Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

I think I'm going to agree with others and say that this isn't a science fiction book. But it's getting a lot of SF award nominations and it contains a SF novel so I guess that's close enough. The lead character (Zelu) writes a novel that touches a nerve and is acclaimed as one of the best novels ever, but the fact that it is a SF novel, while often repeated, does not seem to be important to the book's success.

All that said, I think this is my favorite book by this author. There's a whole lot going on in here, and while it seems to lose some folks I think it is well managed. The SF novel within a novel (Rusted Robots) manages to be autobiographical about Zelu, which is I think quite an achievement.

The book is very forthrightly and consciously African, and its Africanness is an important element of the story. Maybe I should say it's Nigerian, specifically upper-class Nigerian including the diaspora (Zelu is Nigerian-American). It's a perspective we don't see that much of in English language SF, so it's refreshing. Okorafor's dialog is direct to the point of awkwardness sometimes, and this really comes through in the depiction of the family relationships. But it gets less awkward with every book she writes. Good stuff.

My Goodreads Review

The Humans, by Matt Haig

After reading this book I definitely get the comparison to the show "Resident Alien". There are strong plot similarities--an alien is placed on earth by killing someone and replacing them, with a mission of killing more humans. Unlike Resident Alien this replacement only wants to kill those who might know about the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

But like Resident Alien, the protagonist here learns feelings and grows to love humanity. It's a warm and poignant book, really not about the tropes of SF. But it's not the first time I have read a book like this, and I don't know how the alien protagonists get the sense of humanity that they need to be able to make witticisms about them without being at least somewhat human themselves. They always seem to be species that have given up connection with each other, and that's what they learn from humans.

The book was a good version of this plot. Not 5 stars good, but good. It's funny, in addition to being poignant. A fine diversion.

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

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

The Mercy of Gods, by James S. A. Corey

I enjoyed this book from start to finish, mostly because I think the craftsmanship of the authors shines through. It is not part of or related to the Expanse novels--the science McGuffin that allows FTL expansion in this universe is something called "asymmetrical space". Much closer to ideas in other SF series where one species that got a head start is dominating all others. And humanity beats them. This is disclosed in the chapter headings, so there are no spoilers possible--humanity wins. The story is in how, and even that gets a lot of disclosure (many hints about a single human that directs humanity in service to the big baddies the Carryx, but who eventually subverts and defeats them). So how does the story hold our interest?

The secret sauce is in the details of the relationships of the characters, and what they go through. Some reviewers compare this group unfavorably to the Expanse characters, but 1) That's setting the bar insanely high, and 2) Give them a little time to grow! The novel is deliberately paced. It's planned as a trilogy but I'm already seeing one "filler" story in between 1 and 2 so there could be a lot of content here. It's very enjoyable reading if you're an Expanse fan and willing to not compare this to the Expanse too closely.

My Goodreads Review

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by Peter S. Beagle

This is a fun little book. Peter Beagle is an accomplished storyteller at this point, and this story absolutely delivers. The characters follow familiar growth arcs to become more fully themselves. I agree with others that this is a YA-accessible story, definitely beneficial for a young reader. Maybe not enough depth to blow away a seasoned speculative fiction reader like me. At the end Robert's denial of his true interest and destiny gets a bit wearing. The description of how dragons take up residence in a home makes me think of highly intelligent cats. The royal castle in the story has become a kitty house, something that happens regularly to elderly people living alone. And the process to remove those cats gets sad in just the way described in the book.

Overall a pleasant read though.

My Goodreads Review

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is a very serviceable (ha ha) stand-alone novel. Tchaikovsky is very good at main characters, and this is no exception, but it might take some effort to see that. Charles the robot valet is designed to derive satisfaction from ticking off his assigned tasks, and is "conscious" of this. I put it in quotes because it's hard to say that Charles thinks of himself as conscious (see how hard this is? How does a robot that explicitly denies that it has consciousness and free will demonstrate it?). This tension becomes a core of the book as Charles has to leave his manor job and become Uncharles, in search of employment. The plot is a pretty standard robot rebellion with hero's journey, but that tension between Uncharles's developing consciousness and explicit denial that this is happening makes it interesting. Tchaikovsky is an ambitious writer and wants to take on big questions. He is also a prolific writer, and these two drives sometimes interfere with each other. Service Model is a really interesting read and wrestles with the biggest question of all, but in the end he needed to finish the book and get on to the next project.

My Goodreads Review

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraboty

The title describes this book quite well. And the first pages of the book describe Amina al-Sirafi very well. The book is a straight up adventure read with a female protagonist. She is a giant and strong, but also revels in her appreciation of men and sex. The book comes in halves--some people like the first half, some the second more. In the first half she and her adventures are more on a human scale. Then she undergoes a magical transformation and from there her character and the action are more bombastic. I liked the transition, for me it refreshed the book at the halfway point. In the end I give it 4 stars rather than 5--it left me entertained but not moved. If you want entertainment with a strong female protagonist this is your story.

My Goodreads Review

Semiosis, by Sue Burke

I think I liked this better than most reviewers. What I got out of it was an exploration of how human colonists would communicate and share space with a native being that was incredibly powerful in ways they knew they would not understand, and also absolutely necessary for their survival. Stevland, the sentient plant that is the character of continuity for most of the book, reflects in a very thoughtful way about how he (Stevland adopts a male persona and pronoun) relates to aliens.

I do get the criticism that the way the Pacifists talk about their community makes it sound a bit YA. I wonder how this would have gone over if she had made them be an overtly religious group, and had their convictions come from their faith? In places she seems to be quoting directly from the founding principles of the Unitarian Universalists.

I would say that this is "medium-hard" SF. Little is said about how the colonists actually made it to Pax. And nothing at all is said about how a plant embodies sentience. What do they think with, if not brains? I didn't struggle to believe that an intelligent and capable plant would think in terms of the chemistry it is intentionally trying to create. Stevland (the main plant) is capable of manipulating his chemical products (as many plants are) and Burke chooses to show this by having Stevland's inner monologue be very geared toward common names for what he is producing.

There is a rape scene in an early chapter that is meant to illustrate the depths to which the original colonists are willing to go in order to control future generations. Think Clockwork Orange, but in writing so less graphic. Some reviewers pointed out that the consequences of this action were not well explored.

Overall I thought the book had a lot of nuance and explored difficult topics well, and I'm glad I read it.

My Goodreads Review

Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I've read several other works by Adrian Tchaikovsky and have gone back to read this one. Gotta say I enjoyed it tremendously.

The world building is done pretty quickly but really works if you are willing to buy in--the big leap is a nanovirus that will drive evolution and brain development in a species. I especially enjoyed the nod to David Brin's Uplift series--and the fact that the book took the concept in a new direction.

The plot summary you can get from other reviews. Some things that stood out for me:

1. Tchaikovsky does a nice job of taking the spiders' perspective without getting so awkwardly alien as to be difficult to read. One of the things he does that is very telling is to have continuity in the spiders' names over generations and even millenia. They're all Portia, Bianca, or Viola (females) or Fabian (male). It gives you the real sense that spiders have a different idea of identity than humans, and it informs their motivations. But in other ways they form a hierarchical society and fight just like humans do.

2. Some people felt like the middle section got long-winded. I think they missed some things. The spiders fended off two existential threats to their civilization, both of which changed them thoroughly. The humans visited a second terraformed planet and fought to keep their creaky, hastily built ark ship alive. We got an extended view of the contrast between the spiders' generational changes and the central core of human characters, which did not change because they spent extended periods in cold sleep.

In all my reviews of Adrian Tchaikovsky's work, I highlight the bit in his bio about being trained in stage fighting. You can see this in the construction of his plots, never more clearly than in this book. We have early indicators that there will be conflict. The initial clash with the remnant of Dr. Arvada Kern. The enemies separate and regroup, each following their own dramatic path. They come together for the final conflict, including various reversals of fortune. It makes for very exciting reading. Not all of his books work like this--he has several novellas that tell stories in different ways--but his large scale series do seem to follow this pattern.

My Goodreads Review

The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson

I liked this book quite a lot, though it has its flaws. The setup is good for storytelling--there's a technology that allows access to the multiverse, but only a limited number of them, so you don't go completely off the rails with possibilities. I am seeing from some DNF reviews that they thought plot elements were missing--like the protagonist and Dell's very complicated romance, which was perfectly clear to me.

I had a better time with the book once I accepted the fact that the science and the action, while present, take a back seat to the main character's introspection. Most of the writing is about Caralee's dialogue with herself. She tells us, in great detail, both the backstory and current motivations for everything she is doing. There were more than enough plot reveals to keep that introspection relevant and interesting. Johnson uses, but doesn't overuse, the multiverse as a way to introduce surprises.

Race and class are central to understanding Caralee. The contrasts between those inside Wiley City and outside in Ashtown are made very clear and iterated over and over. It ends up feeling a bit one-dimensional as an exploration of race and class difference. But I will say that Caralee doesn't ever give in to holding herself up as some kind of example because of her circumstance. She is very clear about all the compromises she is making to survive.

Overall a bit of a grind but worthwhile.

My Goodreads Review

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

A lot of folks seemed to have expected something a bit different than they got from this novel. I did not read the blurb so was fortunately not misled. This is a fun and interesting fantasy novel based in Nigerian culture. When Talabi writes about Nigerian culture, he blends past and present in a way that's really interesting to me as a white reader. Nigeria is a country of extreme income inequality, but his depictions of wealth in Lagos remind us that destitution is not the only story in Africa. The book is both playful and deep, laying a goofy corporate power structure over pre-colonial tribal religion to create the backdrop for the story.

Shigidi is a constructed being, a minor nightmare god created from clay by Olorun, a powerful Orisha that used to run the spiritual corporation they are both connected to (it has a totally forgettable generic name). He works for prayers of believers--Talabi hints at an economy of prayer money. He is just scraping by when he meets Nneoma, a succubus and more elemental being that lives outside the spiritual economy the spiritual corporations have created. Their growing love is the central driver in the story, as Shigidi is remade into a god as potent as any other with Nneoma's infusions of power. The brass head is a macguffin, a physical object that focuses the efforts of the protagonists.

Talabi's writing has really developed. The narrative has many threads, mainly distinguished by the date and time at the head of each chapter. Pay attention to these. I found the shifts entertaining, they made me work a bit to keep up with the plot but injected backstory at the right time. Good stuff! Not perfect, there may have been too many of those threads and it got confusing sometimes, but overall worth it and a really good read.

My Yelp Review

Translation State, by Ann Leckie

 This entry in the Imperial Radch universe really shows Ann Leckie's writing skills. We have three protagonists, and cannot do without any of them. And we get to learn more about the Presger, that incredibly alien threat.

There's also a lot of interesting and astute political commentary here. Leckie has built a consistent world where gender and race are fluid concepts, with alternative pronouns used naturally. She then reintroduces race and oppression through the Phren and the Hikipi, two human races from LoveHate station now residing on a planet. The Hikipi suffer from terrible oppression at the hands of the Phren, but this does not make them into saints and martyrs. The Hikipi fall for disinformation (the Presger aren't real!) and commit violence just like real humans do. The point of valuing all people, and lifting up those who have suffered oppression, is not to put them on a pedestal. It's to make space for them as people.

Family and human connection are the center of the novel. Protagonists Reet (raised as human) and Qven (a Presger Translator) want to be human, and their family (who adopted Reet, and then embraced Qven when Qven is in a relationship with Reet) fight for their right to be human.

There's so much high quality teaching going on that it starts to become the point of the book. That's the only issue I have, and hard to say it's a real one. The Imperial Radch is an incredibly complex place, Leckie can explore it for her whole career and just get started. Looking forward to the next one.

My Goodreads Review

A Stranger In the Citadel, by Tobias Bucknell

Like many others I thought this book was going in a YA direction at the start. The plot seems a bit on the nose for our anti-intellectual times. But the book takes a good dark turn when Lilith finds out that her father isn't the staunch defender of the faith that she thought, nor is her beloved mentor Kira. There is a sort of classic element here, in that it's when Lilith acts according to the principles her father upholds that she finds out what's really going on.

The book is pretty focused on protagonist Lilith's coming of age, so it's still very YA, but in a good challenging way. But the relationships in the story are mature. Not that kind of mature, you dirty-minded people! In fact, not that at all. A strong element in the book is that people who don't share goals or values end up having to cooperate, or tolerate each other. Those stories are very well drawn here, and it's not something you see that often in SF literature. Worth the time in my opinion, I got a lot out of it.

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

Beginnings, by Kristina Ten

Beginnings is a gun fetish/fascism allegory, with a macho dad, and a directionless son.  But the protagonists are two girls that become best friends, exploring their relationship.  It's a sad tale but very well told and very innovative.  I would have voted it higher in the Locus polls.

The Coward Who Stole God's Name, by John Wiswell

The privilege of omnipotence is explored in The Coward Who Stole God's Name.  Pretty good twist on the topic, giving social media a role.  This was at least as good as D.I.Y., his other highly nominated story this year.  I liked it.

Douen, by Suzan Palumbo

Douen is an ethnography as a story.  Palumbo is from Trinidad and Tobago and tells the story in her vernacular English.  We learn about child ghosts in this culture.  I liked reading it, and that I have read it.