Reviews

Guns, Grenades, and Dragons, Oh My!

Rich, over at SF Signal, posts his review of Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real, which he accords four stars.

He calls the book, “A great blend of science fiction and fantasy! Imaginative characters, while based on previous fantasy archetypes – have their own unique aspects and personalities. Quickly pulls you in, and picks up speed from there.”

Finally, what’s not to love about this? “All the guns, grenades, mystical vortexes, motor cycle chases, and dragons are great. They move the story along and I for one really enjoy ‘action sequences’. Most of all they serve as a vehicle to move the characters along and grow them for the reader, and lay the ground work for some hopefully very interesting and exciting sequels.”

Works by me.

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The Age-Old Question of Artificial Life

Tomas L. Martin reviews Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel for SF Crowsnest.

Tomas nails what I love about these books when he says, “It is this extremely nuanced political spectrum that truly brings Breakaway to life. That and the explosions. The superb set pieces featuring SWAT teams against extremists are matched in excitement by the battles on the floors of government. The debates between Callay’s representatives are as exciting as the running gun battles in its streets.”

My initial reaction was to smile when Tomas talks about “the age-old question of how an artificial human would feel,” since I think of age-old as referring to something with a timeless, centuries-old history to it and A.I. isn’t that old of a concept, but then, SF has been dealing with this question for over a century now, and I suspect we can find corollaries in ancient myths as well, and certainly a certain work by Mary Shelley applies to… so I guess it is a age-old question after all. Fortunately, the consensus is that Joel Shepherd puts a new spin on it. And an exciting one at that.

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The Universe Next Door

Over at SciFi.com’s Sci Fi Weekly, Paul Di Filippo gives an A to Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky: Entire and the Rose: Book 1. He predicts the work will catapult Kay to the next level, due to “a bravura concept bolstered by fine writing; lots of plausible, thrilling action; old-fashioned heroism; and strong emotional hooks.”

Paul goes on to compare Kay’s work to the “planetary romances” of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edward Hamilton, with a shout out to recent works in this vein like Chris Roberson’s Paragaea. “Kenyon’s conceptual leap provides an environment conducive to prolonged Odysseus-like wanderings among exotic places, cultures and sentient beings. And she has a fertile enough imagination not to disappoint in this regard, conjuring up vivid races, ways of living and sights.”

But, he says, Kay is also “working in the Big Dumb Object territory exemplified by such past masters as Larry Niven, Bob Shaw, Greg Bear, Paul McAuley and, more recently, Karl Schroeder,” with the unusual cosmology of her invented world, the Entire.

And finally, he applauds her prose when he says, “Kenyon exhibits a clever narrative structural bent as well…. the mark of a fine writer.”

He ends with a comparison to Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers books. So, like, what are you waiting for?

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Sci-Wii & A Tale of Two Americas

Adam Balm is back with another SF book review for Aint It Cool News, this time with a very astute review round-up that includes his thoughts on Justina Robson’s Keeping It Realand Adam Robert’s Gradisil.

After a review of the novelization of Spider-man 3, Adam proclaims Keeping It Real, ” a novel that … tears apart all genre conventions and mixes them together into something new. …In a male-dominated industry, this is a novel written by someone channeling their inner teenage girl, writing for teenage girls.”

Then he goes on to suggest that Justina may be carving out new territory in a direction necessary for the very health and survival of the genre. As he writes:

“Last month I spoke about SF needing to change or die. In an essay by Kristine Kathryne Rusch that appeared in Asimov‘s last year ‘In [2003], SF counted for 7 percent of all adult fiction books sold. In 2001, SF counted for 8 percent. The literary trend spirals downward while the media trend goes up. Half the new television dramas introduced in 2005 were science fiction, fantasy, or had a fantastic element. Most of the movies in the top twenty for the past five years have been SF. Nearly all of the games published have been SF.’ The print SF world has been falling behind for decades. It can expand to reach out to this new audience, or it can continue to be incestuous and cannibalistic. Right now the only entry point for new readers is media tie-ins. But Keeping it Real may turn out to be one example of the change that SF may want to embark on. Because this isn’t SF for SF readers. This is SF for a generation raised on anime, manga, and MMORPGs. This is SF for the Wii gamer. “

A discussion of Orson Scott Card’s Space Boy follows. Then, turning his attention to Gradisil, Adam invokes the connection to the Ansari X-Prize as he says:

“This wasn’t the top-down space travel we were promised in 2001. This is bottom up. This is tweakers and hackers seeing how far they can push technology by themselves. This is the future that Gradisil explores. Modeled after Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy of greek tragedies, it’s a multi-generational saga of man’s colonization of the high frontier of low-earth-orbit. It’s epic SF in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy or Allen Steele’s Coyote trilogy, although it feels like it could have been written in the days of Heinlein. And perhaps most profoundly, it’s a story about two Americas: The America that WAS (reflected in the rustic frontiersmen of the uplands) and the America that IS (reflected in the ambitious and expansionist US that launches a war to gain dominance of the new frontier.)”

Adam goes on to say that our Adam’s book isn’t engaged in “trying to writing about something new, it’s trying to write new about something,” and then concludes:

“There’s an old saying about good science fiction: Pick one. You can have good science or you can have good fiction. You have your Hal Clements, your Poul Andersons and Gregory Benfords whose science are unassailable but whose dialog and characterization are barely above Star Wars fan fiction; and then you have your Ursula Le Guinns, your Samuel R. Delanys, your J.G. Ballards and Brian Aldisses who are as interested in science as The Prisoner was interested in the criminal justice system. In choosing between good science or fiction, Adam Roberts works incredibly hard to reach the former, but he achieves the latter effortlessly.”

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PW Gives a Starred Review for Brasyl!

Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl has just received a Starred Review in the March 26th issue of Publishers Weekly:

Brasyl
Ian McDonald. Pyr, $25 (480p) ISBN 978-1-59102-543-6

British author McDonald’s outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America’s largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all. McDonald sets up three separate characters in different eras—a cynical contemporary reality-TV producer, a near-future bisexual entrepreneur and a tormented 18th-century Jesuit agent. He then slams them together with the revelation that their worlds are strands of an immense quantum multiverse, and each of them is threatened by the Order, a vast conspiracy devoted to maintaining the status quo until the end of time. As McDonald weaves together the separate narrative threads, each character must choose between isolation or cooperation, and also between accepting things as they are or taking desperate action to make changes possible. River of Gods (2004), set in near-future India, established McDonald as a leading writer of intelligent, multicultural SF, and here he captures Latin America’s mingled despair and hope. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance. (May)

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Libertarians in Low Orbit, Cyborgs Come of Age

Jim Hopper, in the March 11, 2007 San Diego Union-Tribune, reviews two Pyr titles in an article entitled, “ECCENTRIC ORBITS: If you’re ‘Counting’ on the government, count again.”

Jim describes Adam Robert’s Gradisilthusly, minus a medium-sized spoiler in the middle:

“Ahh, governments! How about Libertarians in Low Earth Orbit? When Gradisil’s grandfather develops a way to use old aircraft, instead of huge rockets, to get into orbit, Things Change. With ‘Elemag’ technology, a suitably sealed and adapted airplane can become a spaceplane, climbing the branches of the Earth’s magnetic field, like Yggdrasil out of old Norse mythology. …and there’s more than one betrayal. It seems, as the story closes, that the blood of patriots must water even Yggdrasil, as well as the tree of liberty.”

Of Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real, he says:

“Robson’s cyborg heroine, Lila Black, is hired as bodyguard for an Elven rock star, which is a much bigger job than it seems. This is not YA material, but, yeah, even an embittered cyborg can grow up.”

Also reviewed are titles by Kim Stanley Robinson, Hal Duncan, China Miéville, and Eliot Fintushel.

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Infoquake: A Dangerous Vision?

David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake has racked up praise beyond my wildest expectation, being called “a triumph of speculation” by Bookgasm (who listed it in their top five novels of 2006) and “the science fiction book of the year” by SFFWorld. It prompted Ian McDonald to proclaim, “So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller…. Buy Infoquake, read it…. Give him the Philip K Dick award.” Alas, they did not, but Barnes & Noble chose it as the number one book of the year in their list of the Top SF&F Books of 2006. Needless to say, we are more than thrilled. (And hey, there’s still the Locus poll.)

But it’s this review in the April/May 2007 issue of Asimov’s, that may be the most interesting analysis of the book that I’ve read thus far. In the latest of his always enjoyable On Books columns, “Whither the Hard Stuff?”, Norman Spinrad praises Infoquake as a “high-speed, high-spirited tale of high-powered and low-minded capitalist skullduggery, corporate and media warfare, and virtual reality manipulation. It’s the sort of thing that would make a perfect serial for Wired magazine, given the nature of its ad base, if it ever decided to publish fiction.”

He further praises Edelman for his skill in crafting hard SF, saying “Edelman seems to have convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level. And cares about making his fictional combination of molecular biology and nanotech credible to the point where the hard science credibility of the former makes the questionable nature of the latter seem more credible even to a nanotech skeptic like me. And after all, let’s not kid ourselves too far, that’s really the nature of the hard science fiction game; otherwise it wouldn’t be hard science fiction.”

Here I have to warn you there’s a spoiler in the review as to what the MacGuffin of the book is (or seems to be), but Spinrad finds all of this struggle for verisimilitude erected around a core concept that he feels is a “‘doorway into anything’—superpowers conjured up at will out of the bits and bytes, infinite replay of actions in order to come up with the desired result—in other words, magic” to be disturbing. Yes, disturbing!

He concludes, “I have no quarrel at all with the use of magic as a literary device in fantasy or surrealist fiction, where it has produced masterpieces. Magic masquerading as science and/or technology is another matter, and a graver one. And the better the masquerade, the more successful on a literary level, the more disturbing the transliterary consequences.”

Unfortunately, or fortunately, or both, I doubt a great many of today’s readers will get hot under the collar about “transliterary consequences,” a state of affairs that is part of the lament of Spinrad’s broader article. As he says, “Literarily and commercially, the question of whether or not such a novel could be considered ‘hard science fiction of the post-modern kind’ is ridiculously irrelevant. ” But it is nice to imagine a world where the debate might reach titanic proportions, like the shouting matches once provoked by the New Wave. I’d love to hear reports from Nippon 2007 that there were knock down drag outs between the Mundanistas and the Infoquakers. As well as constituting a healthy sign of the state of SF, that would be high praise indeed.

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Brasyl Nuts and Shoofly Pie

William Lexner really loved Brasyl.

“Last June I reviewed Ian McDonald’s most recent book, River of Gods, and I called it ‘The most important SF novel that has been released in my 18 years of fandom.’ So it may be a bit surprising when I say that the forthcoming Brasyl is just as strong, a bit tighter, a lot faster paced, and all-around probably a better, more enjoyable novel…. Brasyl is almost guaranteed a Hugo nomination.”

Lexner’s “rapturous review” finds itself lampooned on the hysterical My Elves are Different.

Meanwhile, Another Piece of Shooflypie really enjoys Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge:

“My fourth book of the year was the original SF anthology Fast Forward 1, edited by Lou Anders. Anders is the editor of the Pyr line, which has quickly become one of the best SF publishers around (River of Gods and Infoquake and Paragaea, to name a few). This book is also from Pyr and does not disappoint. There are 19 stories and 2 poems (both by Robyn Hitchcock, former lead singer of The Soft Boys and current solo artist) underneath yet another brilliant John Picacio cover (and I really need to buy that book on his work). There was only one story I didn’t care for, which is a fantastic ratio for any anthology. The highlights include Paul Di Filippo’s “Wikiworld,” where a guy in love with an oyster pirate ends up running the government for a few days in a future where Wiki is the basis of all interactions from political to economical to social; Ken MacLeod’s “Jesus Christ, Reanimator,” a look at how things might go if Christ actual did return to today’s world; and John Meaney’s “Sideways From Now,” about quantum linking and alternate realities and politics and loss (and I must start reading his novels). Almost all of the rest of the stories are at that high quality and I can’t recommend it enough. The best part is the “1” in the title…I can’t wait to read the second in the series and I hope that one day I’ll actually have a story in Fast Forward as well.”

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Keeping Things Real Bright

Monsters and Critics’ Sandy Amazeen on Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity, Book 1:

“Worlds overlap in unexpected ways … in this action-packed futuristic sci-fi that will appeal to techies and fantasy fans alike. Tension between the characters is credible even if the premise is a bit farfetched and it’s fun watching Black grow into her new self as she confronts magic in ways few other humans have managed in this first of the Quantum Gravity series.”

Meanwhile, Booklists’ Regina Schroeder on Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky: Entire and the Rose: Book 1(emphasis mine):

“In the future conjured by the first book of The Entire and the Rose, megacorporations control Earth, and only the best and brightest get company jobs. Titus Quinn was on his way, though, until he piloted a Minerva corporation colony ship through a network of black holes. The ship disappeared. Believed dead, Quinn showed up six months later on a distant planet that no transport had visited in years, with disjointed memories of a parallel universe in which the sky is fire. There he lost his wife and daughter, also the ship. In hope that the place will provide a safer alternative for interstellar travel, Minerva sends him back. Once there again, Quinn becomes embroiled in strange politics and faces terrible choices and the emerging, awful memory of what he did during his last stay in the Entire. In a fascinating and gratifying feat of worldbuilding, Kenyon unfolds the wonders and the dangers of the Entire and an almost-Chinese culture that should remain engaging throughout what promises to be a grand epic, indeed.

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