In the Lives of Puppets, by T. J. Klune

I picked this up on Goodreads' recommendation. What I'd say about this book is, it was fine. Interesting and sympathetic characters, a hero's journey, love and surrender and redemption. All fine. The characters are unfortunately one-dimensional, but they mesh together to produce fun reading. It wasn't challenging reading, unless you find alternative sexuality challenging, and really if you're reading SF award winners or anything outside of mainstream romance novels you should be over that by now. No actual sex. In the afterword Klune says he backed off of telling the story he wanted to tell with these characters, which explained this for me. I wasn't sorry I read it, but mainly it occupied time.

My Goodreads Review

The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts

I read this after reading his later philosophical SF novel, "The This". I think The This is better, but The Thing Itself is absolutely worth reading. The blurb does it no justice at all, it must have been written by someone who had the book described to them third-hand.

In both The This and The Thing Itself Adam Roberts tries to bring philosophical concepts in by way of physical instantiations. So in The This there's a Dialectic trying to bring itself into being. In The Thing Itself we get to meet, well, the thing itself--Kant's "Ding An Sich". Because we perceive the world through our senses, what we know of things is what our senses report to us. This much was understood by Plato, and elucidated in his Cave analogy. Kant goes further in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics to argue that our ways of moving in the world and categorizing it, like space and time, are also constructions out of our mental nature, and that the world does not necessarily work that way at all. Certainly advanced physics from Einstein through Feynman makes this clear--the world is stranger than we can imagine.

What I can't quite get past with this one is that, in order to drive a plot, our protagonist and his nemesis get to SEE and interact with The Thing Itself, by way of an AI that can get past categories. This seems to me like any other advanced scientific instrument, like a particle accelerator or the James Webb Space Telescope. These tools are designed to go beyond our sensory and mental categories.

But in order to interpret the output of these tools we have to bring it back to where our senses can apprehend it--false color, loose analogies, etc. There is, as Kant says, no way for us to "see" The Thing Itself. And our instruments don't really do that either, they are just built to examine things from different perspectives.

So my philosophical hangup kept me from the thorough suspension of disbelief that you need in order to enjoy a novel. But I still loved it. No other SF novels have made me think so hard. Kudos to Adam Roberts for having the guts to write novels like this.

My Goodreads Review

Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler

It is amazing to me how well this book holds up 30 years after it was written. Definitely in its predictions--climate change was a mere gleam in an Exxon scientist's eye when this came out. The MAGA prediction does not shock me as much as some--there's a pretty straight line from the Moral Majority to today's Christian Dominionism.

The way this book holds up is in the lesson Butler conveys. In her time she said "I write not to predict, but to warn". And we did not heed the warning. Now here we are. Her protagonist's blunt descriptions of the failure of our culture and its consequences will be read 100 years from now as a companion to history.

Another reviewer said, "This is one of the best books I have ever read. I do not want to read it again". I absolutely second that. This was one tough read. I put it down at one point for more than a month. But I am glad I finished it.

My Goodreads Review

The This, by Adam Roberts

I am a jaded SF reader with a degree in philosophy so I have to say The This scratched all my itches extremely well. Yes, it's a difficult read, and those are very much not in style right now, but having come off reading Travis Baldree as an award winner I was really pleased to have come across Adam Roberts.

Here are two brilliant little side ideas I have not seen in other reviews:

Roberts uses two "cutouts"--men with no serious connections to anyone else, who won't be missed--in his story. SF often uses one, but he needed two. One protagonist is a fellow "orphaned" in his mid-twenties with his parents' death. Roberts notes that it's a hard time to lose parents. I've known people in this position and can say this is not acknowledged enough. So Rich (real name Alan, lots of play on this) is kind of drifting through life as a low-rent writer. Roberts captures the little elements of his life so well--preparing a microwave dinner and forgetting to eat it, and noting the careful place setting in a sad way. A perfect capture of a moment.

He also has an extended segment where Rich is reading an interview of a psychologist who argues for the importance of people being together. He says that to be present to each other we must *smell* each other, even if that is subliminal. I have believed this ever since social media and remote meetings took off, and have seen very little on it.

But of course Roberts' big project here is to tell a Hegelian story, and I believe he does so very successfully. This does not mean that at the end of it you will understand Hegel's dialectic, even though Roberts references it directly at the end. Rather, the story arc and how the plots come together is distinctly Hegelian. I would say he has to have understood Hegel much better than most who read it (certainly better than me) in order to pull this off.

This got shortlisted for some minor award, but generally speaking there's not much reward for writing deeply thoughtful work now. I am glad I came across this.

My Goodreads Review