Book Review: Fade to Black, by Francis Knight

Francis Knight does what so many fantasy authors fail to achieve: create a fantastic world in which to play.

In Fade To Black, pain-mage Rojan Dizon works in the shadows of Mahala, finding people who need to be found, trying to stay a step in front of the law. When his niece is kidnapped and taken to The Pit, Rojan must follow, where he finds that he’s going to be put up against every boundary he has.

The city of Mahala is built up, not out. Bound by mountains on either side, the Mahala is a tall metropolis that shoots into the sky, with a complex, dystopian society run by a ruling elite. Rojan makes his living in this environment, using his forbidden powers sparingly, to avoid detection from the ruling elite. Journeying to the roots of the city, Rojan is in pursuit of his niece, and comes across a world that he never expected, sealed off from the upper levels of the city. There, he encounters Pasha and Jake, a pair of outcasts who have their own agendas that coincide with Rojan’s.

Fade To Black is an engaging, but flawed read. Knight takes a closed, claustrophobic world and spins an interesting story within the walls of Mahala, populated with some solid characters and underlying themes that come together more or less as expected. The book is hard to put down throughout the first half, and while the middle slows considerably, everything flows along pretty well throughout.

The novel works well as a sort of pulp-thriller. A noir-ish detective is pulled into a mystery that grows as the character digs (or in this case, descends) deeper into their surroundings. Knight has set up Mahala as a neat metaphor for overwhelming corruption, and we see firsthand the effects of this when Rojan does go below. Starting with the disappearance of his niece, he uncovers a horrifying truth to the true nature of the city and just what the city’s rulers have allowed under their watch. Overall, while the plot is solid, Rojan and the rest of the characters feel like they’ve being snapped into a rigid framework that leads them through points A, B and C, inorganically. The result is a quite a bit of treading water through some ‘character moments’ that feel like they’re just biding time in at points. A romance between characters is forced at points, and ultimately, what slows the book down is the distraction from Rojan’s main goal: rescue his niece.

Unfortunately, Rojan feels far more out of water than he should: an archtype anti-hero right out of a ’30s detective story, it feels as though he’s further along in his character development than he should be. When he’s in his element in the upper levels of the city, he’s just fine, but as he drops lower into the underside of the city, it’s clear that he’s far more clueless than previously thought. He’s ignorant of the underworld’s entire existence, he flounders around with two companions for much of the middle of the book before going through a sort of internal dialogue about his willingness to use his powers. It’s frustrating, in many ways, because it feels very backward.

This isn’t to say that this is a bad book: far from it. At its heart, Fade To Black is a pulpy, noir-ish adventure, one that is engaging and quite a bit of fun to read. While flawed at points, Knight’s debut work is an unconventional fantasy, one that is a nice departure from the pseudo- Medieval European setting and modern day urban fantasy stories that seem to populate the bookshelves now. With two more books (Before The Fall and Last To Rise)set to be released later this year, readers won’t have long to wait before we’re treated to new adventures in Mahala.

Book Review: London Falling, by Paul Cornell

After Rob Toshack, London crime boss, dies a horrific death while being interrogated, four members of the London Metropolitan Police Service encounter something in a crime scene that gives them the Sight. Transformed, they're now able to access an entirely new London, one that's more dangerous than they ever thought possible.

Paul Cornell’s latest novel London Falling is a fast-paced police procedural with a twist: it’s also a clever urban fantasy novel that brings in all manner of the paranormal to policing. It’s a book that balances both genres superbly, and it’s one that’s hard to put down.

Following a sting operation, officers Quinn, Constain, Ross and Sefton find themselves with paranormal powers. An occultist version of London appears before them: they see ghosts, remnants of the past, and most importantly, a suspect that adds a new dimension onto the case on which they’ve been working. With this new power, they do the only thing that they know how to do: tackle the problem with their tools and knowledge as police officers. The team finds themselves after Mora Losley, a centuries-old witch who has a penchant for the West Ham United football club, and child sacrifices. Helping out mobsters like Toshack, she’s existed in a state of revenge for centuries, using her skills and craft for horrific evil and longevity.

Cornell, who’s worked in the comics, television and literary markets, has been named a triple threat by George R.R. Martin, and it’s easy to see why: London Falling is a deceptively easy novel to start, before he cranks up the pressure, delivering an impressive story that’s complex, emotional and quite a bit of fun to read.

Cornell’s phantom London is a fascinating place, bringing the book into such company with China Miéville’s Kraken and Neil Gaiman’sAmerican Gods. There are deep magical roots to the city, wholly dependent upon the memories, perceptions and actions of its citizens. Ghosts patrol the sites where they lost their lives; invisible ships travel up and down the Thames, and if you get onto certain buses, you’ll end up in an entirely different world. Cornell weaves this all together in a breathtakingly fresh manner, and it’s quite a bit more interesting than most of the typical urban fantasy and high fantasy magical systems that you’ll see on bookshelves today.

As vivid and interesting as the world is, however, the novel’s greatest strength lies in its characters: Quinn, a cop with a strained home life, Ross, whose father was killed by Toshack, Costain, an undercover cop looking to run and escape, and Sefton, a closeted gay man with his own demons to battle. Apart, they’re a dysfunctional group with their own issues to sort out. The Sight gives them a collective purpose: put down Losley and end her terrible acts that have sustained her for so long. The quartet work through the problems of paranormal powers logically, figuring out the world around them, working out the tools that they can use, all before working to apprehend their suspect.

Memory, in a lot of ways, is the central focus to London Falling. The idea of a collective memory defining a central location is a strong one, and in a place such as London, with its very deep history is a place where stories can literally come alive, so long as enough people believe it’s true. It’s a neat thought, one that sets the book apart from the rest of the pack.There are points where this book is genuinely horrifying and gut wrenching. Losley sacrifices three young children, and their fates alternatively repulsed and riveted me to the book. More frightening than the immediate murders is her proclivity for messing with people’s memories. Not only do the parents of the children over her reign not know that their children have been horribly murdered, they can’t even remember having children in the first place. It’s a terrifying thought.

Cornell does an excellent job putting thought behind the power, and this is a book that gets better and better as you read it, all while blending a story that’s equal parts fantasy and detective thriller. While parts of it seem slightly odd on the surface: witches sacrificing children to punish football players, it comes together in utterly top form, and kept us at the edge of our seats right up to the last page. London Falling succeeds at this wonderfully, and already, we can’t wait for its sequel, The Severed Streets, which will be out in December in the UK.

Book Review: Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Originally published to Geek Exchange.

When a man steals a car and drives to the end of a lane, where he commits suicide, it sets off an unfathomable horror on an English family. The premise of Neil Gaiman's first novel in five years is the basis for a subtle, intense read that may very well be his best fantasy yet.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens with a man revisiting his childhood home in England, following his memories down a country lane to a house that he vaguely remembered. There, he abruptly remembers his past, and the tragic events that set into motion a horrifying presence that was unleashed against the world. A man stole his family’s car and committed suicide in it. Something has been released, and our narrator comes across a strange family, the Hempstocks, who know things that they couldn’t possibly know. The youngest, Lettie, becomes the narrator’s only hope to staying alive while dangers from around and within come for him. Lettie is a strange young girl. She claims that the duck pond in her back yard is an ocean, while her grandmother claims to remember the Big Bang.

There’s an understated feeling to this short novel, a multi-layered narrative that flows smoothly as the pages turn. It’s a story about memory and stories, and I get the sense that this is a story that is a very personal one for its author. Our young narrator is a shy, bookish boy who’s afraid of the world around him, but taking comfort in his familiar surroundings.

Gaiman strips away the comfort following the upheaval of his world. The death of the Opal Miner stirs up something dark, and unwittingly, our narrator is partially responsible for the utter terror that follows him and young Lettie Hempstock when they go to investigate. There are things beyond the world that simply do not belong in ours, and it finds its way into the places where he’s the safest. There’s a visceral sense of horror that bubbles up and grows as it slowly takes over his life and surroundings, leaving him with a single safe way out. This is a fantasy of a different caliber, one that is both subtle and powerful as the narrator observes an entirely new world around him. This is a raw novel, full of emotion, one that refused to let me go until I finished it.

There’s an almost epic sense of proportions in this novel, a tragic good verses evil story fought on the tiniest level, and it succeeds in the most heartbreaking way. Gaiman is a master storyteller, one who carefully constructs his characters and makes their lives miserable for an incredible payoff for the reader.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a powerful, masterful work of fiction, one that resonates long after the last page has been turned and the book put away on the shelf. Quite simply, this short, incredible novels is one of the best of the year, and is not to be missed.

Book Review: NOS4A2, by Joe Hill

Originally published on Geek Exchange.

A man named Charlie Manx has a special car that he uses to take children to a magical place called Christmasland. The problem is, once they arrive, they can never leave, and they never realize the horrible truth to the man and place. This is the background for Joe Hill's latest novel, NOS4A2. This novel is Hill's magnum opus, an incredible work of fiction that is equally fantastic, horrifying and utterly impossible to put down once you begin.

At some point in the 1980s, a girl nicknamed Victoria, (Brat to her father) lives in a troubled home. Her parents don’t get along, and to escape the arguments, she rides her bike through the woods, where she finds a covered bridge. It’s not really a real bridge, however: it’s a conduit that allows her to find lost objects. She’s soon after introduced to a new world: there’s certain people with abilities to enter another world, one that’s split away from the real world, and powered by their imaginations. Armed with a totem, they can use this conduit to accomplish certain things. In Vic’s case, it’s her bike. Maggie, a librarian, it’s scrabble tiles. For Manx, it’s his terrible car. When Vic and Manx’s worlds collide, it sets them on a path that’s filled with madness, terror and violence.

Joe Hill has established a name for himself when it comes to dark speculative fiction. His collection of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts, is an excellent read, his comic series Locke & Key, as well as his first two novels, Heart Shaped Box and Horns have received wide acclaim. NOS4A2 adds to his superior backlist and it’s easily going to be one of the best books released in 2013.This novel is a long, sprawling narrative that covers decades of the character’s lives, and it’s by far Hill’s most complex novel to date. Despite that, it breezes by quickly, and it’s a testament to Hill’s ability to weave together a number of divergent characters and each of their actions without losing sight of the overarching picture.

A delight throughout NOS4A2 is the tiny references peppered throughout: Charlie Manx at one point carries around a silver hammer – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, anyone? Music titles, like many of Hill’s other works, work their way into the prose many times. There’s a character named de Zoet, which in and of itself doesn’t mean much, until one follows Hill on Twitter for a while, where you might have seen that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell was one of his favorite books. When the characters get a glimpse into Charlie Manx’s head, there’s a neat reference to Hill’s fantastic comic series Locke & Key on the map with Lovecraft Keyhole. Beyond these references, there’s also Hill’s wondrous preference for the double entendre. The titular car, a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith is entirely perfect for this sort of story, while Vic’s own ride, a Triumph Motorcycle, likewise is born for the role that it plays in the story.

At its core, NOS4A2 is about a single, basic concept: the importance of loving relationships. Vic comes out of a home that has quite a bit of tension that feels typical for the 1980s (especially if one’s reference point for suburban culture is films like ET and Terminator 2), and has a difficult relationship with her parents. She eventually moves out, taking off on her bike and ending up finding Manx, who attempts to kill her. She’s saved by Lou, a biker fleeing from his own problems. With Manx apprehended, Lou and Vic become an unconventional couple, with a little boy, Wayne.

Through Manx, we see that relationships are far more important. In many senses of the word, he’s a type of vampire, one who’s sustained by the empathy and emotions of the children that he kidnaps, forging an ever-depleting pool that he continually draws upon. His helpers, terrible men who kidnap and murder in his name, are strung along in a Stockholm syndrome-like relationship of their own, one that leaves them shriveled up and ultimately, dead.

The problems don’t stop with Manx’s apprehension, and his relationship with his captured wards goes both ways: Vic, now an illustrator for a popular novel series calledSearch Engine, goes crazy as she begins to receive calls from the children of Christmasland, who are going hungry without their master. The episode forces Vic to rethink her memories and childhood, which adds in an entirely new level to the horror that she faces: while she thinks that what she experienced were false memories, they were in reality, completely true. That, to me, is something far scarier than the violence, blood and gore that we see throughout the book. It’s still scary, but Hill knows exactly where to twist the knife to crank up the temperature for his characters.

Amongst this drama is an overarching theme of modernity versus tradition. Manx, by his own admission is over a century old by the time that the book begins, frequently rails against the flaws of women in society: modern dress styles, tattoos, sexual behavior are all lifestyle choices that he feels compelled to work against, and often help him select his victims: children whose parents are deemed immoral are often the ones selected for Christmasland. On the other side of the line are the characters who inhabit of modern society. Vic is a single, tattooed parent who drives a motorcycle. Maggie is a punk-rock lesbian librarian. Lou is an overweight geek who’s willing to go with the flow, and so on. They’re products of their surroundings, and as alien to Manx as the vampire is to them. In a lot of ways, this book works with and without the supernatural elements, as the cultural clash sets up a comparably horrifying motive for Manx’s actions throughout the book.

Finishing the book, it’s easy to see the battles that are waged between the characters, time and time again. On one side, Vic is backed with her loving family, who go to extraordinary lengths to keep her safe, informed and loved. Manx, on the other hand, has his insatiable hunger and his car, and his anger and iron grip on long-gone traditional life simply isn’t enough to sustain him.

Hill balances all of these relationships throughout the novel, building up a convincing base as we follow Vic throughout her childhood and adult life, and looking back, it’s an impressive effort that really succeeds once all the cards are on the table. Moreover, there’s not a single instance when this novel is bogged down with unneeded exposition, explanation or road map. He sets the characters into play, and lets the story take over. It’s a fun, exhilarating ride.

NOS4A2 as a whole is quite possibly Hill’s best book to date, and it’s easily one of the best that will be published this year. Balancing a complicated story, incredible characters and a really horrifying sense of dread and discomfort, this is dark fantasy at its absolute peak. Hill pulls it off seemingly effortlessly, and already, he has us eagerly waiting for more.

Book Review: Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, by John Joseph Adams

A while ago, I wrote for Geek Magazine's online portal, Geek Exchange. It was a fun gig, and a decent outlet to write a bunch of articles and reviews. Sadly, it didn't last: my editor was abruptly fired, and the internal restructuring left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I ended up leaving. Checking back the other day, it seems that it was the beginning of the end: the site is no longer there, replaced with something else. All my reviews and articles vanished. Fortunately, I was able to recover the reviews via the Wayback Machine, and I'm going to be posting them up here.

The image of the Mad Scientist is deeply ingrained in our popular culture. It’s a scientist with a plan that none other dare to attempt, due to the sheer insanity and peripheral casualties that usually occur. We can’t get enough of them, from Victor Frankenstein to Lex Luthor to Dr. Horrible. Anthologist John Joseph Adams has brought together 22 stories in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, an impressive book that purports to be guide for the singular, misunderstood genius, and it covers the range and depth of their insanity.

There’s no doubt that the Mad Scientist is a reaction to the great leaps and bounds that science has brought society. Mary Shelley’s titular Victor Frankenstein came at a point with incredible leaps and bounds in the scientific community, especially when it came to biology. Over the course of the twentieth century, we’ve seen advances in modern healthcare with the introduction of penicillin and the creation of the atomic bomb. We’ve gone to the Moon, all the while developing missiles that could destroy a city across the world. It’s interesting that we have such reverence for the character while their real life counterparts are rarely as venerated. The villains of the comic books are funny, bumbling folk, easy pickings for the heroes of the story. They’re funny, ironic, in a way.

As a result, it’s the humorous stories that really stand out in this book:  The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is an unexpectedly hilarious read. Stories such as Professor Incognito Apologizes: an Itemized List by Austin Grossman, Father of the Groom by Harry Turtledove, Ancient Equations by L. A. Banks, Rural Singularity by Alan Dean Foster andThe Angel of Death Has a Business Plan by Heather Lindsley had me in stitches throughout. They’re pointed deconstructions of the elaborate plans that are frequent in the Mad Scientist world, undercut by a dose of reality, some unexamined element, or the workings of those who they depend upon.

Indeed, it’s the stories where the Mad Scientist is taken overly seriously where the volume doesn’t quite work: The Executor by Daniel H. Wilson is a ponderous story to get through, joining a small number of stories that didn’t work well.

Then, there are the outliers: the ones that don’t quite fit between the two extremes. Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution by Carrie Vaughn, (joining two other stories, Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris and Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil, published through Lightspeed Magazine) is a fun steampunk adventure story that is equal parts pulp and science fiction. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss is a brilliant examination of the consequences of the scientist’s actions through the eyes of the daughters of some of the well known monsters in literature.

Throughout The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is an appreciation for motivation. Behind every Mad Scientist is someone who doesn’t quite tick in the normal way, and for every plan that they’ve come up with is an elaborate motivation behind it. Sometimes, it’s someone who just hasn’t gotten their due in society. Some are trying to get away from everything, others are trying to remake the world to be a better place (casualties be damned), while some are just mentally ill. Regardless of the reason, it’s the stuff of a fantastic story.

While Superheroes and their nemesi are generally found in the comic book store, there’s been a couple of similarly themed anthologies lately: Masked, edited by Lou Anders, andSuperheroes, edited by Rich Horton. While we always tend to root for the good guys, it’s the bad guys that make for a better story, who tend to have more variety than their lawful counterparts, who generally tend to fall into the Batman/Superman extremes (Vigilante vs. Unambiguously good). Mad Scientists have no such qualms, and run the gambit from bad (but with noble intentions) to really bad (trying to destroy cities). They seem to make for more interesting stories across the broad.

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is the book for anyone who appreciates the stuff of comic books, and it’s a tribute to Adams’ style that the outlandish characters that are usually better suited for a more visual field. While not all of the 22 stories here worked for me, collectively, it’s one super read.  Muwahaha!

* Disclaimer: John’s my boss over at Lightspeed Magazine, but I had no part in the conceptualization, publication or editing of this anthology.

Ebola: The Natural And Human History of A Deadly Virus

I picked up this book the other day: reading up on the ongoing West African Ebola Outbreak has become a focus of research and interest of mine lately. My interests in Ebola go back to the granddaddy of all Ebola books: The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, published back in the mid-90s, and read while I was in Middle or High School. It's been one of those things that's sort of been at the back of my mind in the intervening years, with an assumption that at some point (not an IF), it'll break out into a wider population and cause some real harm. That's what's happened for almost a year now over in West Africa.

David Quammen's book is an interesting review of the history of Ebola, and an excellent alternative to Preston's book. It's short - this is actually an excerpt from his 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections And the Next Human Pandemic, where his publishers asked him to take the various chapters on Ebola and update them a bit in light of the ongoing outbreak. The result is a primer of how Ebola interacted with people since it first erupted in Central Africa in 1976. It's a little opportunistic on the publisher's part, but it provides some good context for what's going on in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Quammen takes a less sensational track than Preston did, outlining his own experiences in Africa as they searched for Ebola, as well as a number of earlier outbreaks that occurred in the region. The end result is a good, if very short, overview of the virus.

I'm not entirely sure if separating out the chapters really work for the greater argument, and it's clear that the greater work here is from his other book, Spillover. The central premise of that book looks at how diseases spill out from an animal reservoir, which is a good question to be asking: not just for this particular outbreak, but for the ones that will come as Africa (and other places around the world) become less isolated and more connected to the global community.

The Martian, Andy Weir

Andy Weir's first novel, The Martian: A Novel, has garnered a lot of buzz lately: it's an addicting, rapid-fire book that runs along with a manic energy that makes it difficult to put down. You know how you slow down while passing an accident on the high way? I had that reaction as I blew through it, waiting to see just how Astronaut Mark Watney would survive.

The plot of the book is fairly straight forward: a low-ranking astronaut, Watney, is stranded on Mars when a storm prompts the evacuation of his expedition just six days after they arrived. When he awakens, he finds that he's alone on the planet, with no way to call home to let NASA know he's still alive, and more importantly, let them know that he needs a ride home. With only the mission's remaining supplies and equipment, he needs to figure out just how to survive until the next mission is scheduled to arrive.

A lot's been made of the fact that this is a hard science novel: there's a lot of technical details throughout the book, from calculations of air volume to chemical reactions to physical engineering. All of this gives the book a technical, grounded feel, and you can imagine that someday, this book will come true, or at the very least, be used by NASA to plan for a Mars mission. It's near-term outlook and reliance on strictly realistic components makes this a safe science fiction novel. It's the sort of book that's okay for the general public to read because it could really happen; there's no aliens, galactic empires or expeditionary backstory that require any great leaps of faith for the reader. It seems to work well, too: the book currently sits at #11 on the New York Times bestseller list for Hardcover fiction, and is ranked #158 in books over on Amazon (#7 for Science Fiction).

That isn't meant to denigrate the book: it's easy to see why it's so popular when it's cracked open. Weir's narrative plays out as Watney recounts his misfortunes in an audio log, occasionally jumping back to Earth and in between to other characters for some outside context. They, like the reader, are captivated by this slowly unfolding disaster. There are some nice touches to this: cable news puts Watney front and center for their own segment. Like Apollo 13, all eyes become focused on the skies above, waiting to see if the astronaut will return home safely. Weir's Watney is a fun character: witty, immature, resourceful and optimistic, it's hard to do anything but root for him to get through the crisis, and you can't help but cheer for him as he overcomes just about everything that Mars throws at him. This is high-tech Robinson Crusoe, with a much steeper difficulty curve.

Space disaster narratives have been popular lately: last year's big film was Gravity, which featured a similar premise: an astronaut, stranded after an accident, must find her way back home, using only what she's got with her. These are good stories to root for, because at their core, they're about humanity against nature.

What holds The Martian back from being a *great* book is what separates it from Gravity. Watney's trials are technical in nature, and Weir never quite spends the time to step back and have him question his survival or do anything but blindly plow forward from task to task. Gravity presented a far more interesting character story that addressed some much larger themes: Stone's own challenges (fall) and eventual recommitment to live life on her own terms make it a much stronger narrative that makes me come back time and time again.

But, I enjoyed the hell out of The Martian. It was an exciting read from start to finish, one that kept me up late into the evening, frantically turning pages to see what happened next. That's what every good book should do, and this does it nicely.

Review: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

The Justice of Toren faithfully served the Radch, a galaxy-spanning empire overseen by Anaander Mianaai, the multibodied, immortal The Lord of the Radch. The empire has stood for millennia, maintained by a militaristic system of ships, human soldiers and undead ancillary soldiers under the control of their ship. The ships, such as the Justice of Toren, are run by advanced AI systems who oversee all parts of their command and mission. With the opening of Ann Leckie's debut novel Ancillary Justice, we're introduced to Breq, the last individual of the Justice of Toren, whose twenty year mission is almost at an end.

Epic in scale, but intensely character-driven, Ancillary Justice never gets lost in the minutia of world building details that so often befalls most space operas: Leckie is focused and precise with her story and characters, putting them through their deliberate paces as the story advances.

The story unfolds in two narratives: one in the present, the other in the recent past. Breq has arrived on a cold, distant world, where she rescues Seivarden Vendaai, a soldier in her service over two thousand years ago, from certain death. She's on a mission to acquire a weapon that will help her kill Anaander Mianaai. The reasons behind her mission unfold with a flashback narrative that runs about twenty years before the present day, as she and her ancillaries are over the planet Ors, where one of her lieutenants comes across a vast conspiracy that could rock the foundations of Radchaai society.

Breq's very nature is a unique voice, and an interesting choice for this novel. She's everywhere, and the first chapter when we see her in her former glory is a fantastic scene that flows from each of her decks down to the planet's surface, showing just how powerful she is as a tool, and just how resiliant she is as a character. When she's on her own, Leckie gives the distinct sense that Breq is incomplete, formidable as she is as the last Esk from the Justice of Toren.

One of the delights of this novel is the complete flip of gender roles in this novel. Space opera is historically a very male-oriented sort of fiction, and about halfway through this book, I realized that I couldn't pull out a single male character that had been named, or even mentioned. It's an odd change, but that seems to be the intention: changing up a reader's expectations helps make this a more interesting and enjoyable read, because it left me with fewer character memes to work with as I read. Throughout the novel, Leckie is a master with her characters, something made more difficult when they span multiple bodies and at times, with competing factions within one's self.

Leckie pulls the reader along in excellent form, folding in a nice range of interesting characters and their actions. It's a task made less easy when parts of the story sit twenty (and even a thousand!) years apart, but the end result comes together at the end in satisfying and unexpected ways. The story begins as a sort of quest, and evolves into one of the more politically astute adventures that I can think of that's come in recent years. Elements such as societal change become readily apparent as we come towards the end, providing a very real sense of allegory that's all too relevant in this day and age.

Topped with a fantastic cover by John Harris, Ancillary Justice is easily one of the best books that I've read thus far this year (in a year crowded with excellent books!), and it's one of the best first novels of this new decade. Already well known for her work as a short story author and editor, Leckie is now a novelist to keep a close eye on.

The Kassa Gambit

As the new year rolls around, I've been keeping my eyes out for the new crop of books that are set to be released. Already, there's a handful that have caught my eye, including M.C. Planck's debut novel The Kassa Gambit. Set in deep space, with inter-colony intrigue, a smuggling ship and a neat cover, it has all the hallmarks of a book that looks to be a fun read, and for the first two-thirds, it really is. The final third, however, demonstrates just how quickly a book can go from a fun and entertaining affair to one that fills me with the desire to throw the book across the room. It's a shame, because this book looks as through it might have been good, rather than blatantly offensive.

Set in deep space following the ecological collapse of Earth, humanity has taken to the stars by way of nodes, transportation points that allow ships to travel the vast distances of space, and settle on a variety of colonial worlds. The crew of a smuggling ship, led by Prudence Falling, come across Kassa on a routine run, only to find that the planet's population has been utterly devastated by an unknown attacker. Close behind her is Kyle Daspar, a political officer and double agent infiltrating the League, a political movement intent on dominating the planet Altair Prime. The two characters fall into one another's company, and uncover something that is poised to upend the order that's been established in space.

The overarching political elements to this story, the characters and overall universe start out great, and I was reminded a number of times of a favored novel, The Icarus Hunt, by Timothy Zahn more than once. Planck has set up a neat universe, with some good logic behind the people and mechanics of how things run. As the characters move forward, we see that not all is what it seems, and that their groundbreaking discovery has very different implications than they previously thought: it's part of a political movement that's designed to allow the League to gain an incredible amount of political power. Here, it's a neat take on what's generally a blunt instrument in science fiction, and there's a nice blend of space opera and political commentary here.

However, around the 60% mark, the book loses steam - a lot of it. The characters break down considerably, and the political conflict that felt very nuanced, devolves into a bunch of caricatured villains and half-hearted action that moves along only by momentum. The characters just... drift and bicker to no end. Worse, however, is how Planck completely upends the two characters, absolutely ruining everything that came before it. In the final act, Prudence is threatened by a violent rape that leaves her utterly traumatized  The scene is so poorly thought out and out of place that it feels as though it doesn't belong.

I don't want to diminish the real horrors of sexual assault, and the presence of the actions aren't what bothered me: it was that the scenes felt as though they were simply dropped in as a tool from a menu: threaten main female character with violation, and have the male character that she's previously hated/disliked/attracted to inconsistently throughout the book sweep in to save the day and protect her dignity. The scene is so utterly by the numbers - a smelly, disgusting enemy guard advancing on the stripped naked (Yep) characters, before letting his guard down and being taken down.

There has been a lot of talk about this sort of thing in the geek lit community, from Seanan McGuire and Jim C. Hines in the literature realm to quite a bit in the video game industry. McGuire had a point recently that bothered me: a reader asked her when a main character of hers would be raped. Not if - when. The action seems to have become a tool through which a female protagonist can be almost casually brutalized and I was very bothered to see it present in this book. McGuire had this to say about it: Because it is a foregone conclusion, you see, that all women must be raped, especially when they have the gall to run around being protagonists all the damn time.  This sort of thing troubles me greatly, and while I don't know what the author's intentions are with the scene, whether or not it's simply an escalation, but the male characters in the book are never threatened with similar trauma.

Beyond that, the action becomes a point where Falling moves from being a strong, confident character in charge of a space ship, to someone who realizes that all she really needs in life is a strong man to protect her from the bad things in the world, which runs completely contrary to everything that ran up before that. It was enough to make me slam the book shut when I finished, never to open it again. I don't know what the intentions of the scene were, or if there was some noble intention behind it, but whatever the reason, it sent the book off the rails to such a degree that there is no return. It's a shame, because the book had quite a bit of promise.

So, The Kassa Gambit turns from a rather fun read to one that's downright offensive to read by the time you reach the end, and ultimately, while it contains a number of interesting kernels, they're never followed up on or capitalized in any major way. It's a shame, because the book was a promising one.

Jagannath, Karin Tidbeck

A journalist recounts an encounter with an alien entity that appears throughout human history, a woman creates a creature from her own blood and spit in a can, and a man falls in love with an airship. These are just a couple of the tales to be found in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck's collection of short fiction, Jagannath. The collection has received considerable critical acclaim in the past couple of months, from Tor.com to NPR, and it's easy to see that the attention is well deserved: it's a brilliant book, full of stories that linger long after the words have been read, and the book replaced on the bookshelf.

Jagannath is by far one of the best books that I've picked up this year, a collection of short stories that left me utterly breathless and at the edge of my seat while reading it. More than once, I found myself at the end of a story, only to turn back and begin rereading it immediately. Each story in this short book is a gem, wonderfully crafted and constructed, each leaving me with a shiver of dread and thrill.

What impressed me the most is how utterly normal and natural a vast majority of the stories felt while reading them: normal people encountering something that's just slightly off from what is typically natural. A woman comes out of the woods and marries into a family - supernatural elements may or may not be at play, while a suicidal friend in Rebecka may or may not be insane, or tormented by divine intervention. Other stories are more fantastic, but still utterly grounded, such as the strange call center in Who is Arvid Pekon?, the timeless fairy world in Augusta Prima or the historical encounters with some sort of creature in Pyret. Still others are way out there, such as in Aunts or the title story, Jagannath. In a lot of ways, she does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft ever did himself.

Location figures into this: I've come across several articles and interviews where Tidbeck highlights her home in Sweden, with its long winters as an inspiration for some of the strange occurrences that she's written about. Coming from New England, with its dark geography and short summers, I can certainly relate to the dark atmosphere that has been injected into these stories.

Tidbeck's stories are uniformly haunting, surreal and sublime, and the collection as a whole is a wonder to behold. There's little surprise to see that the book is recommended by such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin and China Miéville, and Jagannath easily falls into the Weird subgenre, as easily as it can be classified into any genre. The stories are a bit odd, and should place Tidbeck on every reader's must-read list from here on out. I for one, can't wait to see what she has coming up next.

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux's Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is a stunning history of the development of NASA's A7L EVA Space Suit. Used on the Apollo and Skylab missions during the heights of the Space Race, the space suit is quite possibly one of the more recognizable images of mankind’s existence in space. In this extraordinary book, he outlines what we know in abstract form: that the lunar landings were an event that was the cumulative efforts of thousands, if not millions of people across a huge number of industries. The real triumph of Apollo isn't the steps that made history on the moon: it's all of the steps in the decades before that got them there. Laid out in 21 chapters (the same number of layers that went into a space suit), and covered in a latex dust jacket, de Monchaux methodically drills into the development of a garment that would protect an astronaut in the extreme, inhospitable environment of space. In doing so, he covers far more than just the evolution of the spacesuit: he provides an in depth history of how we went to space and the impact that it had, touching on social, military and political influences.

It's impossible to oversell the book: what de Monchaux has put together an exceptional piece of history, one that's eminently readable and beautiful to behold. Laid out with numerous sources with every chapter, photographs and diagrams throughout, it’s a strikingly engaging read. Potentially dense from the outside description, we're treated to a wide-ranging examination of the background, development and execution of the iconic, all while the book covers everything from the bra industry to the New Look fashion collection by Dior to the military industrial complex and the Cold War.

While these connections seem completely unrelated and separate from Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, we come to find that they are incredibly and intricately intertwined. Spacesuit begins far before NASA and Apollo were conceived of in the 1760s, when mankind was first searching for ways to come up off the ground, first in balloons. What follows is a story that follows mankind's experiences in the extremes, and we find out not only why such protection is needed, but how we figured out that we needed it in the first place.

In a large way, Spacesuit is the story of technical evolution in the much larger context of humanity's greatest technological achievement. NASA was a complicated organization that has its roots in a number of diverse fields. Custom fitted for the Apollo and Skylab astronauts, the research, development and production of each space suit was the product of an incredible organizational structure that NASA oversaw from beginning to end, working closely with partner organizations, such as the International Latex Corporation, among many others. The space suits were constructed to exceedingly minute tolerances, and accompanied by reams of paperwork certifying every single component and step along the way.

Alongside the evolution of technology, Spacesuit contains a parallel narrative of the rise of NASA's organizational structure, in how planners oversaw the development of the world's most complicated machines and processes. The story of Apollo’s spacesuits is a microcosm for NASA as a whole: innovative, but bureaucratic, it shows the enormity of the challenge laid down by President John F. Kennedy at Rice University in 1962. Accomplished in hindsight, this history demonstrates just how utterly impossible the task would have likely been had it not been for the expertise in both public and private organizations. In addition to the technical and historical content, de Monchaux looks back philosophically at the end, examining the very nature of systems in nature, and how utterly deceptively complex a project such as Apollo really is.

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is the rare extraordinary book that provides such a wide-reaching view of the workings of the space industry that brought us to the Moon and back. Frequently, I found myself almost faced with numerous facts across all number of fields, from fashion and society to computing to military history and the Cold War. de Monchaux's words are deceptively easy to read, dense with information, yet shedding the dry, pedantic nature of an academic text. In telling the story of the space suit, we're treated to something much greater: a story of recognizing and realizing impossibility, and then overcoming it with a clear vision of what to accomplish. This book is a must-read for a wide range of people: those interested in the history of the Space Race, certainly, but also those with an eye towards project management and leadership. This book outlines the complicated nature of NASA and its task, and shows that it wasn't just a handful of astronauts who deserve all of the credit for stepping on the moon.

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed

Saladin Ahmed's debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon has been getting a lot of attention since its release earlier this year. It's a fantastic novel, right out of the gate, gripping and engaging, but it's also been getting quite a bit of attention for its location. Epic fantasy set in a recognizable Middle East - inspired world; it's a far cry from the pseudo-Middle-Ages-European settings that most worlds seem to inhabit.

For all of the hand-wringing lately about how little innovation there is in the fantasy world when it comes to actual world building, Ahmed's story is a nice change of pace; not because an author has bowed to public pressure and recognized that they can break out of the pack, but because he's been writing about this for a while now.

Throne of the Crescent Moon isn't all that notable within the fantasy genre because it's set somewhere besides Europe: it's notable because it's an incredibly strong, character-driven narrative. It’s the first fantasy novel that I’ve read in a while where all of the characters really work to own their destiny, and that *they*, not some long forgotten prophesy has guided their actions to make them realize who they really are. It’s a refreshing change of pace.

The line of storytelling that has been troubled me lately is the prophetic style of fantasy, and it's one reason why I tend to favor more science fiction-flavored stories in general, which tends to avoid it. Far too often, character lives have been pre-determined, with the central focus revolving around the character realizing their inherent importance or internal strengths. Far more interesting to me is when the characters move the plot forward on their own, with their own actions helping or hindering them. Thankfully, this is largely what I've found over the course of reading Throne of the Crescent Moon with its three central characters: Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, a ghul hundter of Dhamsawaat, Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla's assistant, and Zamia Badawi, the shapeshifting protector of her band. The trio is deeply and at times, broadly flawed, but as the novel progresses, there’s an increasing recognition of this, and growth to overcome it.

A murder triggers the opening of the novel, as a powerful dark presence rises around the city of Dhamswaat, draws in the elder Doctor and his young, naïve assistant, and the young protector together amidst the backdrop of political revolution and corruption in the city. Following the trail of the gruesome murders, the unlikely band comes across a much greater conspiracy that threatens their whole world.

The plot isn't terribly original, but Ahmed's richly textured world more than makes up for it. The streets of Dhamsawatt in particular are a delight to read. Vividly written, the city and characters are captured in their entirety. Defined by their flaws, each character essentially works to overcome some of their learned nature (or, it's clear that some of them already have), presenting a nice ensemble of characters that felt very real to me.

Ahmed’s writing is the last main pillar of the novel, and Throne of the Crescent Moon is a deftly written story that pulls the reader along effortlessly. His prose is crisp, detailed and allowed me to burn through the book in just a couple of sittings, something that feels like an ever-rarer joy to do. The book is a short read, but ultimately a satisfying novel, one that has left me awaiting more installments of Ahmed's fascinating world. He’s certainly an author worth checking out and watching for the future.

The Lion The Beast The Beat

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are a band on the upswing. Enormously popular in Vermont from their first album, it's been quite something to have seen a band go from playing small gigs around town to major venues across the country. With their latest album, The Lion The Beast The Beat now out, the band is reaching new heights.

The group's self-titled 'debut' landed two years ago, which came after three prior albums (two independantly produced - Original Soul and Nothing But Water - and their first under a major record label, This Is Somewhere), and was a mixed affair. The production was great, but the album was lacking some of that energy and whimsey that really made heads turn. This latest album still has the major record label fingerprints but they've delivered a superb album that captures Grace's fantastic voice much better. It's a strong album, and bodes well for their future.

In a way, The Lion the Beast the Beat is Grace personified. All of her albums have felt deeply personal, but this one makes the jump over to the singer as a literal mechanical component: a vinyl record. Turntable is a sexually charged number that puts Grace spinning around a record player, while Never Goes Back brings in the idea that a person's life can be scratched just like a record can be.

There's a lot to love in this album with a lot of variety. Title track, The Lion the Beast the Beat perfectly mirror the energy that you'll see at one of their live shows, while Never Goes Back feels much like a throwback to the 1980s and Stars shows out her country influences nicely. There's others still, like Loneliest Soul that are just strange and very different from her usual sound, but very fun to listen to. At the center of it all is Grace Potter and her fantastic voice, which runs up and down the register effortlessly.

There's a little big of everything on The Lion The Beast The Beat, and the entire album feels like it's moved from the safe territory that their last album seemed to drift to. Potter's music has always felt like it's a bit on the edge, and it's nice to see them back to having a bit of fun.

Review: Caliban's War

Caliban's War, James S.A. Corey's follow-up to the Hugo-nominated Leviathan Wakes takes readers back to the well-realized world of The Expanse. It's an all guns blazing thrill-ride that ups the stakes in the Expanse and keeps me wanting more.

Picking up several months after the events of its predecessor, we find James Holden, who had survived the Eros event and started a system-wide war between the various planetary factions, is now running missions for the Outer Planets Alliance. At the same time, Earth and Mars have returned to an uneasy relationship, with their forces ready to open up on one another across numerous fronts. Praxidike Meng, a botanist on the breadbasket of the Outer Planets, Ganymede, finds his daughter has been kidnapped after a mysterious threat is encountered by UN and Martian Marines. The two groups of Marines are attacked, leaving a single survivor: Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper, who is ordered to accompany Martian diplomats to Earth to sort out what happened. There, she meets Chrisjen Avasarala, a UN politician working to prevent outright war between various factions of the Solar System.

Where I'd describe Leviathan Wakes as a robust space opera story, Caliban's War strays far closer to the Military Science Fiction subgenre. This book is packed with quite a bit of military action from the get-go, and throughout the novel, it's approached in a well-thought-out way. When the bullets aren't flying, we see a considerable amount of political work that help make up the backend of any military action, which keeps up a certain amount of tension and adds depth to the book as a whole. The result is a military science fiction novel that gets both the action and the motivations for fighting right on.

Following the end of Leviathan Wakes, with the death of one of the central characters, Corey introduces a number of new characters: notably, Bobbie, the Martian Marine gunnery sergeant who survives an early encounter with what appears to be a new form of the protomolocule. In addition to Bobbie, Praxidike Meng, a botanist from Ganymede plays a key role in the search for his daughter and Chrisjen Avasarala, a UN Undersecretary of Executive Administration have come in to accompany New Characters, trying to get everyone to listen to one another. As a whole, the entire group of new faces is a welcome one, keeping the relationships between the existing characters interesting. Each are nicely assembled with some familiar parts: the tough as nails Marine, the somewhat clueless scientist, and the hard ass politician, and have some other points that round them all out nicely: Bobbie suffering deeply from the loss of her platoon, and Avasarala's about face personality when it comes to her grandchildren. Bobbie Draper in particular has become one of my favorite characters in the series thus far. Tough and determined, Draper is a great example of a strong female character that doesn't really conform to a lot of the molds, and one that wasn't thrown into the series to simply fill out the gender balance.

Caliban's War follows a similar formula as Leviathan Wakes did: a girl vanishes, people attempt to find her, Holden tries to broadcast information to the solar system, all while big picture political elements are at work towards their own nefarious ends, before quite a lot of action happens. It's not a bad formula to follow, and while the story doesn't retell the first one, it does make it predictable at points. Following an exciting opening, the predictability allowed some of the necessary setup to slow down the book for a while, before the last act brings all of the diverse elements together and end the book with a bang. As the story accelerates towards the finish line, so to does the stakes, and this second novel becomes a fantastic bridge for the rest of the presumed trilogy. (There are a further four books and several short stories planned at this point). A major cliff-hanger moment down to the last line of the book makes me hope that at some point, HBO will pick up the books for a television series.

Like Leviathan's Wake, the two authors who comprise James S.A. Corey, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, have done a knock-out job when it comes to the world that they've created. Hearty, durable and dripping with details, Caliban's War gives you all of the major food groups and desert. They layer on some new details that weren't extensively covered in the first book through the new characters, and we're privy to new parts of the Solar System that open up the world even more. If anything, Caliban's War does an even better job with working in the world, sustaining the storyline while not having to introduce the reader to a completely new world and storyline. If anything, it's more focused and to the point, while covering a lot of ground towards what is building up to be an epic time in the solar system.

I really enjoyed Leviathan Wakes, and Caliban’s War is a fantastic addition to what I suspect will be a great series of books. For all of the talk about science fiction going away in favor of urban fantasy or some other spectrum of speculative fiction, it does a great job showing that the stories that can be told in space aren’t going anywhere, all while blending great storytelling and characters, and giving us a new world to look forward to revisiting.

Can't Wake Up: Awake

The show opens with a calm moment, as lights pass over the grass on the edge of a road and just before a screech signals imminent disaster. It's this moment that sets up the entire premise of Awake, starring Jason Isaacs (whom most people will remember as Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter). At the wheel is Michael Britten, a homicide detective who's about to have the worst imaginable tragedy: he collectively loses his wife and son in the accident. He's a man between two worlds: in one, his wife is alive, but his son has perished. In the other, his wife has died, but his son still lives. Britten lives each day by alternating: going to sleep in one world means waking up in another.

The pilot episode for Awake is stunningly brilliant: it's beautifully shot, directed by David Slade, with a great eye towards the visual styles that separate out the two worlds. One is soaked in bright shades where Britten's son is alive, while the other is clad in darker, moody tones. To keep them apart, Britten wears a wristband that corresponds with the two worlds: red for his son's reality, green for his wife's.

The premise of Awake has an incredible amount of potential: In each world, Britten works with a psychologist in each world, trying to figure out why he's experiencing each reality, and trying to cope with the idea that each presents to him: the other world is most certainly the imaginary one, a construct in his mind designed to cope with the loss of one of his loved ones. There are a number of elements touched on here in the show: trying to remember which world he's working in, trying to move on from the accident, and above all, trying to continue on with his life. Britten comes to the determination that the only way to move forward is to accept the situation: where this is the type of problem that would be the first impediment in front of the character, Awake looks elsewhere for story ideas.

This is the crux of where Awake has turned from what could be an interesting genre television show, and into the potential for a great one: it takes on some very heady issues: what is the real reality, how do you come to terms with losing the people important to you, and how do you react to trauma? It's delivered with smart writing and fantastic acting, scenes that had me at the edge of my seat while watching it a couple of weeks ago.

The high quality of the show reminds me of some other high-concept shows: NBC's 2009 show Kings, and ABC's 2007 show Daybreak. Unfortunately, both shows had limited runs: they ran for less than a season before they were cancelled due to low audience numbers, and I worry that this same fate might befall Awake before it gets a running start. Hopefully, excellent reviews in the New York Times, NPR, LA Times and Hollywood Reporter will help give the show the critical legitimacy to push it up over the edge.

What I have enjoyed so far in the show is that there is no clear or easy answer for Britten that has been painted out by lazy writers: the characters here are ones that are well crafted, and it's painful to think of what might happen to them, much like George R.R. Martin has demonstrated with his own characters and their inability to remain alive. Awake has an excellent cast that makes me dread some of what might be coming up for them. This also isn't one of the numerous LOST clones, trying to shock the audience into sticking with the show: questions and possibilities arise throughout in ways not seen since that show, but here, it feels far more organic, rather than the product of a writer's room.

Regardless of the length of Awake, it's something that I hope remains around because of the fantastic writing and acting that we've seen, not just because I'm looking to get to the end of the story. This is television at its very best, and for that reason, it's something that you should check out tonight when it airs at 9pm.

The Icarus Hunt

This year, a major goal of mine is to try and cut down on my ever-growing 'to read' list, which has slowly crept into the triple digits over recent years. There are a handful of books that I've been meaning to get back to and revisit from earlier days, and at the top of the list was Timothy Zahn's 1999 science fiction / mystery novel, The Icarus Hunt. The book was one of the novels that I first read during my transition from Star Wars novels to mainstream genre novels, and it's been a book that's stuck in my mind since I first read it.

The story opens with Jordan McKell, smuggler and ship's pilot, meeting up with Alexander Borodin, who hires him to take his ship, the Icarus and its sealed cargo, to Earth. Deep in debt to crime lord Johnston Scotto Ryland (Brother John) and his superior, Antoniewicz, McKell accepts, and ships out with the assembled crew. Shortly after starting off, one of the members of the crew is murdered, and deep questions emerge into the nature of their cargo.

The Icarus and her crew quickly becomes the target of an intergalactic manhunt from numerous factions: the Patth, a commercial race that holds a near-monopoly on interstellar shipping, believe that the cargo is an advanced star drive that would undercut their own technological advantages, while an unknown agent amongst the ship's crew has begun to endanger the crew. As the Icarus and its crew jump from system to system, steps ahead of the Paath and the growing contingent of opportunistic planetary governments and criminals, the true nature of the mission comes to light.

Zahn's solidly-constructed world is one that sees a number of parallels with popular franchises, from Star Wars to Titan A.E. and Firefly, but feels wholly unique and original in its own right, and fans of the recently released novel Leviathan Wakes, by James A. Corey should certainly pick this one up in the wait for the next installment in the trilogy.

Of particular note is the story's structure: this is very much a mystery novel set in space: who the fellow members of the crew are, from Tera, who strives to keep her identity under wraps, Nicabar, a former EarthGuard marine, Chort, the crew's alien space-walker, Everett, the ship's doctor, Geoff Shawn, the hot-tempered electrician and Jones, the short-lived mechanical expert, who's murdered early on. There's also the nature of the cargo that they're carrying, and as more people appear in the sidelines who want to get their hands on the cargo, the book kicks into a race that feels genuine to the core. The pacing is perfect, and never overcrowded as the mysteries deepen and the characters all develop richly. Zahn has done an excellent job creating a cast of dynamic characters, and keeps the reader in the dark until the very end as to some of their true intentions: when I first read the book, I went back and re-read it to pick up on the hints along the way. All the way through, it's a gripping read.

The Icarus Hunt is a book that feels like a solid hit out of the park, and while all of the plot points come together in the final chapters, the setting of a McKell in the dining room with all of the players feels more like homage than sloppy structuring. All along the way, Zahn has constructed a plausible, fascinating world that hints at other stories (sadly, this appears to be the only one) at every corner of the galaxy. It's a book that takes a lot of common story elements and mixes them together into something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and has very few books that it can really be compared to. Even better, it holds up past my nostalgic love for it, despite the release of more recent, similar stories. Truly, a cult classic in the making.

The Best Books of 2011

2010 was a good year for reading, and this year, while it had some significant downs, also had its share of really great reads. I'll be posting a full list of the books read in 2011 in the next week or so, but in the meantime, here's the books that I most enjoyed this year:  

1 - Soft Apocalypse, Will McIntosh

My absolute favorite read of the year was Will McIntosh's debut novel, Soft Apocalypse. Already the recipient of a Hugo award, this book is one that I hope will follow suit. A bleak and outstanding look at what the future might hold, McIntosh weaves a tale that's outstanding in its character growth and understanding of how the world works on massive scales. It's tragic and heartbreaking on one hand, and unmistably beautiful on the other. (Review)

2 - The Magician King, Lev Grossman

I didn't think that Grossman would be able to top The Magicians, and I was wary of it earlier this year: Where the first one could be described as the anti-Harry Potter, I have a hard time seeing how this one could play out. It turns out, it played out very well: Grossman not only topped the first book, he created a story that was brilliant in all regards: further building up the characters from the last book, and making the stakes from this book much higher, darker and deeper than I thought possible. The story is simply stunning. (Review)

3 - Leviathan Wakes, James A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes is a book that grabbed me at the cover and refused to let go. I've long had a soft spot for space opera, and this book really fits the bill, with an exceptional world within our solar system. There's a bit of everything in this story: military action, detective fiction, weird science and space Mormons. I already can't wait for the followup, Caliban's War, due out next June. (Review)

4 - Rule 34, Charles Stross

I'm currently in the middle of this book, but I'm confident of it's place here. I met Stross at ReaderCon in 2010, where he told me that his next book opens with a man getting murdered by a viagra enema. It's set in the same world as his prior novel, Halting State, and in a way, the book is a cross between the J.J. Connolly's Layer Cake and William Gibson. (Review to come at the Functional Nerds)

5 - Embassytown / Kraken, China Miéville

I loved Miéville's book, The City and The City, and the 2 books that I read from him this year both deserve a place on this (Kraken was a 2010 release). Both are wholly fantastic books: an alternative, weird London in one, and a totally alien world in the other. Miéville is a master at fully understanding the worlds, and both are fantastic examples of a brilliant story meshed with a perfectly conceived setting. (Review / Review)

6 - Spellbound, Blake Charlton

Charlton did a nice job with his first novel, Spellwright, and his second is a worthy followup that expands and builds upon his world in grand fashion. I loved his understanding of magic: this book is almost a science fiction novel, running on a bit of a slightly different frequency. It's a great addition that builds on the first novel, and I can't wait to see what happens next. (Review)

7 - Halo: Glasslands, Karen Traviss

I've long loved the Halo franchise, and I got into it hardcore: bought several other books, bought and played through Reach, Combat Evolved and got my wife hooked on the armored folks. This novel has a great story to it, which is sort of par for the course for Traviss, revolving around the end of the Human-Covenant War, continuing the storyline into new territory. I'm excited to see where she goes with it. (Review)

8 - Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi

John Scalzi embarked on a bit of an experiment with Fuzzy Nation: it's a literary reboot of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy. It's a fun read, with an pointed, relevant message. The book is a quick read, and it's got about the same level of substance to it, but it's a hilarious read, one that had me laughing out loud throughout the couple of hours that I read it. (Review)

9 - Machine Man, Max Barry

Max Barry's Jennifer Government was a book that showed me that great science fiction could be really funny and ridiculous at the same time. Max Barry returns with Machine Man, partially written online, and falls with much of the same level of humor that Jennifer Government held. It's ridiculous at one level, but then, when you look at our increasingly technology filled lives, it's not so far fetched. (Review

10 - At Queen's Command, Michael A. Stackpole

I've long been a fan of Michael Stackpole's books, going back to the X-Wing Series and some of his other fantastic novels. He's now back, under the Nightshade Books banner with an alternate history novel that reimagines the early days of the British colonies in the Americas with magic, zombies, necromancers and dragons. It's a fun, vivid read. (Review)

Other Notables: A couple of additional books that I enjoyed were Ganymede by Cherie Priest, Germline by T.C. McCarty and Ready Player One by Ernie Cline.

In Time

Over the past year or so, I've begun to go through the incredible backlog of science fiction movies that I've missed, coming across such gems as Soylant Green, Logan's Run, Omega Man, Silent Running, amongst others. Coming out of In Time, I found myself comparing it to the films of the 1960s and 1970s, when the filmmaker's message was key, dominating the characters and story. Andrew Niccol's latest film keeps close to some of the traditions of the past, as well as some of the surrounding visuals, to deliver a solid, interesting and thoughtful science fiction movie.

Set a hundred and fifty years into the future, people don't die of natural causes. The human body has been engineered to exist at our whim. To counter over population, you've got a 25 year head start, where the countdown clock kicks in. Nobody ages over 25, but if you don't replenish your stocks, you've got a year to live as the clock on your arm starts counting down. Currency has become time: it's become the currency of the world, in a literal twist on the phrase time is money.

It's also highly Darwinian. The smartest or those with a good job stay before the countdown hits zero. Those who don't, die. It's a highly dystopian system, where the rich get immortality and the poor pay the ultimate price. Will Salas, a worker staying just ahead of the clock, gets very, very lucky when he saves the life of a man who has over a century on the clock, transferring the time over before committing suicide. Salas snaps when his mother dies within moments of being saved at the last minute. (The puns here are endless.) Taking the time that's been given to him, he goes to the wealthy side of the country (a time zone), and begins to undermine the system, aided by the daughter of one of the wealthier members of society. What ensues is a Bonnie and Clyde sort of story, with all the hallmarks of a blockbuster science fiction movie, with car chases, countdown clocks and an excellent looking cast.

The first thing that really jumps out at me was the fun world that Niccol has set up. There's a lot of little references and clever world-building here, from the names of the locations to the differences between the rich and the poor: the former have time on their hands, while the poor run from place to place, in a hurry because they really don't have time to spare. Watching Gattaca the next day, I found myself wondering if that film could be a forerunner to this one: a glimpse of what came before.

This is a film about the idea that people have time on their hands, about the rich verses the poor and a very unsubtle look at how the capitalist system works. As Charlie Jane Anders said in her review of the film, it's landed in theaters at the perfect time: the Occupy Wall Street movement has been in the streets for just over a month, while right wing politicians and their supporters (arguably the more pure pro capitalist of the political spectrum, at least in American politics) have openly talked about letting people die if they can't make it on their own. It's not a movie that pulls punches, and it plays to the strengths of the genre, telling a story that's really about the present day, just taken out of context a bit.

In this horrific world, the system allows people to die who are essentially no longer useful to society. The rich, in the glimpses of the lives that they lead, have all of the usual excuses: they're lazy, unmotivated, ignorant, or merely unable to cut it in the world as it exists. They have their supporters who believe wholeheartedly in the system, who have a legitimate point of ensuring that the system stays in place, because the world, as a whole is stable and accepted by all involved.

The problem is, as the mighty come down to minutes on their clocks, they realize how much the cost of the system is. They've never had to worry about putting food on their table, or whether they'll make it home. They don't have to worry about a system that's designed to squeeze them out with higher costs of living in a society designed only for the purpose of keeping the small few at the top alive and comfortable. This film lands right on the tone of the political culture in the country.

There's problems with the film to be sure, but they're problems in that it's a film with a budget and designed to bring people into theaters. The cast, guns and car chases certainly don't hurt the film as a whole, and in the end, make this a well rounded piece of entertainment, one that's direct and overt, but worth paying attention to nonetheless. In Time isn't the best science fiction film that I've seen, but it's got the style and pluck of some of those old classics that still hold up because they focused on the ideas over the visuals. I can't help but think that this one will be looked at the same way, somewhere down the road.

At the very least, the film provides an easy out for a last minute halloween costume: 13 numbers on your arm in glowing green ink or paint. Before you pass out, you can even zero yourself out, and remain in character!

The Windup Girl, Revisited

In 2009, I picked up Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl based on the cover and early reviews. It looked like an interesting read, and I quickly devoured it, enjoying the complexity of the plot and intertangling characters in an all too frightening future that looks all the more plausible today. It's been two years since I read the book, and finding myself stuck in my car for much of the weekend, I decided that listening to a book would be better than constantly fiddling with the radio: a good as a time as any to revisit a book that I've recommended countless times.

The book far exceeded my expectations when I first read it, and revisiting the novel has surpassed my memories of the book. In the time since reading it, much has changed in the world: we're still in the middle of an economic crisis, one that has spread world-wide. Conflict has broken out in new places around the planet, and we've seen a number of ecological and industrial disasters that have been both highly public and highly contentious.

The Windup Girl has also done exceedingly well since my first read: it's garnered Bacigalupi the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel (along with with China Miéville's fantastic The City & the City), the 2010 Compton Crook Award, the 2010 Locus Award for best first novel and the 2010 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Time Magazine has named the book one of the top ten books of 2009, and it's established Bacigalupi as a major up and coming writer.

What impressed me the most about the book was the interconnected nature of the entire, overall story. Bacigalupi takes a snapshot of a contentious, troubled, point in our future. Global climate change has had a profound impact on the worldL sea level rise has impacted millions, while war, politics and corporate entities appears to be linked in a single dangerous dance.

The strongest point in the entire novel is in how the various stories are handled: one action influences all of the other actions. It's an excellent example of two schools of thought when it comes to characters: characters either make the world themselves, through their actions (Self-made man), or the actions define the characters (Rising to the occassion). Jaidee's White Shirts, the enforcement arm of the Environmental Ministry, work to ensure that their country and city do not succum to the horrors of the outside world: diseases, war, conflict, trade, and so forth. They act as customs for Bangkok and Thailand. Early in the story, they destroy a sizable amount of cargo that is being brought in by outside interests, one of which is Anderson Lake. Lake is there to get the seedbank and work with the Environmental Ministry's rival, the Trade Ministry, to try and leverage his company's way into the country. The third puzzle is Emiko, a windup who's very presence is something that the Environmental Ministry is trying to keep from the country, and who runs to Anderson as life becomes more and more difficult for her.

The three storylines interact in an ever-closing circle. The destruction of the air pads and cargo at the hands of the Environmental Ministry sets into motion conflict between all three storylines: Trade and their interests are furious at the losses, and move against the Environmental ministry, which shocks the city into further conflict, with each of the numerous characters involved. The actions of one influence the larger picture in ways that's hard to see individually, but clearer collectively.

Bacigalupi lays his fingers down on a key point when it comes to the interaction between government and politics, and The Windup Girl is a very political novel. Multiple sides are presented: the factions in the Environmental Ministry that sticks to a rigid goal of protection, while the Trade Ministry works to leverage their own advantages. At the end of the day, the story really looks to the influence of money on people: the highly corruptable, and the marginally less so, and how that motivates their rise and retention of power. While all sides are equally flawed - both sides are corrupt in their actions. It's clearly a book that looks at what happens when large corporations gain a lot of influence and power in a political system. They work to their own advantage, an end that's not usually in line with the overall good ends of a country and large population.

What does that sound like?

The Windup Girl hit at the right moment: We're facing environmental degredation at the hands of a population and from corporations that can't look to practical, long term requirements or beyond shareholder interests, and when power in politics is generally distrusted by a large number of Americans. While listening and reading this book, I've had snippets of news on the radio or from twitter about protests from around the world, protests against an entire array of opressive governmental power and economic disparity. I view science fiction as the literature of the moment, and this book has certainly hit on a wide range of important points. Bacigalupi's future holds much of the same, in different forms and examples, in an all too realistic, frightening and plausible vision. It's a book that's not only held up to its first reading, but grown in significance.

Germline, TC McCarthy

A common talking point that I’ve found when it comes to military science fiction is that it's not a game. War is more than a bunch of soldiers dressed up in powered armor, shooting at aliens or their enemies, and telling a good story set against a backdrop of an epic war that pits the good guys against the bad guys. More than its surrounding features, military science fiction is a way to look at the present day. Germline, by TC McCarthy is a book that really gets the complexity, danger and horrors of warfare. It's the shock to the system that the first World War was to the civilized world, where they saw, first-hand, that war is a cruel and unforgiving institution.

Set at some point in the reasonably near future, the United States is at war with Russia. The battlegrounds are the mountains of Kazakhstan, where the war has dragged on in brutal fashion. Oscar Wendell is a reporter for Stars and Stripes, dropped in on the front lines to report on the progress of the war, where he's caught up amongst the soldiers that he befriends, and alongside the genetically engineered soldiers designed to take on the hardest battles.

One of the first novels that I've picked up that really seems to be influenced by the past decade of war in the Middle East (the other being Dan Abnett's Embedded), and it's a pleasant surprise to see the book draw from ideas other than the American experience in the Second World War or abject American exceptionalism. This feels like a book with less a political or national agenda, and one aimed far closer to the idea that warfare is, at its core, a horrible experience that should be avoided on the policy level.

Germline hits some snags early on, and takes a little while for it catch it's breath. For most of the book, I was wavering between liking the book for its message, and frustrated at points for some of the execution. Oscar is bounced from place to place, seemingly without warning, cause or purpose, as the war just drifts along. Key characters and moments that feel like they're supposed to take on far more significance pass by quickly, and a couple of personal issues that Oscar has are focused on and then dropped. Looking back, the ground-view experience from Oscar feels authentic, from his interactions with the US Marines in the beginning of the story, to the simple chaotic nature of his movements: this isn't a book that really looks at the war sans blinders. It's a tiny piece of a greater conflict, and within that context, it does a remarkable job.

For all of my misgivings, several of the complaints that I had about the story evaporated when I read a review that spoke a bit about the First World War experience, when everything began to fall into place. For all that warfare can be explained through charts, power point slides, rank structures, and the combat readiness statistics that are out there to explain why going to war is sometimes needed, it simply cannot explain away the experiences of a person on the front lines, no matter what the objectives are.

Reaching the last couple of chapters of Germline, it's clear that McCarthy gets warfare: his short bio includes a coy reference to his experiences as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency during the opening days of the 'War on Terror'. The final, key part of the book shows us everything about how warfare is all but unknowable to the people who haven't experienced it. (I'd like to think that studying it provides some level of insight)

When it comes to much of the military science fiction that's out there - and there's a wide variety of what's available - this book stands apart because it so intensely focuses on the people caught up in the middle of the war. They don't care about the larger parts of the strategy that's required, nor the theory behind it, but at the people at the other end of their rifles. There's other books that have focused on the characters, but there's none that I've really come across that drives the point home so effectively.

War, at the end of the day, is complicated. It's rarely as clear cut a story of overwhelming good verses overwhelming evil. It's far more than strategy, while it's also far more than just the soldier's perspective. While I found parts of Germline underwhelming in some of its details, I found that it was more than a match for my expectations in other arenas: a good lesson to internalize. Moreover, the book outlines some outstanding points about how we as a society deal (or fail to deal) with the institution of warfare: the people who experience warfare firsthand deserve a major amount of respect for what they've experienced and survived, and in some cases, are still dealing with.