Tag: Science Fiction

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Darwin’s Radio – Greg Bear

I saw the sequel to this one in the bookstore and it intrigued me. So I picked up the first book. It’s all about the “next step” in evolution. Sure it’s been done, but this looked cool.

Unfortunately it was monumentally boring. The main characters are very well described and interesting, but you always feel as if you’re at one remove from the real action. A new chapter will suddenly assume that a lot of things have happened since the last one, but none of that stuff is filled in. This sometimes had me checking if I actually missed a page or something. The biology is very interesting, but there is too much of it, disrupting the flow of the story.

I gave up after about 150 pages. Blech.

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Slant – Greg Bear

I am still not entirely sure what this novel is about. It is a near future tale, with few traditional SciFi space trappings. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and my final conclusion is that Bear is writing about societal trends that may appear in the future, in particular the impact of the very rich wanting to live for a very long time. Not nearly as epic as Eon and Eternity, it is nevertheless a solid work.

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Eon and Eternity – Greg Bear

Greg Bear can think BIG. Eon is his classic tale of an asteroid that arrives in orbit around the earth. The asteroid is revealed to be simply one endpoint for an endless (?) corridor named The Way. Inside The Way is the city of Thistledown, populated by humans. That human civilization is thousand of years old. Thistledown is the future, and the past. Greg Bear knows how to describe his quantum mechanics, and the non technical reader should not be intimidated. The characters and intrigues of the various factions, as well as the strong characters and fabulous descriptions all combine in a marvelous story.

The sequel, Eternity, is about how mankind must give up it’s manipulation on space-time. After the message of hope brought by the first novel, it is interesting how in Eternity Bear takes humanity back down a notch, not closing the door to the future but simply reminding us that the gods do not take kindly to hubris. And through it all, Bear’s astounding imagination is combined with a gift for good, clear and interesting prose.

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Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space – Stephen Baxter

Manifold is not a series per se, but rather different explorations of the theme “Are we alone in the universe?”. In “Time”, a portal is discovered in the solar system, and some fascinating stuff happens related to preserving life and intelligence in the long term. In “Space”, The Fermi Paradox is suddenly reversed, with aliens appearing everywhere and the whole universe is just one big fight for resources, to the point of utter barbarism.

I had some nasty nightmares after these, which is why I will probably never read the third book, “Manifold: Origin”. On a certain level, this is very stuff, but not like a horror movie. It scares me on a very deep level that I can’t rationalize away. The same level that knows that the goody two-shoes future of Star Trek simply is not a realistic vision. Still, I would rather watch Star Trek since I don’t want to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, however good Baxter is. Read the books if you feel you can take it. They are very good and the themes and subjects are both engrossing and fascinating.

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Moonseed – Stephen Baxter

This novel starts off rather slowly and without fanfare, with our hero moving to Edinburgh to work on a moon rock. This moon rock is taken out of the lab and lost. It slowly starts to devour the landscape. Weird premise, but Baxter does it well. It’s all about how the humans of today would cope with the Earth literally disappearing under them.

I very much enjoyed how the novel starts small and events snowball into a massive cataclysm by the end. Well worth a look.

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Anti-Ice – Stephen Baxter

Steam Age SciFi from Baxter. In the 19th Century, the British discover a pile of stuff in the Antarctic. This stuff releases fabulous quantities of energy when it comes into contact with other stuff. A whole transportation economy develops based on the so-called Anti-Ice. And there is a mission to the moon. Fun!

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Flux – Stephen Baxter

As he did in Raft, Baxter plays with an idea in this novel. Heavily modified humans have colonized the mantle of a neutron star. The micro story taking up most of the novel is rather pedestrian, but the setting is magnificent. The macro story is about the fulfillment of a long lost purpose. Fun idea but not such a fun read.

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Ring – Stephen Baxter

This is probably the most important novel in the “early Baxter” books of the Xeelee sequence. Michael Poole has opened the universe to mankind with his wormholes. We are introduced to Lieserl, humanity’s sentient probe inside our sun. GUTships ride to the very edge of space and time. One of them carries, ark-like, the seed of humanity. Thousands of subjective years later, it arrives at the Ring, a classic BDO (Big Dumb Object) constructed as an escape hatch from the impending destruction of our universe. Big stuff, and Baxter makes it look easy. The message of hope and the importance of Life expressed here are, I think, Baxter’s greatest hallmarks. A fascinating novel indeed.

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Timelike Infinity – Stephen Baxter

In this important book in Baxter’s Xeelee sequence, Michael Poole, architect of a tunnel through time, must confront what happens when the tunnel ends in a time when humanity is enslaved. Be prepared to stretch those physics and existential synapses in your brain to the limit. If you are not really into hard SciFi, you should probably give this one a pass.

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Raft – Stephen Baxter

Baxter always thinks big, but his stories often revolve around small communities on the edge of the main action in his universe(s). Raft is about such a human community living in a universe where gravity is much stronger than in our universe. The ancestors of the community somehow crossed over into this universe about five hundred years prior to the action. It is a solid story of courage and determination, and the need to face one’s destiny.

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Jennifer Government – Max Barry

This starts off very well. It is a satire on globalization. The free market is everything and people change their last names to that of the company they work for. Take Mr. Hack Nike, for example. He is hired by the marketing department of Nije to stir up hype for a new line of trainers. The plan is for him to kill a couple of customers in order to give the product “street cred”. He subcontracts the job out to the Police. The government is weak and only handles crime. Jennifer Government is a government agent who used to work for an advertising agency. Definite Shades of “Snow Crash“.

This book is very clever in many ways, but disappoints in others. The story and characters are not much in themselves, but work pretty much only as vehicles for the author’s admittedly excellent satire. The novelty of the whole globalization run rampant idea wears off pretty soon, but it’s a fun, light-hearted read that kept me going until the end.

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Orbital Resonance – John Barnes

Tale of some youngsters growing up in an asteroid habitat. I never really understood the point of this one. I think the morale is that kids will inherit the world, and parents should not pollute their brains with old ways of thinking. But it is so dull. Pah.

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Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks

Banks is a best selling author of both Science Fiction and regular fiction. His Sci-Fi universe is known as “The Culture”, referring to the main civilization. Being systematic, I started at the beginning with the very first book of this celebrated series. I was sorely disappointed. Although there are space pirates, BDOs (Big Dumb Objects), interstellar intrigue, great characters and some solid action scenes, I failed to grasp the point of the story. For me, it was just plain dull. Your results may vary. The cover is gorgeous though.

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The Digital Dead – Bruce Balfour

In the setting for novel, one can get an implant that takes a snapshot of the brain at death (a little like in Altered Carbon). This snapshot is transferred to the databanks of the company Elysian Fields and a sort of electronic heaven. So the dead are not really dead. Looks promising, but my first question is: If these dead can be “alive” why don’t they just implant their cybernetic consciousnesses into cyborgs and roam free? This question is answered, but not really to anyone’s satisfaction.

The story is rather complex, with a host of characters being introduced in the first eighty pages or so. It remains complex for most of the novel, but without ever really coming into focus. The driving threat feels abstract and the actions of the characters are rather erratic.

The writing is average. Many good ideas are competently presented, but there is no sign of prose virtuosity. The author tries a bit too hard with the near future clichés, such as “Brooks Armani”, or the worst one yet: “President Schwarzenegger”. Not because it is implausible, but because it is so uncool. His descriptions of locales are formulaic and boring and I found myself skimming through them.

I was left dissatisfied. I could barely work up the energy to finish the book, and it took a long time. Balfour has some great ideas, but does not present them nearly well enough.

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Nightfall – Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg

An expansion of an earlier story with the same name by Asimov. Very interesting novel about a planet with six suns. This astronomical oddity results in a world that (almost) never knows night, and has never seen the stars. Astronomy is all about calculating the orbits of the suns. An astronomer figures out that night is going to fall soon, for the first time in 2049 years. Chaos and madness follow.

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The Ugly Little Boy – Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

An expansion of an earlier story by Asimov in which scientists retrieve a Neanderthal child from the past. A nurse feels empathy for the boy and helps him escape. Competently written, but mostly interesting due to the questions it raises about scientific ethics. Published as “Child of Time” in the UK.

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Nemesis – Isaac Asimov

One of Asimov’s later works, and not his best. His prose has certainly become more modern and, dare I say it, refined, since Foundation, but his ideas have not. Not a struggle to get through, but it is not a very original story. There’s a classic roving habitat, impending doom, and some youngsters.

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The Foundation Series – Isaac Asimov

The series consists of seven books. In order of internal chronology with original trilogy shown in bold.

  • Forward the Foundation
  • Prelude to Foundation
  • Foundation
  • Foundation and Empire
  • Second Foundation
  • Foundation’s Edge
  • Foundation and Earth

This is truly one of SciFi’s classics. The original trilogy (starting with Foundation) is widely considered to be one of the finest SciFi series ever written. The rest of the books are of equally high quality, except (in my opinion) for Forward the Foundation, which seems more like an attempt to tie up loose ends, something of an obsession with Asimov towards the end of his career. Interestingly enough, the man who is arguably the main character, psychohistorian Hari Seldon, is long dead in most of the books. Few series convey a sense of evolving history as this one does, and at least the original three should be a must read for any Science Fiction fan.

So why not a higher score? Well, I feel that although it is a classic and very good, it did not quite capture my imagination as much as some other books have.

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Pebble in the Sky – Isaac Asimov

Although written in the same style as the forgettable The Currents of Space, this novel has a better story. A 62 year old retired tailor from 20th century Chicago is transported to a future earth so poor that citizens are euthanized at 60. His arrival and subsequent actions change the world. If you want to read Asimov (and you should), read the Robot books or Foundation instead.

Incidentally, this particular cover uses one of my favorite pieces of art of all time, by the late Peter Elson.

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The Currents of Space – Isaac Asimov

Typical Asimov fare, in which our hero Rik is mindwiped and abandoned. Naturally, the information in his mind which he can no longer remember will bring down the reigning world order and so on. Not one of Asimov’s best, with an annoying lack of descriptions for environments and so on.

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Gridlinked – Neal Asher

In many cases, when an author tries to tackle an utopian future, in which large parts of humanity are without want (if there is such a thing) and live a very good life, the effort falls flat. During the first fifty pages or so, I was indeed worried. Things soon looked up, however. First of all, there is trouble in paradise, both internal and external. Secondly, there are cool people, such as our hero, superagent Ian Cormac. Thirdly, there are cool gadgets, like self-aware shuriken. Interestingly, most of human society is controlled by AIs, probably since they seem to be doing a better job than humans ever did.

In an unforgettable exchange, it is explained that AIs have the power of self-determination since it is programmed into them.  On the other hand “biologicals” do not, because they have biological imperatives to breed and so on. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, even though the ending left me a bit puzzled. What the heck was going on there?