Review of Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald

Millennials catch a fair amount of guff from older generations, much of which echoes criticisms previous generations had of previous generations had of... The wheel of time spins. But one thing that Millennials (even Gen X) have minimal awareness of is living in the shadow of nuclear war. Putin's rhetoric over Ukraine has put people on alert, but it's nothing compared to live news feeds showing the destruction of Hiroshima or warheads being deployed in Cuba, pointed at the US. Capturing the anxiety and folly of this atmosphere is Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959).

Level 7 is set in an underground arcology, built as a massive nuclear bunker for half million people. It is told through the eyes of X-127, a technician whose only job is to stand in front of a panel of buttons that launch nuclear missiles, and push when directed. Living on level 7 in the arcology, he interacts with other technicians, teachers, psychologists, engineers, etc. who share the level. X-127 settles into his role quite easily, his emotional expectations minimal. And with no wars happening, his life goes smoothly. There are no buttons to be pushed. That is, until the klaxons sound.

Review of The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

“Meanwhile, back in the Emperor's throne room...”

To date I'm twenty-two novels deep in the Horus Heresy series, yet the Emperor, the character on which the series pivots, has primarily existed offstage. Like the king in chess, his early movements have been minimal. Almost all the action in the series has been through the bishops and rooks, queens and pawns. Considering the Emperor is the piece Horus is trying to topple, the metaphor is real. Castling the rook to bring the king into the field of battle, Aaron Dembski-Bowden's The Master of Mankind (2016), 41st book in the HH series, looks to raise the series' stakes and peel back the curtain on what has been happening on Earth meanwhile.

A lot has been happening. Extending directly from the events of A Thousand Sons, The Master of Mankind takes the reader into the webways between worlds and the ongoing intrusion of Chaos there. If there were a similar scene in reality, it would be that of a mother returning home with groceries, opening the front door, and discovering a raging chaos of a dozen children—swinging from the chandeliers, throwing water balloons, drawing on the walls, etc. The Master of Mankind is exactly this, just with chaos demons and chaos space marines roaring around. This is what has been happening on Earth while the events of Isstvann III and V went down and the Imperium Secundus attempted to keep the Emperor's mission alive. The novel describes precisely what the Emperor is doing in response as he is attacked from the webways.

Review of Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

There are a few genre defining science fiction films out there, and one is The Matrix. About a man unknowingly living in a virtual world, one day he has the curtain pulled back to reveal the dark reality beyond. It is the poster child for brain-in-a-vat stories. The film is likewise candy for paranoids and conspiracy theorists everywhere. It's true man, it's true! And was there any more paranoid a writer in science fiction history than Philip K. Dick? Time Out of Joint (1956) says 'no'.

Time Out of Joint is the story of Ragle Gumm (brilliant name). Gumm makes a living in the most extraordinary way: he plays the lottery, guessing where a green alien will appear next, and does so with extraordinary success. He lives in a classic 50s American suburb and is friends with the neighbors around him. Considering his life dull and boring, however, Gumm starts exploring ways of making it interesting, starting with attempting an affair with a neighbor's wife. The attempt leads him to some interesting variations in reality—glitches in the matrix as it were. Gumm eventually notices enough of the variations to begin pushing beyond, to learn the whys. In doing so discovers why he is so successful at his job.

Review of Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

1950s science fiction featured proportionately more satire than does the current landscape—an interesting fact considering the sheer volume of sf being published today. Writers like Frederik Pohl, William Tenn, C.M. Kornbluth, Wilson Tucker, and others used speculative situations to comment on the times, often in subtly eviscerating fashion. James Morrow, for as little known as he is in 2024, was one of the few writers keeping the satire torch alight in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Towing Jehovah (1994) is not Morrow's sharpest blade, but it gets its point across in wildly imaginative fashion.

Nietzsche was right: God is dead, and at the beginning of Towing Jehovah Morrow manifests this in reality by having the elder one's massive body fall from the heavens and land in the ocean stone, cold, dead. The Vatican the first to learn of his death (natch), they dispatch one of their most ambitious priests to commission a ship to tow the corpse to a secret location where they can study and attempt to revivify it. A ship and unlikely group of mariners is pulled together, trouble is, it may end up getting in its own way more than effecting the mission.

Starcraft II - 2023 Year in Review

With IEM Katowice 2024 now in the rearview mirror—the defacto Blizzcon, we can take a look back at what made 2023 a year in Starcraft 2. We'll look briefly at the state of play, the best players, the best series, and other relevant things (balance!!).

State of Play

SC2 in 2023 should not have happened at the scale it did. But thanks to crowdfunding and unexpected injections of cash, the competitive scene declined but did not die. We lost one of the seasonal premiere non-Korean tournaments and GSL was reduced in size (number of participants). Viewership dropped overall. Up and coming RTS games Zerospace and Stormgate started to distract viewers' attentions. And there was not a rotation of talent. Perennial names remained at the top while zero new names emerged as contenders.

But the SC2 scene stayed alive. It has only half a foot in the grave. On and offline tournaments continued to be organized—most importantly at the premiere level. Some decent prize pools and one giant one were awarded (at least outside Korea). People continued to attend live events and watch online. And perhaps surprise of all surprises, the game got a balance patch.  It helped, at least a little. The community seems split on the health of the game, but one thing for sure is that, if two years ago someone would have said that in 2023-2024 things are as they are, most people would be satisfied. At least I hope so.

Review of Hotwire by Simon Ings

Making the reader feel uncomfortable is inherent to body horror fiction. The author wants you to squirm in your skin through primeval situations and visceral exposition. As a result, body horror is coconut fiction: you either like it or not, no middle ground. Simon Ings Hotwire (1995) is body horror in cyberpunk form. Let's see which side of coconut you fall on.

Hotwire is nicely edited to jump between varying scenes and circumstances, but all feeds the story of Ajay. Ajay once had a nice job working for the Haag Agency, a company which creates intelligent cities, but he is convinced to betray the Agency, and at the outset of Hotwire has been tasked with stealing a bit of exotic technology from a wetware expert named Snow who has an AI daughter named Rose. Ajay's quest for this tech anything but A-B-C, Ings takes the reader through the messy, bloody side of body augments in seeing whether or not Ajay can conclude his mission—alive.

Review of Double Star by Robert Heinlein

In 2012 the Library of America released a two volume set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. Naturally, I checked who had been chosen and how many I'd read. At the time it was about half, and so I set a goal to read all in order to comment on the set. Twelve years later I've finished all nine. I will save my comments on the two-volume set for a separate post, but here are my comments on the last but not least of the nine, Robert Heinlein's Double Star (1956).

Double Star is the story of a rogue actor who finds himself in a bizarre situation imitating a politician. Lorenzo Smythe is a down-on-his-luck performer who knows his skills are excellent but can't seem to find the sponsors he needs to become properly famous in the galaxy. That is, until he is approached by a small group of men who want him to pretend to be the famous Mars politician John Bonforte. Kidnapped and held hostage, Bonforte's associates do not want the show to stop, and so they are able to convince Smythe to step in for just one speech. One speech becoming a television presentation becoming a... eventually things come to a head and something must give in Smythe's double life.

Review of Angels of Caliban by Gav Thorpe

A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill and Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett are two early Horus Heresy novels. Conceived as a pair, the novels complement one another by describing the same moments in time from two different points of view. Repeating this concept are Pharos by Guy Haley and the subject of this review, Angels of Caliban (2016).

Where Pharos is set primarily on Sotha, a perimeter planet where only bits and pieces of Ultramarines and other loyalist legions perform guard duty, Angels in Caliban is primarily set in and around Macragge, the heart of Imperium Secundus. As the Night Lords descend on Sotha to attempt to take control of the Pharos beacon, so too do they look toward Macragge—to further Horus' aims by taking out the Ultramarines, Dark Angels, and Blood Angels stationed there. But not all is well in loyalist land. Internal conflict festers quietly in the Dark Angels, while Sanguinius broods over Conrad Kurze's surprise attack in Pharos. Cracks appearing in Imperium Secundus, the time may be ripe for Horus to attack.

Review of Sandkings by George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin's name is synonymous with A Game of Thrones, and likely always will be. But decades before he became a cultural phenomenon, he was a middle-of-the-pack writer of science fiction and fantasy, jostling elbows with the other genre writers of the 70s and 80s for success. And he was solid, even sometimes good, at short fiction. Sandkings, a collection published in 1981, offers a good sampling of his shorter, pulpier stories.

The collection kicks off with one its lone ideologically motivated story, however. “The Way of Cross and Dragon” tells of an inquisitor sent to reprimand a heretic. Set in a vastly populated galaxy, the story offers a thinly veiled piss-take on Catholicism. There is extremely little plot meat on the bones, and lacks beautiful skin to make up for it. Moreover, the story's end point, despite its logic, could have been more artfully presented. I know other people like this story, but for me there are more sophisticated take downs of religion out there. “Bitterblooms” is about a woman who runs an ice wagon on a snowy planet overrun by vampires. Martin does his best to humanize the woman, but the pulp mode and the pulp-ish denouement leave the story without the sparkle it could have had if Martin had decided to go deeper into her character.

Article: Coddling Readers: Spengler May Be Right

I have read the four novels of the Chinese canon, which includes Outlaws of the Marsh (aka Water Margin) by Shi Nai'an. The novel is a tragi-comedy about a group of outlaws who build an underground rebellion against a corrupt government. It's my least favorite of the canon, but seeing that S.L. Huang recently wrote an alternate take called The Water Outlaws, I looked into the reviews. Wading through I encountered the following publisher disclaimer:

“Wuxia Novel so includes Violence, Torture, Cannabilsm, Sexual Assault, as well as values that may disturb the modern reader.”

Exclamation points shot up above my head. What is going on here? Since when has this type of thing existed in the adult book sphere? Why are readers being so coddled? I think I need to take a step back...