Tag: scifi

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book reading reviews

All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka

As is often the way with me, I got this book because of a podcast. Specifically Pop Culture Happy Hour were reviewing Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt movie this got made into, and one of the contributors – Glen Weldon I believe – said that it was worth reading this book as it was short and he implied it had a different ending.

So I bought the book, read a few chapters, set it aside and didn’t pick it up again until after I’d seen the movie – which was last week. I enjoyed the movie and so decided to read the book, and did.

A couple of decades or so into a global war with an invading alien race called the “Mimics”* Keiji Kiriya is a newish recruit in the United Defence Force (UDF). He’s a “jacket jockey” which is an infantry soldier in a powered exo-skeleton suit called, you guessed it, a jacket. We see him go through his day from waking up, through training, preparing for battle, fighting and subsequently dying in what seems to be a futile attempt to hold the Mimics back on the coastline of Japan. Did I say dying? Did I just give away a spoiler? Not really, as this is the premise of the book and film – we discover very early on that something is different about Kiriya, after that first death on the battle field he keeps going back, re-living the day over and over. So it’s a kind of Groundhog Day with aliens and war. We follow Kiriya as he tries to work out what’s going on, how to get out of the time loop, how to defeat the Mimics and what all this has to do with the near-mythic UDF soldier who crosses his path, Rita Vrataski, the so-called “Full Metal Bitch”.

OK. So first off I can say that both the movie and the book are fun and are different enough that if you’ve experienced only one (or neither) then it’s definitely checking out the other (or both). That said this is not a review of the movie, and I won’t be listing the differences between the two.

All You Need is Kill
 is a fun, pacy, quick read. It has a certain tone to the language which is almost noirish in its grimy, toughness that I liked. It suited the story. It’s not deep but we skid along on the surface so quickly that that doesn’t matter. The time loop business was not over-used – that is to say, it didn’t become overly convoluted in a way that made my brain hurt (yes Primer I’m looking at you!) but served the purpose of the story. It’s particularly effective that what we end up with is a battle-hardened, war-weary veteran in the body of what the rest of the world sees as a raw recruit.

Like a lot of SciFi at this level the logic of it all doesn’t bear too close a scrutiny but that’s not what you’re interested in. And if you are this is probably not the book for you. If you want a fun little romp with aliens and fighting and so on then it may be.

I’d have like to have seen a slightly more nuanced view of women in this book, which you could argue is misogynistic. I think it’s mostly not but in a teenage boy’s naive, “it can’t be sexist if the women are kick-ass fighters too” kinda way. Then again nuance of any sort isn’t really that much in evidence here.

7/10 – all you need is a better title.

(*not really sure what they’re mimicking)

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book reading reviews

Lot Beta – Tom Merritt

I came across this book because Tom Merritt is one of the presenters of the Sword and Laser podcast to which I subscribe. More specifically I also follow the S&L group on Goodreads and it was there he posted a link to a book trailer video. I followed the link, was curious… and here we are.

The story of Lot Beta is a space opera set in a part of the universe controlled by a vast mining corporation. The hierarchy of the corporation is interesting in that it is, for the most part, hereditary, especially the senior positions. This is supposed to be because of the way the colonization process took place with people leaving behind their home planets on generation ships. I think there’s another reason as well but maybe I’ll come back to that.

Anyway a senior position opens up on “Sat A” by the death of the previous head of this unit*. Normally of course he would be succeeded by his child but this particular COO did not have one. Or did he?

And so begins a tale of a boy with a hidden past who is suddenly thrust into a position of power by a birth right he didn’t even know he had.

He says in the front matter that this was a NaNoWriMo book. I think that this shows, and not necessarily in a bad way. It’s short and has a big central idea but a lot of the avenues it could have taken aren’t expanded on, especially toward the end. Whether that was because the author was “pulling to the finish line” or simply he didn’t want to major on those parts of the book I’m not sure. What I do know is that a lot of the first half of the book is full of corporate politics and bureaucratic wrangling and power plays. Which may appeal to some but I found I was over it relatively quickly. It was well done I think just not really my thing. How our main character uses the vagaries of the supply trade agreements to assert himself over central control was cleverly worked out but for me, not as interesting as some of the later passages about space battles, mining settlement trouble-shooting and dealing with smuggling issues. In other words the action-heavy versus the talky-heavy sections of the plot were not evenly distributed.

At this point it’s probably appropriate to point out something important about the structure of the book. Which is that it’s based on a well-known myth but set in space. The author himself has mentioned this elsewhere on Goodreads but not in the book description so I feel I’d be spoiling to point out exactly which myth it is. I can see how this idea would be the sort of thing one might come up with for NaNoWriMo. It gives you a ready made plot outline to work to. It did make me think at times though, once I realised just how closely to the source he was sticking, whether he would have done certain things if he hadn’t been following this pattern. A couple of the analogues he found were quite clever {spoiler} but then there were sections I think don’t make sense at all unless you realise what it’s based on {spoiler}

It was fairly enjoyable overall. Short and readable.

6/10 – The legend of … in space!

Oh nearly forgot. The title alludes to something in the book which is a set up for a truly awful pun. {spoiler}

*I was never 100% sure whether a “sat” was an artificial satellite like a space station or a natural one like an asteroid. Plus I think there were planets but whether they had a different designation and how they fit into the corporate structure was unclear, or I simply missed it.
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book reading reviews

Among Others – Jo Walton

Among Others is a pick from my currently reading shelf (i.e. it’s one I’d started before and now finally finished.) I originally bought it when a friend from work suggested it a) because he knew I like SciFi/Fantasy and b) because it was Amazon’s deal of the day that day for 99p.

Among Others tells the story of Morwenna Phelps. She’s a twin whose sister died and she herself was injured in a car accident. She loves to read and specifically she reads SciFi/Fantasy which she devours at a scary and intimidating rate (5+ books a week!). Oh and she sees fairies and can do magic.

Which makes it sound more about that than it is. If it’s about anything it’s about books and stories and how they make you see the world a certain way. It’s also about how that can be a refuge. I think the book makes a case for it not being a withdrawal as Mor, as we come to know her, is always really trying “to live” and it’s not that she abandons ‘real life’ in favour of books, it’s that she has expectations of what life should be that come from books and these expectations cause her to reject certain things about ‘real life’ – things she sees as trivial perhaps.

The book is told from her point of view, in fact it comprises her diary for a period from the autumn of 1979 to the end of Feb 1980. This places some of the books she references very specifically in their time.Which is also the right time for when I was growing up and discovering books and SciFi books in particular.

A big question that arose for me was whether or not the magic was real. Did she really see fairies or did she merely think she did? Was her mother really a dangerous witch or simply someone with mental health issues? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the book never steps outside of the point of view of Mor, so that question if it arises for you – and it may not – is left open to interpretation.

I enjoyed this book. It’s very good on her everyday life. She’s been shipped off to an English boarding school and is having trouble fitting in – because she’s Welsh, because she reads, because she neither cares about nor can participate in sport. So the sense of a lonely outsider is well drawn. I did feel that she was somewhat ‘spiky’. I felt I ought to have liked her more, on paper she had a lot of stuff going for her – a tragic back-story,  being the outsider, being picked on, being bookish and smart. But I never quite got over the slight sense that she felt herself better than all these other girls who weren’t into books and SciFi.

Another minor irritation – and it is no more than that – was the book references. There were so many and I’d read a handful, had heard of most but not heard of a few. However I got most of what I needed to know about them from context. Which was fine but it rankled every time she compared her situation to characters I knew of but hadn’t read, or concepts I didn’t know from SciFi novels. (If you’re thinking of reading this for example and you don’t know what a karass is then I’d look it up. She explains toward the end of the book but uses it a lot before that.)

As I said though, I did enjoy it. And if you ever felt yourself out of step with others because of a love of books, and especially SciFi/Fantasy then this might well be the book for you.

7/10 – a book about books and about magic (which may be the same thing)

TBR has gone back up to 253 because having finished one book I’d bought two new ones. Need to be careful about that deal of the day. Currently Reading holding steady at 10 because my next book is not from that list. I feel like I’m doing well but then I remind myself that this time last year I’d read 7 books. However that slowed down considerably. Plus I’m reading with an eye to enjoyment not (purely) book count this year.

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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 1: Ringworld – Larry Niven

Yay! First book of 2012’s Read Every Day (hereafter referred to as RED). In fact I finished this earlier in the week and am a little disappointed that I haven’t written it up yet but still at least it hasn’t been weeks as has been the case in the past.

I can’t remember exactly what made me choose Ringworld as my first book of the year, except that towards the end of 2011 I was already thinking about it and shuffling the list of five or six possibles into an order. I think it was looking at my bookshelf and realising I had bought Ringworld Throne (Ringworld 3 if you like) and never read it and perhaps I’d read the series. In any case I knew I’ve liked it whenever I read it in the past.

I have a lot of the same feelings about it as I do about A World Out of Time so I won’t repeat the High Fidelity reference (see here if you don’t know what I mean).

So, Ringworld is set about 600-700 years in the future. The earth is over-populated compared to now but stable thanks to a world government and its Fertility Board regulations. Space travel is possible and a number of worlds have been colonised and a number of alien races encountered, and warred or traded with. Technology has moved on of course and teleportation has replaced air and surface travel. Thus Louis Wu, the protagonist of this novel, is celebrating his 200th birthday by travelling around the globe moving on just before midnight in each timezone, thereby extending the day, and his traveling birthday party, to nearly 48 hours.

He does this by hopping around using the ‘transfer booths’ and after one particular hop he finds himself not where he intended but in the presence of a Pierson’s Puppeteer – one of a particular race of aliens who apparently abandoned the galaxy on masse a couple of centuries earlier. The alien has a proposition for him. They have discovered the Ringworld – an artificial world made by constructing a ring around a star – and they want to put together a team to investigate it and they want Wu on that team.

The thing about Ringworld, in fact Niven’s writing in general, is that the stories serve as delivery mechanisms for big scientific, speculative ideas. So you don’t get character nuances and investigation of the human condition, but what you do get is an examination of what it would take to build a ringworld, why you would want to and what that implies about you and your technology and what it would be like to live on one. And Niven does provide a plot which gives us a good old romp through such a world. In the first third to half of the book he sets up the scene introducing the members of the team (Wu, another human, the puppeteer and another alien, a Kzin – an eight-foot tall tiger-like creature) and gives us time to absorb the level of sophistication, technology and species differences in so-called Known Space before launching us to the Ringworld itself. That Ringworld seems awesome and vast and an intimidatingly impressive achievement to these people, themselves much more advanced than us, is a clever way to get across just how remarkable this thing would be. (a sort of SciFi version of “When scary things get scared, not good” – a line Xander Harris once uttered in Buffy)

I have a minor irritation with one of the invented elements. It’s not the strange ability of the other human, Teela Brown, which the novel itself flags up as implausible thereby at least recognising the fact. It’s the idea that you could hook up a communications device to a computer and simply by listening to enough spoken language begin to translate it. How exactly would that work. That implies that there’s some inherent meaning in the sounds themselves or the structure and frequency with which they’re used. OK so there would be some, maybe enough to realise when a word was a verb, but ultimately you need context and you need to be able to do the equivalent of pointing at an object and saying the name for it.

Still, if I really knew enough about physics there are probably any number of things that are equally impossible and it doesn’t really hurt the enjoyment of the book for me, which is based on the scope of the story and the ideas it contains. It’s also quite well constructed in the way that a lot of back-story (and more scifi ideas) are included in such a way as to directly affect where the plot is going.

I’d remembered the ending before I got to it even though it’s probably at least 15 years since I last read it but it was still satisfying. There were a few things that I was looking forward to that weren’t in the book and must therefore have been in the sequel and I confused the two.

7/10 – a fun book of big ideas and a bigger world.




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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea – Ursula K. Le Guin (pages 8490-8703)

Some time around the middle of the year I started reading collections of short stories as a break from lengthier books. I’ve still got a few on the go but this is one I both started and finished this year[1].

I’d never read any Le Guin before but was aware of her reputation and had thought about reading one of her more famous novels. However I decided this would be a better way to discover if I liked her style or not.

There’s a range of stories here, all except one in a SciFi or Fantasy vein. A couple are little more than jokes. There’s one that’s a parable about gender roles. The final three – including the one the collection takes its name from – all take place in a connected universe. This irked me slightly whilst reading the first one. I like things to be self-contained. When the world is already alien and you’re having to learn about new technology, races, cultures and planets it seems to annoy me when some of that is not relevant to the current story. However I do acknowledge that this is a quirk of mine and in other contexts I don’t expect stories stripped down to just the essential for the current narrative.

I enjoyed these stories although it seems my favourites were the ones, according to the introduction that Le Guin was least happy with herself, or saw as less substantial. In particular the parable one, The Rock that Changed Things, she felt was a little too on the nose and preachy. I also enjoyed the jokes. The others contained things that were a little strange. Sometimes strange and beautiful, sometimes just odd.

She’s clearly a gifted writer but I don’t think I’ll go back to her for a while.

6/10 – Probably most enjoyable if you’re already a fan.

[1]Which leads to a dilemma about whether I ‘count’ the others if I finish them next year.
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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages, A World Out of Time – Larry Niven (pages 2296-2551)

A World Out of Time by Larry Niven

It’s going to be hard to separate a real review from a personal, autobiographical account of this book. I’ll probably not try.

This is, uniquely since I started 25 books much less 6000 pages, a re-read. I felt I needed something familiar, something I knew I’d enjoy.

There’s a section in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity where he talks about listening to the Beatles because it’s music that he first heard as a child and it isn’t (for him) associated with love, loss and chasing girls, it’s associated with a more innocent, less complicated time and as such it’s comforting.

A World Out of Time is a little like that for me. I didn’t first read it when I was a child. In fact I was 22. Although…

OK. Let’s go back to when I was a child – 11 or 12 – and first discovered book shops. I knew I loved to read but faced with a choice, my own choice, of what to read I was a little stumped. So I went with what I knew. I knew I liked Dr Who so I figured that meant I liked SciFi so I went to the SciFi section. I’d already devoured HG Wells and some other classics so I wanted something a bit more up to date. What I eventually chose was a book of short stories by Larry Niven. I must have enjoyed them because over the next several years I read most of his “Known Space” books including the Ringworld ones.

Anyway one of the stories was called “Rammer” and was the story of a man awakened from frozen sleep to discover he’s being trained to be a spaceship pilot. A World Out of Time’s first chapter is a slightly modified version of this story.

What I like about this book is its ideas. A lot of science (which may well have been superceded since it was written). It has a huge scope – the main character travels to the centre of the galaxy and back and his story spans 3,000,000 years (though his personal timeline doesn’t due to relativistic time effects). There’s discussion of how in this future the solar system was adapted by moving planets around. Red Dwarf played this for laughs but here it’s done seriously with what looks like a plausible stab at the science needed.

It’s also a rolicking good story. The earlier part of the book is about Corbell’s exploration of the galactic hub and his return to what he believes is earth. The later part is almost one long chase scene. Certainly I found (then and now) that the pace keeps you interested.

The characterisation isn’t much to write home about. Emotionally it’s a little cold I guess. Corbell and the other few characters act mostly in ways dictated by logic. And the logic is applied to these huge events such as what will happen if/when the earth is moved again. But I can forgive it that. I’m not looking for insight into the human condition here. What I get is a good story, interesting scenery and big ideas.

Also – maybe this is not entirely irrelevant – the plot of the later part of the book concerns the hunt for immortality. The scientific secret of which has been found but lost.

I can’t necessarily recommend this unless you have the same set of idiosyncratic tastes as me, but it is a guilty pleasure.

7/10 – good old fashioned ‘hard’ scifi. Full of ideas.

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25 books reading reviews

25 Books, Book 8, Hothouse – Brian W. Aldiss

This was another audio-book, or in fact an abridged audio version as recorded from Radio 7. I wasn’t going to do this again but then I got behind and well I did listen to it all the way through.

Hothouse is weird. It’s SciFi, and it’s probably the kind of thing a younger me would have loved. It’s set on earth in the far future when the world is no longer spinning and entire continents are cover in vegetation. And the vegetation is huge, sometime mobile, occasionally carnivourous and well, a bit weird. In the world we follow a group of humans who live in a simple tribal culture. Their main focus is to stay alive “in the green” where there are so many forms of plant (and a few insect) life that want to kill them.

If you’re sensing a downbeat tone to this review you’d be right. I actually started out enjoying Hothouse but in the end the same thing that grabbed my attention wore it thin – it’s an alien world with so few reference points that everything is strange. Not only that but the characters are simplistic, so without anyone to really care about, once you get bored with the novelty of how this plant-filled planet works that’s not a lot else to grab you.

5/10 – inventive but lacking real heart.

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reviews

Battlestar Galactica

I’ve just watched the finale of Battlestar Galactica, and whilst I’m probably not up to a proper review I did want to say something about it.

Earlier in the year I bought a box set with the mini-series and seasons 1-3 in and worked my way through it in a matter of weeks. I then started on season 4 – courtesy of my internet friends – but had had the final 3 or 4 episodes sitting on my harddrive for the last few months. I think part of me didn’t want to watch the end, and part of me had run out of patience with the increasingly convoluted plot and depressing storylines of season 4.

Anyway yesterday I finished all but the finale and today I watched that.

What a let-down. Not because I expected cast-iron consistency or wanted all those outstanding questions answered (“because of God’s plan” seemed to be the one-size-fits-all one anyway) but because I wanted something a bit more uplifting. Everyone seems to end up either dead or alone, or at the very least facing a life of hard work as a subsistence farmer with only their SO as company.

I’ll admit it’s been a tough weekend personally so I may be projecting my need for a happy ending but I found that, at best, a little flat.

One of my favourite Joss Whedon quotes comes from a commentary track where he’s discussing the liberties they took with consistency and reality etc and he says

“Some shows, X-Files for example, very much into the realism, the science behind whatever the horror is, explaining it, really justifying it in the world. We are so much more about the emotion resulting from
this. Not why there might actually be vampires, but how you might actually feel in high school if you had to fight them.”

BSG at its best let you experience what it would feel like to be a small band of refugees on the run from an enemy trying to wipe you out. All the technical stuff it always felt like it was grounded in how people relate to modern-day technology. So it felt real.

This ending didn’t feel real. Because I think that whilst there would be some spreading out if 38,000 people had a whole planet to share, I think there would be large groups wanting to stay close.

And despite the beauty of the African plains or whereever they were supposed to be, I reckon they’d never be so foolish as to throw away all their existing technology. “Never underestimate the desire for a clean slate,” says Adama. “Never underestimate a writer’s willingness to override the logical for the poetic, ” say I.

Still the series as a whole was excellent.

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reviews

Fringe

I watched the two hour pilot to the new JJ Abrams produced show, Fringe, the other day so here’s a quick review.

I told M that this was coming up and asked her if she was interested (she’s a huge Lost fan). In trying to describe the show based on the brief bit of blurb I’d read, I think I made it sound like a version of Heroes. When I tried to correct that impression after reading more, I told her it sounded a bit like X-Files (I knew she’d liked X-Files when it was on). She still wasn’t feeling any excitement about it. In the end she explained:

“Looking back I think a lot of the appeal of X-Files was David Duchovny.”

which is fair enough. But now having watched the first installment of Fringe,

  • I can see that Fringe is not just “a bit like” X-Files, it really really wants to be X-Files. Fringe wants to marry X-Files and have its cute little alien babies. More importantly,
  • How many people out there are going to watch for the pleasant day-dream inspiring delights of Pacey from Dawson’s Creek? Ok, ok – unfair I know. I’m sure Joshua Jackson has his fans but, and I could be way off but it never struck me that they were the kind to get drawn in to a pseudo-science pseudo-scifi thrillery thing with a, no doubt, soon to be very convoluted back story.

Now all this sounds very negative which is a shame because I don’t think it’s a bad show, I just can’t quite see it finding a huge audience, but what do I know? Anyway I’ve not really started reviewing yet, so let’s do that.

Fringe is about a CIA-FBI liason officer who gets involved in the case of a flight full of people whose flesh literally melted off their bodies. In the course of investigating this her partner (and lover) gets blasted with a dose of the chemical agents responsible, thus setting up a “solve it in 24hours before he dies” scenario. In order to reverse the effects she needs the assistance of a crazy chemist locked away in a mental institution. To get to him she needs his estranged genius drifter of a son i.e. the aforementioned Pacey/Jackson.

Thus the roles are all neatly defined. She needs to solve the crime to find the plane-poisoner and extract vital information for the cure. Mad old Dad assists with forensics and the final cure. Pacey can speak crazy/science to M.o.D and therefore acts as both handler to him and sidekick to her. In fact his role is a little thinly defined right now. There wasn’t much he did – chasing someone down an alley, a bit of particularly harsh interrogation – that someone else couldn’t have down. In a way he played the traditional female sidekick role, seemingly involved but with little to actually do. However since I don’t believe a golden dawn of radical feminism has yet arisen on Hollywood I suspect he’ll have more of a job to do in upcoming episodes.

But back to the neatness. This was a perfectly serviceable piece of television but I think the thing that stopped it being more than that was that I was too aware of the pieces of series setup slotting neatly and smoothly into place. The core team and relationships. The mysterious billionaire who seems destined to be the ongoing bad guy and his apparently benevolent organisation. The hints at what kinds of things we’ll be exploring in future. Mention of shadowy agency-within-an-agency machinations and some vague idea of a connecting threat called “The Pattern” (which I fear will end up as a holdall container for whatever mystery-of-the-week they want to write[1]) It was all efficiently and relatively unobtrusively done. But I was still aware of it. Maybe that’s just a problem with pilots, or a problem with viewers like me who’ve seen too many pilots.

Overall, ok but nothing here to tempt me into regular viewership – 6/10.

[1]As a Buffy fan I can hardly complain. What else is the Hellmouth but a built-in excuse for so many monster stories in one place?