Review of Descent by Ken Macleod

Ken Macleod’s The Stone Canal opens with the story of the young Jonathan Wilde and the major happenings of he and a fair-weather friend as they grow up in near-future Scotland.  Getting drunk, chasing girls, and arguing politics, they eventually split due to personal differences as post-humanisn spins everyone’s lives in crazy directions.  Easing back on the throttle (aiming at ‘mere’ purposeful humanism), Macleod’s 2014 Descent uses a similar character setup, but keeps its agenda more closely tied to the here and now.  Purported UFO sightings, government and commercial conspiracy theories, speciation, and subjective reality abound, the story of Ryan Sinclair successfully extends the personal struggles of Wilde into more relatable and eerie Orwellian near future.  Featuring the tightest technique of the author’s career, some may argue it is Macleod’s best yet.

Where Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors plays with the psychological, cultural, and sociological aspects of UFO visitations, Descent looks into the ____________ aspects.  To fill in that blank would spoil the story, but suffice to say Macleod uses existent concepts on the pinboard of UFO theorists to paint what he would see as the empirical reality of the situation.  From government conspiracy to neuroscience, the underpinnings of urban myth to street drugs, the strange objects people—some of whom consider themselves rational beings—see in the sky are looked at in mysterious/thriller-esque style.  As the front cover copy says, seeing is not always enough to believe.

Star Wars-ars-ars-ars: Why Zahn Did It Better

Like so many I loved Star Wars as a child, and to this day lazy holiday afternoons with chocolate, chips, soda, and a deep, plush sofa might find me re-watching any of the movies.  Sure they have the brains of a toaster and can spawn the nerdiest possible conversations (evah), but for those lazy-lazy times, they entertain with that all important sf quality: sense of wonder.  (Zzrrum, zzrrum goes my lightsaber.)  I have recently been to see Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, and since the whole world is having a go, I will add my one, possibly two cents.

The Force Awakens is one of the most derivative pieces of pop culture I’ve ever been witness to.  Abrams went the politically correct route and provided two major new characters, a woman and black man, and then reversed the hero vs. damsel in distress roles between them.  Bravo.  Otherwise, he outright copies what has come before.  Jakku is Tatooine, BB8 is R2D2, there is another Death Star (the series count has now reached three, with the possibility for more), which includes another Death Star trench run, Kylo Ren is Darth Vader (with one twist on family), General Hux is Grand Moff Tarkin (with no twists), there is another cantina with alien musicians, Maz Kanata is Yoda, Rey is Luke (scavenger on a desert planet, parentage unknown, latent force talents, finds a lightsaber in haunted underground cavern, blah, blah, blah), there are AT-AT Walkers on a snowy planet, there is big, evil Empire attacking innocent, altruistic Rebellion…  And on and on and on goes the list of things copied from the first Star Wars films. Episodes I-III catch a lot of flack, but for sure they were original films, and fun for it.  The Force Awakens is just recycled material that has a lot of its fun sapped for having so obviously been done before.

Review of Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling

Everybody knows the story of Alice in Wonderland.  A little girl playing in her yard one day discovers a little hole, falls in, and suddenly arrives in technicolor fairyland bizarro.  Innumerable similarities posited by science fiction, Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical vision of a little girl’s adventures in a world far abstract from her own makes for something of an ur-text for the ‘sensibility’ of post-human fiction.  I guess that would make Bruce Sterling’s superb Holy Fire (1996) a post-human rabbit hole. 

Medical economist Mia Ziemann is out for a walk through the rolling streets of San Francisco one shining morning when she is invited to the home of a very old friend.  Martin, like Mia, is chock full of medical enhancements that have pushed his lifespan well-beyond the natural.  But he has reached his limit: he knows he will die the following day.  Martin having bequeathed his memory palazzo to her, on the way home Mia ponders what to do with the lifetime of digital memories.  While having a drink at a café, she encounters a teenager learning how to design her own clothes.  Inspired, Mia decides the next day to have a controversial new treatment that will restore her body to its twenty-year old form.  Awakening from the procedure with the vim, vigor, and rashness only the young possesses is too late: she’s fallen down her own rabbit hole.

Review of Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

While for many people cave paintings strike little aesthetic interest due to their simplicity, it’s virtually impossible for a person not to ruminate upon the circumstances of what brought them into existence.  Religious art, Louvres of the past, or mere pre-historic vandalism, we can only speculate on the larger significance of the paintings to the groups of humans who created them thousands and thousands of years ago. 

Perhaps the least likely inspiration for a science fiction novel, Kim Stanley Robinson nevertheless took one such cave painting as inspiration, the Chauvet Cave in France, and created its backstory in Shaman (2013).  Rich in prehistoric detail, from social function to sheer survival in the Ice Age, speculation on life before recorded history may never been as realistically or engagingly created in fiction. 

Review of Glow by Ned Beauman

Ned Beauman’s 2012 The Teleportation Accident slides along a wet blade of charm and wit, most often of the irreverent variety.  A raucously fun read, it draws blood for the rich language, uniquely realized personal stories, and left-field view of early ‘30s flapper life in Europe and Los Angeles.  Beauman’s follow up Glow is to be enjoyed for similar reasons, though the blade seems to have dulled some in the meantime.

Glow is the story of Raf and his unintentional involvement in a global synthesized drug scheme involving Burmese revolutionaries, a slippery American corporation, and the most eclectic thing of all, the city of London and its raver youth culture.  Music and drugs everything, Raf’s life takes a new direction when riding home from a rave very early one morning after trying a new drug called glow.  A fox sitting in the seat behind him, afterwards he sees even stranger things, particularly silent white vans kidnapping people off the streets.  It isn’t long before his friend Theo is snapped up.  But meeting a half-American/half-Burmese woman calling herself Cherish is what really turns Raf’s life upside down.  Can she help him get Theo back and get him another hit of glow?

Review of "Interlude: Swallow" by Chuck Wendig

Approaching the creation of serial killer fiction, the writer must choose their entry point with care.  Politicized? Stylized?  Sensationalized?  The politicized best done in satire (for the dark, cynical edge) or realism (it gains the appropriate degree of sympathy).  The sensationalized functions at its “best” when uber-violence and eroticisms are laid on a formula storyline such that the masses can suck it up with a straw.  It’s the stylized that takes real talent.  On top of being saturated in the sub-medium you are working in to make the little homages and delicate points have the proper touch, the writer must also have a feel for language above and beyond average so as to effect the desired mood or tone.  Caitlin Kiernan’s “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No.8)” possesses these qualities in spades.  Chuck Wendig’s “Swallow: Interlude” (2015) doesn’t.

Lacking a single entry angle, “Swallow: Interlude” is stuck between sensationalized and stylized.  There are scenes of violence intended to discomfort, but being either mediocre or overwritten, do not have the desired effect.  Due to lack of style, the mood and tone do not exist to the level necessary to cut (har) in desired fashion.  The main character Miriam, a girl who can see the day people die, has attitude as she tracks serial killers, but digressions such as the following severly dilutes her attitude, and indicates a writer unable to detach themselves from their story: 

Review of Declare by Tim Powers

Tim Powers is one of fantasy and science fiction’s long standing writers.  Never seeming to get his due, however, the award nominations, media presence, delightfully varied and imaginative novels for four-plus decades, and strong recommendations have never been able to push him fully into the radar of mainstream genre readers.  Yet that is precisely where he best fits, and 2000’s Declare is an example why.

Homage to LeCarre with strong elements of the supernatural, Declare is a steadily-paced spy thriller set in Cold War history.  Powers himself perhaps best describing his angle of approach, he takes the search for solar systems, particularly the search for nearby interstellar anomalies as indicators of nearby systems, as his metaphor.  The biographies of British spies Kim Philby, Anthony Burgess, and other historical figures having numerous gaps between them that recurse through WWII and the Cold War, Powers fills them with a story of his own without, in his own words, changing accepted facts.  Anthony Hale the British spy created to cement the pieces together, from the unknowns of his birth to the uncertainty of life as his assignment grows ever more mysterious and dangerous, Powers steadily plays out a line of story that has the reader begging for resolution come the final pages. 

Review of Prador Moon by Neal Asher

Consistent, dependable, Neal Asher has a real handle on grimdark space opera in his far future universe, the Polity.  Prador Moon is the second of three Polity books that came out in 2006, and the fifth overall.  Telling of the first meeting between the Prador and humanity, to say things don’t get off on the right foot would be to sell the opening scene (and the several novels which follow) short.  Prador-human relations tumbling to bits in the aftermath of ‘diplomacy,’ all-out space war erupts.

Asher, as is his custom, provides viewpoints into all sides of his conflicts.  Scenes from the Prador general Imminence’s ship grotesquely describe what happens to the humans captured, including the rudimentary research into thrall technology as war increases the pressure on the lab.  Meanwhile, humanity is not unified against the Prador.  Not wanting to be ruled by Polity AI, a Separatist faction has blossomed, a faction whose agenda may see the war turn one way or another based on their guerilla actions.  And within the tech labs of the remainder of humanity, a young woman recently augmented by an illegal technician finds her new skills more than helpful meeting a certain technical challenge facing human logistics.

Review of The Restoration Game by Ken Macleod

I was having one of those bibliophiles’ moments of crisis: with so many books to read, what next?  I looked through the stacks, read a few back cover blurbs, and stutter started a few pages.  But none felt right.  None clicked: this is the book to read now.  What to do?  I did what I always do in such situations: fall back on something dependable.  Knowing in the very least his books are tightly plotted, possess sharp prose, and intelligently playful with politics and technology, I fell back on Ken Macleod, particularly his 2010 The Restoration Game.  The final result: while not his best, Macleod remains in my TBT pile*.

An inference to a nation state’s continually evolving quest to bring itself back to some self-perceived glory day, The Restoration Game plays with the idea of political recursion, as told through the life of Lucy Stone.  An admin for a small start-up computer games company, she receives a most unusual request one day from her mother: to design a computer game based on the history, legends, and myths of their native Krasssnia, a former Soviet bloc state.  Lucy’s past a bit of a mystery, particularly the identity of her father and whether indeed her mother is an agent working for a government, researching the background details of the game soon draws her into a political sub-world she never thought existed, and just perhaps, may even bring her back to her native Krassnia to face the demons of the controlled state.

Evidence #836: Pulp SF Has Returned

Every once and a while I like to take a screenshot of the books available for review on NetGalley as a kind of cross section of the state of genre. Long story short, it's not looking good.  No less than five pairs of oiled pecs, some with animals, and somehow only one with a sword-wielding girl superimposed over a generic ethereum.  And the titles, Forbidden Dance, Iron Dominance, Shadow Rites, it's like low budget, straight to television film...  I'm feeling nauseated...