The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian by Andy Weir
Finished this one on a trans-Pacific flight from Canada to China, safe in an awesome spaceship operated by Air Canada. I’ve never read a more delightful, more scientific, sci-fi novel.

Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars when the NASA mission he is a part of goes sideways. Alone, without communication, he… I will tell you no more. But suffice to say this tale is never dull, despite being peppered with hard science. Mark is one of the more likeable heroes I’ve read about in a long time. And while the “man-vs-nature” core conflict seems like something that would have gone out of fashion around the time of Stephen Crane, this one manages to be vastly more engaging than, say, Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball.

The Martian is a light, joyful celebration of human knowledge, scientific inquiry, and the human spirit. It’s also a fine adventure story, and a superb lesson in how to use language to make what could be dry subjects interesting.

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

So now are you ready for Extinctathon? Like loads of other Atwood fans, I was delighted to pick up her newest novel, and the conclusion to the trilogy begun with Oryx and Crake. MaddAddam is… uneven. There’s a lot of brilliance here, and some fine language, but to be honest, Atwood seems like she’s tired of Jimmy and AdamOne and the rest of the crew. The novel plays out well, giving us some insight into Zed, one of the most interesting characters in the series, as well as a few other people we like, at least insofar as we feel sorry for them and sad when they are gone.

We also get to hear a muted account of what happens after most of the last of God’s Gardeners are gone, when the Crakers pick up the reigns of civilization.

A solid ending to a solid tale of apocalypse, with some good writing and memorable scenes. More than that I cannot say.

Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

Drowned Cities is the sequel to the mildly interesting novel Shipbreakers. So this is another tale of dystopian cities and populations scattered by war, resource shortage, and rising sea levels. Tool, the bioengineered dog-man from Shipbreakers, returns. This time he helps a young refugee girl and her friend, Mouse, try to escape a DMZ where warlords fight an endless feud for which there can be no victor.

The novel suffers from being written for the YA audience, which means that the dystopian nastiness Baculgulpi clearly wants to write (and did in The Windup Girl) has to be reigned in. The descriptions and his world vision are interesting; everything is sticky, damp, calorie-obsessed, violent, and makeshift. It’s a low-tech version of Gibson or low-magic version Miéville.

Ultimately, the novel steers a little too straight a line up the middle of standard adventure story plotting, and never breaks much new ground. A decent romp, but plays it too safe, coloring only inside the lines; and this amounts to a fatal flaw for a genre which is supposed to be pushing the boundaries.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

God’s Gardeners live off the grid, more-or-less. They recycle, eat trash, eschew consumerism and products created by the corporate chemical-biological compounds. They are led by AdamOne, and they try to memorize the names of extinct (or soon to be extinct) species. They take in almost anyone, including our protagonist.

Meantime, a massive virus has wiped out most of humanity. Jimmy the Snowman and The Crakers, and a few ladies Jimmy once knew survive. Also some Painballers, which are pretty much exactly what they sound like.

This novel rounds out the world a bit, and introduces us to the brothers, Adam and Zed, who end up being pivotal to the early stages of the after-party.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Jimmy the Snowman, what have you done? You’re a half-size God, a lesser deity who has been manipulated into ending the world just because you were a misfit in High School. You poor fucker.

This kicks off the tale of Jimmy, Crake, Oryx, God’s Gardeners, and the end of the world as we know it by Margaret Atwood.

Book One tells us what brought about the specific mechanics of the end, but for the bigger picture of what brought us there, just look around. Inequality of wealth, society divided, genetic manipulation, pornography, fast food, and corporatization are what makes the world need destroying. Then Crake appears with the brains to really get the party started.

Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Would you like to play Extinctathon?

In Other Worlds by Margret Atwood

In Other Worlds by Margret Atwood

Atwood grew up on science fiction. Then she became one of the top five writers of the genre (Currently living? Women sci-fi writers? Canadian writers? Why do I feel a need to further pinpoint her position in the firmament? Top sci-fi writer. Let’s leave it at that.)

In Other Worlds is Atwood’s loving retrospective and gentle effort at critiquing some of her favorites from the golden age of Science Fiction. Along the way we get a lot of autobiographical asides, and a pretty good look at why she writes the kind of fiction she writes.

Read this one as part of my Atwood binge in Q3 of this year. Thoroughly enjoyed it, but it’s only for Atwood buffs or big sci-fi fans, or both.

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

Haldeman writes a good soldier’s tale, a passable science fiction story, and an interesting, if confusing tale of mankind’s ascension to the next stage of evolution. In Forever Peace we are introduced to Julian, an advanced physicist and a “soldierboy” who remotely pilots a giant mech for the US Alliance. The Alliance is at war with all of the brown people of the world, and uses its massive technological superiority to crush their various pathetic attempts at terrorist rebellion. Each such terrorist action is played out in the media as if it somehow justified the massive war-machine retaliation that invariably ensues.

All of this works well enough as a meditation on the War on Terror, but what makes this a bit more interesting than a simple sci-fi reflection on Gore Vidal’s notions in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace is how early it was written. In 1997 the “9/11 Might-Have-Been An Inside Job” notion floated here (nuked Atlanta) and much of the mildly cynical language surrounding Julian’s musings on the war effort ending up seeming a bit prescient.

The novel takes a turn for the strange with the notion of a sort of group mind as therapy takes center stage. From then on, we’re concerned mostly with the logistics of a plot to bring this type of transformative pacification to the entire world. All of this sort of dribbles out over the last hundred pages of the novel, with a few good scenes of action and a lot of fuzzy hope that humanity may be on the cusp of evolving away from the aggressive and murderous tendencies that comprise parts of our worst nature.

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

I enjoyed The Windup Girl sufficiently that when LT kindly loaned me a copy of Mr. Bacigalupi’s newest, I eagerly gobbled it up over a quiet weekend on the Third Coast.

Ship Breaker is set in a not-so-distant future Earth in which the petrol has run out, the seas have risen, and the delta between the rich and poor has continued to increase to near third-world levels everywhere. In the ruined beaches near the wreckage of Orleans, Nailer and his friends work as ship breakers, stripping valuable copper and metals from the carcasses of derelict ancient tankers. Their existence is a hard, cruel one, where the strong take what they can from the weak and only the lucky or clever survive for long. Many cyberpunk staples appear, from rampant amphetamine abuse to organ harvesting syndicates, though the networks and AI that likely exist somewhere out there are far beyond the reach of Nailer and his illiterate village of scavengers.

When a massive “City Killer” storm deposits a strange bit of scavenge int.Nailer’s world, he is propelled into an adventure. The novel has a bit of young adult bildungsroman learning and growing, and likely has only about a PG-13 rating, but is still sufficiently violent to feel gritty.

Good world creation, good sci-fi. I’m looking forward to his next novel, The Drowned Cities.

Starhammer by Christopher Rowley

Starhammer by Christopher Rowley

I’m told that Starhammer is the basis for the Halo mythos. Luckily, Jason Jones and the Bungie team managed to go far, far beyond their original inspiration when crafting their sci-fi epic franchise. For while Halo is a tale of heroism and military fetishism in a galactic struggle against various alien races, Starhammer is not.

Instead, Rowley gives us a strange, highly dated bit of intergalactic sci-fi in which a race of sexually sadistic blue people hold dominion over the human race. One guy, and… a girl… and… a prophet type…. and some other people find some artifacts that lead them to an ancient spaceship, which takes them to some dustball planet where they activate… The Starhammer!

Worlds are smashed, wicked blue alien genocide ensues. The whole affair is a messy and occasionally perverse bit of “fight the man” science fiction, in which humans are the good guys.

Perhaps if I’d read this several decades ago, or as a much younger man, I’d have been sufficiently titillated by the “Rape Room” and sufficiently riled up and eager to fight aliens that I would have been inspired by this one. Maybe then I would have created a majestic science-fiction franchise and would be worth a bazillion dollars.

As it is was, I found Starhammer uninspired and almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of other .99 paperback sci-fi novels that crowed the shelves at Half Price Books, hearkening back to a particular subgenre of early eighties pulp.

Mockingjay by Susanne Collins

By book three, of The Hunger Games, the Districts are in all out rebellion against the Capital. Collins stays true to her genre fiction roots here and gives us a properly dystopic (if shallow) political analysis.

Unlike the grand finale of the Twilight series (to which Hunger Games is often unfairly compared), this is not a bloodless resolution in which everyone walks away happy.

I enjoyed all three of these books, though the style and characters are both presented at a fourteen year old level. It is surprising and strange that mainstream tween fiction will also likely be the best (and most popular) dystopian sci-fi of the first decade of our brave new century. 

Catching Fire by Susanne Collins

In the second book of The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins introduces us to the broader struggle between the impoverished Districts and the capital, whole malice and selfish largesse are embodied by the eeeeevil President Snow (and a cast of hairdressers, costumers, and the like.)

We get another round in the arena, and the Kat/Peter/Gale love triangle continues to exude dissonance without ever getting steamy. 

 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is now such a phenomena now that it hardly needs introduction. Katness is cool, if wooden heroine, and the first novel managed to really engage me in her struggles.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the novels is that they present, initially, as tween fiction. And on some level, they remain that way, by dint of sex or profanity. In fact though, this trilogy is pretty straight dystopian fiction.

And yes, we all know that there was a Japanese film called Battle Royale in which kids on an island kill each other. No, this is not just a remake of that, nerd trolls.   

Little Brother by Cory Doctrow

Little Brother is a fun, adolescent romp through the basics of modern computer security. In Little Brother, some teenaged hackers in San Francisco use a networked of hacked Xboxes to fight an invasion of overzealous Homeland Security goons who are turning the Bay area into a surveillance happy police-state. Sound corny, as if it’s meant for thirteen year old boys? It is.

Little Brother is likely the second or third geekiest book I’ve ever read. But, it does give you a pretty good overview of some basic computer and network security philosophies and techniques. There’s some ‘netspeak dialog (“Being at school on a Friday was teh suck.”) in case you missed out on the wholesale assault on the English language that forums and icanhascheezeburger have mounted. The hero quotes Kerouac to his girlfriend. But then he does get laid, so that’s good I guess.

Fun, silly, highly juvenile “fight the man” romp around the Bay Area through the eyes of an adolescent hacker.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl is inventive “Calorie-punk” sci-fi set in futuristic Bangkok a few hundred years after the “contraction” that came about in global trade as a result of us running out of hydrocarbons, and a series of corporate germ-warfare based around genetically modified foods. Edgy, fascinating world that lushly envelops a story that gets tripped up by its own plotting on occasion.

The language is solid, the characters are generally interesting, though only the Yellow Card and the Windup Girl stand out as memorable. The plot gets tangled in a study of regime change politics in Thailand, which is interesting, but can’t help as feel a little bit beside the point.
Still, this is certainly the best sci-fi I’ve read in a decade or more.

The Kraken by China Mieville

Ummm, Lumm, Dumm indeed. Mieville is smart, erudite, wacky, and has great skills with language. But this is much more Pynchon than Perdido Street. In London, cults with strange magics vie for control of sacred artifacts. There’s a stolen picked squid corpse involved. But it’s all a bit silly and the main character was too much of a clueless Hitch-hiker’s Guide castoff to be that interesting. The darkness, the blood, the beating heart of awesome that infected New Cruzoban and rode distant rails as part of the Iron Council just isn’t to be found in weirdo cult London.

Zero History by William Gibson

Following in the same footsteps as Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Gibson tells us of the modern brand elite and their machinations. An ex-addict, Milgrim, and Hollis, the former lead singer of the band Cerfew, get caught up in another of Big End/Blue Ant’s schemes in London and Paris. As with most of Gibson’s books, he presents us with a power struggle which takes place in the pantheon above normal mortals, and in which the main characters play a role they don’t understand in bringing about a power shift that changes a world one order of magnitude above the one they live in. (Case frees Wintermute from the bonds of Turing, loosing a new godhead upon the Matrix; Count Zero frees the Loa into the Matrix, changing the power from one AI god to a pantheon, and in this case, Bigend ascends to a new level of financial moguldom through the unwitting, confused efforts of Milgrim and Hollis.)

It’s another fascinating look at our-world-as-cyberpunk. Ono-Sendais are replaced by iPhones, but otherwise the prose and the song remain much the same, albeit with the violent and sexy juicy bits at far greater remove. (Remember when Case spreads Molly’s labia? Here a veiled reference to a shower scene is the closest we get to sex. Remember when “someone made wet sounds in the alley and died” during the show for 3Jane? Here at a climatic moment an AK appears (but is never used.)) It’s a conscious choice to focus instead on brand intrigue, the texture of consumerism, and the stately mechinations of a media elite rather than the low-level heat of sex and violence on the streets of Chiba City. But unfortunately the story loses some animal pleasure as a result.

The style works for the most part. Occasionally Gibson’s tangled sentence construction, layered clauses, and aggressive disregard for basic subject verb relationships gets tedious. Likewise the so-hip-its-incomprehensible dialog which serves as narrative most of the time sometimes just isn’t worth untangling in order to figure out WTF these folks are talking about. But as a general rule the language still reads as Gibson, and helps serve up the world of today as a fresh cyberpunk utopia that lives in each of our pockets.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s sad funny little tale about the firebombing of Dresden is a fast tragic-comic romp which is still probably the best example of his writing. I read it back in high school and enjoyed it immensely, and again in the early part of this summer in South Austin with no less love. I’d love to grab it and include a quote here, perhaps from the beautiful image in which time reverses so that the buildings all grow back together and the bombs fly up into the air where the airplane hanger doors shut quietly, and the planes fly backwards to land in reverse on the runway and the pilots and crew all walk backwards down the tarmac and return on boats to their homes in America and the bombs are disassembled in reverse and their dangerous chemicals returned to elements and carried backwards into the mines beneath the earth where they can never hurt anyone again.

But alas, we’ve moved from the library on Mosquero into an apartment near the Arboretum. So like almost every other book I own, Slaughterhouse Five now lives in storage, awaiting the return of a new gilded age when it will be able to go back on a shelf where it belongs in some new library somewhere else.

The Watchmen by Alan Moore


First “graphic novel” I’d ever read, and it took some coaxing by The Professor and LT, I’ll admit. But, this was a cool work of fiction; far more than I’d expected, even if there were people in tights who dress up and chase criminals.

I’ll not go into any plot or character details here, since I think the movie is about to break on the shores of North America like a marketing tsunami. The subject matter is very dark, the character portraits complex, the plot labyrinthine. The artwork is, as a rule, mediocre at best, but the “camera work” and scene composition is often interesting. There’s a particularly cool chapter told with attention towards the relativity of time such that it stutter-jumps around over a fifty year span every panel or two.

Overall, it was a neat bit of super-hero mayhem and murder to devour over the course of a few sunny hours in Florida in the days just leading up to Christmas.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn


LT recommended this one to me, and since I remember enjoying reading The Dispossessed a few decades ago, I eagerly gave it a try.

This is classic sci-fi from the eighties. Guy shows up on a planet where gender relations are very usual because, well, gender isn’t binary. Turns out that the inhabitants of this planet are neither male nor female most of the time, but enter a sort of estrus state where they can become a specific gender for a few days when it’s time to reproduce or to, you know, party. As you might imagine, this adds an usual dimension to the politicking and interpersonal relationships in their quasi-feudal society. Our primary narrator observes all of this and gets deeply involved in palace intrigue and international diplomacy. Then the story takes a radical right turn, and we get an extended men-vs.-nature bit in which a couple travels across arctic wastes for a few hundred pages.

All of this works out okay, I suppose, but several issues kept me from really enjoying the novel too much. The first was its plodding prose – frankly, just plain bad in many cases and dull in most others. The second was that I felt the novel was unable to maintain focus. If the idea was that traditional gender roles has a huge influence on society – okay, fine. Tell me about that. If the notion was that realpolitik works differently in a culture where gender is non-binary, okay, fine, keep focused on that. Instead, I’m left with a setup, and elaborately explained set-piece dealing with this core conceit (“What if instead of having a predefined gender, people could become male or female when it was time to have sex?”) that ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere. The politics and behaviors of the characters and kings here was basically what you’d get from similar Earth societies. The interpersonal relationships and intrigues weren’t markedly different either. And then, as if she was as bored as the rest of us with the notion, the author wanders into a different story for the last third of the book. Now, if the point is, “gender roles don’t really influence the machinations of culture all that deeply”, then I suppose this book would serve as some low-grade ammo for this perspective. But I’m nearly certain that this is exactly the opposite of what Ursula was trying to wrestle with.

Finally, I’d be curious to get The Professor’s take on this one, since she’s so much more deeply initiated in to the arcane of 21st century gender studies than am I. She might understand what was attempted here in a way I’m just missing. But, since it just wasn’t that cool or interesting, I don’t think I’ll ever recommend it to her.

The Iron Council by China Meville

Meville has cool ideas. It’s that simple. From golem commanding thaumaturgies to mangled half-men Remade, to the catacopic stained zones where chaos reigns, he shows us a darkly fantasic mirror of our own world.

The Iron Council is set in the same world as Perdido Street Station, many years after the events described therin. It’s not a sequel, or really related in any way, and you don’t need to be familiar with Meville’s other works to enjoy this one.

Meville could improve the occasional impenetrability of his prose, which makes wading through all of his novels a bit tiresome at points. He overuses arcane words, and obscures the flow of narrative needlessly on occasion.

But he gives you very interesting places, characters, and action sequences. What do they they all really mean? Not much, I think, other than telling a fine and dark tale of things that might have occurred in a strange place which never existed. It’s not fantasy, except in a literal sense. It’s not horror, though often horrific. It’s fine speculative science fiction, I suppose. And it’s good, if a bit tedious at times.