The Invasion of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen

The Invasion of the Tearling is the second in the Queen of the Tearling series.  I have reviewed the first volume and said it was a "fun read", and didn't so much bear comparison to The Hunger Games, as the review in Entertainment Weekly said.  With the second volume I'd have to change my mind--it's a much heavier and message-driven book.  The cultural commentary is brought foward by a link back to the time of The Crossing.  We get a very bleak view of pre-Crossing life, even if it is privileged life, in the form of Lily Mayhew.  She becomes magically connected to Queen Kelsea's life and the book goes back and forth between them.  There's not a lot of nuance here--the end of America comes in the aftermath of an autocratic President who completes the throwback to a paternal, highly unequal culture.  This is contrasted with William Tear's utopian dreams for "the better world", a pastoral community of equals.  Queen Kelsea lives in Lily Mayhew's life through visions, and helps here survive the violence. 

But we know that the reality of The Tearling is much different from William Tear's vision.  It is a poor and weak country, pretty much at the mercy of Demesne and suffering from inept and corrupt rulers for at least a few generations.  Kelsea inherited a complete mess.  The vision and the reality are set side by side with some wondering, but no real resolution, so I'm thinking that subtlety will be coming in the next volume.

Like a lot of second volumes, this one is somewhat heavy going.  The kingdom seems doomed as the far superior forces of Demesne invade and Kelsea considers bad and worse alternatives.  Queen Kelsea is driven by duty but is getting farther from being a saint--her kingdom is becoming a cult of personality and pretty much everything depends on her.  There's a lot of ways this can go, which kickstarts the conclusion.  I will give it 3 stars, somewhat on the low end. 

The Day the World Turned Upside Down, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I went looking on Free SF Online for something to read, and found that the webmaster had put the two winners of Hugos on the home page.  The Day the World Turned Upside Down won in the Best Novelette category, was linked there, and I had not read it.

So this evening I did so.  And it's a nice little story--an end-of-love story, with a trick speculation.  The loss of the love of his life has turned the protagonist's world upside down, and then--that happens, literally.  Everything that is not attached to the ground falls up. Somehow the atmosphere and water stay in place, but otherwise everything sticking up falls unless it's held firmly by the ground.  Quite the mess.

So our hero is one of the very few survivors, and processes all this as he is processing his broken heart.  He has something to live for--returning his lost love's goldfish, who has survived also.

And so the metaphor goes.  It's reasonably entertaining, if not excessively so.  I'm glad I found it and can say I'm caught up on award winners for now.  I give it 3 stars.

Existence, by David Brin

David Brin is one of my all-time favorite writers.  His Uplift series is a great concept, and has served him to build a very fertile universe.  However, I'd have to say that I like his more grounded SF even better.  Earth is an excellent near-future novel, which is very tough to pull off.  And then, after far too long away from SF, he published Existence in 2012.  He'd been so long away, other than one short story I'd seen in 2009, that I didn't go get it right away, but received it recently as a gift.

And I would have to say that it's my favorite work of his yet.  This is a very ambitious work, stretching possibility to the limit without breaking it.  The reviews of the hardcover book say that one can read it as an Uplift preview, but the author makes it clear that this is not the case.  He said that having Faster Than Light travel, like in Uplift, is like "playing tennis with the net lowered".  This universe breaks no laws of physics, but instead speculates on what a cosmos that produces intelligent beings would look like if they were able to send something--a probe, a recording, anything--across the vast interstellar distances.

And what a rough place it would be.  Brin's core thought is that any non-static object, like a self-replicating probe or an artificial intelligence in a small package, would undergo change over the millions of years it would be in transit.  The spawning species would almost certainly be extinct by the time the artifacts made it to another civilization, with most never making it at all. If there were enough of them to actually encounter each other away from their home system, they might have evolved very different abilities, motives, and tactics from what their makers intended.

Existence is the story of what it might be like if earth received one of these evolved probes at some point in the not too distant future.  Then, more, and more...could we survive the influence of devices so far removed from their makers?

Brin is an astute student of society, and has written much non-fiction on the topics of privacy, politics and sociology.  His blog (on his website) makes for fascinating and inspiring reading.  He deeply values diversity of ideas as a defining human strength and the key to survival--and I heartily agree with him.

So I give the book a rare four stars for execution, and a nearly impossible fifth star for all that went into it.  More people should be reading and listening to David Brin, whether they agree with him or not.

S., by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

I was looking for something to read around the house and found a book my wife bought, but did not read.  I guess that's not free by any stretch of the imagination.  It's also not speculative fiction.  The main credited author, J. J. Abrams, is a speculative fiction director so that's as close as this comes to being SF.  And while I think libraries have probably purchased this book, part of its "thing" is that it has a lot of loose inserts.  Don't think it would survive one reading in a public library. Not even available in Kindle form--though I think you could almost pull it off.

There is a consistent way in which this book is not what it seems.  Let's start with a "meta" element--the authorship.  J. J. Abrams "conceived" S., but Doug Dorst seems to have done most of the writing.  It's a very elaborate project, including a website (eotvoswheel.com) with more "source" material. The presentation of the book itself is a tribute to the printed volume (see above).  The real story is in the margins, handwritten.  Physically it's an impressive product.

So how is it as a reading experience?  Well, interesting--the setup here is that you have a volume stolen from a school library and heavily annotated by a devotee of the author.  This author supposedly has a set of literary scholars interested in him, as his life was quite mysterious.  There's an in-joke here, in that the book itself is a kind of turgid adventure/philosophy novel--critics would study it but it's not popular.  And you get the idea that these scholars were maybe wasting their energy.  But the story in the margins is quite lively--a love story with intrigue and implied danger.

The format makes the book a very long read. You have the main story, which you really can't just skip since the annotators are using passages to make points.  And the margin story is nonlinear, which makes one slow down and sometimes reread.  I was intrigued for awhile and stayed with it, but found myself getting tired about halfway through.

In the end, it's an OK story wrapped around a bad novel.  The badness of the novel is intentional, the OKness of the story perhaps not as much.  Really it's about the production, an homage to print.  This is how we know the bound volume will never go away, even for simpler books. 

In the end, I give this four stars.  Three for the book, and another one for the production.  It's a beautiful thing.  Some books are worth owning, even for a biblio scrounge like me.   

The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen

The Queen of the Tearling is first in a series--it's been reviewed in Entertainment Weekly (actually the review is for the second one, but they do say to go read the first) and gets a comparison to The Hunger Games, though it is backhanded.

I think this book is better off if the comparison is not made.  It's a solid fantasy novel featuring a strong female lead--the audience clearly is the same as The Hunger Games.  Otherwise, it's more of a good fun read than a message piece.  It makes an interesting contrast with one of this year's multiple award nominees, The Goblin Emperor.  Both feature young protagonists living in exile, then thrust into leadership and danger unprepared.  But The Goblin Emperor's empire is a relatively peaceful and prosperous realm, while The Tearling is a deeply troubled kingdom in need of a savior.  The Goblin Emperor ends up to be the more unusual of the stories, though I would say both are very well written.

The Queen of the Tearling pushes a lot of YA teen girl buttons--concern over physical appearance, a kingdom in danger, a dashing and dangerous romantic interest, and untapped inner strength.  They're all done very well, with good pacing and plenty of action.  It was a fun book, I can easily give it 3 stars and recommend it.  

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurdly Hypothetical Questions

The core of almost all hard science fiction is to start with a premise that is not currently, or ever, possible (what if we could travel faster than light?  Fly at will?  Visualize the Internet in our heads?), but to then keep the rest of scientific knowledge the same and speculate about what happens in a story.

By this definition, Randall Munroe's What If? is very close to science fiction.  All it is lacking is the story.  It should be required reading for anyone considering writing science fiction, since it's basically a book of premises.  But I don't really think I would have to tell an SF writer that, I'm quite sure they have all read it by now. 

If you are at all interested in science and are reading this, you have heard of xkcd. Munroe has been drawing this comic for many years, starting as a NASA engineer.  He has made enough fame and fortune off this work to kick the NASA gig and write full time.  In What If?, he takes his readers' most elaborate and interesting hypothetical questions and tries to answer them with as much accurate science as possible.  He is thoroughly and amazingly successful at this--it's clever and interesting all the way through.  It's written in short chapters so you can consume it in little bites, and this is actually a pretty good way to read it.  I've been reading bits and pieces off and on for several months.

Munroe has a clean, clear, humorous writing style that will last forever.  If he wrote a novel, it would read a lot like Andy Weir's The Martian, for similar reasons--they are both engineers that obsess over the facts and just relate them straight out.  Maybe Munroe will try it sometime.  I loved it and give it my most utterly rare 5 star review as required reading.  If for some reason you have procrastinated, go get it now.

Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson

I consider Neal Stephenson to be one of the modern Grandmasters of science fiction, right up there with David Brin, Greg Bear, or William Gibson.  I have not, however, obsessively read everything he's written, as I did with earlier Grandmasters (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke).  For one thing, I'm a grownup now and don't have the time I once did.  Also I have branched out quite a bit in my reading, and have come to concede that even Grandmasters do not create all their works equally.  I could not manage to get into The Baroque Cycle and put it down after Volume 1.  But I got Seveneves as a gift and looked forward to reading it.

And am really glad I did.  This is throwback SF in the best possible way--informed socially by the present, and packed with fascinating descriptions of ideas for what's coming in the future.

We start out with a bang as something that comes to be known as the Agent rams through the Moon and breaks it up into seven big pieces.  Pretty shocking stuff, but it looks like life will go on, until scientists start crunching the numbers and figure out that life won't, in fact, go on.  The Moon will continue to break up into smaller pieces, and those pieces will come down on the Earth in a five thousand year firestorm.

Stephenson plays out the story in Grandmasterly fashion from there, telling a compelling story of humanity's efforts to allow at least a few to survive.  The focus is on setting up a space colony.  That colony barely squeaks by, but get by it does, and eventually builds a thriving society that prepares to resettle earth.

There are several well-done characters in this book, but in truth it stands out as a work of ideas.  We have the survivors deciding to divide the human race into seven different races, for the most part cooperating but with some deep divides.  Lots of orbital mechanics and physics along the way.  The story is a great one for geeks and keeps you wanting more all the way through.

Stephenson is good with different literary voices.  Cryptonomicon (a follow-on to the Baroque Cycle, but written first--a post-quel?) is very geeky but businesslike, and The Baroque Cycle somewhat flowery, as one would expect.  Snow Crash (his breakout) is very Cyberpunky.  For Seveneves, he chose--dry.  Not as dry as Jack McDevitt, but dry nonetheless.  I wondered why, as he doesn't have to write that way, and have not sorted it out.  Most of the characters are scientists, maybe he's trying to be true to their type?  The bartender departs from this with somewhat--dry--humor.

Also, the book jacket kind of has spoilers in it.  It gives away that humanity really does survive, which was in suspense for awhile.

All in all, it's a terrific book and you should go read it if you haven't.  I  give it 4 stars.