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Vintage Science Fiction Month: Podkayne of Mars

3 Comments / Science Fiction / Mark / January 9, 2019

Vintage SF Month is hosted by the Little Red Reviewer. The objective: Read and discuss “older than I am” Science Fiction in the month of January.

I’ve always enjoyed Science Fiction, but a little over a decade ago, I decided to make my casual enjoyment of the genre a little more formal by broadening my horizons and reading more important examples of the genre. One of the first things I did was read a bunch of Heinlein Juveniles (akin to what we’d probably call Young Adult these days). Robert A. Heinlein was never my favorite of the Golden Age authors, but I’ve gathered that he was among the most important, and after reading many of his novels, I’ve gained a solid appreciation for the novels themselves and their influence on the genre (and, for that matter, real-world space exploration). Since then, I’ve slowly been working my way through his bibliography, and this year, I decided to take a look at the unofficial 14th Juvenile novel, Podkayne of Mars. Heinlein himself doesn’t consider it a Juvenile and he’d long since gotten tired of being regarded as a “writer of children’s books and nothing else”, but then, it is written mostly from the perspective of a 15 year old girl (with her eleven year old, snot-nosed little brother playing a big role), so it kinda fits within the Juvenile mold.

Podkayne “Poddy” Fries is a 15 year old girl living on Mars who dreams of becoming the first female starship pilot and leading deep-space exploration efforts. The novel is presented as a first person narrative consisting of her diary. As the story begins, she is about to embark on a trip from Mars to Earth, but the whole thing is scuttled when a hospital mixup inadvertently saddles her parents with three newborn babies to care for (in this future, kids are conceived early and then frozen in order to allow parents to “uncork” the children as time permits, though obviously not in this case). However, the trip is resurrected when Poddy’s uncle Tom manages to arrange passage for Poddy and her unbearable (but genius-level smart) little brother Clark on a cruise ship to Earth, with a stop at Venus first. After some minor adventures and meandering, we soon learn that Tom’s magnanimous offer to chaperon this trip is really just a cover for some sort of secret political wrangling, and higher-stakes hijinks ensue.

In short, this is probably my least favorite Heinlein novel, though it fails in interesting ways. There’s a promising start, and some things play to Heinlein’s strengths, but there’s a fair amount of unfocused meandering and the whole thing falls apart completely towards the ending, which feels rushed and weirdly dismissive of our narrator/protagonist. Spoilers from here on out!

Speaking of which, our protagonist here is a teenage girl, a fraught proposition when it comes to Heinlein these days. He doesn’t exactly have the greatest reputation for writing female characters, and if you were so inclined to look for it, you would find a whole host of things to be offended by in this story. You probably won’t have to look very hard. For instance, Poddy seems to be intelligent, but opines on multiple occasions that a woman should hide that intelligence around men, or that a woman should never beat a man in any sort of game of strength (thus she pretends to lose an arm-wrestling match to her little brother), and then there’s the thrill of discovering how to properly apply make-up, and so on. I suppose a more generous reading could be that depictions of sexism or the ways females cope with same is not an endorsement, but this novel (especially the ending, which we’ll get to in a bit) strains that reading of the story. It’s also worth noting that, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this is the second earliest example of a SF novel that features a female protagonist (narrowly beat out by Naomi Mitchison’s lesser known Memoirs of a Spacewoman). To be sure, there were earlier short fiction examples, some even written by Heinlein himself as early as 1949 (featuring a character who he eventually used as inspiration for Poddy), but this is notable in itself.

Other topics are more deftly portrayed, with Heinlein working in a more exploratory mode than he has in many of his works, which are often more prescriptive (i.e. there aren’t bald lectures a la Starship Troopers). Indeed, when describing the laissez-faire corporatism of Venusian society, uncle Tom states that he “…can’t make up his mind whether it is the grimmest tyranny the human race has ever known… or the most perfect democracy in history.” Heinlein goes to great lengths to portray the “corporate fascism” of Venus without resorting too much to lecturing, and he allows the reader to infer a lot of the details so they can make up their own mind.

Alas, the ending really puts the breaks on things for me. Events escalate quickly and Poddy and her brother Clark end up kidnapped by nefarious political forces hoping to blackmail their uncle Tom for concessions. At this point, Poddy goes from being an intelligent, active character to being almost entirely passive, as Clark immediately senses the gravity of the situation (no matter what Tom does, there’s no incentive for the kidnappers to keep the kids alive) and devises an escape plan. Furthermore, Poddy is grievously injured during the escape because she went back to the compound to rescue a semi-intelligent Venusian baby animal and Clark had forgotten to disable a nuclear bomb (another baffling subplot, to be honest), which inadvertently went off. The original ending that Heinlein wanted was to have Poddy die in the explosion, but that was apparently a bridge too far for the publisher, who insisted he rewrite the ending. You can kinda tell that Heinlein’s heart wasn’t in it, as the endings aren’t that different and it’s clear that he did the bear minimum to satisfy the publisher’s expectations. Both endings are available in some editions, but to my mind, neither are particularly good, for reasons already expounded upon.

Another strange thing about the ending is uncle Tom’s admonishing of Poddy and Clark’s parents for not caring enough about raising their children. Given uncle Tom’s use of the children as little more than human shields, disposable meat-pawns for his chess game of interplanetary politics, this is perhaps another example of depiction not being endorsement. Still, the ending strains all storytelling credibility in ways that I’m not used to from Heinlein. It doesn’t help that Poddy, thanks to an experience on the trip to Venus where she had to help save babies in the nursery (an event that probably also influenced her decision to go back and save the animal), is implied to be reconsidering her dream of becoming a starship captain, which even from a storytelling perspective, is a bit odd given the opening of the novel.

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Heinlein is his fondness for experimenting with ideas, asking “what if?”, and there’s certainly some of that going on here. I suspect even his more prescriptive works (the aforementioned Starship Troopers comes to mind) are more stronger-stated thought experiments than strict representations of Heinlein’s actual beliefs. There are certainly themes that underlie his work, but from what I’ve read (which is certainly not comprehensive), they might not be quite as well-defined as usually portrayed. Indeed, one of those underlying themes is certainly his propensity for thought experiments, and thus you get a hard-right book like Starship Troopers followed a year later by the sixties counter-culture template of Stranger in a Strange Land (and just a few years after that, the proto-libertarian The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). As such, Podkayne of Mars occupies an interesting, if not entirely successful, place in Heinlein’s oeuvre (coming in between the three books just mentioned) and perhaps SF in general (as an early SF novel with a female protagonist, if not a particularly great example). Owing to Heinlein’s importance to the genre, there are actually tons of biographical materials about his beliefs and how they influenced his work, and it’s something I should probably look into more sometime. Still, judging solely based on what I’ve read (and my tendency towards optimism), I gather I have a mildly different view of Heinlein than a lot of other people. Perhaps we should be less concerned with what Heinlein thought than how we interpret his works ourselves. It’s entirely possible that I’m just projecting my love of thought experiments onto Heinlein (though given his endless imagination for wide-ranging stories, I suspect there’s some basis for my thoughts here). That being said, of his juveniles, I vastly prefer Tunnel in the Sky and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. While not entirely enthused with this one, I’m not deterred from continuing to explore Heinlein’s works much at all.

2018 in Books

3 Comments / Arts & Letters, Science Fiction / Mark / December 30, 2018

As 2018 grinds to a halt, it’s time to take a step back and look the year that was. In accordance with tradition, I’ll take a deep dive into the books I’ve read (as well as the movies I’ve watched and beers I’ve drank, though those will have to wait). I keep track of my reading at Goodreads (we should be friends there), and they have a bunch of fancy statistical visualization tools that give a nice overview of my reading habits over time, especially now that I’ve been doing so for 9 years. This year, they’ve even introduced a couple new graphs, which will be fun. Starting off simple though, with the total number of “books” read:

I read 52 books in 2018, which is just two shy of the record I set last year (and still the second best year in recorded history (i.e. the last 9 years)). It’s worth noting that a fair amount of these titles are actually short fiction, but we’ll get more into that later. Full list of titles here. Also of note, a significant amount of these were audiobooks, which sometimes feels like cheating. These disclaimers also applied to last year’s record-setting run, so I feel like I did alright, especially considering the next way to slice reading, where I did set a new record – total number of pages read:

It’s important to note the inherent variability of page numbers, but I managed to exceed the previous record by almost a thousand pages, which ain’t too shabby (last year’s record setting total was only about 100 pages more than the previous record). Some additional info:

While I did read short fiction this year, which does indeed help to inflate “book” totals, the average book length this year was 306 pages – a huge improvement over last year’s 279 pages. This means that I read lots of longer books (i.e. 500+ page books) to make up for the handful of short stories (and to a lesser extent, the 150 page novellas). The record for average book length was set in 2013, a year in which I specifically and intentionally set out to read massive doorstops (and even then, the average was 356 pages). The longest book I read all year was Justin Cronin’s The Passage at a respectable 766 pages (though a far cry from my record, which is somewhere in the 1000+ page range).

The pie chart breaks things down a bit further, though it’s a weird graph due to the dumb way I categorize stuff on Goodreads (i.e. fiction, short story, and novella contain lots of overlap, non-fiction has no overlap). Still, roughly on par with previous years in terms of short fiction, with a mild increase in both novellas and non-fiction.

In terms of publication dates, I curse myself every year for having read Alice in Wonderland and The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2010, thus stretching out the vertical axis of this graph. I’ve done a decent enough job spreading out my reading, though there’s still a big recency bias here, probably owing to my participation in the Hugo Awards as well as generally keeping up with favorite authors. These things happen, but as it turns out, January is Vintage SF Month, so I will most certainly hit some older stuff that month (as well as the rest of the year).

Ohhh, new graph! This one is for books over time (with a monthly period), which sounds great, but ends up producing weird spikes when I finish books at the beginning of a given month or when I read through, for example, the short story category of the Hugos. Still, it’s neat, and I always grumble about wanting more visualizations, so this is welcome.

As is this one, which is page numbers over time. Alas, it falls prey to the same issue as the books over time graph, and indeed, books that I slowly read over several months get all their pages attributed to the month in which I complete something, which creates some of these spikes. I think there are ways to log progress throughout reading, but that might be too much manual effort for even me (though it would be interesting).

Some more assorted observations on the year’s reading:

Only 10 non-fiction books in 2018, which is actually an improvement over 2017 (when I had just 7), but still something I should probably try to improve in 2019.
Only 15 books were written by women, which is a step down from last year when the proportion was roughly 50%. Then again, none of this happened by design and just came in the natural course of reading, so go figure.
The oldest book I read all year was Isaac Asimov’s robot story Runaround (for the 1942 Retro Hugos, which I didn’t vote in because I didn’t end up reading all the stories). Since that was a short story, the oldest actual “book” was Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump, written in 1955.
A brief scan of the list sees that somewhere around 30 were Science Fiction, which is about in line with previous years (but more than last year, which was a divergent year for some reason).

And that about covers it. Stay tuned for a overall movie recap, followed by the traditional onslaught of the Kaedrin Movie Awards. Sprinkled in there will be some reviews for Vintage SF Month, because I’m looking forward to that…

SF Book Review: Part 30

Leave a Comment / Arts & Letters, Science Fiction / Mark / November 18, 2018

Catching up on reviews for recently read SF (check here for some Halloween Season’s readings as well)…

The Passage by Justin Cronin – A secret government attempt to breed super-soldiers only succeeds in creating what are basically vampires. As all secret government projects are wont to do, this one fails spectacularly and unleashes a hoard of vampirism across the country (and probably the planet). Various enclaves have survived, like the Colony, a small refuge of humanity protected by massive banks of ultraviolet lights that keep the vampires at bay. But a century or so later, and the technology is starting to wear out. Enter Amy, a mysterious young girl who shares the vampire’s immortality, but lacks the bloodsucking monstrous parts. Does she represent hope? It’s a nice spin on the vampire mythologies that we all know and love, especially for those who don’t like the whole sexy sparkling brooding emo vampires that became common for a while there (one review mentions that you won’t be seeing any “Team Babcock” tshirts anytime soon, though I think they’d actually be pretty cool (Babcock is one of the original twelve vampires in The Passage)). I like the background and there are some later revelations about how they work and what their community is like that are really interesting. Unfortunately, those bits tend to be drowned out by endless, inchoate chapters of characterization. With a massive, sprawling cast of characters, this is sometimes fine, but ensemble pieces always suffer from unevenness, and this is no exception. Cronin’s longwinded style drags things out longer than is probably needed, and it doesn’t help that a lot of these character bits are about people going through something dysfunctional if not downright traumatic (and this is before we even get to the vampires). The first third or so of the novel works pretty well, but then things shift dramatically and unexpectedly (an interesting development). We’re shifted to an entirely new set of characters and this is where things bogged down for me. Eventually they got moving again, and I think the novel ends strong. Ultimately, I loved the vampire bits, but found it a bit overlong and bloated. There are two more books in the series, but I’m on the fence as to whether I’ll get to them…
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells – The second in Wells’ Hugo winning series of novellas concerning a Murderbot who only wants to sit around binging TV shows, but ends up getting sucked into human affairs and protecting foolish humans from themselves. In this one, our Murderbot protagonist makes another AI friend and meets up with some naive scientists who want to recover their data from murderous, bloodsucking corporate suits (but um, not Passage-esque vampires, I’m being more metaphorical here). It’s a lot of fun. I like the new AI companion, and Wells is decent enough at the whole corporate intrigue thing too. Along the way, we find more about Murderbot’s mysterious past, and Wells does a good job blending those elements into the novella without overwhelming the rest of the story. I’m pretty excited by this series, and will most certainly be checking out future installments (which have been coming at a pretty steady clip).
The Uplift War by David Brin – The conclusion to Brin’s Uplift Trilogy, but then, each book is pretty much a standalone, with only small direct connections (though, all taking place in the same universe, we see lots of indirect overlap). In this universe, most alien races were originally non-intelligent creatures that have been “uplifted” by one of the higher races in the galaxy. Once uplifted, a race must serve it’s patron for a long time before they are permitted to uplift other species on their own. However! Earthlings appear to have developed their intelligence all on their own, which upsets the galactic society to its core. Where the first book, Sundiver, concerned a mostly human story, the second mostly followed the human-uplifted dolphin race, while this third book mostly focuses on human-uplifted chimpanzees. Now, this is a tough book to judge, because the second book in the trilogy, Startide Rising, is phenomenal and thus represents a tough act to follow. In truth, this didn’t really reach Startide‘s heights, but it remains good on its own. The story, about one of the affronted alien races attempting to invade a human/chimp planet in order to blackmail humans into revealing more about their recent discovery of an ancient Progenitor ship (an event from the previous book), is mostly self contained, and while kicked off by the whole Progenitor angle, doesn’t really do much to progress that overarching story (I assume this is addressed in future books of the series). But the self-contained story is done well enough by itself, and most of the characters are likable and competent in their own right. Like previous books, this story seems enamored with what I like to call Earthican exceptionalism, but given the more downbeat titles of current SF, this actually represents something refreshing to a modern reading. That being said, the ending does make you feel a little bad for the invading Gubru, who are so thoroughly defeated and humiliated by the humans (and their trickster-like Tymbrimi allies) that you just can’t help it. On the other hand, the Gubru are presented as being humorless, entitled, and petulant (as, indeed, are a lot of alien races in this universe, making you wonder how they’ve all become so powerful in the first place), so take it with a grain of salt. The overarching narrative that spreads across all three books doesn’t move very much in any of them and is not resolve here, but I assume it is in the later books… Ultimately, while the whole Uplift Trilogy is pretty darned good, the real gem remains Startide Rising. I’ve enjoyed these all enough that I’ll probably get to the sequel trilogy at some point, and obviously Brin has written lots of other stuff as well.
Head On by John Scalzi – This sequel to Scalzi’s Lock In mostly represents an improvement on its predecessor, if only because the universe is established and thus Scalzi can focus on the mystery of the week bit of the story rather than the worldbuilding (which is a little clunky to start with, and which was poorly established in the first book). The mystery itself is, once again, a pretty decent take on a futuristic detective procedural (i.e. better than your typical CBS crime show, but not exactly even reaching for the top tier of literary mysteries). It’s nothing that’s going to win awards (at least, it won’t be making my Hugo nominating ballot), but it’s a fun and entertaining read. While this isn’t my favorite setting, I enjoy spending time there well enough and Scalzi is good at fast paced plotting and snappy dialogue, making the pages turn quickly. Well worth checking out.
The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by Jack Campbell – Captain John “Black Jack” Geary is a legendary war hero presumed lost in the early days of a war between the Alliance and the Syndics. The war isn’t going particularly well for the Alliance when they miraculously discover Geary, who survived in hibernation. Geary is shocked to learn that he’s revered as a hero, but resolves to do his duty, whip his fleet into shape, and dodge the onslaught of Syndics coming his way. This is basically a military “long retreat” story adapted to work in space, and it’s a surprisingly good fit. Geary makes for a good protagonist and the situation he’s in generates plenty of fodder for internal conflict that must be overcome before the external conflict with the Syndics can be properly dealt with. Again, this is a pretty enjoyable spin through military SF tropes, even if it’s not exactly breaking new ground. Then again, “strategic retreat” isn’t a particularly revered military SF trope, so props to Campbell for going with this unsung but important angle. There are more books in the series, and I’ll mostly likely seek them out at some point (always a good sign for me, as I tend to be sequel averse…)

So there you have it. I’ve got a whole slew of SF novellas and a couple novels I want to get to in the next couple of months as well, so maybe the next one of these will come sooner rather than later…

Hugo Awards 2018: The Results

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / August 26, 2018

The 2018 Hugo Award winners were announced last Sunday, so it’s time for the requisite whinging/celebration that keeps blogs in orbit. I participated this year, but was somewhat less vigilant in reading and voting, but will probably continue to play along. Anyway, let’s get to it… (For those who really want to geek out and see how instant-runoff voting works, the detailed voting and nomination stats are available.)

The Stone Sky wins best novel and N.K. Jemisin becomes the first author ever to win three in a row. I have not been a particular fan of the series, but people seem to love these books. Too much misery porn for my liking, which always kept me at an arms length from the characters and story. Forcing myself to read the three books over the past few years (if I’m going to vote, I’m going to read the books; the authors deserve that much) probably doesn’t help. I don’t see why this series in particular deserved the three-peat, but this third book was actually my favorite of the series, so there is that (in fact, the only real baffling winner in the series was the second book, which suffered from clear middle-book-in-a-trilogy problems. I can definitely see why the first and third books won.) The other funny thing about this is that a few years ago, they created a whole award for “Best Series” that could have potentially cut down on the number of sequels in the Best Novel category, but that clearly isn’t happening. Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire came in second, and probably would have been my choice (though I certainly get the criticisms of it, it was a lot more fun and pushed my SF buttons more than most of the other nominees). New York 2140 came in last place, which also matches my preference…
World of the Five Gods (formerly known as the Chalion series after the first book), by Lois McMaster Bujold takes the Best Series Hugo, which is also funny because Bujold won last year for the Vorkosigan Saga (deservedly so, in my opinion, but still). This award still suffers from a big logistical problem, namely that if you haven’t already read all the nominees (some of which contain more than 10 novels, etc…), you can’t really judge properly. That being said, Bujold is one of my two favorite authors, so this win isn’t exactly unwelcome.
All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells takes home the rocket for Best Novella. Though I have not read any of the other nominees, I had nominated the Wells story, so I’m happy to see that it did well (and this is a good reminder that the sequels are out, so I should get on that!) I’ve neglected the novellas in recent years, but it’s funny, a lot of the most interesting SF these days is coming out in Novella sized bites, so I might have to pay closer attention to the category this/next year.
“The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer takes the Novelette award, but the only Novelette that I read this year was Yoon Ha Lee’s excellent “Extracurricular Activities” (which I was rooting for). I’ll probably give Palmer’s story a shot though, as it seems fun.
“Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™”, by Rebecca Roanhorse wins Best Short Story. I had placed it firmly in the middle of the pack of my ballot, but didn’t feel particularly strongly for any of the stories (despite this year’s category in general being of higher quality than the last few years).
Wonder Woman wins Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I thought that my preferred Get Out might actually pull it out (it did finish second in the voting), but Hugo voters tend to go for bigger, splashier movies, as evidenced by the other nominees. A The Good Place won the Short Form award, which is great.
All in all, not too shabby! I’m definitely curious to see how next year goes. Will series and sequels continue to dominate the Best Novel category? Should Lois McMaster Bujold release a new Sharing Knife book this year to see if she can three-peat the Best Series category? Will Novellas continue their ascendancy? Only one way to find out.
I have not read a ton of 2018 SF, and what I have read so far has not struck me as Hugo Worthy (Head On was a lot of fun, but doesn’t strike me as needing recognition in this way). Some things I’m looking forward to catching up with though: The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts, The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard, Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries sequels), by Martha Wells, and a few others (of note: all of the preceding are novellas).

And that’s all for now. We’ve only got a few weeks until the Six Weeks of Halloween starts up, so stay tuned…

SF Book Review: Part 28

Leave a Comment / Arts & Letters, Science Fiction / Mark / August 5, 2018

Of course, I’ve been reviewing a bunch of recent Hugo nominees separately, but it’s been a while since I caught up on reviews of other SF I’ve been reading, so let’s get to it:

Eon by Greg Bear – Before I left on vacation last week I posted a poll on twitter asking which SF book I should listen to during the drive (embedded in the vacation was also the annual Operation Cheddar side-mission, which also involves a lot of time in-car). Despite around 400 impressions, only four of you jerks voted, but this Greg Bear book was the winner. As it turns out, it’s very good and the audio-book was well produced, but man, it’s pretty heady stuff for a trip like this. The story starts in the far flung future of… 2005, when the US and Soviet tensions are strained and nearing a nuclear exchange. Into this volatile political environment comes a massive asteroid, appearing out of a huge energy burst just outside the solar system. It takes up a near-earth orbit, and what appears to initially just be a big-dumb-object turns out to hold secrets within secrets. It soon becomes clear that the “rock” or “potato” (as the Russians call it) is from the future, but maybe not quite our future. The rock once held an advanced civilization, and from studying in their libraries, we see that it was a human civilization made up of the remnants of nuclear war. The history described mostly (but not wholly) matches the history our characters know. Then there is the mysterious seventh chamber, which is larger than the asteroid itself and seems to house a singularity of some sort. This is a big, ambitious hard-SF novel that builds on top of previous big-dumb-object SF in a meaningful way. Sense of wonder abounds, and there are a bunch of startling plot developments throughout the story, which is far-ranging and demands close reading. The SF bits are well done, mixing accessible ideas with more mind-bending concepts. The latter can get a bit dicey or difficult to understand, but there’s enough underpinning them to keep the book from feeling bogged down by technobabble (your mileage may vary; it worked well for me). The characters suffer a bit in comparison to the idea content and plot. They’re likable enough, and Bear spends plenty of time with them, but they’re clearly not the focus of the story, and the book drags a bit when Bear focuses on them. At first, the book does seem hopelessly dated, what with all the Cold War machinations (and a weird Ralph Nader reference), but as we progress through the story and become acquainted with the concept of alternate universes, that complaint shrinks and nearly vanishes (clearly not intentional, as this was written during the Cold War, but still). The finale ties things together reasonably well, though there’s still some open ended questions, which I gather are addressed in a sequel to this book. Unlike most of these situations, I can actually see myself following up on that sequel, which I think says something. I don’t think Eon is quite as successful as Blood Music, but it’s still great, big-scope SF that’s well worth checking out.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez – When computer game magnate Matthew Sobol dies, a computer program awakens and starts executing various schemes. These start out as small scale murders, but quickly escalate into more devious and wide-ranging territory. Detective Peter Sebeck and a handful of others must find a way to counter the Daemon’s ambitions. Pretty straightforward techno-thriller type stuff, entertaining for what it is, but not quite grounded enough to really make an impact. In computer terms, a Daemon is a background process that waits for requests (a necessity in a multi-tasking OS). Here, the term is used more generally, as a mixture of sorta background AI that only kicks off processes once certain things happen (for example, the whole story is kicked of when the Daemon monitors the news for Sobol’s obituary). It’s not quite a full AI, but it’s implied that Sobol has thought up a lot of things in advance or something. Interesting enough as it goes, but the story often goes for flashy over subtle explorations. The character work is simple and purely functional, which again focuses on superficial explorations. This makes for an entertaining and quick read (even if it is probably too long and bloated at parts), but not something that really sticks with you. There is a lot of value in entertainment, and I feel like this often gets lost in the shuffle, so on balance, I liked this book. However, despite some loose ends, I probably won’t follow up on the sequel. That being said, I’m curious enough to pick up more Suarez at some point.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis Taylor – Bob Johansson just sold his software company and to celebrate, he signs up for a cryogenics program and almost immediately gets into an accident. He wakes up a century later to learn that corpsicles have no rights and that he’s now the property of a religious state. His consciousness has been digitized and he’s now going to be controlling an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets, which actually aligns pretty well with Bob’s personality. However, there are several competing programs out there (notably the Brazilians), and the universe is not necessarily a friendly place. A decent little exploration of Von Neumann probes told in a very entertaining, Scalzi-esque manner. Bob is reasonably likable, and so are the majority of his replicated brethren (each replicant having subtle probabalistic differences that can result in wildly different personalities), and each gets into their own curious adventure. Not as deep or ambitious as Eon, but not simple, trashy surface-level stuff like Daemon, this winds up being an entertaining little book. Clearly the first in a series, this is another one that I will probably revisit at some point.
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks – This third novel in Banks’ Culture series tells the story of Cheradinine Zakalwe, an ex-special-circumstances agent recruited for one more mission by his former handler Diziet Sma and supported by the Culture AI Skaffen Amiskaw. Told in two alternating narrative streams, one moving forward chronologically, the other in reverse. Neither stream is notably great on its own, but their juxtaposition is what gives this novel its complexity as each alternating chapter informs the others, leading to a final revelation. While it is a genuinely well constructed novel, I also find that the glowing terms in which people describe this perhaps oversold the impact, and thus I wound up finding it a bit disappointing. The final narrative twist is interesting, but I’m not sure it can bear the weight of the rest of the story. In particular, the backwards-moving sections of the story are a little repetitive, disjointed, repetitive, and episodic, leading to lots of wallowing in guilt and misery, which is ultimately the point of Zakalwe (and not something I particularly enjoy). It’s still a good book, to be sure, but it’s much more of a character sketch than a space opera (though it contains enough window dressing on that front, I suppose). I liked it, but found Player of Games to be a much more effective story and probably my favorite Banks novel so far.
Millennium by John Varley – A DC-10 and a 747 collide in mid-air, and a team of investigators find a few bits of evidence that don’t quite fit. It turns out that teams of people from the future have been time-traveling to the moments before accidents like this and swapping out the passengers with prefabricated smoking bodies. When one such operation goes poorly, more time travelers need to go back to try and fix the problems before they cascade into bigger problems, blah blah, paradox. So this starts off enjoyably enough and the premise is put through its paces, but the ultimate justification and ending left me feeling hollow. I’m not entirely sure it all fits together, and the whole motivation behind the scheme wasn’t particularly well established. That said, the in-the-moment bits were pretty well done. It reminds me a bit of a J.J. Abrams mystery-box type story, where all the questions are tantalizing and mysterious, but the solution isn’t quite as satisfying as you’d like. So I enjoyed reading it, but it hasn’t stuck with me. I’d be down for reading more Varley at some point though…

These were the most recent five books that I’ve not already covered, but I have a few more to get to at some point, even if I read them quite a bit ago…

Hugo Awards: Six Wakes

2 Comments / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / July 8, 2018

One of the longstanding criticisms of the Hugo Awards is that the same names keep showing up on the shortlist every damn year. No name is necessarily permanent (though some have had tenures lasting 20 years or so, especially in the smaller, more obscure categories), but this is the sort of thing you’d expect for what is essentially a popularity contest. This year is no exception. Of the 6 nominees for Best Novel, 4 are written by an author who has already won the award and another that was also nominated last year. Mur Lafferty is the only author on the shortlist that hasn’t had a book nominated before (though she has been nominated in ancillary categories and won the Campbell award a few years back, so not a completely new name). In all honesty, this immediately endears me to the book. Additionally, the book is quite enjoyable and *gasp* not part of a series, also big pluses.

Six Wakes tells the story of six clones who awake a few decades into their mission crewing the starship Dormire. They awake to chaos. Their previous bodies have been gruesomely murdered, the ship is off course, artifical gravity has malfunctioned, and the food printer is only able to make poison. All memory backups and logs have been deleted and the ship’s AI is offline. No one has any memories of their journey so far, so we’re basically left with a locked-room murder mystery.

There are some clear flaws in the story and worldbuilding here, but funnily enough, I found myself making excuses for them and giving a lot of slack while Lafferty eventually works out some of the issues. I often have a sorta reverse reaction (i.e. a bunch of nitpicks sinking an otherwise good story), so this was an interesting experience, and probably belies a deeper positive feeling about the story.

So this crew of six people are all criminals that have taken on the long and boring trek with the hopes of clearing their records. While this clearly raises the stakes and makes them all suspects, it also feels like a bit of a dumb cliche. This is the premise of a million dumber stories and SyFy movie schlock. Fortunately, Lafferty eventually posits a more plausible reason for these six specific people to be on this trip. Is it totally convincing? I was willing to go with it, but I could see it not working for a lot of folks.

The characters themselves are all reasonably well drawn and naturally, they all have something to hide. Sometimes these are important, sometimes not, which is a key component of the whole mystery genre, so this was well done.

The cloning technology is mature and seemingly ubiquitous, and Lafferty does a great job exploring the logical extensions and unexpected consequences of the technology. Some of the fictional laws surrounding the tech seem rather short-sighted or implausible, but since I was apparently being so charitable, I found it had the ring of political compromise (i.e. a process that often produces incredibly stupid laws). I won’t spoil any of the surprises here, but it’s definitely a good exploration of the idea (something a lot of the other nominees didn’t particularly accomplish this year) and this, more than anything else, is what made me enjoy the book.

So it’s a lot of fun and it tackles some interesting philosophical ideas with respect to cloning; flawed but highly enjoyable, I’m find it bubbling up towards the top half of this year’s nominees. I don’t quite think it will reach the top of my ballot, but it certainly has an advantage over several other works in that it’s self-contained, interesting, and enjoyable.

Hugo Awards: New York 2140

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / June 17, 2018

I’m sad to say that until this novel, I had not read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s previous works. I’ve had Red Mars in my queue for a long time, but since New York 2140 was nominated for this year’s Hugo ballot, I figured it was finally time to bite the bullet. Unfortunately, I don’t think this was a particularly good introduction.

Set in a future where the world has endured two sudden, catastrophic “pulses” of rising sea levels, this novel focuses mostly on New York City, which has managed to adapt and survive as a sorta New Venice, using various high-tech solutions to cope with the water levels. The story, such as it is, follows several residents of the MetLife Tower on Madison Square as they go about their lives. The Met is run as a co-op, generating food and power as well as providing shelter.

At first, it seems like there’s a buildup of plot elements that will all come together in the end, but it ultimately doesn’t go in that direction. At least, not in as satisfying a way as I was expecting from some of the initial chapters. There’s two programmers, Mutt & Jeff, who want to muck with various finance laws/code and get kidnapped. Inspector Gen is a police officer investigating their disappearance, as well as some other mysterious stuff about security contractors. Two young kids, Roberto and Stefan, are engaging in an old-fashioned sunken treasure hunt. The Met is run by social workers like Charlotte, who is trying to fend off a purchase offer for the building. Vlade is the building manager, and he’s finding weird little malfunctions in some of the water-proofing tech of the building as well as being the general glue of all the folks living in the building. Franklin is a hedge fund manager who is anticipating a housing bubble burst and trying to position himself to profit. He’s also trying to get into a woman’s pants (this gets tedious and belies future twists in his story). Amelia is a ditzy social media star and environmental activist that lives in the Met, but spends most of her time in a dirigible helping animal migrations. Like any story with a large ensemble cast, some of these plot threads are more enjoyable than others, but it’s all set up reasonably well and it leads to a sense of anticipation.

Unfortunately, most of these plot threads simply fizzle out in an anti-climactic fashion. Roberto and Stefan find their sunken treasure quickly and easily, enlist Vlade and his ex to actually extract the treasure. During that process, they inadvertently stumble on the location where Mutt & Jeff were being held. Gen is pleased by that discovery, but it doesn’t lead to much for her investigation, which is unglamorous and slow moving. Franklin is enlisted to launder the treasure, but that also goes smoothly. Amelia’s initial efforts to move polar bears to a better climate is literally nuked by environmentalists? But somehow that’s also anti-climactic, with little in the way of fallout (both literally and figuratively). Later, there’s a hurricane that hits New York that has some mildly compelling episodes, but the drama that is derived from that feels half-baked and rushed. It becomes clear that it’s only there to provide a thin excuse for the blatant wish fulfillment of the finale. That finale, which involves a large proportion of the population simply not paying their bills, is probably the most politically partisan part of the story and the most likely to annoy (I was not exactly on board with this plan, which seemed to somehow go off without a hitch and with unconvincing simplicity). It all hinges on a lot of coincidences and unbelievable changes of heart, such as Franklin’s Grinch-like transformation (which did not feel earned). Aside from Vlade and maybe the two kids, I didn’t particularly find the characters very engaging either, but rather more like partisan plot delivery devices.

Mostly the novel is basically about how pissed off Kim Stanley Robinson is about the 2008 economic crisis. And like, that’s not an unsympathetic stance, but this novel doesn’t really provide much in the way of new perspectives on the matter. In fact, the longer the novel goes on, the more clear it becomes that everything he’s set up in the worldbuilding is there to comment on our present-day economic ills (or those of 2008). Again, that isn’t necessarily a problem. Great art can be manipulative, but in bad art, you can see the strings being pulled, and that’s what’s going on here. This can be subjective, to be sure, but it was not successful for me. Plus, we’re already steeped in critiques of capitalism or explanations for 2008. I mean, if you weren’t familiar with this stuff, this book might read much better, but while I’m no expert in the matter, I didn’t find much here to chew on that isn’t better explored in popular non-fiction. The bald, tailor-made way in which Robinson patterns the issues affecting New York in 2140 means that there’s not much new to learn about finance here. Add to that a disjointed narrative that isn’t really interested in being an actual story, and you’re left with a simple screed. A valued one, perhaps, but a screed nonetheless.

This is most obvious in the chapters attributed to a nameless “citizen”, which are basically didactic and condescending history lectures from an angry standin for Robinson. Some of the information imparted in these rants are actually interesting and get at the technical aspects of the worldbuilding, but the tone is generally offputting and weird. At one point, this citizen even urges us to skip these chapters if we’re not interested in them, which feels like a bit of self-awareness on Robinson’s part, but it’s also a confounding notion. Being self-aware of your bad choices does not exactly excuse them (this sort of thing works best in very limited doses). Look, science fiction is infamous for its info-dumps and I’m usually pretty forgiving of such, but this is pretty excessive. (At one point, the citizen is whining about how most of the population didn’t see the whole climate change problem coming, or if they did, they didn’t do anything about it; then he mentions that only some scientists and science fiction writers were ahead of the curve, which just felt kinda smug on Robinson’s part.)

I kept thinking about a couple of other books while reading this one. First, I thought a lot about Cryptonomicon. If you ever pinned me down and forced me to pick a favorite book (an impossible task!), it would probably be Cryptonomicon. And I do see a lot of surface similarities here. There’s no CliFi in that book, but lots of speculations about finance, treasure-hunts, money-laundering, and so on. It’s also a big ensemble piece with multiple viewpoint characters and a sorta disjointed narrative featuring tons of digressions and yes, info-dumps. I love the book, but I have yet to meet a person in real life who has read it and loved it (there are plenty on the internet who do, to be sure, but still). I kept wondering if my experience reading New York 2140 was like my real-life friends’ experience reading Cryptonomicon. As New York 2140 progresses and diverges more clearly from what Cryptonomicon is doing, this feeling lessened, but I thought it an interesting observation. Ultimately, I think Cryptonomicon tightened its various plot threads as it went on, while New York 2140 slowly unraveled. It also speculated on new technology (cryto-currency and data havens), which put a spin on economics that was new and interesting and thus not as well covered by non-fiction of the time.

The other book I kept thinking of was Neptune’s Brood. Charlie Stross is pretty clearly not a fan of things like capitalism and debt (and I’m sure he was just as upset at the 2008 economic crisis), but he still managed to build a fascinating story around finance (!) that gave me that vaunted Sense of Wonder that great SF can generate. And his message was baked into an entertaining space-opera that plays well as a narrative all on its own. As a result, his book is much more successful at making me think about our current day woes than New York 2140, which strikes me as a fictional rehashing of Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty or whatever. I suppose Robinson was trying to use climate change as the mutator of economic ideas, but that’s not as interesting or effective as Stross’ use of Slow Debt and planetary colonization. Or, you know, non-fiction about climate change and finance today.

Science fiction is often used to comment on present day ills, but the way Robinson constructs his critique doesn’t work. I’m not really sure who this book is for. It won’t convince political opponents, that’s for sure. Moderates might take more from it, but I suspect they’d have my main complaint: If I want to learn more about 2008 (or climate change), there are far better and more accessible non-fictional avenues to pursue, and New York 2140 is nowhere near abstracted enough to be more broadly applicable (a feat that both Cryptonomicon and Neptune’s Brood managed because they abstracted and generalized to an interesting degree). I suspect people who are more aligned with Robinson’s politics would like it, but that means this is just preaching to the choir. I suppose there’s value in that, but perhaps not “Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year” value.

For all my whinging about this book, it wasn’t particularly difficult to read and in fact flowed pretty smoothly. It was certainly overlong, the pacing was inconsistent, and more episodic than I’d want, but there were plenty of interesting ideas and page-turning moments. They just didn’t add up to a cohesive whole for me. I think you can tell that this will be towards the bottom of my Hugo ballot. At this point, I’ve read all the novels (review of Six Wakes is incoming; spoiler alert, I liked that a lot more than this…). I’m not entirely sure what will be at the top, but there’s a pretty clear list of three tiers for me (and New York 2140, sadly, is on that bottom tier).

Hugo Awards: The Stone Sky

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / May 27, 2018

N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky is the concluding volume of a trilogy of beloved novels… that I’ve never really managed to connect with. I have generally found that these novels’ pessimism and relentless misery have only served to distance me from the narrative rather than suck me in. I like a lot of the worldbuilding choices of the initial book, The Fifth Season, but I the story was full of misery porn which resulted in a detached reading experience for me. The second book, The Obelisk Gate, continued the misery and suffered from middle-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome. This didn’t stop Hugo voters from awarding the Best Novel Hugos for both, and I judge a fair chance of The Stone Sky to bring home the third straight.

The story picks up where we left off. Essun is traveling with her comm, Castrima, in searching for a new place to live, but ultimately seeks to find her daughter Nassun and help save the world by bringing the moon back into proper orbit. Nassun, for her part, has lead a miserable life, is fed up with the world, and wants to destroy it by smashing the moon into the earth. Finally, we get glimpses of the past as Hoa describes Syl Anagist, a civilization that existed thousands of years ago which, we soon learn, created the obelisks and inadvertently shot the moon out of its orbit, thus causing their destruction and leading to the current, miserable situation.

Interestingly, the entire story is narrated by Hoa. He appears to be telling the story to Essun, as her sections of the story are in second person (as they’ve been throughout the series). Hoa’s portions are in first person, and Nassun’s are in third. It’s an interesting choice and I suppose there’s a reason for it, but it ultimately felt a bit distracting at times and my dumbass engineer’s brain kept wondering about irrelevant things: How does Hoa know the inner emotions of closed off people like Essun and Nassun so well? Wait, when is Hoa relating all this to Essun? Why is he relating this to Essun? I can certainly come up with answers to these questions and they’re ultimately nitpicks. The thing is, I find this happens most often when I’m not sucked into a story. I’ve learned to trust that these sorts of nitpicks don’t mean much in and of themselves, but the fact that I’m making them at all means something important and indicates a deeper problem.

While I like a lot of the worldbuilding choices, this isn’t a world I like spending time in, nor do I particularly enjoy hanging out with these characters. I mean, I don’t think we’re even supposed to like them very much. Sure, they’ve endured horrendous hardships and misery, but they’ve also perpetuated that abuse and oppression and some are easily described as mass murderers. That people struggle to deal with abuse or respond in ugly ways that only serve to continue the cycle is certainly relevant (and obviously reflects some of our society’s worst tendencies), but it’s difficult to sustain. This is the point, I guesss, and it does represent rich thematic ground. I just don’t like wallowing in it for three books, especially since all of this was so ably demonstrated in the first book. I didn’t love that one either, but I could see why it was so well regarded. The succeeding volumes feel like a rehashing of the same ideas, over and over again, and they do so using that awkward second person narrative device that tells more than it shows.

The book attempts a hopeful but ambiguous ending, which is something that I would appreciate much more if anything else in the series had indicated a cause for that hope. When your premise is that the end of the world is coming and the world is not worth saving, it’s difficult to care about the actual outcome. I don’t want every story to be fluffy bunnies and rainbows, but these books tend to be so extreme in their portrait of misery that I was immediately detached from the story and never found a way back in.

I feel like I’m being very harsh on the novel here. Perhaps it’s because I never would have read the second or third books in this series, but I did because I wanted to vote in the Hugos (and I don’t think it’s fair to vote when you haven’t read the book). The funny thing is that this is probably the most upbeat of the three books and I probably enjoyed reading it more than the previous installments too. Plus, it actually has an ending and some sense of closure! Some of the characters actually express love in this book, and it’s a love that is genuine. As mentioned above, it’s got a mildly happy ending. However, after all the betrayals, endless rehashings of infanticide and abuse, and inescapable oppression, the hope at the end feels hollow and unearned. Maybe we’re supposed to feel that way and I just don’t like being immersed in despair? Look, these books are very well written and I think I can say that Jemisin achieves exactly what she wanted, which is certainly laudable. It’s just not my bag, and that’s fine.

As far as the Hugo Awards go, this will probably end up on the bottom of my ballot. I’m still reading one novel and I suppose it could fall off a cliff, but I’m doubting that.

Hugo Awards: Provenance

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / May 13, 2018

Ann Leckie’s Hugo Nominated novel Provenance takes place in the same universe as her Ancillary trilogy, but in a largely independent locale that is only peripherally impacted by the events of those three novels. Ancillary Justice was the first, and to my mind, best of that preceding trilogy, managing a great balance between crunchy hard-SF and social/cultural exploration. In particular, I found the depiction of shared consciousness and hive minds intriguing, and Leckie posited some interesting consequences of such technology. Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy largely jettisoned that idea in favor of the more social and cultural context of a much smaller system (also: tea), a maneuver that was unexpected and bold, but which left me mildly disappointed. At the time, I wondered what it would be like to read a story in the same universe, but with different characters.

Enter Provenance, a story set in the same universe, but not tied to any of the characters from the Ancillary series. Ingray Aughskold is seeking to gain favor with her Mother so that she could be named heir. She’s in competition with her brother Danach, who is considered to have the position locked down. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so the book opens with Ingray’s plan to free a notorious thief named Pahlad Budrakim out of “Compassionate Removal” (a wonderful doublespeak euphemism for “brutal prison that is anything but compassionate”) in the hopes of convincing em (not a typo, we’ll get to it) to reveal the location of valuable vestiges that he had stolen. If she could find those vestiges and return them to her family, it would be a big coup for her (vestiges are apparently a big deal on her home planet, wielding enormous cultural and political influence), and potentially get her back in the competition for heir.

Naturally, her plan starts to disintegrate immediately. She’s spent most of her money getting this thief smuggled out of prison, only to find that e’s not who she thought e was. Then it turns out that Tic Uisine (the captain of the ship she’d chartered for her mission) has some undisclosed beef with some authorities. Even once they manage to get their way back to Ingray’s home planet, the trio keeps encountering newer and increasingly more complicated obstacles. There’s an archaeological dig that has implications for Ingray’s family, a murder mystery pops up, a group of children is kidnapped, alien ambassadors hang around causing fun, titular questions around provenance crop up, and so on. There are actually some mentions of the far flung events of the Ancillary books, but they’re exactly that: far flung and not particularly important to the workings of the plot here.

It’s all, well, pretty good. While lacking a bit in that crunchy SF component, it’s got lots of fun elements, a complex plot (something I usually enjoy more than most), and reasonably well done characters. The thematic exploration of how the past shapes the present is well done and fits neatly in with Leckie’s wheelhouse of exploring identity. Speaking of which, while the Ancillary series played with a sorta lack of gender, here Leckie reverses course, reintroducing gendered pronouns and including a third, gender neutral set of pronouns (e, eir, er – this is what Garal/Palad identify as, which is why I used those pronouns above), and allowing characters to choose how they identify. Like the primary use of feminine pronouns in the Ancillary books, it has an effect here, though it doesn’t feel entirely in line with the story.

All well and good, but aside from some interesting uses of mechs, the openly SFnal elements are a bit lacking. I mean, sure, there’s different planets and spaceships and whatnot, but they’re used to establish and illustrate cultural differences more than to cultivate that sense of wonder that SF can do so well. Not that this sort of thing can’t generate sense of wonder, but nothing in the book really twixed me the way that it probably should. There are references to two alien species in this novel, but neither are fully explored and mostly exist on the periphery. The Presger remain enigmatic, but we do find out some stuff about the Geck (in particular, we get some background on Tic, who has a complicated relationship with the aliens). I like that the aliens seem to be actually alien and not the distressingly common “basically a human but with a slightly different appearance” trope that a lot of SF uses… but it would be nice if we’d actually explore these worlds and beings a little more. But then, the plot here really doesn’t need it, and such a digression would probably only serve to kill the pacing.

So we’re left with a generally enjoyable novel. It’s got lots of fun elements, decent characters, and a nice, twisty plot. While I feel like I should like this a lot more than I do, it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it or anything. It seems to be sticking with me more after I’ve read it than I thought it would whilst reading. Is it truly Hugo worthy? Maybe, but I suspect it’s here more because of the follow on effect from the popular Ancillary books. Personally, it will probably fall somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of this year’s Hugo nominees, but this is only the third (of six) that I’ve read, so it’s hard to say for sure (I’m midway through two others though, and this seems about right).

Hugo Awards: Raven Stratagem

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / Mark / April 8, 2018

Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit was a dense, sometimes gruesome Space Opera. I really enjoyed it, and it was nominated for a Hugo Award last year. Raven Stratagem is the follow up, second in a trilogy, and yes, I enjoyed this one too, despite it succumbing to traditional middle entry in a trilogy syndrome.

I was initially a little hesitant to pick up this sequel. As much as I enjoyed it, I remember the first novel being a bit difficult to follow at parts, and I didn’t entirely remember what had happened (I read it almost two years ago) except in broad strokes. Fortunately, Raven Stratagem presents itself in a much more accessible manner than its predecessor, which allows you to ease back into the universe without too much strain.

We continue to follow the bleshed personalities of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao, quasi-successful at retaking the Fortress of Shattered Needles in the first book, as they now set out to defend the Hexarchate from an invading enemy, the Hafn. Cheris is a gifted mathematician and infantry captain for the subservient Kel faction. She’s been possessed by the “ghost” of long-dead military genius, madman, and mass murderer, Jedao, of the Machiavellian Shuos faction. The Hexarchate being an oppressive tyrannical semi-dystopia, the leaders/dictator aren’t sure if they can trust Jedao and his stated intention to simply repel the Hafn. For that matter, neither is the fleet that Jedao has taken over for that purpose. General Kel Khiruev even attempts to assassinate Jedao, but eventually succumbs to Jedao’s, er, charms? That’s not the quite the right word, but it gets the job done, I guess.

So yeah, that brief description kinda captures the density of the worldbuilding, but again, Raven Stratagem is more accessible at laying this out than Ninefox Gambit. This is a best-of-both-worlds situation here. I appreciate dense worldbuilding, and Lee was able to make it more approachable without losing anything. Shuos Jedao, despite frequent reminders of atrocities he’s committed in the past, remains a fascinating character and indeed, things tend to bog down a bit whenever we’re not following him (and I should add her, as Cheris is a woman). I found myself much less interested in the Hexarchate politics side of the story, which comprises a large portion of the second act, though it’s clearly a necessary part of the story.

There are some twists and turns along the way. One of them, which I think is played as a twist, was actually something that I thought I had just misremembered from the first book, but which it turns out, I remembered correctly*. But the final revelation sets up a genuinely interesting premise for the third book to tackle. Unfortunately, that leaves this book in a sorta limbo, as a lot of middle entries in a series feel. This is excellent, but it’s not self-contained, and that always makes Hugo voting a little tricky. Of course, the Hugo context is a bit unfair – as middle entries go, this is a good one, and it moves the story along briskly (which is more than can be said about a lot of middle novels). In any case, Lee’s worldbuilding is solid, but quite dark and sometimes gruesome. Fortunately, he doesn’t wallow in the misery in the way that other books tackling similar themes seem to do.

As Science Fiction, I’m not entirely sure the whole Calendrical Math thing feels grounded enough; it feels more like a metaphorical representation of the way the Hexarchate is controlled than an actual mathematical thing. That not a terrible thing, and it does seem to be played with an internal consistency that I appreciate. Again, Cheris and Jedao are interesting, and their immediate surroundings work, but as mentioned above, once you get beyond that, the story falters a bit.

This is a good book, and Lee’s skill is worth rewarding with a Hugo Award, but I don’t think this is the book to do it. As the second in a series, it feels incomplete (again, not in a way that is bad outside of the Hugo context), which makes it difficult to judge against other books. On the other hand, I expect this will actually do well when it comes time to put in my ballot – I like this work, so I suspect it will come out ahead of several other nominees that I’m unsure about. Fortunately, Lee also has a novelette that’s been nominated, Extracurricular Activities, which is self-contained and excellent. It follows Jedao back when he was a young officer, and bears a sorta Bujold-esque feel to it, which I naturally love (this is high praise, people). I haven’t read any of the other novelette finalists, but I suspect this one will top my ballot. Ultimately, I will most likely pick up the final book in this trilogy, which says a lot, and I greatly look forward to whatever Lee tackles next.

* (Spoilers) I had assumed that Jedao’s ghost had died in the betrayal at the end of Ninefox Gambit, but for most of this book, Cheris is basically just pretending to be Jedao, and since she still has all of his memories implanted in her consciousness, she can pull it off. Lee can get away with this because we mostly see Jedao from the perspective of others, like Khiruev, and Cheris has no reason to let on that she is using Jedao’s reputation for her own purposes (which, to be fair, were also Jedao’s).