$1.99 Kindle sale, Oct. 9, 2020. I'm tempted - the basic concept of no one ever remembering you at all once you're out of sight is the same as in The $1.99 Kindle sale, Oct. 9, 2020. I'm tempted - the basic concept of no one ever remembering you at all once you're out of sight is the same as in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (though this one is SF and that one is fantasy), and I really enjoyed Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. But my local library has a copy of this book, so I'll probably go grab it there instead. :)...more
“War is hell,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said in the aftermath of the American Civil War, anFinal review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
“War is hell,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said in the aftermath of the American Civil War, and Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, a Hugo and Locus award nominated novel, drives that point home. The brutality of a soldier’s life combines with dystopia and hellish corporate behavior, but it’s lightened by the gritty determination of the main character, Dietz, and a handful of others to find the right path out of the nightmarish war, and by a hopefulness that refuses to be beaten down.
In a near-future day, six huge corporations, called the Big Six, control most of Earth’s society, doling out vital services only to people who are citizens. Dietz, a non-citizen of São Paulo, has suffered the loss of family and friends in “The Blink,” a mysterious event that instantly destroyed São Paulo and killed over two million people. Martian colonists, considered “aliens” by Earth, are blamed for the Blink, and Dietz promptly joins the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps to avenge the deaths and to try to be a hero, a personage of light. Which Dietz becomes, but not in the way envisioned.
Earth has one major advantage over Mars in this war: scientists have figured out how to break down the soldiers into atoms and transporting them, like a beam of light, to various battle locations, even across space. This teleporting technology doesn’t always work out well for the soldiers, but nobody asks the privates for their opinions. The corporation considers that it owns the soldiers, body and soul, and has the ability to order them to do anything and everything. But the war isn’t what the brass in power have made it out to be, and Dietz begins experiencing the war in a non-linear fashion. Each teleporting jump lands Dietz in a different time and place, though generally with the same platoon.
The Light Brigade is a military science fiction novel that follows the time-honored path, first popularized in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, of following an eager but naïve recruit into the military machine, through basic training and into battle, gaining experience, seniority and skepticism along the way. Dietz’s Brazilian origins and yearning for the benefits of citizenship, among other things, make it clear that The Light Brigade is in conversation with Starship Troopers (there are a number of these deliberate homages and references to various MilSF novels). But Hurley’s novel is far more spiritually akin to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which speaks to the dehumanizing effect of war and the alienation experienced by soldiers.
The Light Brigade takes the discussion in a somewhat different and more modern direction. It’s more viscerally and overtly brutal and bloody and profane, punching home the point that war, in addition to being hell on earth, is more often than not unjustified by the circumstances. Dietz narrates almost the entire book, other than some occasionally transcripts of interviews with a prisoner of war, the purpose and import of which become clear much later in the novel. It’s interesting that we don’t find out Dietz’s sex for a long time, or first name for even longer. Soldiering and war are equal-opportunity, and equally brutal for both sexes. Dietz is truly just a cog in the warfare machinery … until Dietz isn’t.
There’s a lot of jumping around in time and place and the plot can get a little hard to follow as a result. In the acknowledgements at the end, Hurley mentions her debt to the person who helped create a mathematical graph to track all of the events in the book and ensure that they line up correctly, so I’m certain that the events and timeline(s) would make far more sense on a second read. The Light Brigade is a bit simplistic with its villains, contrasting the profoundly uncaring and frequently even evil corporations and their leadership with the hopeful and hope-bringing socialists. The world-building is also a little sparse, as are the characterizations of the soldiers other than Dietz. With just a couple of exceptions, I tended to lose track of who was who.
But Hurley’s handling of the events and themes is powerful. There’s optimism and hope in the face of despair, corrupt corporations and governments, abuse of authority and a blasted world. The teleporting and time travel aspects add to the intrigue of the plot.
The Light Brigade is based on Hurley’s 2015 short story of the same name, published in Lightspeed magazine. I read it after reading the novel, and it’s rather like reading the CliffNotes for the novel (so, spoilers ahoy). I don’t always prefer novelizations of shorter works; for example, I think the original short versions of Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon,” Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall and Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain were all more potent than the subsequent novels. But in the case of The Light Brigade, I’d definitely recommend the novel, as long as the reader has the stomach for unpleasant wartime events.
Content notes: Pretty hard R rating for gory and brutal battle scenes and lots of F-bombs. Dietz has sex (all non-explicit) with multiple people of both sexes (at least one of whom was married)....more
I wasn’t at all sure this book was going to work for me when I realized that the plot revolves around financial fraud and almost all of the charactersI wasn’t at all sure this book was going to work for me when I realized that the plot revolves around financial fraud and almost all of the characters are deeply flawed at best and deliberately dishonest at worst. But I should have had more faith in the author of Station Eleven....more
3.5 stars. This is the first in a 6-book detective series, with an unusual LDS (Mormon) religious twist to it. I've enjoyed some of this author's late3.5 stars. This is the first in a 6-book detective series, with an unusual LDS (Mormon) religious twist to it. I've enjoyed some of this author's later books, so when I found that my local library had (most of) this series, I decided to check them out.
Our main character is private investigator Rhea Jensen, who despite being only in her twenties is already a highly accomplished investigator with a gift for breaking into homes and computers to find the evidence. The case she's working on in this first book is an embezzlement case that gets unexpectedly complicated and dangerous.
But as much or more time is spent on Rhea's personal life. She's gorgeous, talented and incredibly physically fit, but is stuck in a rut with a seemingly hopeless crush on her old friend Ben, an aspiring musician. Sometimes he acts like he wants her, and then he jumps into yet another relationship with another woman.
To make things more complicated, Rhea starts talking with some LDS missionaries on the street one day. At first she blows them off, but then things happen and she starts thinking, maybe she should take a harder look at this religion?
It's a bit of a quirky mix with these disparate elements, but the author handles them pretty well and she's a capable writer who can spin an interesting, fast-paced plot. This is in the LDS fiction genre and will probably appeal mostly to readers interested in that. ...more
Stephen King takes over 550 pages here to relate the story of the mysterious Institute an3.75 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Stephen King takes over 550 pages here to relate the story of the mysterious Institute and its merciless dealings with kidnapped children. Given that page count, it shouldn’t be too surprising that King spends the first forty pages setting up his tale with a seemingly unrelated story of a man adrift in his life. Tim Jamieson, an out-of-work cop, takes a hefty payout to give up his seat on an overfull flight, and ends up making his rambling way from Tampa, Florida to the small town of DuPray, South Carolina, where the local sheriff gives him a job as a night knocker, an unarmed beat cop who patrols DuPray during the night. But — as King informs us not once, but twice — great events turn on small hinges.
That same summer, Luke Ellis, a twelve-year-old Minneapolis boy with genius-level intelligence, loving parents, and a very mild talent for making pie pans and other lightweight items rattle and move in moments of strong emotion, is kidnapped from his home by a SWAT team that murders Luke’s parents as part of the operation. When Luke awakes from his drugged sleep, he’s in a bedroom that, spookily, almost mirrors his own (there’s no window, for one thing). But outside of the bedroom, he finds he’s in an institutional building in rural Maine that’s nothing like his home, with other kidnapped children and some adult caretakers.
A black girl, Kalisha, introduces Luke to his new life. All of the children and teenagers at the Institute have some degree of talent with either telepathy or telekinesis, and the doctors and staff forcibly work them over to try to enhance their supernatural gifts and to bring out the more-desired telepathy in children like Luke who have only displayed telekinetic power. Luke and a handful of other children are in the part of the Institute called the Front Half. After a few weeks, children “graduate” to the Back Half … and none of them knows for certain what happens to them there, or why they are there. But what’s clear is that no child has ever escaped from the Institute.
The Institute is a horror story of the human heart. The children who have the supernatural powers are entirely sympathetic; it’s the adults surrounding them who are horror figures, particularly the cruel head of the Institute, Mrs. Sigsby, who is of the Nurse Ratched school. She’s assisted by doctors, technicians and orderlies who punish and torment the children in pursuit of their secret goals. The tortures they inflict on their young charges can make for difficult reading. King weaves in allusions to Nazi concentration camps and digs at individuals who, in their fanatic pursuit of a goal, lose their moral compass. If you’re thinking that might also be applied to the current political climate in the U.S., King certainly wouldn’t disagree.
King is a talented storyteller, and though The Institute is a fairly hefty book it moves with a sense of urgency. But even if one accepts (at least for purposes of reading this novel) the existence of telepathy and telekinetics, the plot’s logic breaks down when the Institute’s true goal is finally revealed. The justification for the entire secret scheme of those in charge of the Institute, combined with some cost-benefit analysis when considering the cost in lives and the other potential methods of reaching their goals, really strained my ability to suspend disbelief. That issue is briefly raised and dismissed in a few short paragraphs, but I wasn’t convinced.
If you’re not too inclined to find logical plot holes and poke at them, The Institute is a compelling science fiction read with a solid mix of action, suspense and horror.
Content warning: death, mistreatment, abuse and torture of teens and children....more
This is the graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald," which won the Hugo Award for short stories in 2004. It's a brilliant mash-up This is the graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald," which won the Hugo Award for short stories in 2004. It's a brilliant mash-up of the Sherlock Holmes universe and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, a weird but wonderful fantasy variation on a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
So I'm normally not a graphic novel kind of person - I like my reading straight-up, the traditional way, not in audio or graphic novel version - but when I saw this book sitting on the library shelf staring at me I couldn't resist picking it up, since the original "Study in Emerald" is one of my favorite Gaiman short stories. (Really, it is brilliant.)
It's Victorian days in England Albion, and a doctor, wounded in the Afghanistan war (in this case, by a monstrous being), moves in with a new roommate. Names are never mentioned, but the new roommate is a consulting detective with a deep knowledge of obscure facts. Oh, and he lives on Baker Street. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard comes to beg the detective's help in solving a mystery: an alien noble from Germany has been murdered, emerald blood scattered everywhere. All the nobility and leaders of nations in this world are Lovecraftian aliens, owing to their conquest of the world 700 years earlier. But the thing is, most people heartily approve of government-by-alien-monsters, despite some ... drawbacks. So the detective and the good doctor set off to hunt down the murderers.
I still like the original written version of this story better, but this graphic novel does have about 80-90% of the original version's text (I was doing a side-by-side comparison for most of the novel). The illustrations are appropriately creepy, especially Queen Victoria and her magic tentacles and human mask. :) (view spoiler)[Prince Albert is human, and I just don't even want to think about the human/monster interbreeding going on in this world. (hide spoiler)]
Once you read this, I highly recommend Wikipedia's spoiler-filled page about this book, which includes discussion of the many hints and Easter eggs that Gaiman slipped into this story. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article. The "advertisements" are to die for....more
Author Jojo Moyes, of Me Before You fame, tries her hand at something a little different here.
[image] Pack Horse librarians in the 1940s
It was hard to Author Jojo Moyes, of Me Before You fame, tries her hand at something a little different here.
[image] Pack Horse librarians in the 1940s
It was hard to put this one down! It's set in depression-era rural Kentucky, where an intelligent (if somewhat clueless, at least at first) English girl moves after a whirlwind romance and marriage to a handsome guy who's the son of the local bigwig and mine owner. Everything - including the marriage, for very good Reasons - is working out to be a huge disappointment for Alice, so when a lady in a town meeting asks for women to deliver library books by horse to the locals, Alice impulsively volunteers, to the dismay of her husband and the anger of her father-in-law.
The Giver of Stars is a well-written historical drama, focusing on the relationships of Alice with the people around her, and spiced up by a murder investigation and trial. Despite the trials and tribulations of Alice and her friends, I'd say this book is ultimately on the lighter side of historic fiction, especially where Jojo Moyes wraps everything up in the end with a nice feel-good bow. But if you like books like Where the Crawdads Sing, I think this one is fairly similar in style.
And I’d love to know more about the actual history of the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky!
[image]
I’ve looked into the plagiarism claims relating to similarities between this book and The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. I have to say I’m not convinced at all ... and I’m an IP lawyer. Most of the limited similarities can be explained by coincidence and current trends in historic literature (there's an inescapable logic in having a smart black woman character be part of the packhorse librarians, even though there's no actual history supporting that, or having an uncouth mountain man accost and threaten one of the librarians). The timelines of the novels coming out are awfully close for any copying, even if Moyes did see an ARC (which she asserts she didn't). But I’ll reserve final judgment until I actually read Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (ETA: which may never happen at this rate, oh well)....more
Orson Scott Card‘s ENDERVERSE has grown to sixteen novels and counting, along with several novell3.5 stars. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Orson Scott Card‘s ENDERVERSE has grown to sixteen novels and counting, along with several novellas and short stories, since he published Ender's Game in 1985 (or if you want to go back even further, since the original “Ender’s Game” short story was published in Analog magazine in 1977). Andrew Wiggin, or Ender, is the main character in only a few of these works; others focus on his brother Peter Wiggin, Ender’s protégé Bean, and other new or secondary characters from Ender’s Game. Which brings us to Mazer Rackham, the half-Māori war hero who plays a brief but pivotal role in Ender’s Game.
In 2012, Card, along with co-author Aaron Johnston, began writing prequels to the original ENDER series, beginning with Earth Unaware, set almost a century before Ender’s Game. Mazer Rackham is a key character in this series, but shares the stage with many others, particularly Victor Delgado, a space-born mechanic; Bingwen, a brilliant young Chinese boy training as a soldier to fight the alien Formics; and Lem Jukes, immensely wealthy son and heir of the first Hegemon.
I mention this background because, although The Swarm is designated as the first volume in the SECOND FORMIC WAR trilogy, readers should really consider it the fourth book in the prequel novels about the original Formic attacks on Earth. It’s possible to start your prequel reading with The Swarm, but the events and characters are so closely connected to the FIRST FORMIC WAR trilogy (Earth Unaware, Earth Afire and Earth Awakens) that I really can’t recommend beginning with The Swarm.
After barely beating off the Formics who invaded Earth in the First Formic War, the people of Earth have reorganized themselves politically and militarily, knowing that a larger invasion of Formics is inevitable. Lem Jukes’ father Ukko has become the Hegemon, a type of prime minister over the entire planet, and he’s been joined by a Polemarch, chief over the new International Fleet, and a Strategos, in charge of the defense of our solar system. As Victor and his shipmates discover a second invasion of Formics gearing up, hidden among the asteroids in our solar system, Mazer battles his superior officer’s greed and corruption that have resulted in punitive court-martial proceedings against Mazer. Meanwhile, Bingwen and other Chinese orphan boys are being whipped into soldiers by the merciless and driven Captain Li, who knows that their small size may make them invaluable warriors if humans need to battle Formics in their underground tunnels.
The plot of The Swarm is complex, jumping between these and other characters’ points of view. One of the more fascinating, and appalling, characters is Khalid, a murderous Somalian space pirate, whose brief subplot makes for compelling reading. (There will certainly be more to come from Khalid.) There’s also Wila, a young Thai biochemist who takes a lot of heat for her Buddhist-inspired empathy toward the Hive Queen of the Formics, but whose scientific and philosophical insights may lead to key breakthroughs in defending against them. Overall it’s a typical Card cast of characters: incredibly bright, precocious children; idealistic fighters for freedom; and the corrupt, self-centered people who stand in their way.
The theme of deadly alien threat, counter-balanced with the grave problems caused by human selfishness and greed, plays out throughout The Swarm. For my money, Card and Johnston are taking much too long to spin out this tale, when you consider not just the 500+ pages in this novel but all of the other books you need to read to get the entire story. But all in all, it’s a well-told tale if you like SF space operas and you’re a fan of Orson Scott Card’s ENDERVERSE books. If you haven’t already read Ender’s Game, I strongly recommend that you start there, then read my favorite book in the entire series, Speaker for the Dead, and then decide from there if you want to get deeper into the ENDERVERSE. The SECOND FORMIC WAR series continues with The Hive, just published in June 2019. It’s on my short list for upcoming reads!
Initial post. OSC's publicist sent me a copy of his latest Enderverse novel, The Hive, and since I hadn't read the first book in that series (this one, The Swarm) and I hate trying to jump into series mid-stream, I dutifully trotted off to the library and checked out this book. What I didn't realize at the time was that I didn't go back far enough....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
First book in a trilogy. Pretty good SF thriller! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Apparently I’ve been living under a rock or, perhaps, in aFirst book in a trilogy. Pretty good SF thriller! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Apparently I’ve been living under a rock or, perhaps, in an isolated cottage in a pine forest, since I had never heard of Wayward Pines — the town, the trilogy of novels by Blake Crouch, or the Fox TV series based on these novels — before I picked up Pines. In this case, being oblivious was a great thing, since the mystery wasn’t spoiled. I think it would be possible to enjoy reading Pines already knowing what the big secret is, but certainly not knowing was a major reason I found it so compelling.
A man regains consciousness by the side of a road in a small town, bruised and battered after an apparent car crash, and with temporary amnesia about most of the details of his life, and no ID on his person. He meets a few of the residents in town, who seem oddly withdrawn and wary. He winds up in the local hospital but feels leery of his treatment there. But with no ID, no cell phone, and little memory, his options are limited.
Fairly soon, Ethan remembers that he’s a Secret Service agent, and that he was heading to the town of Wayward Pines, Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two other federal agents, one of whom was his former partner and lover, Kate. Wayward Pines looks like a cozy, picturesque town, with its charming Victorian-style houses and high rock cliffs surrounding the town. But Ethan starts to realize how much he’s getting the runaround from … pretty much everyone in town. The hospital staff, the local sheriff, the people he talks to on the telephone (when the telephones even work): everything is just OFF, and people are acting strangely around him.
There are so many questions in Ethan’s (and the reader’s) mind: Why is everyone acting so oddly? Why can’t he find his way out of town? Why can’t he reach anyone on the phone — including his boss and wife — that he knows?
Pines is a bewildering book (until the secrets start being revealed and All Is Explained), but it’s bewildering in a good way. It’s full to the brim and spilling over with tension and a lurking sense of danger and horror that becomes more and more tangible, as the novel picks up its pace steadily until the adrenaline-driven conclusion. I did have a couple of theories about what was going on; one was totally wrong and the other was, well, not quite right, but at least on the pathway to being right. I ended up rereading the final chapters a couple of times because the final answer was so very fascinating to me.
Pines loses a star in my rating because, after all the excitement of reading it was over, the explanation of what was going on in the town of Wayward Pines didn’t entirely hold water for me. Several of the events that took place struck me, in the cold light of morning, as unrealistic and illogical, elements that were added just to make the plot more exciting and Ethan’s life more stressful and dangerous.
My recommendation is that you turn off the critical functions of your brain and go along for the ride. Pines is an intense, gripping novel that was completely impossible for me to put down. I was in the library the very next day, checking out the two remaining books in this WAYWARD PINES series....more
The deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.
4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.
I'm not, generally speaking, a fan ofThe deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.
4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.
I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but World War Z popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go. (I checked it out from the library; I wasn't going to stick my neck that far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.)
Anyway. World War Z takes the quasi-historical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of loosely-connected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world. Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more. The lies that government leaders tell their citizens. The lies that people tell themselves. The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope.
It's definitely not your standard zombie-flavored horror story. The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe (e.g., profiteering) as in the moaning, grasping and biting (a 100% death sentence if you get bit) of the zombie hordes.
Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre. I thought it was fascinating. VERY different from the movie that it inspired....more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
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