Helicopter Story, by Isabell Fall

This story was withdrawn from publication in Clarkesworld.  I am able to find it on the Internet, but out of that much respect for the author I will make you find the link for yourself.  I have read some of the backstory but not nearly all of the spilled ink.  But I am an activist in this space so was motivated to chase it down.

I understand it being viewed as controversial--it is a very unusual and continually disturbing take on the harnessing of gender roles for other purposes.  The protagonist told her story in extremely personal terms.  Isabell Fall is a writer who can really write, and I think it is a true loss for SF that she probably will never write again.  I have seen so many tired takes on LGBTQ+ support and gender issues get nominated for awards, where the main contribution seems to be simply role reversal--putting women in place of men and homosexual for heterosexual relationships.  This story takes gender seriously.  And the setting--a postapocalyptic matchup between a fugitive human government and one run by an AI--pretty much gets lost in the controversy.  I am sad that this went down the way it did.

Unconquerable Sun, by Kate Elliot

Well, I liked reading the book, it had some good battle scenes and kept me going. But "gender swapping Alexander the Great" is a little too literal. It reads like it is set on earth, in pretty much every way. We have modern references with Channel Idol (American Idol, get it?), and older references with descriptions of what is sumptuous (sandalwood incense). Instead of kings and sons we have queens and daughters, and broader sexual expression categories. But if those things are not explored (and they're not), the switch is just a bit flip and not signifying. I've read this story many times, in earthly fantasy, make-believe world fantasy, and galactic fantasy. It's not new or fresh and plays directly into the notion of someone having worth, merit and power because of their birth. Can we somehow get away from this?

My Goodreads Review

Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow

Like other reviewers, my feeling as I read this book was that it was not science fiction--more of a cutting-edge thriller with technologies that seem very possible today. This is how Cory Doctorow usually writes--the technology is from the descriptions of alpha- and beta-version tools in the best technical journals and blogs (like Boing Boing).

For about 80% of the book I felt sad at the state of play that Doctorow describes. There's just no real hope of retaining your privacy if you have the nerve to stand out and get a powerful actor's attention. For the last 20%, the hope faded to cynicism. The setup was so bleak that it really did not leave much room for a turnaround beyond Masha's "waking" moment. It made me think about Hong Kong, where the protesters had the latest versions of all this technical and social engineering thrown at them. The protesters lost in the end. And they knew it was going to happen. I do have to give props to Doctorow's complex ending. Even a turnaround that stretches hope to the edges leaves the situation at status quo ante.

We live in historic times. This book is not going to make you feel better about them. Sorry.

My Goodreads Review

Machine, by Elizabeth Bear

Well...I liked Machine, better than I liked Ancestral Night.  I'm still not really enthused, even though I basically enjoyed it and was engaged in the plot.  The story is not simple, nor is the resolution.  But I agree with other reviewers that both Haimey (from Ancestral Night) and Jens spend a lot of time introspecting in our general direction, meaning that they infodump big time. 

They are also very similar in their basic belief in the Synarche.  It comes off as an inhumanly prosocial galactic empire, until it doesn't.  The plot situations are slightly different, but both characters react to their situations as though they were representatives of what the Synarche is about on an individual level, instead of real people.  I am reminding myself that Haimey was in many ways not a real person.  Jens seems to be, though we learn less about her background.

The novel stands alone, and you really wouldn't need to read one or the other first.  That is kind of what drives me nuts about this one, because Ancestral Night leaves a very large plot element out there for later development.  <spoiler>Singer, the shipmind from Ancestral Night, is a peripheral character in Machine so we know it takes place later.  I was really hoping this book would take the idea of the pattern written into the universe that only Haimey can see a bit further.  There's a very mild echo of it in the poetry written into the archaic humans of Big Rock Candy Mountain's DNA, but that particular reveal ends up getting dropped entirely</spoiler>  So this book, in my view, *should* have been a straight sequel but it wasn't.  

I liked Helen Alloy as a side character, and the way the action unfurled kept me reading.  But both of these books just leave me thinking they could have been better.  Darn.

My Goodreads Review

The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi

The metaphor for the Interdependency is the Trade Winds. In the age of sail-driven cross-ocean trading (15th-19th centuries) ships would ride the southern Trade Winds to the Atlantic coast, and the northern Trade Winds back to Europe. So let's imagine interstellar Trade Winds that allow relatively easy contact between far-flung parts of an empire, and that the parts become specialized enough that life isn't possible without these trade winds. What would happen if climate change stopped them? That's the basic driver of the series. I kind of missed that in the first book, but the second book with all its exposition makes it more clear. Mind, Scalzi never *says* directly that that's what is going on, but it is.

So the plot has basically written itself, from the title of the first book. A collapsing empire, but instead of the Holy Roman or Ottoman empire it's a space empire. Honestly there are so many of these kinds of stories out there now, particularly among major award nominees, that I'm coming to pick the plot up pretty quickly. So I end up judging the book more by how interesting the characters are. We have a visionary (literally) leader, who doesn't really see herself that way, trying to act on behalf of a large and mostly functional empire, and all the other royalty is in complete denial and mostly out to screw the Emperox and each other.

The book rolls along nicely and there's plenty of humor so it's quite readable, but I can't say I engaged deeply with any of the characters. The Emperox Cardenia and her consort Mace Claremont are basically super nice people, out to help others. Their governing philosophy is expounded at some length throughout the book, which is pretty much straight Bentham utilitarian--the greatest good for the greatest number, in the most practical way possible. The Church of the Interdependency seems like worshipping Benthamite economics. Which would be a decent world--kind of like what's in John Rawls' Theory of Justice, with allowances for imperfect execution. Some think it's worthy on its own, but to me it's really a bridge to the next one, where I hope to engage a bit more.

My Goodreads Review

The Ministry For the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

I am coming to this book later than most. As a work of fiction I would give it a weak three stars, but I read many of the reviews, and any book that can generate that much interesting discussion deserves better than that.

Even though it's kind of a flawed book in a lot of ways. Many of Robinson's books feature compelling central characters, and the story is told through and around them. This is not one of them, even though it features two interesting protagonists (Mary Murphy, head of the titular Ministry, and Frank May, climate disaster survivor). We are subjected to long philosophical discourses and chapters told from the perspective of a species, or a concept, or something. Some of these work really well and made people think. Others were just windy. Toward the end of the book it's pretty much all not real necessary--the book kind of peters out.

I'm with a lot of other reviewers in finding the plot both too easy and insanely hard. As we speak, fossil fuel interests are striking back with fierceness and precision at climate activists, and appear to be ready to take the risks of aligning themselves with authoritarian parties and regimes. After all, oil companies are very familiar with how to work with dysfunctional and downright evil authorities. Robinson either left out a lot of potential tension around how fossil fuel interests would react to having top executives killed in terrorist attacks (I have to think KSR is on multiple watch lists. Take care, sir...) or he didn't think it would actually happen. The terrorist drone swarms are interesting, but I would have to think there'd be countermeasures, or ways to use them against the terrorists as well.

The opening sequence is one of the best graphic descriptions of a heat disaster that I have ever read. Took days to get over it. Consider that a trigger warning. And incredibly plausible at that. Wet bulb temperatures above body temperature are very real and happening increasingly in populated areas (part of what cleared out Syria).

Overall I am more depressed after reading this than hopeful. KSR is an incredibly imaginative writer, and I think he meant to write a difficult but hopeful book. But the path to survival involves a generous dollop of murder along with some pretty incredible changes of direction by world elites, in particular bankers. He may be onto something in thinking that legislative bodies in both democratic and authoritarian countries become less relevant due to their inability to act. So the conspiracy theorists end up being sort of correct. Yikes. I am sleeping even worse now.

All that said, it's a book that should be read, as I believe KSR properly gauges the threat of climate change and gives a good idea of the scope of changes that would be necessary for the bulk of the population to survive. Will we actually do this, or something like it? I don't like the odds. I personally cannot take or defend this path on moral grounds. Would we manage something like it with more justice? It would be irresponsible to give up.

My Goodreads Review

Agency, by William Gibson

I actually liked this book better than The Peripheral, though it has some of the same weaknesses. We have kind of moved past how the stubs (alternate futures not connected to the "main" line) get generated, and that's a good thing because there's nothing in either book that pretends to explain them beyond the fact that they are Chinese. Several logical things are happening--Ainsley Lowbeer, whose title is Metropolitan Police but that's about a toenail worth of what she does, is getting ever more powerful. It's more clear how the stubs connect to the main, since by using peripherals they can exchange information. And the AI feels like it could have happened already. If it has, would we know? Only if it decided to announce itself...

That said, it doesn't live up to the visionary fire of The Sprawl trilogy, though that's setting the bar awfully high. The extrapolations feel less like a whole new world, and more like a good anticipation of the very sad current one we're dealing with. The characters in Agency have grown, relative to Peripheral--Netherington has stopped drinking, though he is now very boring (perhaps deliberately so, he's a very familiar family man now), and protagonist Verity Jane is a more worldly wise ingenue than the one in The Peripheral.
Throughout the book it becomes clear that Lowbeer has gone beyond the point where anyone can control her, and the end of the book makes that perfectly clear. That sets up a turn in Book three--absolute power corrupts absolutely. We shall see.

My Goodreads Review