It’s been a while since I did some quickfire book reviews, so lets go over the last five books I’ve read1.
Green City Wars – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It’s the latest Adrian Tchaikovsky book, and so he dips into the Bag Of Acceptable Adrian Tchaikovsky book themes2 and came out with Animals That Are People, Capitalism Run Rampant and a bunch of sub-themes, and now we’ve got Green City Wars. What if we uplifted small animals and had them do all the work to keep a city running, and what if those animals returned to their base instincts if they didn’t get the good brain drugs every few days? And what if there was a super-intelligent mouse?
It’s a fun romp about a cyberpunk/solarpunk adjacent setting, running around the undercroft of a bioengineered city with all the service animals and their guilds and corporations, and the gangs and armies between them. I did have to keep reminding myself though that these aren’t anthropomorphic animals. When Scotch the Raccoon talks to a rat and a pigeon, it is just a raccoon talking to a rat and a pigeon.
There’s a slow consistent ramp of stakes and threat throughout the book, and a wonderful third act reveal even if I do wonder how much the average reader will be surprised by the final revelation? I do also wish that it sat with it a little longer, the consequences of the final revelation should be revolutionary but the tiny snippet that we see feels like the status quo we’re introduce do, just with a little less desperation. I found this kind of disappointing.
4 out of 5 Tiamats. A solid addition to the Tchaikovsky canon and a lovely standalone novel.
Slow Gods – Claire North
The audiobook is narrated by Peter Kenny, and one of the biggest compliments I can give Slow Gods is that several times I had to remind myself “this isn’t some hidden Iain M Banks novel I missed”.
Set in a universe where faster-than-light travel requires transit through an alternate, much smaller dimension but it requires a sentient biological mind to traverse it, and there is something in that dimension that actively harms the navigator (and sometimes everyone and everything) transiting it. Different cultures handle this differently: some ply their navigators with money and fame, and only let them navigate twice. Others do it by sortation. Some just treat it like a job, with good pay and an acknowledged risk. The Shine, a hyper-anarchocapitalist society, take their poorest and most indebted and lobotomise them, and use them as pilots.
Our protagonist, Mawukana, is one such unfortunate who gets caught up on the edge of a protest, sent to a penal colony, breaks his leg and is sold off to become a pilot. And then the darkness eats him and his ship, kills everyone on board, and makes him immortal. If he is in the dark, or unobserved, he returns to the exact physical state he was in at the moment he came out of the other dimension, and also sometimes he forgets to obey the regular laws of physics, and if peoples stop thinking of him as human, he can do things like pull your heart out of your chest.
The core story of the book follows the events around a supernova that will destroy a dozen or so inhabited worlds, and the different ways in which the civilisations and people in them handle this. The Shine refuse to evacuate their worlds, insisting that those of value will evacuate themselves, and instead wage wars of conquest to take new worlds outside the blast radius. Mawukana starts out doing cargo runs to help get cultural artifacts off one particularly doomed world, but it turns out he is immune to the thing that lurks in the other dimension, and he begins helping rebels on the occupied worlds fight back against the shine.
Some of the analogies in the book are a little hamfisted (the good civs all have multiple and varied models of gender and language, the Shine have four genders: men and women, and manly-men and womenly-women. You are born a man or woman, and if you’re successful and rich and perform your gender perfectly you can become the super-genders.) and whilst the first eighty percent has incredible pacing as we’re introduced to the various bits of setting and peoples and ideas, the last fifth or so speeds up in terms of the time covered, but massively slows down in terms of the ideas covered.
Still one of the best books I’ve read in years though.
5 out of 5 Tiamats. Beautiful and moving, something I could really chew on.
We are Legion (We are Bob) – Dennis E. Taylor
What if a tech bro CEO had his body frozen after he died in a car accident at Gencon, discovered that the USA has largely been taken over by theocrats who declared cryopreservation illegal but them experimented on the cadavers to perfect mind uploading, and then sent a copy of his mind out into the universe on a Von Neumann probe? What if also world war four then happened where the Empire of Brazil nuked the world, and our tech bro ended up in a weird arms race against a Brazilian military probe? And what if our tech bro and a dozen copies of themselves returned to a post-apocalypse Earth and installed themselves as the benevolent dictator of Earth to evacuate the surviving human population.
This is an uncharitable description of the plot of We are Legion (We are Bob). Bob is a tech bro who thinks a sense of personality can be substituted for a TV Tropes account, and has the regular software dev delusion that everything else is pretty easy. There are some real humdinger moments in this book where Mr Taylor really presses the emotional aspect of the situation that Bob finds himself in. And then there are entire chapters where Homer Simpson and Will Riker unilaterally install themselves as unopposed dictators of Earth.
Add on to this the third act main plot where Bob-Prime discovers a sapient species right on the cusp of both extinction and fully entering the stone age, and decides “fuck it this book is about one particular intelligent alien and how he gets laid because he’s clever and rich (because I keep interfering to help him)”.
Add on to that, that there are only three named female characters in the entire book, only one of which gets really more than a single scene. There are zero named people of colour (there are two Brazilian uploaded people, who might have been non-white, but also aren’t ever treated as people) and the primary thing that anyone not-American and not-Brazilian adds to the story is that apparently World War Three happened between Bob dying and being uploaded in the Middle East, went nuclear and the things they learned there meant that when the US Civil War II happened and a single nuke went off, very few people died of radiation poisoning. Also maybe that’s where they got the mind uploading tech too3?
1 out of 5 Tiamats. There’s a fascinating premise here, squandered.
The Murderbot Diaries Parts 1-54: Martha Wells
This is the second time I have tried to read the Murderbot Diaries. Several years ago I tried to read the first novella and bounced off of it for a variety of reasons but largely that I did not gel with the descriptions of the PresAux crew and Murderbot’s internal dialogue was just the wrong side of smarmy for me.
The Apple TV series convinced me to give it another shot and I am so glad I did. There are still things that I find a little disconcerting or unpleasant. Murderbot often feels like too much the power fantasy of “I am both socially awkward and capable of incredible violence and it is good when I deploy that violence” although the continuing theme of Murderbot realising it cannot continue denying its own agency is good and the Murderbot-ART relationship is excellent.
4 out of 5 Tiamats. Nothing deep nor groundbreaking, but solid scifi.
The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson
Shortly after I finished5 this book I saw a joke that the second edition should come sponsored by the Swiss Tourist Agency, with cut out coupons for the various tourist attractions in and around Geneva that play major parts in the book.
I was expecting Years of Rice and Salt but in a near future climate catastrophe and instead I get blockchain apologia, the idea that the BJP would be overthrown in India after a climate disaster, and that terrorist groups could use swarm drones to end commercial aviation and the USA wouldn’t just start bombing anyone who looks like they might be able to fly a drone.
It is simultaneously one of the most optimistic and pessimistic books on the near future climate I have ever read, but none of the science, economics, or politics make any sense. Maybe that it was Barack Obama’s favourite book of 2020 should have been a red flag.
1 out of 5 Tiamats. Bad enough it’s made me reconsider what I loved about the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt.
I currently have a well developed To Be Read pile right now, and the next five fiction books on my list are:
- The Wicked and the Warped – Robert Rath (currently in progress, a shaky start but shaping up to be every part what I loved about the Infinite and the Divine)
- A Trade of Blood – Robert Jackson Bennet (Shadow of the Leviathan book 2 just missed the arbitrary 5 book cutoff, looking forward to this)
- Against all Gods – Miles Cameron (I re-read all three full books of the Arcana Imperii series recently6, and I loved the Traitor Son cycle, and I love Bronze Age fantasy, so feels like a no-brainer)
- Amongst the Burning Flowers – Samantha Shannon (I had not seen this release last year, but I love the other two books in the series. I mean it’s a full novel, but given it’s a quarter of the length of the others, is it a short story?)
- The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi – Shannon Chakraborty (It came strongly recommended by a friend, going in pretty blind)
- These days I read a lot through audiobooks. Still reading though. ↩︎
- I say this entirely out of love for his work. Everyone has the themes they like to explore, and any author as prolific as he is is going to expose them. ↩︎
- The implication that they did medical experiments on dead and dying middle-eastern people which then primarily benefited Americans is only like the third most fucked up thing in the book. ↩︎
- Hey look they’re small so the all count as one book for the purposes of this. I make the rules. ↩︎
- I actually gave up on it about five chapters from the end. ↩︎
- The short story collection sadly isn’t available in print as far as I can see, and I was reading them physically. Because I didn’t read them for the first time, no review here. But tldr they’re really good. ↩︎