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RYO Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice is a complex novel. There are a lot of good ideas and fun plots strewn around it. There’s the twist to the AI computer has a nervous breakdown plot, there’s the evil empire, there’s the noir-ish assassin, there are the subjugated people assimilated into the AI’s human network, and finally there’s the part that everyone’s already reviewed the heck out of: the language without gender. It has all the makings of a terrific novel, but to me, it just fell flat.
There is so much to this novel that it’s hard to give a synopsis. I’ve already listed most of the plot lines, but I’ll try to wrap it together in a few sentences. Breq is an AI, inhabiting a single body. She used to be a ship with hundreds of human bodies acting as tentacles, or ancillaries, all part of her collective (yes, a little like the Borg from STNG). She is on a mission to assassinate the Lord of the Radche. The Lord of the Radche has ancillaries too, but some have been infiltrated by an alien race. On her way, she encounters and helps a former captain who has OD’ed on a frozen planet. Together, they try to find the LOTR (heh) and destroy her before she destroys the empire.
RYO Review: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh
I’m not a big fan of C. J. Cherryh. I know she has a huge fan following, but I find her books a tough read. Downbelow Station was no exception. It started out interestingly, with a chapter summarizing Earth’s early space colonization activities. As space stations were built farther away, the more remote stations and merchants, which formed the Union, began to rebel against domination by the Earth Company. Chapter Two begins the story in the middle of the war between the Union and the Company at Downbelow Station, the first station built around a planet inhabited by sentient, although primitive beings. That’s where it fell apart for me.
As many of my readers know, I don’t care for space operas. This is first of the operas to win a Hugo. It’s full of anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, gangs, riots, assassins, and greed. No one is really happy and it takes a long time to figure out if any of the characters are even likeable. The book is divided into five parts, and Cherryh spends a lot of the first three inside the characters heads. They’re low on action, and high in exposition and setup. I found this unbearably tedious. All the characters are flawed. I don’t mind flawed characters, but was sad was that most of them were cardboard and unredeemable.
RYO Review: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I loved Vonnegut in high school. In my Modern American Lit class, we read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, and of course Slaughterhouse Five. On my own, I read Jailbird and Slapstick. Picking up one of his earliest novels thirty-five years later, I realized I had forgotten what a bizarre, dark writer he was.
The Sirens of Titan has a crazy, convoluted plot that is quite difficult for me to describe. It’s about Malachi Constant, one of the richest but also most spoiled and morally bankrupt people on earth. When his fortunes collapse, he takes an offer to go to Mars to become an officer in their army. Constant’s adventures on Mars, and later Mercury and Titan seem to be manipulated by Winston Niles Rumfoord, a man who apparently knows the future, and moves through space making appearances on earth every 50-some-odd days. Besides Constant, Rumfoord manipulates the people of earth, starting a new religion, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, turning Constant into a sort of anti-messiah. Also in this mix is Rumfoord’s suffering and spoiled wife Beatrice, and a robot alien named Salo from the planet Tralfamadore (Vonnegut uses this planet in several of his works). And, well, let’s just say, you have to read the book to really get it.
WoGF Review: Among Others by Jo Walton
Stephen Poltz (spoltz)‘s love of anything SF and Fantasy was inspired by his childhood heroes Carl Sagan and JRR Tolkien. Oh yeah, and by watching cheesy ‘50s sci-fi movies on a black and white TV. He got a book-reading-reboot when he met his partner, Jacob, a voracious reader from a family of hard-core, genre fiction enthusiasts. After seeing a display of Hugo Award winning books at his local bookstore, Steve became obsessed with reading all the winners. Now, when not QAing software, learning Polish, or finding new books to read on WWEnd, he writes reviews on his blog It Started With The Hugos…
It’s great that a Hugo winner is a book about a science fiction fan. The attraction to science fiction, for many of us, begins when we’re young, feeling outcast, different, or otherwise disenfranchised from the mainstream. We find it a solace, a place where we can believe that there’s something else out there, something better, something more real than our cruel reality. The main character of this story is one of these fans, a teenage girl whose turns to SF to escape from the cruelty and craziness in her life.
Morwenna has a crazy, abusive mother from whom she’s escaped, an alcoholic father who she’s just met, and goes to a private boarding school where, of course, she doesn’t fit in. She is also the surviving twin of a car crash caused by her mother. However, she finds her peace in SF, and has read an unbelievable amount of SF and fantasy, mostly by some of the most esteemed and prolific authors. To her joy, she also finds an SF book club at her local library. She gets to do a little growing up through new relationships she forms with the members of the club as well as with other book lovers.
One other thing, Mori can do magic and can talk to the faeries. She spends most of her time protecting herself against the bad magic of her mother. She is originally from Wales where she often spoke with faeries. Now living with her father in England, she can see them, but doesn’t have much interaction with them.
WoGF Review: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Stephen Poltz (spoltz)‘s love of anything SF and Fantasy was inspired by his childhood heroes Carl Sagan and JRR Tolkien. Oh yeah, and by watching cheesy ‘50s sci-fi movies on a black and white TV. He got a book-reading-reboot when he met his partner, Jacob, a voracious reader from a family of hard-core, genre fiction enthusiasts. After seeing a display of Hugo Award winning books at his local bookstore, Steve became obsessed with reading all the winners. Now, when not QAing software, learning Polish, or finding new books to read on WWEnd, he writes reviews on his blog It Started With The Hugos…
Despite being an agnostic, I love SF and Fantasy that questions, critiques, or parodies religion. Some of my favorite novels are A Canticle for Leibowitz, A Case of Conscience, and Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal. So when I looked for more books to read for the WoGF challenge, I searched in the WWEnd database using the tag “theological.” Once again, I found a gem.
The Sparrow transposes the experience of the New World Jesuit missions to the genre of SF. Fr. Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest, leads the first mission to a planet which seems to harbor intelligent life. Something goes terribly wrong and leaves the priest the only survivor, demoralized and in a crisis of faith.
The premise of The Sparrow may seem absurd by today’s standards. We don’t expect the Catholic Church to be the first to send a mission to an extraterrestrial world. Placed in a historical context, it is not absurd at all. This happened throughout the European exploration of the Americas, as well as the non-Christianized regions of the other continents. This book takes that premise and places it in a contemporary context with our modern sense of cultural sensitivity. The result provides the reader with a group of very likable, honorable, and by most definitions, good people put into a morally ambiguous and deadly situation.
WoGF Review: Summer of Love by Lisa Mason
Stephen Poltz (spoltz)‘s love of anything SF and Fantasy was inspired by his childhood heroes Carl Sagan and JRR Tolkien. Oh yeah, and by watching cheesy ‘50s sci-fi movies on a black and white TV. He got a book-reading-reboot when he met his partner, Jacob, a voracious reader from a family of hard-core, genre fiction enthusiasts. After seeing a display of Hugo Award winning books at his local bookstore, Steve became obsessed with reading all the winners. Now, when not QAing software, learning Polish, or finding new books to read on WWEnd, he writes reviews on his blog It Started With The Hugos…
For some reason, when somebody tells me, “You have to read this book,” I normally raise my hackles and resist. I prefer discovering books on my own, perusing the shelves at the library or bookstore, or finding a recommendation on a website or NPR. Over time, I’ve learned to keep those hackles a little lower and be more open to other people’s suggestions, but it still creates cognitive dissonance in my head. So when my partner recommended Summer of Love by Lisa Mason to fill my time while waiting for a hold on my next book at the library, I reacted with outward enthusiasm and my usual internal hesitancy. He’s a good judge of books, and I know that; I’ve read his recommendations before. The psychedelic-designed cover of his trade paperback first edition is in tatters from the numerous rereads, so I know he loves it. I needed another book for my Women of Genre Fiction challenge anyway. I acceded and took the book… and loved every word.
Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, a time traveler from the year 2467, comes back to San Francisco 1967, the Summer of Love, to find a young girl, Susan Stein, aka Starbrite. His mission is to protect her so that the timeline leading to his present, his Now, is conserved. Ruby A. Maverick, a metaphysical shop owner in the Haight district, meets Susan and later Chi, and reluctantly lets them crash at her place. Together they must make it through the summer avoiding the craziness of the hippy culture and demons of an alternative future.
