Read: 40 Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson

It has been almost three weeks since I finished 40 Signs but a busy schedule has stopped me from finishing and posting my review. Life: it happens. Apparently ;-)

Anyway, that means this will be more of a note than a proper review, and firstly I want to note that 40 Signs of Rain was an easy read. Well paced, and despite the constant change in viewpoint I found it easy to track the story.

I have come to associate KSR with frequent and extensive infodumps and that is one reason for 40 Signs spending some shelf-time before I picked it for reading. This time those parts are few, and relatively light and accessible. That of course adds to my reading experience, in a positive way. I have nothing against fiction being founded on credible science, or extrapolations from present day science, but I’m not in it for the diagrams and lectures: if I was I’d read a non-fiction work on the topic. But as I have already noted 40 Signs aren’t bogged down by any of those.

The story follows a couple of people who, in different ways, are involved in the US science community, plus one who is involved in politics. The setting, which probably felt futuristic back in 2004, when the book was fist published, is a near future when climate change is making itself felt, for real. The weather is extreme, the Golf stream has faltered to a weak flow, and the ice, especially in Antarctica, is close to gone. Meanwhile the politicians talk, mainly about economic growth.

Doesn’t sound very science fiction-y to me, in 2019, even though it probably qualified 15 years ago. The times certainly are a-changing.

Despite the topic the book is, as I already said, an easy read. The ending, though, is a bit too fantastical, and jars a bit with the relative credibility of the rest of the text. Not the flooding part, but the events that conclude the story, for now.

I will pick up the rest of the trilogy, at some point in the not too far future. For now I’m steering my mind in other directions: prepare for a review of Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, coming soon.

Read: Hexarchate Stories, by Yoon Ha Lee

Having enjoyed the Machineries of Empire trilogy I very much looked forward to this collection of short stories, set in the same universe. I don’t know what I had expected, but after having read through the volume I felt underwhelmed.

The stories varies in length, from mere snippets to one novelette. They are ordered chronologically according to the Hexarchate timeline but were written at various points and for various reasons. The latter we know because each story is followed by a note from the author. The question is – did I need to know the things he choose to share? My answer to that is an unequivocal “no”. In no way did the notes add to my understanding of what was going on. Instead they broke the rhythm, diluted the storytelling.

Had these stories all been stand-alones it would had worked better, but now each story (except two: the very first, and the very last – more on the latter soon) was a jigsaw puzzle piece, a peephole into the lives of Shuos Jedao and Kel Cheris before the events in the Machineries trilogy. And the notes distracted from that, broke the telling apart. In my mind the better choice had been to take these “prequel” stories, work a bit more on them, and drop the notes in favour for a meatier afterword.

This leaves the novelette. It is set after the original trilogy (a sarcastic tank you to George Lucas for making it so easy to just drop that phrase, with everything it implies), and is different in tone than the rest of the stories. My only issue with it is that after having read all these prequel stories it felt weird to jump into what essentially is a kind of epilogue to Revenant Gun. In fact I think it had worked better if it has been added as such to the book. Either that, or a fourth book. That would had required some more work on the text, though.

All in all I don’t regret reading Hexarchate Stories, but it is not essential reading. And it should definitely not be read on its own.

Read: The Kingdom of Copper, by S.A. Chakraborty

For anyone enjoying The City of Brass it is imperative to continue with The Kingdom of Copper right away, and the privilege of being late to the game is to not have to wait for it to be published… because it already is.

The story picks up were City ended, and as before each of the three main viewpoint characters gets their own chapters. This could easily have resulted in a fragmented experience, but Chakraborty is clever in letting story lines both intertwine and diverge in a way that allows her to give both characters and plot depth and roundness. The result is a tale that deals in a sliding scale of grays rather than in the black and whites so common in the fantasy genre. And to me that is a great plus.

While the story well can be read as an action packed adventure, for those who want it there are several themes that resonates with our present time: power games, belonging, ownership of culture, heritage, and expectations on the individual. I might expect that kind of currency from a science fiction story, but not so much so from the fantasy genre. Again, a plus, and I might have to revise my preconceptions of the fantasy genre.

The only real draw was the love story. It was a bit too cringey for my taste, but it did move the story forward so it’s more about the execution and predictability of it that I object to, than to it being there at all.

If I won’t give The Kingdom of Copper, or The City of Brass, for that matter, the very highest marks it is because while I greatly enjoy this particular tale I don’t feel a need to stay in the universe. Nonetheless I recommend this series highly.

Now for the wait for the concluding part of the story, rumoured to be published in February 2020.

Read: The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty

I picked Chakraborty‘s The City of Brass up on the strong recommendations of several persons who usually read good and interesting books, and I was not disappointed.

The story picks us up in Cairo, sometime in the first half of the 19th century, presumably – it is never said outright, but general referrals to the Franks chasing out the Ottomans provides a clue – when we meet Nahri, a young girl trying to get by on the shadier side of the city, sometime healer, sometime pickpocket, sometime petty thief, but hoping to somehow get enough funds to apprentice her to a real physician.

One of the services she provides is the purging of evil spirits. She does not herself believe in the supernatural, but it has proven a sure way to get paid, and while it doesn’t exactly heal it doesn’t hurt, either, and so she feel that she’s morally in the clear. Until one evening everything changes… and how it changes!

The reader is then brought on a spectacular ride into another and largely parallel world, disguised from us humans by religious dictate, magic, and law. And while many aspects are magical or fantastical, the main themes are of belonging, power, politics, and of having expectations shoved on you, in spite of what you personally would wish for.

It should be said that this is the first book and a trilogy. In this first one we are introduced, by name at least, to the main characters, and the rules of the universe are explained. Fear no infodumps, though. Chakraborty manages to explain through showing rather than telling, but it is convenient that Nahri is a newcomer to this world and needs to have things explained to her. It never gets in the way of either storytelling or character development, though.

This could so easily had been a sugary damsel in distress and dashing (male) warriors and princes tale, but Nahri is both strong and crafty, and her struggles with fitting in, and her decisions, good and bad, are believable. I do find the love story a bit cringey, but it is motivated by the over all story arc.

That I went on to read the second part – The Kingdom of Copper – immediately after finishing City of Brass should be enough to tell that I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Recommended!

Read: Luna: Moon Rising, by Ian McDonald

Two things could be said of the concluding volume of Ian McDonald’s Luna trilogy – it manages to knit together all the threads strewn through volumes one and two, and it could be used to showcase the importance of proofing before publishing. Spell-errors and wrong names are liberally sprinkled throughout the volume, and especially the misnaming makes the book hard to read.

If you can see beyond that, and has managed to get through both Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon Moon Rising is worth it: this is when reading the previous 800 pages pays off. The trilogy follows the members of the Corta family and the power struggles that they are involved in, but this is not a story were one sides with a likeable character or two. Almost everyone who the reader meet are morally and ethically dubious, and some more so than others.

Everyone on the Moon, be they a member of a Dragon family or someone who fight to survive in the shanty towns clinging to the outskirts of the domed cities buried in the rock, lives courtesy of Earth. The Moon is, after all, mainly a mining colony, and until now survival and success has depended on the ability to ruthlessly exploit everyone else: in a world of finite resources abundance for some can only come at the price of deprivation for everyone else.

Intrigue, assassination, trying to set one’s competitors against each other – until now that has been the norm. It that how it will continue?

I would say that character development is not the strength of this tale, even if we get to understand why at least some of the people that we encounter has turned out the way they are when we meet them: at heart this is a story about society, and how change actually is possible, inevitable, even, and that individuals actually can affect the outcome. Or, alternatively, one could read it as a story about colonisation, the fight for freedom, and how power hunger can play in the hand of the colonial masters. Or maybe it showcases libertarianism and what a society were only the most ruthless survives do to the humans living under it?

Pick your choice. It is, however, not a hero’s story.

The three volumes, about 1200 pages of story, all build to the happenings of the last fifty pages or so in Moon Rising. As the story concludes for the reader a new chapter starts for the people of the Moon: a cliffhanger of sorts, multiple stories could start as this one particular ends.

I would not recommend the Luna trilogy carelessly. This last book was, despite the rather glaring lack of proof-reading, the easiest one to read. But to get there you first need to find your way through 800 pages of unlikable people doing despicable things in a society I at least would not want to live in.

To me it was interesting enough, though, after I had decided to push forward in the first place, but I’d say that you’ll have to be a pretty hardcore fan of idea-driven SF to enjoy it.

Read: The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower is something so remarkable as a book with (to me) no relatable characters, a story that doesn’t speak to me, in a genre that I don’t especially enjoy, that still ended up being a good read. A lot of this has to do with Leckie and the skilful way in which she wields her craft: The Raven Tower is nothing less than storytelling of the highest class.

This is the kind of story that gets spoiled by the reader knowing to much beforehand, so if you plan to read this book – be warned. Possible spoilers ahead.

The story is not arranged in chapters but in sections varying in length between a single paragraph or two to several pages. It is told as two intermingled but separate stories, each by the same narrator but in different ways; and the two eventually meet, s such things usually do, in books at least.

In the present-day timeline we first meet a young hothead prince and his aide as they arrive at the capital city. There he is met by his uncle who has usurped the throne, and it is clear that things are not as they should be, nor as they are told. The narrator talks to itself while also addressing the prince’s aide, whom the narrator apparently found intriguing, and it is through the reflections of the narrator that we get to see what happens in this timeline. We are told about the gods of the city and how they work to keep the settlement safe and in health.

In the long-ago timeline the narrator speaks in first person, and we soon get to understand that this person is some sort of supernatural being – a god. This god sometimes meets with other gods, and forms a special relationship with a god who arrived on the planet as a meteor, long before humans started to form societies. This other god is more mobile; our narrator is firmly set where it want to be, but also not exactly caring for anything much. This god sees the long perspective in which individual humans are but moths in the flame of a fire.

Through both of these stories we bit by bit get to understand how the gods gain or lose power on this world; the power of words and of the offerings of humans, and the care a god must take when thinking things into being, or when making promises or threats. Reminiscent of Le Guin’s Earthsea without being the least derivative, which could be said of Leckie’s writing as a whole.

When the two story-lines meet the ending is inevitable, even though we don’t really get to see it other than as a foretelling.

What about the book, then? What is my judgement?

I will definitely continue to buy and read whatever Leckie next decides to write and publish. She is a true master of words, and in The Raven Tower she excels in about everything there is to excel: it is a book that even a reader such as me can enjoy. That said reading it felt somewhat like an intellectual exercise more than the joy of a shared experience, which took away from my enjoyment if not from my appreciation of her accomplishment. This means that I’ll recommend the book to anyone who has read her before, and to anyone who enjoys literary fantasy or science fiction, but it is not a book that will end up on my reread list anytime soon.

Read: Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson

I got this book back when it first was published, in 2015, but it has lived on a shelf ever since. Three things kept it there: bad reviews from people whom I trust, it’s size (861 tightly printed pages), and my growing scepticism towards Stephenson’s personal politics.

Given this I was not disappointed, the way I might had been had I read this with the expectation of getting another Anathem or Reamde, both of which I would recommend.

Stephenson has a propensity for rambling, which makes his books a bad choice for an audiobook, by the way, and Seveneves is not an exception. Back when I first read Diamond Age (1996), when it was published, I noted his inability to end a story. With Cryptonomicon (1999), a book that I have read at least trice, I learned that to read his books one need to be able to skip the sections were he digress too much: somethings which I call “The Stephenson Skip”. With In the beginning was… the command line (1999) I started to realise that I actually has no patience with his personal politics. Despite all of this I have continuously read and enjoyed his writings.

Seveneves displays all these traits, plus the worst exposition of handwavy pseudo-science that I’ve experienced in a long time.

Some of these things would not be worthy of an eye-roll had he not firmly placed the story in our own universe and general time-frame, but as it is he wants the reader to believe that if humanity as we know it were given a 2 year warning on the apocalypse, in the form that he hypothesise, this is what would happen.

He delves in length on the physics – I definitely had may fill of “delta vee” for the foreseeable future – and hand-waves a lot of other things. To me the genetic engineering, and the way the story hinges on the idea that 5000 years down the line humankind would still recognise a handful of progenitors in both psychological profile, line of profession, and looks, just far beyond my ability to suspend my disbelief.

I never fully abandoned the book, and I don’t think it was a total waste to have read it. But, two months after I started it I’m not entirely sure of why that is so.

It should come as no surprise that I won’t recommend this book.

Onward, to other, hopefully more enjoyable, reads!

Read: An atlas of countries that don’t exist, by Nick Middleton

An atlas of countries that don’t exist, with the additional title “a compendium of fifty unrecognized and largely unnoticed states” is nothing less than brilliant.

Naturally it is limited; the 232 pages can’t hold all knowledge there is about all “unknown” – or as it may be: little known – states, countries and nations that presently exist or has existed, in modern history. Middleton helpfully informs any reader who takes the time to read the introduction how he made his selection, including but not stopping at a discussion of the definition of a country. Or state. Or nation. And so, if you’re looking for your specific favourite largely unnoticed country it may well be that it is not presented in this relatively slim volume.

Also well be noted that this is not a scientific textbook. Each country gets two spreads – a title spread with a summary, and an information spread consisting of a one page map, plus one page of text.

The text is largely anecdotal – it starts with a person or an historical event, and goes on from there to sketch an outline of the most defining characteristics or events as regards the birth, rise, and sometimes fall, of the country at hand.

Each spread on it’s own may feel a bit thin, though elegantly displayed. But as in so many other cases the sum is greater than its parts: we see through this book the story of European colonisation, of Soviet, US, and Chinese imperialism, told from the perspective of the conquered and subsumed – the annihilated, neglected and exploited – spiced with Western libertarian delusions of grandeur, family owned colonies, and citizens of the world projects.

As such it is a starting point for further explorations into several dimensions: one can chose to explore the fate and histories of individual tribes and cultures, or one can chose to look at the macro-political level, the power structures, and the economic motivators, that formed the world as we know it today. Or one can look to what made a specific region or nation, and start to see beyond the mono-cultural and into the more complex situation.

Of course I think some countries could had been excluded. Of course I think other countries should had been included. And on a nit-picketty level I would had liked the maps to show national borders in those cases when an unknown nation is spread over several internationally recognised sovereign states.

I do not miss a bibliography. As stated before this is not a scientific text, and I appreciate that I am allowed to find my own sources when exploring deeper. At points it took me on a journey into formerly unknown territories, branching out into topics that I had no idea existed. And I am not particularly illiterate in the topics concerned: I just hadn’t gone deeper into each region, prior to this.

I definitely recommend this book. And when I say “book” I mean the actual paper version, the hard copy. This is not a book to be listened to, or to browse on a screen. The full experience demands the physical object. That way it is worth it’s money.

It was the perfect gift to myself, on a rainy January night!

Reread: Hellburner, by C.J. Cherryh

Checking my reading records on LibraryThing I realise that this is my sixth reread of Cherryh’s Hellburner, and while I am a rereader this is some kind of record in itself. One or two, yes, three if it is an exceptional book, but SIX times?

Several years ago I committed a review of it on this blog, too, though it held more spelling errors than I want to admit to… and I really want to make a note on it, so here goes nothing –

Written as book 5 of the 7 that makes up the Company Wars suite it nevertheless is is placed as the second one when timeline is considered. As such it tells part of the story from the beginning of what since Alliance Rising was published is known as the Second Company War, with the writer (and any reader who has read these books in the orer they were published) already knowing quite a bit about what will happen in what in Hellburner is “the future”.

We have already grown to distrust, if not dislike, the Fleet. They were once Earth’s, and Earth Company’s, military arm in a bid for power in the wide Beyond, but as the war turned into a no-win game for the EC the EC stopped providing for their Fleet. The Fleet leadership disagrees with the stand-down order, turning rogue. To supply themselves they have been forced to turn to robbery and contraband, terrorising star stations, jump points, and ships. That is were they are as we meet them in books further down the timeline.

Hellburner, then, tells several stories: how a collectively run Merchanter style fleet became the EC’s tool, headed by Conrad Mazian; how the giant carrier ships got their “riders” – i.e. their fast stinger ships; how the Fleet managed to co-opt people who did not agree with what was happening on a higher level.

Two specific features makes the book extra compelling to me.

First, the story is told from the eyes of the every-man. No one of the people whose perspectives we gets to share is in a position of power, not even the one who others perceive as “higher up”. He is indeed higher up on the chain of command, but wields no read power: he is the archetype middle manager, if well-intended.

Second, the way corporate warfare and desktop politics is depicted. I find the politicking going on extremely realistic, from the psychological profiles of the ruthless power-grabbers to the way the politics choice trumps what would be good for a project or mission, ultimately ruining all prospects of success… and how the psychopathic power-hungry ones’ gets a free rein by people who will have only ruin to collect in the long run… but see no other choice short term.

(Third, and I know this is an addition to my “two specific features”, is for what it gives to the fandom. Not only do we get to meet people who will feature later on, getting to understand a bit more of how they came to be who they were when we last met them – we also get a cameo from a ship of Company War renown, the ECS-5, later known as ECS Norway.)

I can see why people who expect space opera and drama might not enjoy this book. Too much politicking going on. I can see why people who expect military sf might not enjoy this book. Again, too much politicking, too little fighting, not enough battle-tactics.

That doesn’t mean that nothing happens – there is a lot going on, lots of drama. Enough to make the story into a miniseries, interweaving Heavy Time tidbits as flashbacks for background (Heavy Time is where we first meet many of the protagonists of Hellburner, a very different book, both can be read stand-alone).

And I just plain love the book. I will reread it several times more, of that I am very certain.

Read: Alliance Rising, by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S Fancher

In our universe but far ahead on the timeline, humankind took off and settled in space. The corporation that put them there – Earth Company – thinks it has a monopoly on… everything, despite there being a natural 6 year time lag, one way, in even the fastest communications route.

As with all prequels that gets published well after the readers know everything about what came after there is a risk: the risk of being too set within pre-existing conditions for real brilliance to shine. Not one wit of it is displayed in Alliance Rising; it is, plain and simple, a top class addition to an already great set of stories.

In later books the Hinder Stars are generally glossed over – hindmost, left behind by humankind’s progress through the Beyond, their only value being the link to Earth, and that’s a link that no one really wants, any more. Who wants to stay connected to a megalomaniac psychopath with an obsession with minute control?

(The reader is free to either just take this as a baseline parameter of the story, or to contemplate mega-corporation control mania as it appears in our part of the timeline.)

When the story starts we meet Ross and Fallan, of the merchanter ship Galway, as they sit in a bar at Alpha Station watching the boards track an unknown incoming, hoping it will not be too hostile, and joining in the general suspicion.

Outsiders seldom come to such an outskirts and down on luck station any more, not since Alpha stopped being able to offer trade in goods from faraway Earth. All shipments from Earth goes towards building a monster ship, and not enough goes to station maintenance, not to speak of trading: that has been the situation for at least two decades, now. The ship is huge and the fear is that it will rob the loyal but small merchanter ships of their trade; others fear it might not be meant for trading, but for enforcement: another kind of threat. Maybe that’s why the newcomer is here? Or maybe they run the errands of almost mythological Pell Station, coming to put Alpha out of business altogether?

Over the 346 pages of the book we get to follow what expires after the outsider ship docks, from Ross’ perspective, but not without hearing from the captain of said vessel – one JR Niehart, Finity’s End being the ship – and the stationmaster, Benjamin Abrezio, formally an Earth Company executive. It should come as no surprise, given the title of the book, that we get to see the birth of the Alliance, of the Alliance-Union Universe.

The story is well paced, well told – much as expected, and despite it being a collaboration between Cherryh and Fancher it feels like a solid one-author job.

A must-read for anyone who have read and enjoyed Cherryh’s stories set in the Alliance-Union Universe, and especially the Company Wars books.

One of the great joys of this Universe, our own but far in the future, is its plausibility. An empire that overextends itself, as in that modes of communication forces independence in the regions far from the centre (think ancient Rome), coupled with layers of power politics, and then the way these politics impact ordinary people and their lives. The parallel with present day is not blatant. No, the genius is in showing rather than telling, leaving the reader to connect the dots… or not, at her own pleasure.

One things is sure, though – the next instalment can’t come fast enough!