This review is for the 1943 SF novella Attitude, currently nominated for a Retro Hugo award, which appears in this collection. Review first posted on This review is for the 1943 SF novella Attitude, currently nominated for a Retro Hugo award, which appears in this collection. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with several other reviews for Retro Hugo-nominated short fiction, if you're interested):
Dr. Little wakes up abruptly. The last thing he remembers is being in his room on the spaceship Gomeisa; now he’s alone, locked in a strange, weightless room, with nothing to eat but a green, translucent sphere of lime juice (because of reasons) that’s injected into his room every few hours, which gets old fast. When the huge ship in which Little is imprisoned finally lands on a desolate alien world, Little finally sees his captors, eight-foot-wide starfish-shaped aliens, and is allowed to rejoin his crewmates from the Gomeisa.
The starfish aliens have also imprisoned a group of Vegans, which appear to be large, furry caterpillar-shaped beings. A Vegan interpreter tells the humans that their captors have treated them reasonably well and allow them a fair amount of freedom as well as access to their supplies, but keep them under observation at all times and whisk away anything that looks like it will be used for a weapon. The Vegans and humans (most of them, at least) can’t understand the motives of their mystifying starfish captors. Why are they treating their captives so oddly, and what can be done to escape?
Hal Clement’s Attitude is fairly typical of Golden Age hard science fiction: a straightforward tale of valiant men solving a knotty problem on an alien world. (No women appear in the pages of this novella.) The characterization is superficial and the human characters largely forgettable; Clement’s focus is on the plot and the details of the science and technology that Doc Little and his crewmates hope will allow them to escape. On an intellectual level it’s a fairly engaging puzzle story that’s reasonably well told for its era, but nothing in Attitude marked it as particularly outstanding or memorable science fiction from my point of view....more
2.25 stars; it's kind of a fun but superficial SF horror novel. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Human monsters take precedence over the crea2.25 stars; it's kind of a fun but superficial SF horror novel. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Human monsters take precedence over the creature type of monsters in The Brink, the sequel to last year’s SF horror novel Awakened. (Some spoilers for the first book are in this review, but are also in the publisher’s blurb for this book, so they’re nearly impossible to avoid.) Awakened was pulpy fun if you like SF horror and mysterious, murderous threats lurking beneath the surface of the earth. The Brink mostly gives us Albert Van Ness, a Diabolical Mastermind (there's even a TV tropes page for it!) of dubious sanity who was apparently imported straight from an old James Bond movie. The creatures are still there, but in a diminished role, mostly as an instrument of revenge in Van Ness’s hands.
Awakened introduced readers to a secret organization euphemistically called The Foundation for Human Advancement, led by Albert Van Ness. The Foundation had its genesis in the final days of WWII, when Hitler was hiding in the depths of his bunker. (“It’s always the damned Nazis,” commented Diego Munoz in Awakened. Truer words, Diego.) One bright spot in this book was finding out how Hitler really died.
In the aftermath, Hitler’s right-hand man, Nazi Colonel Otto Van Ness, formed the Foundation to both fight the underground, methane-breathing creatures and to threaten/blackmail national leaders into paying billions to the Foundation to fund their fight against the creatures, as well as Van Ness’s opulent lifestyle. Otto is dead now and his son Albert is running the Foundation, but Albert’s motivations seem to be more vindictive than his father’s. Albert Van Ness goes completely off the edge when the political leaders of the U.S. and Great Britain decline his demands for vast amounts of money.
Former NYC Mayor Tom Cafferty, his wife Ellen, ex-NYPD SWAT team leader Sarah Bowcut, and ex-gang member and technology expert Diego Munoz managed, against all odds, to survive the events of the first book. Now they’re trying to take the fight to the Foundation and Van Ness, but Van Ness is extremely well-funded and will stop at nothing in his quest for revenge. You can almost see him twisting his moustache and laughing insanely.
In The Brink, authors James S. Murray and Darren Wearmouth take the same fast-paced, tension-filled approach that characterized Awakened, but the fear factor is weakened with the shift of focus from the battle against unworldly creatures to a mere human criminal mastermind. Van Ness’s actions are horrific ― The Brink unquestionably ups the ante there ― but the plot, while it has its moments, simply isn’t as compelling. It’s further weakened by sketchy and superficial characterization, and by wildly implausible events: (view spoiler)[Like breeding hybrids between these creatures and humans, and Van Ness having a vast army of faceless soldiers and staff who don’t blink twice at his massive crimes against humanity and our earth (hide spoiler)].
The final straw was a maddening ending that defaulted to another overused trope (view spoiler)[: (don’t kill the villain; you’re a better person than that) (hide spoiler)] that required people to act in a way that was not only out of character, but created an additional huge, needless risk for humanity. Which risk, one may safely assume, will need to be dealt with in the next book in the AWAKENED series.
The Brink, like Awakened, is highly bloody and violent. It’s short (223 pages) and may appeal to readers looking for a quick, action-packed science fiction horror novel, driven by plot rather than characterization or scientific plausibility.
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher. Thank you!...more
3.33 stars for this SF horror novel. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Grady McGowan has been logging lots of overtime, running a tunnel-borin3.33 stars for this SF horror novel. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Grady McGowan has been logging lots of overtime, running a tunnel-boring machine beneath the Hudson River for the massive Z Train subway line extension that will link New York City to New Jersey with an underground express train. They’re even building a state-of-the-art underwater Visitors’ Pavilion in the middle of the Upper Bay. It’s hard work for Grady, but everything is going well … until a huge hole opens up underneath Grady and his machine.
Three years later, the mayor of NYC, Tom Cafferty, is in the Pavilion, presiding over the opening ceremony and inaugural run of the Z Train. The President of the U.S. is a surprise guest (though not a welcome one from Cafferty’s point of view) and Cafferty’s wife Ellen is one of the honored guests on the Z Train heading to the Pavilion from Jersey City. There’s a delay. A shriek over the loudspeaker. And then the train slowly pulls into the Pavilion, emptied of its passengers but with its inside surfaces covered in blood.
The chaotic scene that ensues only becomes worse when the president’s secret service team hustles him into the command center, shutting almost everyone else out. They’re trapped in an underwater pavilion that is slowly filling with poisonous and explosive methane gas from the Jersey tunnel, and where some unknown but highly deadly danger has roused and is approaching.
Awakened, a fast-paced science fiction horror novel set in our day, grabbed me by the throat and was impossible to put down. It raises so many questions so quickly: What lurks beneath the surface of the earth? Why are people dying in really gruesome, bloody ways? Why do certain people seem to have an understanding of what’s going on? The answers to those questions aren’t clear at first, but what is crystal clear is that a deep subway tunnel under the Hudson River is an extremely bad place to be stuck in.
With nonstop action and lots of plot twists and turns, Awakened reads like a novel that’s waiting to be optioned as a screenplay. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: it’s a lot like a thrilling, scary amusement park ride. The characters aren’t deep or complex, and Murray’s and Wearmouth’s writing, though competent, never approaches inspired. The focus here is clearly on the action.
The plot is more than a little implausible; in particular, there’s a late disclosure about a supernatural power employed by the humans’ mysterious enemy that was a bridge too far for me(view spoiler)[It was telekinesis (hide spoiler)], when my willing suspension of disbelief broke down. But Awakened gets plus points for adding an intriguing layer of complexity to its story with a conspiracy subplot that ups the stakes for humanity. I recommend Awakened if you’re looking for the literary equivalent of an exciting and gory action-horror film.
The conclusion to the story in Awakened is open-ended, leaving several plot threads unresolved. The sequel, The Brink, was just published in June 2019, and I’m definitely on board this Z Train to see what happens next.
I received a free review ebook copy from the publisher.
Content notes: Very gory and lots of language....more
Aliette de Bodard’s UNIVERSE OF XUYA series of novellas and short stories has been nominated for Best SerieReview first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Aliette de Bodard’s UNIVERSE OF XUYA series of novellas and short stories has been nominated for Best Series in the 2019 Hugo awards, for very good reason. The detailed worldbuilding and thoughtful writing pull the reader into a world with an alternative history, where Chinese ships were the first to discover the Americas, drastically changing our history and leading to a space age future where Chinese and Vietnamese galactic empires hold great power and intelligent mindships interact with humans outside of the ship through projected avatars. De Bodard’s website has an extremely useful page that includes a brief description of the Xuya (“Dawn Shore”) universe and a handy chronology listing all of her XUYA tales.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, one of the novellas in this series, takes place in the Dai Viet Empire. Thirty years before this story begins, the Citadel, a space station headed up by the Bright Princess Ngoc Minh, Empress’s oldest and favorite daughter and her heir, was a place of technological wonders: tiny but immensely powerful weapons, teleporting inhabitants, and more. The Empress, furious at her daughter’s ongoing defiance (including not sharing these weapons), had sent her ships to destroy the Citadel, but when they arrived the Citadel and all of its inhabitants had mysteriously vanished.
Now the Empire is threatened by an invading fleet of ships from the Nam Federation, which appears to have discovered a way to hijack the brains of the Empire’s mindships, their biggest advantage in war. The Empress is in more need of the Citadel’s weapons than ever before, and the Empire’s scientists may have found a way to use the mysterious aspects of deep space to revisit the past.
The focus of The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is as much on interpersonal relationships as it is the mystery of the Citadel’s disappearance and the search for a method to find it again. De Bodard examines the sometimes difficult bonds and relationships between mothers and daughters and sisters: the Empress regrets her falling out with her eldest daughter Ngoc Minh; the Empress’s youngest daughter, Ngoc Ha, tries to come to terms with her tense relationship with her own daughter, the mindship The Turtle’s Golden Claw, and her lingering jealousy of her older sister Ncog Minh. The Turtle’s Golden Claw is helping with the search for the Citadel and the newly vanished Grand Master Bach Cuc, the mindship’s paternal grandmother, who was one of those searching for the Citadel’s trail. Meanwhile, engineer Diem Huong, whose mother vanished with the Citadel when Diem Huong was six years old, is part of a team working on an experimental time machine, and she desperately hopes to use it to find her mother again.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is a slower-paced and somewhat opaque novella, with a large and sometimes confusing array of characters (all of the Vietnamese names were, I’m afraid, a slight challenge for me to keep straight). But it’s also a beautifully written, bittersweet mystery in a wonderfully imaginative space setting. Readers who are patient and attentive will be amply rewarded by reading this novella....more
The publisher sent me the hardback of this non-fiction book about eight months ago. I never got around to it. Now the paperback has landed on my doorsThe publisher sent me the hardback of this non-fiction book about eight months ago. I never got around to it. Now the paperback has landed on my doorstep today. It's a sign! Okay, maybe just a sign of extra publicist attention, but I'm still going to do this thing! It actually does look interesting. :)...more
2.5 stars. Unpopular opinion time! The first of my two DNFs in the last few weeks. This breezy adventure about a motley crew in an old spaceship was j2.5 stars. Unpopular opinion time! The first of my two DNFs in the last few weeks. This breezy adventure about a motley crew in an old spaceship was just okay for me. It never captured my imagination, and I ended up putting it down about halfway through and just never picking it back up again.
If diversity and acceptance are deeply important to you, this might be a great read for you. Everybody on the crew of the Wayfarer is diverse (mostly in a space alien but also in a sexuality kind of way) but accepting and loving (well, mostly), conflicts are resolved, love is found, and so on. But other than that diversity-positive element, the plot didn't strike me as anything new or unusual in SF, and diversity and social justice by themselves aren't enough to keep me engaged in an otherwise bland book....more
In a brutal, blasted country called the Yousay (USA, of course), hostile androids contenOn sale now! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
[image]
In a brutal, blasted country called the Yousay (USA, of course), hostile androids contend against regular humans and superpowered mutants against a backdrop of robot death matches, in a dystopian Mad Max type of world. DEV1AT3 is the sequel to Lifel1k3, which should be read first. Obligatory warning: This review ― not to mention a helpful four-page glossary that author Jay Kristoff provides at the very beginning of DEV1AT3 ― contains a few major spoilers for LIFEL1K3. (Those spoilers are also in the blurb for this book. So.)
Eve has spent her entire life thinking she was human, until discovering at the end of LIFEL1K3 that she’s an extremely realistic android, called a Lifelike, indistinguishable from humans except for their extreme strength, speed and self-healing powers. Deeply bitter about all the lies she’s been told, Eve has joined five of the six remaining Lifelikes in the search for Ana Monrovia, the daughter of their founder who was injured and hidden away in suspended animation. Ana is the key to unlocking some old Monrovia technology, including the information needed create more Lifelikes and a nanovirus that erases the Three Laws (protect yourself, obey humans and, most importantly, don’t kill humans) from a robot’s core code. The Lifelikes already have this Libertas virus, but are intent on obtaining it and spreading it to all of robotdom.
Meanwhile, Eve’s former best friend, human fifteen-year-old Lemon Fresh, has been hiding a “deviate” mental superpower all her life: the ability to overload electronics and burn them out. Lemon and the one remaining Lifelike who is friendly to humans, Ezekiel, are on the run, hiding from the agents of two powerful feuding megacorporations searching for the person who has this power and can turn the tide of the war between them. Lemon gets separated from Ezekiel and winds up with a group of humans who may just be her type of people. But the megacorps’ agents are still hunting for her, along with the ruthless members of a religious cult whose goal is to kill all mutants or deviates, like Lemon. Ezekiel is trying to beat Eve’s group to find Ana, in the company of a companion who will be a surprise (possibly welcome; but maybe not) to readers of LIFEL1K3. Ezekiel is hoping that Eve still has a conscience about killing people, but is that hope a vain one?
DEV1AT3 amps up the suspense from LIFEL1K3, and benefits from a more coherent plot. The characters are both colorful and memorable, and the stakes are high: humanity itself is at risk. There are a couple of robot deathmatches to liven up the plot along the way, starring Cricket, Eve’s formerly small robot companion whose brain has been put into a 77-ton WarBot. It’s a previously longed-for but uncomfortable change for Cricket, as he finds himself at the mercy of others’ agendas. Another entertaining character is Solomon, a humorously cynical robot who’s figured out a way to finesse the Three Laws and gain for himself some more personal freedom.
The theme of love and loyalty for friends and found family is strong here, particularly in Lemon. Her loyalty to friends (even the robotic ones) is laudable, even though it leads her to make some highly questionable decisions. Another character whose actions I sometimes found difficult to believe was Eve. Her character transplant lends itself well to the plot of DEV1AT3, and is perhaps even necessary to drive the plot, but didn’t entirely ring true to me.
Anti-religious views seem to bubble under the surface of DEV1AT3. Traditionally religious characters are inevitably fanatical or twisted or both, and when a new friend shares a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species with Lemon, she reacts with a spiritual fervor to its message, tears in her eyes and all. It’s the Good Book for deviates!
Other than these quibbles, I enjoyed DEV1AT3 a lot. There are some great plot twists that truly caught me by surprise, and it kept me engaged from beginning to end. I’d recommend this LIFELIKE trilogy to readers who enjoy dystopian YA science fiction. I’m definitely planning to read the next and final book in this series.
Content notes: Lots of dystopian and sometimes disturbing violence (like (view spoiler)[people with mutations/deviations being crucified by a violent cult (hide spoiler)]).
I received a hardback copy from the publisher, not to mention a NetGalley ebook. Thanks!...more
So the publishing company Tor is moving from its longtime home in the NYC Flatiron Building. To mark the occasion, Seanan McGuire wrote this slight, sSo the publishing company Tor is moving from its longtime home in the NYC Flatiron Building. To mark the occasion, Seanan McGuire wrote this slight, sentimental tale about an airship full of explorers from another dimension, coming to check out the landmark building in this dimension, and perhaps pick up a few artifacts from our world.
It's an amusing if improbable story, told from the point of view of the airship captain. Pluses are the "baklava" theory of multiple universes, the fun way that the first contact with the locals plays out, and this great illustration:
This is a charming Tor.com short story set in the "Wild Cards" universe.* T.K. attends a privileged high school and feels like an outsider in the sociThis is a charming Tor.com short story set in the "Wild Cards" universe.* T.K. attends a privileged high school and feels like an outsider in the social scene. This shows up the most in her PE class, where a couple of mean girls deliberately target her during the weekly dodgeball games, perhaps partly because T.K. has one disabled arm.
T.K.'s frustration at being targeted leads to a sudden discovery of an interesting "ace" superpower: she can control any spherical object with her mind. (T.K. = telekinesis, hah) This new skill proves to be quite useful in getting revenge against catty girls in dodgeball games ... but should T.K. be doing more with it?
Some nice insights into high school social scenes as well as the fallout from becoming a newsworthy story and having superpowers that can be used as a weapon.
*A virus has spread worldwide, killing some, giving others useless and often grotesque mutations (jokers), disfiguring others but giving them useful superpowers. A very few lucky people get mutations that don't disfigure them at all, along with superpowers that are really useful (aces)....more
5 stars for that jaw-dropping ending! I gasped and literally hugged my iPad.
A brief Themis File, set after the ending of the trilogy. DO NOT READ THIS5 stars for that jaw-dropping ending! I gasped and literally hugged my iPad.
A brief Themis File, set after the ending of the trilogy. DO NOT READ THIS if you haven’t read the trilogy. Seriously, it won’t even make sense and it has a huge spoiler.
The original short story version of the movie Memento, about a man named Earl with severe short-term memory loss issues (he can't keep anything in hisThe original short story version of the movie Memento, about a man named Earl with severe short-term memory loss issues (he can't keep anything in his mind for more than about 10 minutes) who is dealing with it through a combination of written notes to himself and tattooed messages on his body, urging himself to investigate his wife's suspicious death.
This opaque, rather confusing story will make a lot more sense if you’re a fan of (or at least familiar with) the movie. What it does best is examine the psychological effects of this ailment and the frustrated drive to seek revenge.
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.
This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.
But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.
The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them.
You know how some books get less impressive as you get some distance from finishing them and think about them some more? You realize the plot had seriYou know how some books get less impressive as you get some distance from finishing them and think about them some more? You realize the plot had serious holes, or the characters were flat, or whatever. But a few books take a while to seep into your brain, and gradually get more impressive. Walking to Aldebaran is one of those, and I'm bumping it to all 5 well-deserved stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
I never know what to expect from Adrian Tchaikovsky, but he’s always entertaining. Walking to Aldebaran is unlike anything I’ve read from Tchaikovsky to date, a powerful, literary SF novella with an edgy, dark sense of humor and a strain of horror that gradually intensifies until its shocking ending.
British astronaut Gary Rendell is part of an international space team sent from Earth to explore a moon-sized, alien-made object ― officially called the Artefact, unofficially called the Frog God because of its appearance in photos ― that a space probe has found lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. Through a series of events that are gradually unfolded to the reader, Rendell is now wandering alone inside the cold, endless, crypt-like tunnels inside of the rocky Artefact, where highly peculiar physics hold sway.
The Crypts are an artificial phenomenon which let matter, energy and information thumb their collective nose at relativity, and do it unchanged, without all that infinite-mass nonsense that approaching light speed entails.
Rendell is separated from his crewmates and desperately trying to find his way back to his ship or even just our solar system (the few exits that he has found seem to lead to other planets).
The chapters of Walking to Aldebaran alternate between the backstory of how Rendell got to be where he is now, and his exploration of the Artefact in current time, coming into contact with the Artefact’s other inhabitants and commenting on his experiences to the reader. The inside of the Artefact is a nightmarish place, dark and dangerous, with countless alien creatures, most of whom want to eat you. About one particularly horrific monster, Rendell observes:
It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.
… Human ingenuity is drawing a blank. Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it.
Meanwhile, there’s also a mysterious scraping, scritching noise constantly echoing inside of Rendell’s skull, something that feels almost understandable to him, driving him to distraction. He develops an obsession with hunting down the source of the mental scratching and stomping it out.
My first reaction on finishing Walking to Aldebaran was, “Well played, Tchaikovsky!” This novella both surprised me and exceeded my expectations. Rendell’s situation and narrative voice at the beginning are similar to Mark Watney’s from The Martian: he’s lost and alone, and has a sarcastic sense of humor, though Gary Rendell’s narration is darker and more erudite. In fact, it’s reminiscent of John Gardner’s Grendel: Gary frequently uses literary allusions, ranging from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to T.S. Eliot, and tosses out vocabulary-challenging words like pareidolia, quotidian, oubliettes, and anagnorisis.
The story gradually evolves into something far more strange and horrifying than The Martian. There’s one final literary reference that was the icing on the cake, but it’s a major spoiler(view spoiler)[: I was getting serious Beowulf vibes from the ending and was pretty certain it wasn’t just my imagination. Then I realized that Rendell had commented a few times about how all the astronauts’ nametags on their spacesuits have their first initial and last name. G Rendell was the last piece of the puzzle clicking into place. (hide spoiler)]
I’m not normally much of a fan of the horror genre, either in SF or fantasy, but I highly recommend Walking to Aldebaran for readers who enjoy science fiction that has unusual literary depth.
Content notes: a nightmarish setting, some gruesome violence and a handful of F-bombs. Not for sensitive readers....more
More time travel craziness mixed with a little less D&D and a little more paradox. Final review (a joint review with Kat Hooper at FanLit) first posteMore time travel craziness mixed with a little less D&D and a little more paradox. Final review (a joint review with Kat Hooper at FanLit) first posted on Fantasy Literature:
As Limited Wish begins, Nick Hayes, the 16-year-old math genius that we met in One Word Kill (you need to read it first) is being pursued by a pack of drunken Cambridge students bent on beating him up. It’s 1986 and Nick has just been enrolled at Cambridge, thanks to the notice of Professor Halligan, a brilliant mathematician who recognizes Nick’s potential. What Prof Halligan doesn’t know is that Nick has to invent time travel so that when he’s older he can come visit his teenage self in the late 1980s and, in so doing, save Mia, the girl he thinks he loves and has a future with.
But there are several major problems with this scenario. Worst: (1) Nick has no idea how the mathematics of time travel might work, especially when you throw in the time paradoxes he’s experiencing, and (2) Mia has dumped Nick. Other significant problems include the hazing that Nick is undergoing at Cambridge, the weird instances where he seems to perceive time fragmenting to create multiple potential futures, the fact that he’s met another girl, Helen, who he’s very much attracted to, and some dire news he receives from his oncologist. At this point, Nick is fairly confused and realizing that he may have screwed up his future entirely. He needs to get it back on track if he hopes to survive to save himself and Mia.
Some visitors from the future ― one familiar character and one new one, Eva, who has a surprising connection to Nick ― complicate this process further, especially since they’re from incompatible futures. If that’s not bad enough, another vicious enemy appears who’s tasked by a shadowy investor with keeping Nick on task with his scientific research, and who begins to take an unhealthy interest in Nick because of certain events from One Word Kill. And have we mentioned that the universe is trying to kill Nick? (It’s nothing personal, Eva assures Nick, “just physics.”)
Mark Lawrence’s IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy is reminiscent of (and possibly a celebration of?) 1985’s best movie, Back to the Future. It’s full of time paradoxes and competing versions of the past, present and future that shouldn’t be examined too closely; you’ve just got to deal with it. The number of hard-to-swallow coincidences, like a second villainous Rust brother, and the overload of problems and challenges faced by Nick, are hand-waved away as all part of Nick becoming a lightning rod for changes and paradoxes that the universe wants to prevent. Logically it’s hard to swallow, but if you can roll with it, it does make the story more exciting.
We’re still concerned about the plot issue that Tadiana mentioned in our review of One Word Kill ― we’re simply not convinced that the first instance of time-travel, the one that created all these problems for Nick and his friends, ever needed to happen in the first place. So far, the suffering and confusion that has resulted doesn’t seem worth it. We’re hoping Lawrence is going to convince us otherwise by the end of the trilogy but at this point we’re doubting it, and will reluctantly chalk it up to some extremely unadmirable selfishness or blinkered thinking on Nick’s part.
Fans of One Word Kill will surely enjoy Limited Wish. Other than the change in setting and the addition of a few new characters, it is an expansion of the story in One Word Kill and the prose, characterization, and dialog continue to impress us. We love how Nick talks about the way mathematics underlies the structure of the universe.
[T]here are fabulous beasts that swim in the seas of mathematics. Multidimensional behemoths of incredible beauty that even the best of minds struggle to glimpse. The equations we battle with, the proofs that we use to nibble at the edges of such wonders: these are the shadows cast by those we hunt.
We also love the retro feel of the novel and Kat, especially, can relate to these characters since she was also starting college in the fall of 1986. (And she will admit to occasionally, like Nick, wallowing in teenage misery while listening to Sisters of Mercy ― though she didn’t have as compelling reasons as Nick.)
The titles of the IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy cleverly blend Nick’s personal life with the Dungeons & Dragons game he plays with his friends on the weekends. The title of the first book, One Word Kill, refers to Nick’s cancer diagnosis. Limited Wish, another spell used in Nick’s D&D game, reflects Nick’s realization that he can’t have everything he wants in life. Some things are going to have to be sacrificed. It’s also a metaphor for the idea that sometimes a small wish, or change, can have a major impact, which plays out in an intriguing way in the plot.
The final book is titled Dispel Illusion and will be released in November. We are wondering what illusions will be dispelled…
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!
Content note: scattered F-bombs and violence. ...more
This is the first book in a very cool, fast-paced time travel SF trilogy that mixes 1980’s Dungeons and Dragons (with a British teenage cast) + cancerThis is the first book in a very cool, fast-paced time travel SF trilogy that mixes 1980’s Dungeons and Dragons (with a British teenage cast) + cancer + time travel/multi-universe aspect. This first book is $1.99 on Kindle, at least right now. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (in a different, collaborative form, with a couple of my co-reviewers at FanLit).
Nick, the 15 year old narrator of the story and a math genius, who's a wizard named Nicodemus in his D&D games, finds out that he has leukaemia right at the start of the story. His group of D&D-playing friends sticks behind him, including the girl, Mia, who recently joined the group. She's probably too cool for the nerdy Nick, but he's still interested in her. :) Nick also has a couple of pretty scary enemies from his school: the bully Michael Devis and the even more vicious Ian Rust.
One day, while Devis is picking on Nick, an older, balding man named Demus (hmmm) appears out of nowhere to slug Michael Devis in the mouth just as Devis is about to empty Nick’s backpack into a pool of vomit. Demus looks strangely familiar to Nick, and the reader figures out why pretty quickly (the clues aren’t exactly subtle). Soon Demus is explaining time travel to Nick, setting out a rationale for it in quantum mechanics, and giving Nick puzzles to solve to make his future ― and, significantly, Mia’s ― possible.
Things grow ominous when Ian Rust is expelled from school and takes up with a local drug dealer to whom Mia owes a debt. Demus makes things even more difficult by asking for a piece of technology that doesn’t exist except as a highly-secured prototype in Nick’s time.
I found the plot intriguing (I have to say I'm a fan of time travel tales and strongly predisposed to approve of them). Mark Lawrence’s writing style is also a noticeable step up from the usual:
A decade seemed like forever, and it would take three of them just to reach the age my mother was right now. Cancer had closed that down. Like the big C, curling in on itself, my view of the future had narrowed to tunnel vision, aimed squarely at the next week, next month … would I have a next year? I was carrying not only the burden of my sickness but the pressure of making something worthwhile of each day now that my towering stack of them had fallen into ruin and left me clutching at each hour as it slipped between my fingers.
The characters also appealed to me (well, except for the psychopathic Rust, with the “hole in his mind that needed to be filled with other people’s pain”) and the plot kept me engaged and interested.
When all was said and done, though, the motivation for Demus’ trip to the past seems clearly insufficient, given the high price that Demus knows it will cost. To say more would get us into spoiler territory, but perhaps the next book will clarify why it was so vitally necessary. As it currently stands, it was a big enough plot hole for me to knock down my rating by a star, especially when combined with too many logical questions being sidestepped with the rationale that Demus has to take certain actions simply because that’s the way it happened before.
Lawrence’s choice of “One Word Kill” as the title of this novel plays out in at least a couple of ways. A key point in a couple of the characters’ D&D games is a spell named “Power Word Kill”; Nick points out how “lame” he thinks this spell is because with every other bad thing that happens, there’s some chance, however small, that you can escape. But with Power Word Kill, there’s no chance at all to escape the spell if it’s cast at you. That same sense of inexorable death looms over Nick personally because of that “one word” every human dreads to hear: “Cancer.” But perhaps there’s a narrow way out for Nick after all…
The next book, Limited Wish, has just been released. It takes the plot in some interesting new directions!
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Thank you!...more
The NYXIA TRIAD YA SF trilogy is complete now that this third volume has been published. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Nyxia Uprising is The NYXIA TRIAD YA SF trilogy is complete now that this third volume has been published. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Nyxia Uprising is the fast-paced conclusion to Scott Reintgen’s NYXIA TRIAD YA sci-fi trilogy, an adventure with several teenage protagonists. It’s set both in space and on a distant planet called Eden that has two moons, an alien race called the Imago, and an abundant supply of nyxia, a malleable mineral with near-magical powers. These three books tell a single, unified story, and it’s impossible to appreciate this series without reading all of the books in order … and here is your obligatory spoiler warning for the earlier volumes, as I’ll briefly recap the tale thus far.
The first volume, Nyxia, had a Hunger Games-in-space type of plot (though the competition between the teens is less … murderous, it’s still pretty intense). A powerful corporation called Babel assembled a group of ten teenagers of various nationalities but generally less-privileged backgrounds for a space flight to Eden to mine the priceless nyxia for Babel, promising them immense wealth for a few years of their lives in Babel’s service. Most of the story is narrated by Emmett Atwater, an African-American teen from Detroit. The year-long flight to Eden is spent in an exciting (for both the teens and the reader) and exhausting (for the teens) competition between the teenagers for a coveted place with the final group that will actually land on Eden.
The second book, Nyxia Unleashed, shifted to the teens’ exploration of Eden (better known as Magnia, the Imago name for their planet) and getting to know the Imago, the human-like inhabitants of Magnia, as their group travels toward and into the planet’s largest city. It becomes even more clear to Emmett, his love interest Morning Rodriguez, and the other teenagers just how untrustworthy Babel is. But it turns out the Imago have been keeping a huge secret as well: the two moons of Magnia are going to collide in a few weeks, and the planet will become unlivable.
As Nyxia Uprising begins, it’s now a race against time and Babel’s military forces, to try to get Earthborn teenagers and a representative group of the Imago ― who will be the sole survivors of their entire race ― up into space to try to commandeer the Babel spaceships that are in orbit around Magnia, and travel back to Earth. Since the Imago aren’t a spacefaring race, getting up to the spaceships is more challenging than it might seem. The Imago and Earth teens also need to be prepared to fight Babel’s leaders and their marine forces for access to and control of the ships. But the Imago have nyxia, limitless imagination, and desperation on their side. Not to mention some extremely bright and well-trained (thanks for that at least, Babel) human teenagers.
Babel’s been not only cheating and lying to the human teens and the Imago, but also attempting to murder everyone on the planet, so it’s all fair. But Babel’s not going to give up easily.
Both of the earlier books in this series were exciting and engaging reads, if noticeably light on the science aspect of science fiction (for reasons I delve into in my review of Nyxia Unleashed). The teenage protagonists are an appealing and highly diverse group, and the novels (especially the first and this third one) are briskly paced, with hardly a moment for the teens and the readers to relax and take a deep breath or two. But I couldn’t help but feel that the series lost some of its sharpness and creativity in this last book. It’s focused on a single mission: get to the spaceships, take over, get back to Earth. Despite multiple obstacles and a few surprising casualties along the way, Nyxia Uprising overall felt rather predictable. The denouement was also a minor let-down, as Reintgen wrapped up the story with some feel-good giftwrap and a nice bow that took a few too many chapters to unfold.
Despite some weaknesses in this concluding volume, overall the NYXIA TRIAD series is a fun read that kept me interested to the end. I’d recommend it mostly to older teen readers who like sci-fi adventures with a diverse cast.
Content notes: Lots of violence and death. Bodies everywhere!
Initial comments: We started off in the first volume, Nyxia, with a Hunger Games in space kind of plot (though the competition between the teens is less ... murderous, it's still pretty intense).
[image]
The second book, Nyxia Unleashed, shifted to exploring an alien planet, getting to know the Imago, the human-like people who live there ... and fighting against Babel, the evil corporation from Earth that brought the teens to this planet.
[image]
The two moons are important: they're going to collide in a few weeks, and the planet will become unlivable. So now it's a race to try to get our group of teens and a representative group of the Imago - who will be the sole survivors of their entire race - up into space to try to commandeer the Babel spaceships, to save as many of them as possible.
ETA: This is too funny! Seanan McGuire is actually going to turn the Up-and-Under/Over the Woodward Wall element of this novel into a real book seriesETA: This is too funny! Seanan McGuire is actually going to turn the Up-and-Under/Over the Woodward Wall element of this novel into a real book series! https://www.tor.com/2019/07/01/announ... I am so there for this.
4.5 stars for Seanan McGuire's latest novel! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature in a slightly different form, as a collaborative review with my friend and co-reviewer Jana. You should read our (excellent) joint review there! :D
James Reed and his assistant Leigh Barrow ― a pair of rebel alchemists of the mad scientist type ― have been doing human experimentation for years, trying to make/breed (it’s a combination of both) children who will embody the “Doctrine of Ethos” and have godlike magical powers. Because putting all this power in one person hasn’t worked, they split the Doctrine into its two components, math and language, between two fraternal twins. One twin will be a math genius; the other gifted with language and words. Raising these children under controlled conditions, the alchemists believe they can achieve the results they want and keep the powers under their own control.
Roger and Dodger are one of these sets of twins, separated at birth and adopted out to families living on opposite coasts of the United State of America. Roger is the language-gifted child and Dodger (a girl) is the math-gifted one. At age 7 the twins figure out that they have not only the ability to mentally communicate (through “quantum entanglement,” announces Roger triumphantly) but the capacity to see through each other’s eyes ― a revelation to Roger, who is completely colorblind. But meanwhile the single-minded alchemists are keeping a VERY close eye on them. They'll do anything - even murder - to make sure nothing interferes with their plans.
In Middlegame, McGuire blends together light science fiction, fantasy and some horror, and then tosses in elements of Greek philosophy (the aforementioned Doctrine of Ethos), Tarot-like concepts, timeline shifting, classic children’s literature, and more in an almost indescribable literary concoction. Initially I found it a little too muddled. I wanted the improbable road leading to the Impossible City to make more logical sense, and I thought the half-explained quasi-Tarot references to the King of Cups, Queen of Wands/Swords, Jack Daw, and Page of Frozen Waters were more distracting than useful. A. Deborah Baker only briefly appears at the very beginning of Middlegame, but her ideas inform the entire plot. The chapter-heading quotes from her Over the Woodward Wall add color to the main plot but didn’t supply all of the additional clarity and meaning I was looking for. (I deeply wish that this were an actual book, though!)
But a funny thing happened on my way to the virtual forum where Jana and I were exchanging our ideas and assembling our joint review. I dug back into the text of Middlegame and found that these various elements melded together far more satisfactorily than I thought on first read. Elements that at first seemed opaque appeared much clearer on second read. I especially like the idea of L. Frank Baum using The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to deliberately muddy Baker’s pure division of the four elements (water, air, fire and earth and the related humors) into four quadrants.
I’m still dubious about the “Doctrine of Ethos” as the concept underlying the entire alchemical plot. The original doctrine (a Greek theory of how music influences the thoughts and emotions of humans) has an extremely tenuous logical connection to how our unbalanced alchemists are literally embodying the Doctrine in a pair of individuals, “forc[ing] the Doctrine into flesh” as a way to influence the entire world, the fabric of time and reality itself. And I’ve concluded … you just have to roll with it. Suspend disbelief, strap yourself into your seat and enjoy the ride.
Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.
McGuire has such a gift for putting profound insights into words that strike your heart. As Roger and Dodger, both lonely children who don’t really fit in with others, get to know each other through their long-distance telepathic relationship, they realize how much they fit together, the scholastic strengths of one matching the weaknesses of the other.
They can help each other. They can shore up the broken places. He knows the words for this: cooperation, symbiosis, reciprocity. So many words, and he’ll teach her all of them, if she’ll just keep being his friend.
I realized, not long before Roger and Dodger themselves mention it, that their last names, Middleton and Cheswich, combine to make Midwich, a clever reference to The Midwich Cuckoos, a classic SF horror novel about a group of alien children (partially) concealed among humans. In Middlegame, though, the cuckoos have our undivided sympathy.
Erin, the female half of one of Reed’s failed twin sets, turned assistant, developed into an excellent, multi-layered character, with far more depth than I initially expected. She ended up being one of my favorite characters … unlike Leigh, whose beauty hides an appalling bloodthirstiness.
I have to add that I think the main plot of Middlegame is ingenious. I loved experiencing the growth of Roger and Dodger and the twists and turns in their relationship, and seeing how their powers gradually manifested. The astrolabe in Reed’s lab turns out to be more than a lovely symbol. There’s some pretty cosmic stuff going on here! If this is just the middle game in this world, I’d love to read about the endgame.
Middlegame is a complex and thought-provoking novel that defies easy categorization. If you’re in the mood for something unusual, I strongly recommend Middlegame.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy!
Content notes: Some horror (THAT BURNING HAND THING) and violence, murder, attempted suicide, scattered F-bombs....more
Four-foot six-inch talA soft 3 stars for this military SF novella, free to download here at this link. Full review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Four-foot six-inch tall, 72 lb. Floribeth (Beth) Dalisay, who makes up in determination what she’s lacking in size, has risen from the underclass on the planet New Cebu to become a pilot for a megacorporation. Flying a tiny, one-person ship called a Hummingbird, she’s on a routine mission to explore new solar systems and planets when she runs into alien spaceships. Unfortunately, they’re hostile aliens who promptly start shooting at her ship. Using some tricky flying that involves nullifying her ship’s AI and taking the controls, Beth manages to escape through the stargate she had set up, blowing it up behind her.
This action, though by the book, runs Beth into deep trouble with her employer, which acts like the typical Evil!Corporation and inexplicably (except that they're eeevvilll) severely punishes her rather than rewarding her. Luckily for Beth, the Directorate Navy hears of her adventure and is now interested in our hotshot pilot, especially since she’s the only human that has ever come in contact with a spacefaring alien race, hostile or otherwise. But can she make the grade as a Navy fighter pilot?
Fire Ant is a quintessential MilSF novella, long on action and intrepid main characters and space battles and rather short on memorable characterization, depth and imagination. It’s readable, and fine if what you’re mostly interested in is space battles and a standard “rising through the military ranks through skill and bravery” type of SF story. It’s the first in a series, so it feels like an origin story, and there are some major hanging plot threads (mostly: what are these aliens and why did they start shooting before taking the time to find out more about humans?).
Fire Ant is a Nebula nominee, but (I think it’s safe to say) only because of some gaming of the Nebula voting system, and I would have given it a pass if I hadn’t found the free copy through File 770. I also think it’s safe to assume that their link to a free copy is temporary during the Nebula voting period, so grab it now if you’re a fan of traditional MilSF and are interested.
Adventures of a space-age repo man! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Fergus Ferguson, a large, redheaded man from Scotland by way of Mars, hAdventures of a space-age repo man! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Fergus Ferguson, a large, redheaded man from Scotland by way of Mars, has made a “career out of chasing things and running away.” He’s running away from his past, for reasons that gradually become clear. But right now he’s focused on chasing something: an expensive, sentient spaceship, Venetia’s Sword, that was stolen from its makers by Arum Gilger, a criminal mob boss. This repo mission has led Fergus to Cerneken or “Cernee,” a haphazard space colony consisting of a ring station surrounded by a of hundreds of marginally-habitable rocks, metal cans and dead ships, all tied together with a web of cables, with cable cars running passengers between the various habitats. Here Gilger has his home base, one of the “big five” powers on Cernee.
Fergus has a plan and a secret method of taking control of Venetia’s Sword, shared with him by the shipbuilders. But things go wrong for Fergus right from the start, when he almost gets killed in a cable car explosion in the space colony. It looks like Gilger isn’t willing to share power much longer. Fergus allies with Gilger’s enemies, who have their own issues with the power-hungry boss, and puts his plan into play, but there are complications … including some mysterious aliens with their own agenda.
Finder is part heist story and part rescue mission, as Fergus finds that he needs to return to Mars to save a kidnapped young woman who’s being used as a pawn in one of Gilger’s plots. Fergus is a hero who’s still finding himself, carrying wounds from his childhood on Earth and his participation in a rebellion on Mars years ago. He comes up with farfetched but brilliant plans on the fly, and it’s great fun to watch him run various cons on his enemies. One creative plan involving foil wrap, sticky candy, tennis balls, and vibrating sex toys is a can’t-miss experience.
The brisk pace and almost non-stop action will keep readers engaged, but Finder has more depth than one might think from the plot description. The characters have interesting (and often mixed) motivations, and Suzanne Palmer has clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding. Cernee is a complex setting, with memorable details like “flysticks” that enable riders to jet between the different habitats (Fergus manages to steal a flystick that fills the space around him with sparkles and glowing holographic cartoon images). The interlude on Mars shows us glimpses of a richly imagined society there as well, peeking around the edges of the main plot.
I’ve been enchanted by Palmer’s short fiction, especially the Hugo award-winning novelette “The Secret Life of Bots.” I was expecting the same type of whimsical humor here, but Finder is more of a straightforward SF action/adventure tale, which disappointed me, although there’s frequently humor in the dialogue and descriptions.
Everyone stood as a woman strode into the room, visibly armed, dressed in a spotless Authority uniform with no rank insignia except a yellow X embroidered on the stiff upright color. She was short even among Cernee natives but built like a tank, if tanks were constructed entirely of muscle and disapproval.
Finder is an imaginative and action-packed tale. The ending leaves a few open questions, like, what are those aliens planning anyway? And why did they do … that particular thing they did to Fergus? There’s plenty of room for more adventures and exploits to come for Fergus Ferguson, and Palmer has more books in this series in the works.
Thanks to the publicist and Daw Books for the free review copy!
Initial post: Whoa! I just realized that this just-published SF novel - which has been languishing on my bookshelf of unrequested review copies - Is by the author of two of my favorite recent short stories: The Secret Life of Bots ( which won a Hugo award last year) and Thirty-Three Percent Joe. Guess I know what I’m reading next!...more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
>
Books:
science-fiction
(428)
Loading...
