So having just finished one massive SF television series, it is time to start on another one. I haven’t seen Stargate SG-1 for ages, although I used to be a big fan, so I am very excited to watch it again. I’m not sure how much I’ll watch, I’m thinking that I may stop when Daniel Jackson leaves, because that is kind of the point I wished I’d stopped watching it the first time around! (Edited to add: yes I know Daniel Jackson comes back, but it was never quite as good after that.) But anyway, I am hoping this will be fun.

I just finished reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It took me awhile to get through the book, not because it was dragging or dull to read, but because it was rather long and intense and I did not want to rush it. I had been meaning to read the book for ages but I also got put off a bit by the length of the series (more on that shortly). But it is a very well-regarded SF classic so I eventually got around to it. I am glad I did, because I really liked the book.

First, a brief synopsis. The book is set in the future after Old Earth has been destroyed and the human race, in the form of the Hegemony, live on many different colonised worlds. The worlds form part of the Web, run by AIs and connected by farcaster technology that allows instant transport between worlds. Outside the Web are a few backwater planets, and transport there requires relativistic space travel in cryogenic stasis, with an associated time debt.

The Hegemony are at war with the Ousters, who plan to invade one of these non-Web colonies, the planet Hyperion. Hyperion is an odd planet, home to a mysterious artefact known as the Time Tombs, and a legendary monster the Shrike. Against the backdrop of this approaching war, seven pilgrims are summoned by the Church of the Shrike, the Hyperion-obsessed Cult, to travel to the planet and journey to the Time Tombs.

The book follows the journey of those seven pilgrims, but the bulk of the novel is made up of the back stories of the characters, as each in turn has to tell their story of how they came to be on the pilgrimage, and in this way the background setting of the novel is gradually revealed to the reader. The stories all vary in tone and style, but all of them were some combination of compelling, interesting and moving, and all very good in their own way.

The book is the first part of the four-part Hyperion Cantos, comprised of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. I mistakenly thought that each book was entirely separate, but in actual fact the first book ends of a cliffhanger of sorts, or at least without any resolution. I mentioned before that I had been put off by the length of the series, but I finally got around to reading this book because I thought that I could wait a bit before reading the others. Now however I just want to go ahead and read the next book in the series!

I really liked the book. It lived up to the hype and I can see why it is so highly regarded. I thought it was really well written and I particularly liked the structure of the book and the way that all of the character background stories came together to build up the setting and flesh out the story. The setting is also very well developed, some nice world building with a good mix of the social and the technological aspects. The whole thing is just full of interesting ideas. If anything, it rather reminded me of some of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, which is high praise coming from me. As I said, I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I have a few other books on the go which I may end up getting through first, but I will definitely be reading at least The Fall of Hyperion in the near future. 

Sirius by Olaf Stapledon is a science fiction book about a super-intelligent dog. The dog Sirius was created by a scientist working on super sheep dogs and was raised as part of his family, with this book serving as a biography of the dog from his ‘puppyhood’ to his death. The book was one I had to read for the science fiction book group that I have recently joined, and I don’t think I would have chosen to read it on my own initiative. Certainly I would not have finished it unless I felt obligated to, because I really did not like the book. It did have some interesting ideas, about what it means to be human and that kind of thing. But the style was just really difficult and unappealing (the book was written in the 1940s and feels very dated). Overall I just had to force myself to get through it and I am not sure I took much away from it. Perhaps it is better than I am giving it credit for (it is after all in the SF Masterworks series) but I just did not like it at all.

This is a great piece about famous artworks redone with a science fiction twist. Lots of interesting examples to be seen, but I particularly love this one.

Divergent by Veronica Roth is another one of those YA dystopian science fiction books with a young female protagonist. Not that that is a bad thing, because while it may sound like this book is following up on (or cashing in on) the success of series like The Hunger Games, it is nonetheless a very satisfying read with many original features, and any similarities are only to be praised, as it is equally as good.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic version of the city of Chicago, where society has divided into various factions according to the virtue they most value - Abnegation (selflessness), Candor (honesty), Amity (kindness), Dauntless (bravery) or Erudite (intelligence). At age 16 young people are tested and must choose which faction to join for their initiation training.

The main character here is Tris, a young girl from the Abnegation faction. Her test reveals her to be Divergent, a rare occasion where she fits with more than one faction. She is urged to keep this secret, and ends up opting to leave her home faction and join the Dauntless. A large part of the book follows her training, in which both Tris and the reader learns more about the nature of the society she lives in. As time goes on Tris learns about the tensions between the factions, and why it is considered so dangerous to be Divergent.

There is also an awkward love story in there. I hope that one day I will read a good YA book that doesn’t suffer from an awkward romance, and that will be a very good day. Actually, Ship Breaker, didn’t have much of a romance to it, and that was a good book, so maybe it is not so bad, except the narrator there was male. So still my points stands: I don’t like these books which start to write strong female characters then ruin it by having them go all mushy over some idealised boy.

I did not realise when I started it that it is the first in a trilogy, and there is a sequel, Insurgent, due out sometime this year. Someday I will have to write a rant post about trilogies/series and their prevalence in both the SF and YA genres… Anyway, it is not a bad thing because I enjoyed the book and I will read the next one when it appears. It is just a bit embarrassing because I keep - sometimes unwittingly - starting series of books; I think two of the next three books I will be reviewing (ah yeah, sorry, I am a bit behind with writing these reviews!) are the first in series.

But to sum up, I liked the book a lot. It is a great page-turner with an interesting setting, and it was exactly what I wanted in this type of book. As I said earlier, it has some similarities to The Hunger Games and I would recommend it if you enjoyed that series; it is not a copy-cat though, it has some common elements (which are good things!) but also an interesting and unique setting of its own.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is a YA science fiction novel. It is set some point in the future after a climate-related crisis. The main character is Nailer, a young teenager who works as a ship breaker, salvaging copper and other useful components from old ships to be recycled. He and his crew live in poverty on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile new fast high-tech sailing ships cross the oceans, using high altitude sails to follow the wind currents. After a storm, Nailer finds one of these ships wrecked, and the sole survivor is a rich girl who promises him an escape from his life in poverty in exchange for his help.

I liked the book a lot. It was a pretty straightforward read but very much a page turner. The setting was very good, and I liked the subtle environmental overtones.

I actually didn’t realise that this book was classed as YA when I started it, as I had heard a lot of praise for Bacigalupi’s other novel, The Wind-Up Girl, which is definitely meant for adult readers. I only chose to read this one first because the description sounded more interesting. But now I am definitely planning to read that other book soon, and indeed I am looking forward to the apparently forthcoming sequel to this book, The Drowned Cities.

Well, if there has to be graffiti, then let there be graffiti of famous science fiction authors.

For The Win by Cory Doctorow is a YA science fiction novel set in the near future focusing on online gaming, gold farming and economics. The book features many characters who are gold farmers and other game players from around China and India. These characters make their living playing games but are exploited for their labour and so they form a union which could bring could the economy of the games and have a big impact in the real world.

I have a mixed history with Cory Doctorow. Having read this one I have now read all of his novels. I thought his earlier books were okay, then I absolutely loved Little Brother, his previous YA book, and then absolutely hated Makers, his last novel before this one.

I liked this one. I thought it got the balance right between presenting interesting ideas and having a good plot and characters. I actually wish I had read it last year around the same time I read Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, as I felt they had some ideas in common and this one, which is fast paced and enjoyable, would have been a good counterpoint to that massively bloated book.

Overall I enjoyed it and I would recommend checking it out if you are interested in that kind of near-future SF. You can actually get it for free as an ebook from Doctorow’s website; indeed all of his books are available as free downloads, which makes it nice and easy to check it out and see if you like his writing (although this one did have some ‘adverts’ for book shops in it that were written by Doctorow, which annoyed me a bit). 

A few years ago I read about 70 books that were part of a series called SF Masterworks, a collection of reprinted classics from the SF genre. This was a great series which introduced me to many great books and helped me establish my particular likes and dislikes in the genre. The publisher stopped the series about 2007, but eventually started up again in 2010, reprinting some of the books that had been part of the original series, and starting to bring more great SF books back into print as part of the new series.

Last year I re-read several of the titles that I had loved when I first read them a few years ago now, and I wrote about it here. This year I decided that I would read some of the new titles in the series, and I started with Inverted World by Christopher Priest. This was actually a book that I had heard of a couple of years ago and wanted to read, but I couldn’t find a copy as it was out-of-print; that is one of the reasons why the SF Masterworks series is so great, bringing older but highly praised books to a new audience.

The protagonist of the book is a young man for a city called Earth. The city is being moved; for the past two hundred years most people have lived in comfort inside the city while teams of guildsmen slowly move it on massive train tracks. The narrator, when he comes of age, joins one of these guilds, and learns about the nature of the strange world that they live on, and the reasons why the city has to be moved.

The setting is incredibly interesting, a really fascinating and original idea. The writing and the way this world is introduced to the reader through the eyes of the narrator/protagonist is extremely compelling. It is full of imaginative and interesting ideas about perception. And then there is a twist which is really incredibly unexpected and very good. I really loved it, and it was a great way to kick off what will hopefully be some good SF reading for me this year.

Rule 34 by Charles Stross was a bit of an impulse read. I was in a weird mood where none of the unread books on my shelf looked appealing, and I was randomly browsing Amazon when I came across this one. I’d previously read and enjoyed Halting State, an earlier novel by Stross set in the same universe, and I’d also read a few good reviews of this one. So I was able to decide to get it as an ebook, buy it, transfer to my Kindle, and start reading it straight away. Living in the future is marvellous.

The book is set in Edinburgh about 20 years in the future, and is largely a high-tech detective story. The book cycles through several narrators. Liz is a police detective in charge of the Rule 34 squad, tracking down crime through the internet. When several murders occur under unusual circumstances, she is called on to help investigate. Another narrator is Anwar, a low-level criminal who gets in over his head when he is made the consul for a newly formed eastern European state which is largely a front for some shady business dealings. There are a few other narrators, including a creepy criminal enforcer who has come to the city on business only to find that his contacts have been murdered.

(As a side note, consider the difference between the UK cover on the left and the US cover on the right. The UK cover is pretty good and gives a bit of a hint as to what the book might be like. The US cover is really misleading, it doesn’t give an accurate impression of the book at all. A warning against judging a book by its cover I guess, something which I find is especially true in the SF genre.)

I really enjoyed the book. It has some really clever and fascinating ideas about AI and technology. But it is not too serious, and the book is entertaining with a great plot. I also liked the use of multiple narrators, as it gave an interesting view on the story. I also loved the setting, as Edinburgh is a city I am quite familiar with so it was great to imagine it in this way. Overall I thought it was very good.

I have just finished reading China Miéville’s latest novel Embassytown. The main character of the book is Avice, who grew up in the titular city, which is a human colony on an alien planet. There the humans live separate from the local inhabitants, a race called the Ariekei. Because of their strange language, the Ariekei (or the Hosts as the human colonists also call them) can only communicate with Ambassadors. The Ambassadors are cloned humans specifically designed to be able to speak the language. Avice was one of the rare few people who left the planet to work in space, but she returned to Embassytown with her husband who wanted to study the language. Problems arise when a new Ambassador arrives, who has a strange effect on the Ariekei and on the language. 

I absolutely loved the book. I think it is fantastic. It is very inventive; I won’t go into specific details because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but there is great world-building going on with a fascinating alien race and their language is a brilliantly unique concept. On top of that there is a great character in Avice, a female main character who is far from any SF cliche. It is incredibly well-written, and Miéville definitely skews towards the intelligent end of the SF genre; he makes you work to figure out what is going on, but the result is definitely rewarding. You don’t have to take my word for it, as the well-renowned SF author Ursula LeGuin wrote this review of it in the Guardian.

I seem to generally have a mixed response to Miéville’s books. I was blown away by The City and the City, and I also enjoyed his YA novel Un Lun Dun. But a few years before that I tried to read Perdido Street Station and gave up because I really loathed it. Earlier this year I started reading Kraken, his most recent book before this one. I gave up on that too; I didn’t hate it but I just didn’t enjoy it at all, it was very underwhelming and almost pedestrian compared to The City & The City. But after this book I am now considering giving his earlier books another shot, as I may just have read it at the wrong time when I last tried.

Back to Embassytown: I thought it was a brilliant book, I loved reading it, and it is one of my favourite books that I’ve read this year.

I have just finished read the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, consisting of The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men. This is why it has been ages since I posted a book review - I did not realise quite how long these books were (one disadvantage of reading on the Kindle). Nor did I think it would take me so long to get through a YA trilogy, but somehow these just didn’t quite hold my interest in places, and I found it a struggle to keep reading them at times.

It is an SF series set on a world that has been colonised by human settlers. When they arrived some vaguely-explained germ infected the men, giving them Noise, meaning that their thoughts are telepathically broadcast. So everyone knows what all the men are thinking, but while women can hear the men, they do not broadcast their own Noise. They also found an alien race, which they called the Spackle, already living there; cue a war that left most of the aliens wiped out.

But all of that was in the past, and when the series starts the protagonist of the story is Todd, a soon-to-be 13 year old who is the youngest boy in his town. There are only men in his town, and he has been led to believe that all of the women were wiped out by the same germ that gave the men their Noise, and that their town is all that is left on the planet. But then he meets a girl in the swamp outside of town, who turns out to be part of an advance scout party for a new wave of colonists on the way to the planet, and her parents were killed when the ship landed. Todd and the girl, Viola, are under threat from the town’s strict Mayor Prentiss, and the local preacher. Todd’s guardians force him to run, telling him to make for a nearby town which has been kept secret from him. Here he and Viola learn that there are still women alive, and that Todd’s hometown is not what it seems. But Mayor Prentiss summons an army of the whole town and goes on the march to hunt down Todd and Viola. The whole series follows the conflicts between Todd, Viola and Mayor Prentiss, with the later books adding in the Spackle and a terrorist organisation to the mix.

The first book is narrated just by Todd, and because the character is illiterate, the narrative reflects his specific vernacular, and as a result I found it quite tiresome to read in places. The second book adds in Viola as another narrator, switching between the two, which was a bit easier to process. The third book also had sections from the point-of-voice of one of the Spackle, which was quite interesting stylistically.

As I said at the top, I struggled in places to keep up my interest in reading the books, and I think part of that was because I found them a bit repetitive and too long. A quick look through Tumblr suggests that there are a lot of people who absolutely love the series, so I hope no one is going to give me trouble for saying that! To be honest, maybe if I had read it when I was younger, and actually in the YA age range, I would have liked it a lot more. But eventually I did get into it, and I thought the series improved a lot as it progressed. Ultimately, I did like it.

The whole idea of the Noise was a fascinating one, and I really liked how that was developed, especially with regards to the Spackle and their telepathic nature. I thought it was well written (aside from some minor stylistic irritations mentioned above). The characters were also good, in particular I liked how nuanced some of them were, especially the Mayor and Mistress Coyle (the terrorist leader), where it was never just black-or-white, good-or-evil. I actually found Todd and Viola to be a bit less compelling, but again I think that may be an age thing.

Overall, I did enjoy it, did like it, and there are a lot of people that I would recommend it to. I wasn’t as absolutely into it as I was with some of the other YA series I have read (I still love the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, and I liked The Hunger Games too) but ultimately it is another example of an increasing range of YA books in the SF genre that are good books, and that are worth reading as adults just as much as they appeal to younger readers.

Scientists have calculated that the chance of anything so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

I know many people who are great fans of Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series, and whenever the topic comes up and they are raving about his latest book, I am always slightly embarrassed that I’ve never read any of them. The only book of his I’ve read is Good Omens, which I read entirely because it was co-written by Neil Gaiman. It is a book I love, but somehow I never got around to following up on that and reading some of his solo books.

Recently I decided to correct that, and ran into another problem, namely figuring out where to start with his many, many books. I asked my friends for advice and the general opinion was that they should be read in chronological order, in order to keep up with all the details and worldbuilding, but that the first few books were not essential reading. Basically, start with Mort, they said, so that’s what I’ve done.

Mort is an unpopular young man who is sent out by his father to find a job and ends up getting hired to be Death’s apprentice. On the job, he makes a mistake and saves a princess from dying rather than harvesting her soul, which threatens to damage the reality of the Discworld.

I liked the book a lot. While I’m generally not a big fan of this type of fantasy, I thought it was very well done here. The plot was great, I loved the character of Death, and the book genuinely made me laugh out loud in places.

Any other book review, I’d give it a glowing recommendation and leave it there. But I do have a slight complaint, which is that as much as I did like and enjoy the book, I was nonetheless constantly underwhelmed by it. My friends regard Pratchett so highly that I was expecting to be blown away by it, and I just wasn’t.

I think my expectations must just have been too high though, because really, I thought the book was great and I’m glad that I finally got around to seeing what this Discworld thing is all about! I am looking forward to reading more of the books at some later point.

Next week I am going along to a SF book club, in an attempt to be social and meet other SF book nerds! The book they’ve chosen to read is Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which was quite convenient as it was one that had been on my radar since it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was generally well reviewed.

The book is a kind of urban fantasy thing, I’m not sure exactly what the label would be if those things matter. It is set in an alternative contemporary version of Johannesburg in South Africa. In this universe, people who have committed crimes acquire supernatural animals as physical manifestations of their sins. The protagonist Zinzi is one such ‘animalled’ person, who lives in a ghetto called Zoo City, and makes a living writing 419 scams and using her special, supernatural talent for finding lost things. She is hired to find a missing teen pop star, giving the novel elements of a detective story as well.

I mostly liked the novel. I thought the idea of ‘animalling’ was an interesting one, and the setting was quite unique, but maybe not as well developed as I would have liked. The plot was also a bit choppy in places, and the ending was a bit rushed without much resolution. But I did think it was an interesting read, and it did a great job of combining a pretty classic private detective story with this fantasy setting. I can definitely understand the praise for it, and I thought it was overall a good book. Maybe not perfect, but unlike anything else I’ve read this year either.