Touch

Touch by Claire North

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Most humans are defined by the one body we get. We change ourselves only through the slow agony of dieting, exercise, plastic surgery, etc. Or we experience the dark drawbacks of the physical body - from overeating, injury, chronic illness, drug abuse. Whoever we are, the grass is always greener in someone else's body.

The narrator of Claire North's Touch knows intimately what it means to inhabit another's body. She is a "ghost" who can wear another person's body like a suit of clothes, and has been doing this so long that her original name, gender, and ethnicity no longer really matter. When she slips into another's skin, she can experience the greener grass for a while and avoid the pain of aging or the inconvenience of suffering consequences.

But a ghost also knows human beings more accurately than they know themselves, and to know someone is to love them. Which is why when an assassin tries to kill her and murders her host, the ghost decides to get to the bottom of the shadowy organization that sent him.

The ghost narrator (who goes by many names but is assigned the name of Kepler by her enemies) likes to readjust her hosts' lives. Whether that means taming the reputation of a society flirt, becoming the loving husband to a previously ignored third wife, or throwing away the drug paraphernalia of a teenaged prostitute, Kepler likes to make projects of her hosts and leave them in a better position than before her arrival. Mostly.

North explores the fascinating implications of a consciousness that can flit from one body to another like a communicable disease. Ghosts suspend a host's consciousness and hijack his or her life, operating invisibly. Hosts may wake after minutes, weeks, or years, unaware of any passage of time or their body's actions in the meantime.

There is sadness and moral ambiguity in Kepler's life. She is very good at running, she tells us, and proves it both literally and also by refusing to question the morality of her own parasitic existence. Kepler prefers willing hosts, but mostly for the convenience. She likes those with good teeth because she has an aversion to pain and the ability to endlessly avoid it. She is also fascinated by the hosts she takes, and calls her attachment to them love. It's easy to like her, though when looked at another way it's a little like having the story told by the protean alien menace from The Thing. The idea isn't new (remember The Host by Stephenie Meyer or The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein), but North's execution is fantastic.

Touch is a complex, well-told story that moves at the pace of a thriller. I am looking forward to reading more of Claire North's books in the future.

Caliban's War

Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When simmering tensions erupt into war, Jim Holden races to discover the fate of a child whose kidnapping may hold the key to ending the conflict - hoping that humanity won't cripple itself before the alien weapon incubating on Venus shows its teeth.

Mars and Earth are locked into fighting that will result in a death spiral for humanity. Everyone's lost sight of the real problem blooming on Venus: the protomolecule has eerily transformed the entire planet, and no one knows why. Faced with a terrifying and incomprehensible threat, the various factions fall back into familiar patterns of strife.

The familiar faces of Holden and his Rocinante crew are back, still reeling from the effect of Detective Miller's kamikaze morality a full year after his death. They begin a hunt for a botanist's missing daughter and uncover a new conspiracy to weaponize the alien protomolecule. (We all knew that was coming.)

Added to this cast are the welcome presences of two new women: Bobbie, a hulking Martian Marine, and Avasarala, a sweet old granny who likes calling people the c-word and is one of the most politically powerful humans in the solar system.

It's great to see epic science fiction that features such diverse characters, characters who feel like real people and are most fun when they conflict with each other. (The meeting of the idealist Holden and the intensely cynical force of nature that is Avasarala was a fun, too-brief moment.) Critics of the first book's two main characters being white males should be happy.

The mystery here is less compelling than Leviathan Wakes because the alien's already out of the bag. Some of Caliban's War feels like a rehash of what came before, but the characters are still worth spending time with as they struggle with doing the right thing and trying not to allow the human race to self-destruct.

But then came the holy crap ending. Now I'm asking myself: how can I get my hands on the last book, as of yesterday? The holds list for Abaddon's Gate at my library is absurdly long.

• Quotable: “Good, because I don’t use sex as a weapon,” Bobbie said. “I use weapons as weapons.”
• Am I the only one who finds Naomi utterly boring?
• I really liked Praxidike Meng's idea of table talk.

Leviathan Wakes

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Idealistic Jim Holden discovers a derelict spaceship and unwittingly ignites a deadly war; meanwhile, run-down cop Detective Miller searches for a missing woman who may have the key to it all.

Growing tensions between Earth, Mars, and the scattered stations of the Belt lead to war in a galaxy where human annihilation is as simple as throwing rocks into a planet's atmosphere. The stars remain unreachable because human curiosity has stagnated amidst age-old societal problems. The ethnic racism of the past has turned into racism based on what level of gravity a person grew up in. Enter our heroes.

The starship Scopuli was empty when Jim Holden stumbled upon it, but someone is willing to start a war that could make humans extinct just to hide the truth behind its vanished crew. In the ensuing chaos, the fate of Julie Mao is easy to overlook. But Detective Miller, once a good cop and now burnt out alcoholic, finds himself drawn to the missing woman and determined to track her down.

This book is a perfect cocktail of horror, noir crime fiction, and space opera. It's science fiction that's all about the characters - an idealist and a cynic - and the disappointing parts of human nature. It's fast-moving, tense, and in places utterly terrifying - which is everything good space opera should be. (It reminded me of Firefly, too, which is awesome!) The story is dark, but because of the balance of likable characters it manages to be optimistic about human potential rather than veering into nihilism.

Leviathan Wakes feels like a self-contained story and can stand alone pretty well, but I'm definitely going to pick up the sequel, Caliban's War, as well as the third book of the Expanse series, Abaddon's Gate.

Final observations:

• The mystery element and world-building made me think of Isaac Asimov's classic The Caves of Steel.
• The authors (James S.A. Corey is actually the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) mention being influenced by the Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter Jon Williams, which starts with The Praxis.
• I would say it's the best space opera I've read since A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
• Vomit zombies

Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

Titus and his friends are products of the Feed: a never-ending stream of advertising and information implanted into their brains. During an ordinary trip to the Moon, Titus meets the smart, beautiful Violet. When a protester hacks their minds, the teens lose contact with the Feed and for the first time get an inkling that there may be a better way to live.

As unsettling and soul-scarring as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Feed is one of those novels that will grow in your subconscious long after you've finished it. Titus is as self-absorbed as Holden Caulfield, but far less articulate. Titus's dystopia is much more Brave New World than 1984, where the affluent are lulled into lives of mindless consumption. Hairstyles change within hours, the oozing lesions everyone has developed become a fashion statement, and School is a trademark, not a place.

Stray observations:

• The pulsing red fields of filet mignon that Titus thinks are part of nature have never quite left my psyche. *Queasiness*
• TV show from the Feed: Oh? Wow! Thing!
• Song lyrics for a love song from the Feed: I like you so bad / And you like me so bad. / We are so bad / It would be bad / If we did not get together, baby, / Bad baby, / Bad, bad baby. / Meg bad.
• "That's one of the great things about the feed - that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit." - 47

A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An undercover police officer struggles with losing his own identity as he investigates a dangerous new drug to which he himself has become addicted.

Philip K. Dick himself struggled with schizophrenia, and the book is dedicated to the friends he lost to drug addiction. That said, it's a fantastic science fiction ride that will leave you feeling sad and thoughtful by the end.

The Robot War

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When the omnipresent robots begin slaughtering their human masters, a small group of survivors scattered across the world use their wits to fight back.

Cormac Wallace is a soldier who saw the war firsthand: from Zero Hour when smart cars began running people over in the street to the final battle to destroy Archos (Robopocalypse's Skynet). Wallace finds an archive of records made by Archos and pieces together stories of the people who ensured human victory over "Old Rob" (soldier slang for "robot"). This frame didn't always work logically, and the stories rely on a great deal of coincidence, but that didn't stop me racing through the pages.

Daniel H. Wilson is a roboticist who wrote How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, so he's got killer robots on the brain. This solidly written novel pulls you into an iron grip and moves fast - I finished it in a day and my attention never flagged. There is a real tension as the survivors recount the eerie first days of the war, when trusted machines became the Enemy - parts of this could accurately be labeled horror.

The style and construction of the book are reminiscent of Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. (And strangely enough, Brooks wrote his own survival guide for his particular brand of apocalypse: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. I guess great minds do think alike.)

And lest you think that Wilson is a complete anti-robot alarmist, the last section of the book has a surprise element that the robot-loving Asimov would have approved of (and in fact wrote about in the short story "Robot Dreams").

Redshirts

Redshirts by John Scalzi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When Ensign Dahl is assigned to Intrepid, he quickly realizes that there is trouble on the Universal Union's flagship - something that has raised the mortality rate on Away Missions, but only for newcomers....

This spoof of badly-written TV science fiction follows a group of ordinary crewmen who quickly figure out that their lives are cheap and that being on an Away Mission (or decks 6-12 during a battle) might mean their brutal and meaningless deaths. For those of you living in a cave, a "redshirt" is the term coined by geeks to describe disposable crewmen who die on Star Trek away missions to raise the stakes for the heroes.

Redshirts has its moments of humor, but plot-wise it feels lightweight. No real surprises here. As a fan of several Star Trek shows, I appreciated the many inside jokes aimed at lazy TV writers, but I wish the solution found by Scalzi's redshirts had been cleverer and less lazy.

The biggest problem for me was the challenge of keeping track of the main characters, who are referred to by their last names and remain two-dimensional.There are few descriptions, and everything about Intrepid and its crew feels too generic to justify the characters' insistence that they are real people, too.

If you like your sci-fi sardonic and meta, you may also enjoy Year Zero by Rob Reid.

Oh, and as for ice sharks being completely ridiculous, Scalzi should have read this Wikipedia article.

Just sayin'.

Theodicy

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Father Sandoz, the sole survivor of a Jesuit mission to an alien planet, grapples with his faith as he reluctantly confesses the disastrous consequences of meeting "God's other children."*

This is a book you have to allow to sink into your brain and heart, where it will certainly take root. It is a character study of Father Sandoz and his closest friends as well as a chilling first contact story of the impossibility of entering a truly foreign culture without suffering from dangerous ignorance and misunderstanding.

I admit to feeling impatient with Sandoz as he mopes and avoids telling his story (which is recounted VERY slowly in parallel flashback chapters, told in third person), but by the revelations at the end I was completely on his side - the horrors he suffered are every bit as soul-shattering as his reticence suggests.

Russell sees no conflict between religion and science, and for this I am profoundly grateful: her characters encompass a range of belief (from priests to atheists), but each person is educated, intelligent, and articulate. The Jesuit mission on Rakhat is to learn, not to proselytize, and the portrayal of the priests is human and sympathetic.

There are no other books quite like this one, but science fiction does have more than its fair share of thoughtful books about first contact by brilliant writers: Contact by Carl Sagan, China Mieville's Embassytown, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin...I could go on.

SPOILER(ISH)

P.S. There are traces of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine here, too, for anyone who remembers the Eloi and the terrifying Morlocks.

* This annotation was a joint effort by students, created in class for "Adult Reader's Services" taught by Nancy Pearl (Spring 2013).

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Avice Benner Cho is a human from Embassytown, a frontier outpost inhabited by Ariekei, whose singular Language can only be spoken by genetically modified Ambassadors. When a new Ambassador is sent to the Ariekei, his attempts to speak the perplexing Language results in devastating consequences for the entire planet.

This book takes about half of its length to warm up, but once the groundwork for the complex universe has been laid out the plot zips to its tense conclusion.

A basic knowledge of the language theory of sign/signifiers may be helpful to understanding the plot - but then again, maybe not. The alien Language, looked at too closely, is completely impossible but must be accepted at face value for the machinery of the plot to turn. There are plenty of puns and linguistic quirks (Avice's initials are ABC, after all), which is fun. I especially liked the way Language is written (like fractions, since it must be spoken by two mouths simultaneously), the naming convention for the Ambassadors (CalVin is an Ambassador made up of two perfectly identical people: Cal and Vin), and the idea of "biorigging"(basically all Ariekei tech are living machines).

There are plot points that don't quite pay off - Avice's friendship with a mysterious autom (a computer intelligence), and her odd relationship with her husband seem half-baked. Characters don't drive this science fiction story: ideas do, and the mystery of how the new Ambassadors could possibly eff up an entire species just by speaking their own language to them. The Ariekei are appropriately alien (I imagined them as giant praying mantises), but - like most of the characters - difficult to empathize with.

If you're into big-concept science fiction and don't mind struggling with disorientation as you try to figure out the rules, I think the ideas are interesting enough to carry you through. There is real horror and dread as Embassytown falls apart in the last half, and Avice's sense of the world ending is not an understatement.


(SPOILER)

Now THIS Is Science Fiction

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two human children crash-land on a planet populated by wolf-like aliens, and they are soon enmeshed in a local war. But beyond the planet an even more desperate war is being waged--one that will determine the fates of entire species and change the fabric of the galaxy itself, but hinges on the doings on the surface of the alien world.

Wow. Reading this book reminds me why I love grand-concept science fiction. It's been a while since I read a story that absorbed me so completely, and to my joy it's a stand-alone (though there is a prequel and a sequel)! There is genocide on a galactic scale, ethnic cleansing on a medieval scale, and a complex, satisfying story in one volume. It's amazing that in telling the story of such huge events, Vinge never loses sight of the individual characters we come to care about.

Human beings are only one sentient race in a galaxy populated by super-intelligent beings known as Powers, which exist in a special area of space known as the High Beyond. Their doings are as unfathomable to us as our doings would be to an ant. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, this does not stop us from messing around with things beyond our comprehension and resurrecting a Perversion, a Power dedicated to the subjugation and destruction of other creatures.

The human survivors crash-land on a planet populated by the Tines, a species of alien absolutely brilliant in concept and execution.

I won't add more, simply because Vinge tells the story so well and spins out the difficult exposition slowly, building tension in the reader as new understanding illuminates this complex and well-designed universe. If you liked David Brin's Uplift trilogy, Orson Scott Card's Enderverse, or even the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, you'll enjoy this book as much as I did. (I do not recommend it as an entry point for non-science fiction readers, however.)

I know I should be working now....

But I'm too busy racing through Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. I've never read his stuff before. It reminds me a lot of Brin's Uplift trilogies in scale - there are a dizzying number of races and expanses of time in this universe.

02/15

page 32

5.0%

Whoa. Just figured out how the aliens work, and I'm hooked. They are mind-blowingly cool: lupine creatures with a gestalt organization to their telepathic packs. One individual, many creatures. If that makes no sense to you, fine. (But it would if you read the book, and that is why this is great science fiction.)

02/15

page 88

14.0%

Get back to the wolves! The "zones of thought" are only slightly less cool than the gestalt packs: basically in our part of space physics works slowly. Brains are dumber, light speed travel is impossible. But the further out you go from the central "Unthinking Depths" (where everything, including intelligence, stops working), the faster and smarter things get - including AI. There are many traps for the unwary there, including malevolent computer intelligences that trick you into writing them...

Robot Visions

Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Isaac Asimov thinks robots are cool, and I'm with him. The technology he writes about is very retro-future, but the ideas are still interesting. I am always fascinated by the logical puzzles he sets up to revolve around the Three Laws of Robotics, which are Asimov's most important innovation.

My favorite stories star robopsychologist Susan Calvin, who I love because she's usually right. Unfortunately Asimov sometimes paints her as a stereotypical sexless career woman (the story "Liar" is particularly annoying). Her fierce intelligence and overbearing personality make the sexist men she works with class her as something other than a normal female. Still, she's a woman who excels in a male-dominated career field. Pretty badass for a character originally created in the 1940s.

Calvin is also a misanthrope who prefers the company of robots. According to her, robots are not at all like human beings, since "Robots are essentially decent." It is true that robots gain the moral high ground in these stories, where the biggest stinkers are usually human.

For great Golden Age science fiction, you simply can't beat Asimov.


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