Back to novella length for Murderbot, a nice compact mystery. Murderbot is currently adjusting to Preservation, a place where humans and bots live alongside one another and bots are granted a certain amount of autonomy and free will when sponsored by humans; however, the people of Preservation (particularly the security personnel) are understandably unenthused about granting those freedoms to an armed and (presumably) dangerous security enforcement bot. Murderbot isn’t terribly interested in trying to win them over, either, or in being some human’s pet bot. However, when a dead body turns up, both Security and Murderbot are interested in finding the killer; it’s great to see them try to combine their resources and work together. Murderbot’s narration is priceless as usual; I love how piercingly observant it is of other humans, set against how determinedly it refuses to analyze its own reactions.
Tag: genre-scifi
More than This, by Patrick Ness
The book begins when Seth is drowning in the sea. Fighting against the waves, battered against the rocks, he hits his head and dies. And then he wakes up, far from the ocean, at what he belatedly realizes is a version of his childhood home. The book is purposefully confusing at first – Is this the afterlife? Is it a simulation? A story? But as Seth feels his way through this newly strange environment, beset by occasional vivid flashbacks to his past, we start to form a theory of what happened to create the world that he’s in now. Love the side characters that appear in Seth’s new present, especially the character of Tomasz who combines snarky insight with vulnerability. It’s very existentialist for a YA novel, thoughtful while still action-packed, and I quite liked it by the end.
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
I felt like half the book had gone by before I had an idea of what was really going on (and then I realized it was more like a quarter of the book because this was actually really long for a Gibson book) because Gibson doesn’t explain anything, and his characters don’t really pause to examine why they’re doing what they’re doing (and some of them are really weird). You eventually figure out that the people from the present world (a postapocalyptic climate future, for us) have reached back to their past and opened a line of communication, thus affecting events and splitting off an alternate timeline, except all this is done via electronic communications so it’s almost like both sides are playing video games with real people. (For a bit I thought that was actually the case near the beginning, that some of them were AI. It’s not a friendly start.) I got into it eventually, particularly liking the interactions between the two main narrators, but overall I found this jumpy and more confusing than it needed to be.
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
After four Murderbot novellas, I was surprised to find that this was a full-length novel (ebooks are so deceptive!). Happily, the awesomeness carried well throughout the longer length; it felt like a movie after watching episodes of a TV show. I love how the characters care so much for one another without having to rely on hormones or attraction to make it work; Murderbot is a spiky ball of reactions that feels emotions so deeply that it literally cannot deal, and it’s really touching to watch its friends (both human and bot) try to soothe a creature that hates to be hugged and doesn’t want to admit any weakness. I loved the plot, which created drama and tension without feeling forced; I loved the characters, both puzzled human and exasperated bot, and I loved the action, which gets intense at times but remains friendly and readable due to Murderbot’s awesome narrative voice. Great worldbuilding too, using the previous novellas as a foundation for establishing corporate greed and cruelty. Such good stuff; I can’t believe I finished an entire novel’s worth of Murderbot and am still left wanting more.
Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper
This book was published in 1989, and I think if I had read it then (or in the mid 90s, more likely), I would have been really impressed by it. The worldbuilding is next level: the planet Grass is filled with waving long grasses undulating like seas, but the residents are viscerally horrified at the idea of building roads through it, so travel is done by air car. The aristocracy gather to ride regular day-long hunts accompanied by slavering not-hounds, mounted on terrifying barbed not-horses with which they have a weird mental dependency, chasing incorporeal not-foxes that they physically rejoice in killing, but don’t bring home to eat. Despite its utter weirdness Grass seems to be the only planet not falling victim to a plague attacking humanity on every other planet, so the ruling religious organization sends a family of horse-loving ambassadors to the planet to try to make inroads with the insular aristocracy. Oh there’s also a bunch of reject priests who seem unable to convert anyone on the planet, but spend their time either climbing towers of grass for fun, or excavating evidence of a doomed alien civilization that (like humanity) apparently failed to understand Grass enough to colonize it successfully. Despite the extremely futuristic setting, the social dynamics are very gendered: both on Grass and off planet, the men have all the authority, and the women have insight but little social power. There is nothing subtle about the messaging, either; there’s a LOT of heavy-handed philosophical discussion about the place of religion and humanity’s place in the ecosystem, and the characters are sketched so obviously that it’s very clear who you are and aren’t supposed to sympathize with. There are also some truly icky bits involving nubile young women (why is it always the young women) whose minds are wiped and end up little more than mental children in problematically mature bodies. I thought the beginning was promising, especially the creepy alien atmosphere of Grass, but then everything got muddled because Tepper had so very much to say and couldn’t resist going on about it at length, or erecting more strawman villains to take down. Mixed bag overall.
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
Murderbot book 4 depends a little more heavily on the previous books to make sense; it does not stand alone as well as the previous ones. But it’s still really good; as Murderbot continues trying to protect its humans, it also finds it harder and harder to avoid questioning its own motives. I love that Murderbot would risk its life for a human without hesitation (scolding the human for being an idiot the entire time), but is so uncomfortable dealing with gratitude or friendship that it would rather run away than accept an overture. I loved seeing the characters from the first book come back to interact with Murderbot; their familiarity and patience with its quirks mean that it is even harder for it to turn away, even though it tries its very best.
The Outside, by Ada Hoffman
Buckle up, because this is a weird one. In a far future version of our universe, humans have built giant soul-eating AIs and now worship them as gods. Through their cybernetic post-human “angels,” the gods enforce their dictates on the people and root out any heresy, which is belief in a reality that doesn’t match the existing one. This is important because too much exposure to the “Outside” can spread like a virus, destabilizing actual reality and bringing hyperdimensional Lovecraftian horrors from Outside. In this world, autistic lesbian heroine Yasira just wants to make useful scientific inventions and hang out with her amazing girlfriend, but is unwillingly drawn into a battle between her former mentor and the AI gods for control of reality. I loved the prominent role that neurodiversity played in this book, and the recurring point that society is built on lies that we all agree on together.
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, by Saad Z. Hossain
Deceptive little novella, I loved it. Starts out with a djinn waking from an unnaturally long slumber and meeting a human sitting by the road eating pistachios. (The pistachios are a running gag with this guy, kind of like Han from the Fast and Furious franchise and his bag of chips.) Turns out the djinn has woken into a far future world where everyone in Kathmandu is implanted with pollution-fighting nanites, no one starves, and good behavior is rewarded on a point system by a citywide AI named Karma. Hilarity and biting social commentary ensue as the djinn attempts to conquer the futuristic city, a local bureaucrat tries to maintain order, and everyone belatedly finds out that the pistachio eater has an agenda of his own.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson
This book is classic Stephenson: a firehose of ideas mixed together in a doorstopper of text, geeky theories of near-future technological advancement sharing space with lengthy ruminations on the utterly mundane. Really, I feel like this is three books, clumsily mashed together: 1) ultrarich game developer dies, inadvertently funding the R&D necessary to scan and upload brains; 2) an honestly quite fascinating road trip through an America where people have banded into groups that all embrace different realities based on the news feeds they subscribe to; 3) an actual retelling of the Bible, or at least the Paradise Lost bits, with God and the angels as amnesiac uploaded minds, that ends up positing that the future of humanity will end with souls existing eternally in a self-imposed uploaded afterlife, as long as server farms exist to maintain them. It was probably too much to cram into one book, but hey, I expect nothing less from Stephenson. Personally I think it’s the middle section that will stick with me the longest; the ideas felt the strongest and most germane to current events.
The Apollo Murders, by Chris Hadfield
I was looking forward to this because I figured that Hadfield, being an astronaut, would be great at dropping in very technical and accurate details about the mechanics and procedures of spaceflight, and in this I was not at all disappointed. (I love Hadfield, for the record; his nerdiness is infectious, as is his clear enthusiasm for public outreach. I still enjoy rewatching his videos from space.) I also figured that Hadfield’s forte was likely not character development or beautiful prose, and in this I was also correct. This is a Cold War what-if thriller, in which the Americans and Russians jockey for primacy with moon rovers, spy satellites, and competing space missions. Hadfield sprinkles in real people with his fictional characters, and although his characters have no real depth or growth, they serve the purpose of moving the plot along. I loved the very technical descriptions of everything, from helicopter mechanics to how a loose solder blob could cause severe damage (see, this is why you don’t skimp on shock testing) to how communications lags meant that you had to deliver and receive information at a remove; that palpable joy in the details made the overall awkwardness of the story easier to swallow.