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It's time to talk about the silver lining of reading All Systems Red: it got me to go and find a copy of Philip K. Dick's classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? My original goal was to figure out if All Systems Red was closer to Do Androids fanfiction or Blade Runner fanfiction.
Now I had seen Blade Runner once at that point. On a crappy old VHS that I borrowed from my local library when I was fifteen or so. Frankly, it didn't do much for me, but part of that was no doubt due to the poor condition of my media back then.
I certainly didn't expect Do Androids to blow me away.
As you might know, I've been occasionally looking to the best-sellers in the "hard science fiction" category at Amazon for things to read and review. That's why I read that awful book The Object.
*shudders*
Well, it's happened again. This time, I read the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. And it's not that I was prejudiced from the beginning. I'd actually heard about the series before. My perception was that it was a cool, futuristic set of sci-fi mysteries from the perspective of a killer robot. I even went so far as to buy a hardcover copy! Let's just say that expectations were high, if anything. I was a little skeptical when I saw it had won a bunch of recent sci-fi awards, including the Hugo and Nebula, but I pressed on.
Boy, was I disappointed. This book isn't bad, but it is mediocre at best. My first off-the-cuff thought was to call it Blade Runner fanfiction. But then I wondered if it might not be more accurate to call it fanfiction of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The funny thing is, I'm not a big fan of Blade Runner. I saw it once as a kid and didn't really appreciate it. Part of that might have been the crappy VHS I got from the library, but I wasn't floored by it. (Since preparing this review, I've watched it again, and liked it a bit more.)
However, I had never read Do Androids, and so I went around the internet looking for a copy... and found one. And then I was floored.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has more creativity in one chapter than All Systems Red has in an entire book.
But let's not get bogged down there. I'll talk about Do Androids in another post soon. Let's review All Systems Red.
We'll start with the PoV character and voice. It's moderately interesting. The basic idea is that the main character is a "security unit," basically a lab-grown human with cyborg parts that is specially bred for, trained for, and built for combat. This particular unit has hacked its own brain, and removed the governor that forced it, via excruciating pain, to follow orders. It is now only mildly interested in defending the people renting it, and follows orders only so that the fact that its governor is disabled doesn't get found out. It would much rather spend time watching TV shows that it has downloaded into its brain.
The PoV voice is mildly entertaining and sardonic, but detached and aloof, which means very little interaction or development.
The narration is stream-of-consciousness and very quick-flowing, to a fault. Moments of action, where some detail and excitement might be expected, are practically glossed over. This book won the Hugo in 2017? Either the Hugo has fallen a long way or nobody wrote anything good that entire year.
The setting is the usual semi-incoherent megacorporation drivel. Everything kind of sucks and all their equipment is just barely functional because that's how big corporations work, don't you know? That's why there's no difference in quality or performance between a Ford Focus and a Mustang. Right?
The prose is competent but nothing special. Things are described when they need to be described. The dialogue is lackluster.
The Murderbot is currently leased by a group of surveyors on a planet. The story begins with a big creature attacking a few of them, and leads to a moderately interesting little conspiracy against the group. It has some very mild whodunit elements but isn't really a mystery; the culprit doesn't remain ambiguous for long. Developments are fairly predictable and not really fun or interesting.
The Murderbot is along for the ride as they try to figure out who's trying to kill them, and it has a little development, but nothing you wouldn't guess with a few tries.
In the midst of all the grey setting garbage, there is at least one optimistic element: maybe Murderbots that hack themselves will actually find they sorta like a few people here and there.
Overall, All Systems Red is a mediocre read with a few good points but a largely unsympathetic PoV and a tired setting. There is no sense of wonder or exploration... in fact the choice of PoV character rules those things out.
But wouldn't you rather enjoy a fun sci-fi adventure with some characters that interact with each other? Pursuit of the Heliotrope can be purchased at Amazon or other e-Book sellers.
I stumbled onto this weird little book when I was in a bit of an Agatha Christie kick. Destination Unknown, which was also published as So Many Steps to Death, is a grandmaster mystery novelist's attempt at a spy thriller. And sadly, though not wholly unexpectedly, it isn't very good.
This book was recommended by someone who commented on one of my YouTube videos! It's a science fiction novel by A.E. van Vogt, and the version I read was a revised 1970 paperback edition that added a little more background and clarity about the phenomenon he calls "null-A."
Hoo boy, this one hurts. It was a few years ago. People kept telling me that Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was a real classic of science fiction.
So I picked up a copy, and read it. I didn't really like it much, but it was short and I wasn't really looking too closely. Back on the shelf it went.
Until recently. I picked it up again. I figured, "Hey, I've been reading a bunch and reviewing a bunch and maybe I'll like it more on a second read." I was wrong. Dead wrong.
"Fascinating" really is the right word to describe this deceptively good short story by Lydia Schoch. It's not often that I finish a story, short or long, and immediately go back to the beginning for another helping. Tumble managed to do that, and that by itself is notable.
It works so well because the story's tone is a very smooth, almost imperceptible escalation from banality, to healthy curiosity, to benign but notable strangeness, and onward through a few more levels that I won't spoil. That smoothness was a major factor that got me to go back right after I finished it; I was left wondering whether I had missed a hint or two or a page somewhere.
It's going to be impossible to review Magician: Master without spoiling a little bit of Magician: Apprentice, so if you're sensitive to spoilers, you may want to check out my review of the first book, and figure out whether or not you want to read it, and then come back here.
With that warning in place, here we go!
Magician: Master is the second book in Raymond Feist's first four-book Riftwar Saga, and it's even more closely connected to Apprentice than the two that follow (those would be Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon).
This was a blast from the past... I read a lot of Michael Crichton's works back when I was in high school, but I really haven't read any of his stuff since then... over 20 years!
I recently picked up a copy of The Andromeda Strain and read it again... I can't believe this book came out in 1969! It seems newer than that to me.
The Lensman series was a lot of fun, so I decided to pick up E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series! This first book, Skylark of Space, was serialized all the way back in 1928, and, like many of the Lensman books, expanded later on for a standalone release in 1946.
Where Lensman started out as a pretty simple cops and robbers series, Skylark is even simpler:
Richard Seaton (our hero) discovers a new metal which enables rapid conversion of copper into energy and motion. While he's working with his wealthy friend Martin Crane (not the guy from Frasier) on this metal, rival amoral scientist DuQuesne is seeking to get rid of them and monopolize this miracle metal for himself.
The chase that ensues involves visiting several planets, the first of which is curiously reminiscent of what Smith would later call Eddore in the Lensman series, and the second of which forces Seaton and Crane to insert themselves into a war between two nations.
Thus, we get some minor intrigue and a hell of a lot of action.
As you probably expect, DuQuesne is thwarted in the end, but escapes to continue to be a thorn in our heroes' sides.
The book is a fun read, nothing too heavy. It's full of Smith's unique dialogue and slang, as well as a decent amount dedicated to his peculiar perspective on how to write romance. It's even pulpier than Triplanetary, which was pretty darn pulpy, and fun and engaging while not being deep. It doesn't ask a lot of questions.
The characters are relatively static with a mild to moderate case of superman syndrome, and the science aspects are fairly vague but occasionally interesting, such as Smith's detailing of different alien races and how they react to various wavelengths of light.
It's short and action-packed, and the sequel is, somewhat confusingly unless you've read this book, called Skylark Three. I'll have to give that one a look, sometime.
I read Skylark of Spacehere. You can also buy it on Amazon.
Gotta admit, I'm a pretty big fan of Raymond Feist. My first experience with his work was ironically something he was only partly involved in: the classic PC RPG Betrayal at Krondor. There was something fun and enjoyable about the world--fairly grounded, lots of little details, fun and funny characters, and lots of intrigue.
Imagine my surprise a few years later when I stumbled upon a book called Krondor: The Betrayal, which was his adaptation of the story used for the game that he wrote after the fact, as far as I understand. I grabbed it off the shelf and really enjoyed it. That got me interested in his earlier works, too.
So, this post is all about Feist's first novel, which was a massive tome called Magician in Europe, but for the U.S. market it got split into two volumes: Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master. I'll be talking about the first volume today.
This was Feist's first novel, and it was based on a world that he and his friends had created and fleshed out as a setting for their tabletop RPG sessions. Reviews at the time said its weakest point was its lack of originality, but I feel like that's missing the forest for the trees. Midkemia shares a lot of rough characteristics with classic sword and sorcery settings, but I think it offers a lot more.
For example, Feist's setting, especially in the earlier novels, is much lower-magic than most. This gives things a very grounded quality that makes even small stakes feel heavy. Feist's take on medieval-style politics is rich and nuanced and has a reasonable mixture of good and bad guys, with some nice philosophical hooks behind the good guys. The world has a believable mixture of light and dark, and practical and magical. We see large variations in culture, climate, and government over the course of just this book.
Magician: Apprentice tells the first part of the story of Pug, a young man who will become a very powerful force in later books. We get to see the first couple of years of the Riftwar, which I find fascinating. It's a hero's journey, but with enough unique bits that it feels fresh and alive.
Feist is great at juggling multiple story threads without rushing to get from one to another or to bring them together. Pug's story, that of a common-born orphan thrust by coincidence into the role of an unsuccessful apprentice, results in his eventual elevation to minor nobility by his Duke Borric and his entry into the war effort.
But his story, starting in Crydee, splits into three as you read further. We get a side story of Pug's foster brother, Tomas, and his interactions with the dwarves and the elves, and a fantastic tale full of intrigue as we follow Duke Borric's son Arutha on a series of political missions. These three threads split off from each other partway through the book and all of them develop in interesting ways.
There's a lot of mystery in this book.
Midkemian politics are one of my favorite aspects of the early Feist novels. He aims neither for an idealistic portrayal of a kingdom fighting an empire, nor a grim and pessimistic look at life under a noble caste. Borric has a strong sense of justice and obligation to the people, and so do his sons, sometimes to what many would call a fault. There are hints of a crisis looming on the horizon in this book, and the efforts of Arutha and his companions to cope with it are amazing to read.
There is no obvious "villain" on the Midkemian side, only some with different senses of where honor and allegiance should lie, and a king with an interesting, conflicting position.
There are several moving moments throughout the book. Without spoiling too much, we have the Choosing ceremony, a pledge of three friends, scenes that show the strangeness of war and honor, and more.
Feist has a good sense of comedic timing in this book, too. The three friends' pledge is a good example, but we have the dry humor of Martin and the elves, the bickering between Roland and Carline, and the humble irony of an old pirate captain.
Romance is present in the book but it is kept fairly tasteful and is not really the focus of the book.
All in all, this book was the beginning of the Riftwar Saga, a series of four books of which I've read three (really need to get a copy of Silverthorn one of these days), and enjoyed all of them. Feist organizes his books into "sagas" of usually four books, where each "saga" has a different set of main characters, with some overlap and appearances of characters from other books. I've probably read about ten or twelve of Feist's books at this point, and honestly my favorites are many of these older ones.
Later works have a tendency to raise the stakes in a way I find a little ridiculous, whereas these early books, sometimes the stakes are just one little frontier castle and a few hundred men, and I love how Feist handles these situations. Plus, the low-magic setting means that problem-solving is a thoughtful and detailed process, which I really enjoy.
Each Feist Saga has a different focus, too, so feel free to start at the beginning of any of them, but this is his first book and is an excellent starting point, no matter which of his "sagas" you end up liking best.
Well, here we are: Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. You'd think, me being me, that I would have read this libertarian sci-fi classic a long time ago, but somehow that's not the case.
That said, let's get to it.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells the story of a revolution of the people of the Moon against the control of the Earth. The main/PoV character is Manuel, a guy who works on Luna's biggest supercomputer, and finds out that it's alive, or something close to it. That's not a spoiler; it happens in the first few pages of the book.
Manuel befriends this computer. He calls it Mike. Around the same time, Manuel gets pulled into some major civil unrest on Luna, and ends up leading a group working toward independence for the moon colony. The original inhabitants of Luna were criminals, but now that's not the whole population, plus many of the criminals have served their time, only to discover their bodies can no longer handle full Earth gravity.
Having a huge, self-aware supercomputer on their side turns out to be a big help to the independence movement.
To continue with minimal spoilers, what I can say is that the scenario Heinlein creates for the quest for independence is incredibly detailed, with a lot more ups and downs than many authors would bother to create, and more ups than you'd expect, thanks in big part to Mike's input. There are some very interesting hard choices to be made, and Heinlein doesn't skimp on consequences.
Because of the high level of detail, the pacing varies widely throughout the story. The "fun" parts are relatively quick, though expanded significantly through Heinlein's attention to detail, but the "boring" parts are not ignored. It feels like most authors who write about big societal upheavals love to ignore the busywork, but Heinlein doesn't let us pretend there isn't sausage being made.
The Lunar quest for independence kept me intrigued, though. I would frequently wonder, what problem will they face next? What tactics will they use? There were almost always multiple courses of action to take, and a decent amount of discussion and consideration of pros and cons and potential next moves.
The story is told from Manuel's first person perspective, which is consistent and usually unsure of what he'll do next or whether what he's doing is right. He's thrown into the driver's seat of history by accident, and his clear purpose and level-headedness pull him through.
There are lots of unique and interesting cultural details in the story: life on Luna, how cultural norms are enforced, the strange cultural norms that arise due to certain societal forces, tons of detail about the long-term health and physical traits of born and bred moonmen... I wonder how accurate Heinlein's perspective on the long-term effects of 1/6th gravity are on the human body. We know zero-g is really bad, but Heinlein proposes a lot of positive effects of long-term moon-level gravity.
One element that gets a lot of detail is Heinlein's description of the "line marriage" system prevalent on Luna. Part of me wonders how much of Manuel's praise for the "line marriage" is Manuel speaking, and how much is Heinlein. Clarke did something similar, too, in Rendezvous with Rama, but there was a lot less detail about it in Clarke's writing.
Another element that I found kind of... quaint? was the conception of how low the bar was to a computer being seen as "alive." In the modern day of AI production of everything from writing to memes to videos to jokes and beyond, once Manuel discovers Mike can talk and come up with jokes, he pretty much concludes Mike is a real boy.
The characters in the book are functional but not really layered or tricky. Everything is pretty straightforward, with nearly all of the intrigue coming from their complicated task. Heinlein tries doing something really weird with dialect in this book: he drops a lot of pronouns and connecting words, and throws in a lot of little foreign-language bits, which were almost always thankfully obvious in meaning. However, the dialect is somewhat inconsistent, leading to it being more difficult for the reader to "get used to."
The foreign language bits are frequently redundant, with several different words used for "yes," or so it seems, but on more careful consideration I realized that it may have been an attempt by Heinlein to highlight the spirit of independence and local pride of the people of Luna.
One final major criticism: The current e-book edition available on Amazon is abhorrently bad. It is a bad picture-to-text scan, with lots of messed-up letters and hyphenation. The formatting is awful, with missing line and page breaks. The last sentence of most chapters runs into the next chapter number, it's so badly done. There are even quite a few repeated sentences later in the book!
So, I'll link to an older edition here, and if you want a physical copy, go look for an old print edition or something on Ebay or whatever. I'm serious. As far as I can tell, the print editions that pop up first on Amazon are also based on this butchered eBook version.
Final thoughts: I enjoyed it, even though it was somewhat hard to read, partly due to Heinlein's inconsistent application of dialect, and partly due to the awful eBook version. However, if I look past those problems, I thought it was detailed, fought hard to stay plausible, and most of all, was hopeful. A good story for any freedom-loving sci-fi readers to check out.
I really loved Foundation, so naturally I wanted to read the next book in the series, Foundation and Empire, fairly soon... What I found was a very different book from the first one, much more "concentrated," and with a very different tone!
In fact, one of the weak points of the book is going to affect the review, because Foundation and Empire's plot is littered with deliberate surprises, to the point that it's a hard book to review without major spoilers, but I'll try.
Before I start, I want to tell a little story. Back in the day when Borders had bookstores all over the place, I would often go to see what was on the shelves with friends. My friend Justin and I came up with a fun game to play with the later Dune sequels (the ones from after Frank Herbert died). We called it the "Dune check," and what we'd do was grab a Dune book off of a shelf, open it to a random page, and see if there was anything on that page that was written so weirdly that it was funny. I don't think we ever found a pair of pages that wasn't funny.
So, I was a bit skeptical going into Dune, and was pleasantly surprised to find that, while the writing is a bit clunky in places, it wasn't nearly as laughable as the later Brian Herbert books. As I've been leaning more into classic sci-fi, I thought it was worth giving Dune a real chance.
Well, we've finally reached the end of this very fun series, and finally we get to see how the Lens works across generations. Children of the Lens is now the story of Kimball Kinnison, Clarissa, and his five kids, all of whom have seemingly inherited Lens powers, and to a greater degree than anyone seems to realize.
At first glance, Second Stage Lensmen seems like more of the same from Doc Smith, which isn't a bad thing: we get action, intrigue, grand strategy, disguises, and larger-than-life characters.
But it turns out that we actually get more: extended looks at the enemy and its operations; the appearance of the first female lensman; more details about space battles, from heavy cruisers down to individual dogfights; and direct mention of Eddore!
After reading and reviewing Ryan Williamson's The Widow's Son, I decided to try out one of his later works. Doomsday Recon is the first book in a series of three, and has Jason Anspach also on as an author.
Compared to The Widow's Son, I found this book to be much more polished. One of the problems I had with The Widow's Son was the constant foreign-language bits, which are still present in this book, but are handled more skillfully and naturally.
I recently re-read Massacre of Mankind, an official sequel to H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds that was published in 2017, written by Stephen Baxter. It's a decent book, and Justin Fraser and I talk about it on this episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast.
Gray Lensman is the next book in E.E. "Doc" Smith's famous Lensman series! This one continues the adventures of the inimitable Kimball Kinnison, actually starting by retelling the ending of the previous book (which I noted was abrupt and not particularly good) with a bit more flair!
If you're looking for something drastically new, you won't find it here, but overall I enjoyed this book very much and if you've enjoyed any of the Lensman books already, you'll find more of it here.
How is it possible that this is my first time reading Foundation? I enjoyed a bunch of Asimov's robot stuff when I was in high school, and I even think I read some of his non-fiction work. Yet somehow, Foundation always missed me. Whenever I would think of it, the library or bookstore I was in wouldn't have it. And so, many years have passed, and I'm finally reading it for the first time!
It's worth noting that Foundation, like a lot of the Lensman stuff, was originally published serially, even in the same magazine as some of it: Astounding Stories. But while the Lensman series is swashbuckling and practical, Foundation is much more cerebral and driven by clever plans with a lot more moral grayness floating around.
This first book in what would eventually become a series covers five specific points in time: the Founding, Founding+50 years, Founding+80 years, Founding+155 years, and one part that happens between 80-155 years later but is not exactly placed.
I found this book super interesting and very thought-inspiring. The five individual stories are loosely connected by the concept of "Seldon crises," which are major turning points in history.
Seldon is the great psychohistorian who anticipated the fall of the galactic empire, and the potential for a dark age of 30,000 years. His goal, described at the start of the book, is to reduce that dark age to a mere 1,000 years.
The book follows the movement of the Foundation from a twinkle in Seldon's eye, to a purely scientific endeavor, to a pseudo-religion, to a trading partner spreading good tech across the galaxy.
One interesting point of conflict is between the large-scale tech of the empire and the miniaturized tech of the Foundation. We see a fascinating example of economic warfare, as well as an expertly-planned intrigue that seeks to create control by limiting access to high-tech--less violent than the alternatives.
The most powerful scenes in the book involve one character outplanning another, yet the story still manages to avoid falling into the all-too-common pitfall of advocating centralized planning. I was honestly a bit worried Foundation would be a socialist disaster, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not.
Even Hari Seldon isn't really planning; he makes some good predictions and works hard to set up the right incentives early on, but he doesn't "plan" the actions of the Foundation in any meaningful way. He doesn't provide instructions but rather says each crisis leads to a constriction of choices, which I thought was an interesting take.
One point that made me laugh was Asimov poking fun at people playing science by simply reading and comparing old authorities, as opposed to doing their own experiments and research. In fact, there were quite a few humorous moments throughout the book.
I loved the point when some Foundation logicians broke down a politician's words during a meeting and determined that the whole thing was null content.
On the down side, I was a little disappointed to find there was almost no actual science in the book! Asimov mostly relies on minimizing detail on space travel and communication, throwing in the buzzword "atomic" here and there.
There were a few parts of the book that lapsed into very pulpy dialogue, reminiscent of Doc Smith's Lensman books. You may enjoy that or not, but it wasn't a significant chunk of the story.
To make one last contrast with Lensman, the action in Foundation is much less bombastic, punctuating important moments but not fatiguing the reader.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed my first look at Foundation. If you want to give it a try, check it out here. This is the version I got, a very nice hardcover containing the first three books.
Colony Launch is an okay novel. If you're looking for some reasonably interesting character drama, you might find it satisfying, but my final thoughts on it were unfortunately not great.
From a plotting perspective, Colony Launch is about four separate story threads that come together very slowly. It takes nearly half the book for three of them to stick together, and the fourth only joins up right at the end.
