Obsolete Your Idols

I read another Charles Stross novel, Halting State. Overall, I think I enjoyed Glasshouse slightly more, but this one was more amusing more often. It starts with a bank inside an MMORPG getting robbed and ends with a 419 nod, so it’s an internet-savvy narrative. It’s got some characters who are likable, though their flaws don’t seem to really hinder them. The shy nerd with a sexcrime history gets laid, the cop with the uppity kid never has to take time off from the case to settle his hash, the accountant with the brittle work situation never suffers from office politics during the course of the story. It’s pretty light on the characters but correspondingly there’s some meaty cryptographic and augmented reality dealt to the reader in careful doses.

The more I think about it, the less satisfied I am with the way things resolve, so I’m optimistic about a rumored sequel which I hope will explain more about why Scotland’s software infrastructure survives the threat which emerges in this novel, but that’s just quibbling. This is a pretty good near future sf novel with varied characters and a briskly moving storyline.

Who might like it

• Gamers, both the tabletop and mmorpg flavors, and possibly casino to a lesser degree.
• Fans of nerd protagonists.
• People who just can’t get enough of the intricate crinkling of police procedurals.

Who might not like it

• People who think you’re getting a whole novel about people playing an MMORPG.
• People who felt Orcbusters in The Computer Always Shoots Twice was fundamentally cheating.

I don’t really know who Emily Devenport is.  Because of the way I came by one of her books, I suspect she’s a member of Broad Universe.  At a Wiscon a few years ago, I wandered past the Broad Universe table and one of the book covers caught my eye.  It’s got a dark skinned woman in what looks a bit like Star Wars Stormtrooper armor kneedeep in a pitted dessert landscape while behind her a looming egg shape contains (reflects?) a bright and complicated landscape, possibly a distorted version of the one she stands in.  It’s called EggHeads.

It’s the story of a lucky woman who takes chances to improve her lot and ends up potentially altering the course of human history.  I gather it’s the start of a series and not the only work by Emily Devenport so if it turns out to be the kind of thing you like, there’s more of it available.  I’ll be seeking out more of her stuff, myself.

What I liked

• The structure of the story.  It’s in three major sections, each titled and each well-divided from the others
• The protagonist.  She’s fierce and lucky, two of my favorite qualities.
• The reveals in this story, where things we are told make no sense until later in the story

What I didn’t like

• The protagonist forgiving her asshole boyfriend.  Repeatedly.
• The ending was a little too pat for my tastes but perhaps later works in this setting undo the happily ever after.

Overall it’s a strong far future science fiction story once you get past the crutch of near-light travel.  It’s got a likable protagonist facing tough odds and beating at least some of those odds.

Who might like this book

• People who like sf by women about women

Who might not like this book

• People who don’t like sf by women
• Or about women

I’ve been reading a lot of airport language books lately, because my employer is undergoing some changes.  New people, new focus, new strategy, and I wanted to keep up with the thinking and jargon going into this transformation.  But when I haven’t been reading those, I’ve been reading short stuff to cleanse my palate.  Here’s something I read worth talking about, the collection by Eileen Gunn named Stable Strategies and Others.

I think this is it, all the collected Gunn, and I say that with keen disappointment because these stories range from the great to the mindblowingly awesome.

I’m not going to go line by line on these but I do want to especially call out “Fellow Americans” which is an alternate history where Nixon hosts a gameshow, “Nirvana High” which is set in and around Kurt Cobain High School and “Green Fire”, a round-robin story about Heinlein and Asimov and Hopper.  These stories were the highlights for me but here’s the thing:  if you read this collection I doubt you’d agree with me on which stories are the best but I bet you will really love some of the stories in it.

Who might like this collection

• people with short attention spans, who generally like weird fiction
• people who’ve lived in Seattle
• people who remember the politics of the 60s and 70s

Who might not like this collection

• people who don’t like the sf/f genres
• people who don’t like in-jokes in their fiction

People had been telling me about but not exactly recommending M. John Harrison’s novel Light to me for a couple of years.  Having now read it, I think I can see why.  The story of this novel is very convenient, a sort of happy ending where everything fits a nice orderly pattern, but the construction of it aspires to concealing that pattern for as long as possible.  The setting is the near-past and the far future, and the central three human characters are depicted through a common lens of them making non-rational decisions which they then don’t attempt to rationalize to themselves or anyone else.  It revolves around a very large maguffin, indeed.  A strange place in space where every technology you try, works.

I found it a frustrating book.  Other people told me it was frustrating to read but they were talking about the prose style which is somewhat experimental. The language and constructs were much more accessible than those of some writers I’ve enjoyed (Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Michael Moorcock, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce) and not really an impedance.   The thing which frustrated me about this story is how obliquely the author tries to tell it.  It’s a story I could express to you in thirty words.

The one thing I would like to champion about this book is the future setting.  I do like the idea of a place and time where radical physical form changes are trivial, computation is no longer a scarce commodity for anyone, intersystem travel is rapid and virtual reality addiction commonplace.  All of that is a fun setting to read about for me.

But to have half of the characters consolidated, the grand design revealed to be a trick all along, and the implausible actions of the characters not given some kind of an explanation, left me looking for the rest of this story.  There are fun bits and funny bits and there are sad bits and moving bits in this book.  But on the whole I can’t say I liked it.

Who might like this book

• fans of space opera
• fans of experimental writing, more poem in places than prose
• fans of Brin’s Uplift stories who want something in that vein

Who might not like this book

• people who hate omnipotent alien tampering ala Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation
• people who hate unreliable narrators who won’t even justify their actions to themselves

One of my co-workers handed me a pair of books by Jack McDevitt after having asked me a couple times if I’d read his stuff.  I hadn’t and now I have, at least one of them, Polaris.  So what is Polaris?  It’s a locked space ship mystery.

More to the point, it’s a story about a group of people who disappear out in space but leave behind a functional ship.  Years later some personal items taken from that ship are going to be auctioned off and come into the possession of Alex Benedict, an antiquities dealer, and Chase Kolpath, his lovely assistant.  I gather there’s an earlier book by McDevitt with these two characters but I didn’t feel lost or very confused without having read it.  (There was a moment when a character, Jacob, is speaking and I didn’t realize yet that that’s the name of their house AI; just a tip if you find yourself similarly confused).

The two have a relationship a touch reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin if Nero Wolfe were reticent and Archie Goodwin was a spicy spaceship pilot.  This story is like one of the Boy’s SF Adventure stories I read as a kid (YA Heinlein, say) if the active protagonist were female and the nominal male lead were distant and obsessive.  There’s plenty of science flavoring to this tale, with interesting futuristic technology and resourceful juryrigging by Chase.  There is a fair amount of macking on and by Chase but it didn’t divert from the narrative or diminish her capabilities.  Chase Kolpath is badass.  Alex Benedict is truly a fortunate employer.

In the end, I only had one qualm with the answer to the mystery and that is because I felt feinted without cause by one of the scenes along about chapter eighteen.  It seemed to me to undermine one of the needed pieces of the ending.  Even after a re-reading of that scene I still felt tricked, but I can forgive that because the whole rest of it hangs together so well.  You get to figure the mystery out along with the characters and it’s a joy to watch them do so.  This is one of the most solidly put together stories I’ve read in a long time.  Highly enjoyable, strong female protagonist, some nice scenes possible only in science fiction.

Who might like this book

• People who are looking for sf with more than bimbo females, flat-personality rugged-jawed mouthpieces-for-ideas males and hand wavey plot resolutions
• People who like tightly woven mystery plots
• People who are or are likely to become trapped in a decaying orbit with quasars

Who might not like this book

• People who like lurid future sex scenes
• People who think girls are dumb
• People who are sensitive about the money they spend on antiques

Approximately fifteen years ago, several friends of mine told me I absolutely needed to read a book by John Steakley named Vampire$.  Then they told me I needed to read Armor, by the same author.

Maybe you’ve noticed, I’m kind of slow.  I’m a slow adopter of technology,  philosophies, mindsets and habits.  So I just now read Armor.  I’m not exactly sorry I waited, but I probably would have been just as happy to have read it 15 years ago.  Sorry, Aaron.  Sorry, Jim.  Sorry, Uriah.  You guys were right, I should have leapt at the chance.

Be that as it may, maybe you haven’t read Steakley, yet, either.  I’m here to tell you that you probably should, if you are looking for a certain kind of experience.  Do you like James Bond movies?  Die Hard movies?  Did you like Forever War at least as much if not more than Glory Road?  Then this book is for you.   It is one man’s story, launched into without any past, any sense of what drives him, in the brutal face of endless war.  It’s got bureaucratic SNAFUs, it’s got dark humor, it’s got graphic fight scenes.  Then in the second part, we get to see the rest of the world from another point of view, more fun, less brutal.  Then it all knots back together at the end.

It’s probably technically space opera, it’s combat fetishizing, and it moves at a high speed pace.

Who might like this book

• Fans of:
  • Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero
  • Resnick’s Santiago
  • The first Zelazny Amber book
  • The aforementioned movies and books I compared it to
• People looking for something fast to stuff in their pocket and take on a short plane flight
• Players of FPS games

Who might not like this book

• People who can’t read past typographical errors, the copy editor seemed to be asleep on this printing
• People who want a richly detailed background  and snort at testosterone blurred scenes
• Pacifists, romantics, deconstructionists, and faith-based intellects

I still haven’t read Vampire$, by the way.  But it’s on my shelves, now.