiences in the past when asking for a specific look and feel to be incorporated? Do inexperienced scriptwriters overdo it if you tell them exactly what you're after? Or were these people just really bad at communicating expectations?
Regardless, this version of the story is, as Gibson says, not really cyberpunk at all. And it's hard to say for sure since it's a script that's been repurposed into a comic, but there's not a lot of Gibson's flair apparent at all. The most recognisable part for me was his attempts to give people realistic speech patterns, only it comes over as intensely confusing here, without the context given to written speech by prose description or actors delivering lines. That, and some weird panel placements and a lot of jumping between scenes with characters who look very similar to one another, made the story quite hard to logically follow at times.
It's a solid Alien story, albeit foreshadowing the 'superior life-forms' direction that things like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant took. It has space communists, which came from the film's treatment pre-Gibson. It has shady megacorp dealings and a sense of the futility of a) opposing Weyland Yutani and b) trying to weaponise the xenomorph. It has Ripley in a coma, also from the treatment. And it has some excellent body horror and new ideas about the xenomorph's transformative abilities. Fun, but more for the insight into 80s Hollywood than anything else....more
I thought this one was going to be three stars, a bit less compelling than the previous two, a bit more unbelievable. I didn't believe in Clarissa/MelI thought this one was going to be three stars, a bit less compelling than the previous two, a bit more unbelievable. I didn't believe in Clarissa/Melba's motivations, her vengeful streak didn't seem to have any real drive beyond 'plot forward'. But probably about halfway through, when everyone was compromised and making decisions under stress and fear, it found its feet again.
The thing that makes Expanse books so good is that they're about the people, and those people are rarely simple. Having someone on a white-hot mission to destroy our hero comes across as simple, and having a politically-parachuted OPA captain who is as one-dimensional as Expanse characters get doesn't help. So until Clarissa started having regrets and questioning her own motives, this story foundered a bit. It barely examined the Rocinante's crew and their experiences, it pulled away from all the world that had come before it, and without anything to anchor us, we're a bit adrift in the world of the Ring along with everyone else.
There are parts that stand out as belonging to the previous books: many people make comments or jokes about Holden's propensity toward broadcasting all his information, and I'd love to see more of the perspective of the guy who says 'we don't ask how high when James fucking Holden says jump'.
And there are parts that stand out as space opera: Anna's wonderment and thrill and terror at the situation they find themselves in, and the link in contrast to Miller's note, the stars are better off without us, with her certainty that humanity will find the stars regardless. She manages to walk the line between frustrating and compelling, and her perspective is wonder to Clarissa's dark despair.
The final quarter of the book is all action, increasing cycles of hope and fear, push and retreat, plans made and ruined and hacked into new ones. It's the reason this is a four star book instead of three; the tension and excitement sustained over that length of storytelling made the wavering at the beginning worth it.
Like any series, taking it outside its original parameters is always a risk, and this is no different. There were points when I lost interest and felt it had lost its momentum, but bringing it back to the Roci and the potential of the future brought it back to centre. ...more
Definitely a middle chapter, the momentum seems to have run out and everyone's getting pissed at each other and nobody is asking why one of their frieDefinitely a middle chapter, the momentum seems to have run out and everyone's getting pissed at each other and nobody is asking why one of their friends can see a giant robot battle? Also older-Tiffany has the same issue that older-Erin had, a hefty case of 'my life is ruined but it felt wrong anyway so this is fine'. Doesn't track very well for me. I guess it works if you think the 14 year old version of yourself was more pure and clearsighted than you at 30. But who thinks that?...more
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