Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I absolutely love reading Adrian Tchaikovsky. He is incredibly prolific and yet is able to say something profound using meticulously detailed hard SF speculation on that very demanding calendar. The protagonist in the book, Arton Daghdev (the pronunciation of the name figures prominently), takes some getting used to. The book is written from his first-person perspective, and as a narrator he can come off kind of flip in a very 2024 way ("you'll never believe what's coming next"). But in my view this is Tchaikovsky doing something very subtle with the narrator--he's distancing himself from his story with the wisecracking. The story he's trying to tell is horrible and sad, and he has to get some distance from it in order to tell it at all.

Daghdev doesn't come off as a true revolutionary, at least not until the end. But again I think this is deliberate. Daghdev regularly refers to himself as a small-time revolutionary, much more talk than action, surprised that his minuscule actions warranted a response from the State. He and his circle played at revolution, and he compares himself poorly to others that he viewed as more committed.

The scientific speculation is amazing stuff--symbiosis taken to the maximum. Organisms have evolved to be able to interface with each other, and any macro level organism (and probably micro too) is made up of many other more specialized ones. They are figuring out how to interface with humans too, which seems pretty awful.

The ending is quite wonderful and highly scary. Tchaikovsky is truly a master of his craft, and his work definitely worth savoring.

My Goodreads Review

Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan

This book is squarely in the Cyberpunk tradition. Am reading it 23 years after publication for a book club. The author's take on personal identity and its technical instatiation is interesting and relevant, but the sex, violence, and sexual torture in the book mean there's plenty of reasonable, otherwise not overly sensitive people that just aren't going to get past it. The reviews show that quite well, with some loving and some hating it.

The book is crudely and directly written, and again that's going to mean some love it and some hate it. On the upside, the directness means the interesting speculation on identity is easy to follow. It's right in the title--the Altered Carbon is the stack, the place where your memories, experiences and personalities are stored, and it can be retrieved and placed in another body if it's not damaged. By social convention this downloaded set of personal details is the "person", and a person can be put in a new body and recognized as a continuation of the same legal person. There's a lot of good ideas around this--the author touches on many of the questions I had (How does the "sleeve" (the new body) affect the identity of the downloaded person? What happens when the same person is downloaded into a second body simultaneously?).

The interstellar aspect of the book is not that important to at least this installment of the series. The protagonists could as easily have been from different countries as different worlds. Maybe it figures more later.

Overall a highly flawed and interesting book.

My Goodreads Review

Everything You Ever Wanted, by Luiza Sauma

I'm going to give this a 3.5 and round up. There's a lot to appreciate in this book. The author's description of our protagonist's (Iris Cohen) life is the perfect buildup to her decision to emigrate to Nyx. She leads an apparently privileged (she has a job that pays enough for her to live decently and party) but absolutely hellish (meaningless work, meaningless relationships, drinks hard and eats horribly because all her friends do and then feels awful later) life. She hates what she does and it seems like an endless treadmill. Her family relationships are not enough to keep her there. Though she would have liked them to be. So off she goes.

The world of Nyx seems artificially constrained in a way that makes it feel like it's fake. Sauma spends no time explaining the science at all, just says one gets there through a wormhole and briefly describes what it looks like. It's all about what Iris goes through. The participants are weirdly cut off--they can (and are required to) post about their lives on social media, but they are not allowed contact with Earth and so never get feedback on what they are doing.

You keep waiting for the book to relent, and it never does. Once the perspective shifts fully to Nyx, the situation just grinds all the participants down until everyone is dead. Iris is hopeful at the beginning, Nyx seems to strip away all the distractions that kept her from having a good life. But the social media and livestream lose support and eventually the colony goes downhill. One expects a reveal or a rescue and it never happens. At the end I reflected on the book and it made me incredibly sad. It also reminded me of the early American colonies--some ended exactly this way, and for most it was a one-way trip with little to no contact with those they left behind..

The writing is excellent and I feel like I understand Iris. It's not a book to lift your spirits but it's worthwhile.

My Goodreads Review 

The Quantum Magician, by Derek Kunsken

 The Quantum Magician introduces us to Belisarius Arjona, Homo Quantus. Engineered to calculate, find patterns, and understand. But in his case the quantum fugue state that accesses his higher quantitative functions doesn't work right, and he fears it will kill him. He has turned to elaborate cons to provide the stimulation his brain needs.

It's absolutely a fun story to read. The plot is very much Ocean's Eleven, from the assembly of his team to the twisty way the con plays out. But there's a whole lot of fascinating stuff going on in the book--it is idea- as well as action-driven.

Let's start with the variant humans--Belisarius, as noted, is Homo Quantus. He spends a lot of narrative time introspecting on the divided nature of his consciousness. He has come to view the quantum fugue state, where he can understand the most abstract concepts, as an inhuman state. But he brings in his former lover, another Homo Quantus, to go where he can't go.

He also brings in Stills, Homo Eridanus--the Mongrels, humans abusively genetically engineered to live under many atmospheres of pressure. Useful for piloting spaceships under high acceleration. Stills is classic hired muscle. He introspects, but it's all about embracing and fighting that oppression.

The third variant human on the team is Gates-15, Homo pupa--the Puppets, a race engineered by the Numen as slaves, who invert the relationship and hold the Numen captive. This is probably the most fascinating dynamic in the book, providing a lot of space for speculation on the nature of religion and divinity. This is where the book veers toward horror. The Numen built Homo Pupa to need them viscerally, so badly that the Puppets were forced to capture the Numen. The need is through the sense of smell, which brings in the body horror as another member of the team, Belisarius' mentor William (a standard human) volunteers to be engineered to be a Numen. The Numen are kept under very strange and brutal conditions. As Belisarius observes, the relationship to the divine is not moral. Gods do not have moral standing with their worshippers.

The other two members of the team are Marie, a cashiered military cutout with demolition expertise, and Del Casals, the genetic engineer who turns William into a fake Numen. Marie and Stills develop an interesting dynamic when they are forced to work together. It is never sexual, which makes it that much more interesting--they find a kind of kinship. Del Casals is hard to talk about without spoiling it--he's there mainly for a plot point.

The last member of the team is Saint Matthew, an advanced and autonomous AI. His visage is Carvaggio's painting of Saint Matthew. Saint Matthew is in the work to find new religious insights. He ends up as a part of Marie's triangle.

In the end, what motivates Belisarius isn't the money. The con is set up as a way to get twelve Union ships carrying a logarithmic leap in technology through the Puppet Axis, a gateway to other star systems and impossibly well defended. Belisarius starts out telling us that it's about the stimulation, but as we go we see that the con is on the reader as well--Belisarius is an unreliable narrator. He is playing almost everyone against everyone and the inevitable betrayals are part of the con. You can see what's coming but you don't mind.

The action is very well described. The second half of the book really picks up and it's hard to stop reading at bedtime. I definitely want to read the next one in the series.

My Goodreads Review

Circe, by Madeline Miller

So I got through this very long exercise, but it never grabbed me at all. I couldn't work up much sympathy for our namesake protagonist. The Greek gods are narcissistic and cruel but anyone with even casual knowledge of the classics would know that. Homer comes off as more complex, so that was interesting. But I am with others who say this doesn't hang together as a novel, it's more a series of stories about Circe's life on her banishment island and those who come to visit her.

My Goodreads Review

Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

What to say here? This is one tough read. I got through it, and I can see the through line (with help from the author at the end). I cannot discern the why of it. It is based in Sri Lankan culture and its fight for independence. Maybe if you have deeper knowledge of that you will appreciate it more. There's a lot of good and interesting parts, but it only comes together by juxtaposition. Oof. 3 stars for the parts my poor mind was able to comprehend.

My Goodreads Review

Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang

I've been reading some of the individual stories in this volume as they came out over the years. It's a really different experience reading all of them together, and I don't think it's better. There's a pattern to Ted Chiang's writing--taking an idea and playing with it through characters, but really focusing on the idea--that works better when you experience it fresh, as opposed to repeating it in a story collection. Still, there were stories I really enjoyed:

"Understand": Some reviewers compare it to "Flowers for Algernon". I see that, but what I like about this one is that it has the best attempt at conveying what it is to be superintelligent in language non-superintelligent people (everyone) can understand. The rest of the plotting was needed to bring forth the idea.

"Division by Zero": Didn't like this one. I am familiar with Godel's Incompleteness proof--that there are true statements in mathematics that cannot be proven--and to me it has just as much impact as the equality in the story. If that's not enough try the history of the concept of infinity, and how it drove Georg Cantor mad.

"The Story Of Your Life": I enjoyed reading the short story, but to really experience the plot you need to see the movie "Arrival". This is the one and perhaps only time I have thought that the movie was better than the book. The Eric Heisserer screenplay intensifies the choice the linguist makes in having a child. And having visuals for a nonlinear orthography helps a lot.

"The Evolution of Human Science": I don't think this story was impressive in its time, but it takes on new meaning as we develop AI. Artificial intelligences could very well do science we can't comprehend.

"Hell Is the Absence of God": A really good one. The idea of a world in which the presence of angels is apparent, disruptive and not entirely positive is fascinating.

My Goodreads Review