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So, as mentioned in the review of Surfing Samurai Robots, I was given this book by some friends and tracked down the first one to read in order. Returning to T’toom, Zoot Marlowe finds even his newfound fame on his home planet isn’t enough for him and that trouble being his business, he needs Earth trouble to make his life complete, so he heads bck to Malibu. His arrival coincides with the appearance on the beach of what looks to be a large top hat, following which one of his friends is turned into a stage magician with real magic tricks (indistinguishable from the science of an advanced race, as he hangs a lampshade on).

Once again running into some cracking characters with names like Medium Rare, the Surfing Samurai Robot spritualist (who has had visions of T’toom), Busy Backson and her brother Gone Out, Zoot has a wonderfully surreal adventure that tears along with wit, verve and hard boiled monologuing.

When I lived in St Andrews, qidane and tobyaw gave me a birthday present of a pile of cheap SF. It was a fun present including various decent books (and a number not so decent) that I’d probably never have tried otherwise. One of them was the second book in a trilogy and being the way I am I tracked down number one first. I’m glad I did, and I later got the third in the series as well.

These are really fun little SF detective books. They’re very lighthearted, riffing heavily on surf culture, Raymod Chandler (and detective noir generally) with a healthy dollop of Dimension of Miracles.

Aliens on the planet T’toom pick up earth radio broadcasts and a young Toomler called Zoot becomes somewhat obsessed with the early radio adaptations of Chandler’s work and decides to head to Earth to become a PI. Landing in Malibu he is befriended by some surfers (mostly teens/twenties with one older guy).  Being basically humanoid, he manages to pass with various tales about toxic waste nose drops and too many drugs.

Meanwhile his new friends have a classic confrontation with beach bikers resulting in a bet about a surfing competition (surfing in this world is done using telepresece robots, not directly). The surfer’s bots get wrecked, all the parts and replacements are unavailable, and there are various other complications running around.

An engaging story that trips along with a cracking pace, wonderful dry wit, hard boiled dialogue. I particualrly like Mel Gilden’s wonderful in-your-face punning names for characters like Whipper Will, Knighten Daise (and his daughter Stormy) and the like.

These have dated well and exist in a sort of timeless parallel timeline with advanced robots but 80s sensibilities. Strongly recommended for comic relief from life’s vicissitudes.

This was  re-read, after I’d read the Science in the City trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting). The first thing that struck me was the repeat of characters between this and both Escape from Kathmandu and the Science in the City trilogy. In fact, this is in some ways a dry run for the trilogy. The politics and the science fit right together, but it’s not quite like the trilogy is a sequel. It’s clear that Robinson made good use of his time at the US Antarctic base as a writer-in-residence. I don’t know all that much about extreme survival, but all the details hang together very well and it has a lot of verisimilitude at the very least. It’s a bit eco-utopian, but then that’s of course one of his ongoing themes.

He’s written better, but there’s lots worse out there.

Robin McKinley does the modern vampire in this one. Neil Gaiman describes it on the cover as “pretty much perfect”. I had this recommended somewhere a few months ago – I can’t remember where now – and since I’d liked McKinley’s Damar books, I decided I’d give it a go. It’s pretty good, but I don’t agree with Gaiman on its perfection. Certainly it’s a cut above most of this sub-genre (and I don’t just mean Twilight and other such teen wangst). In setup I was rather reminded of Kim Harrison’s Hollows. This is a non-masquerade supernatural world, where the beasties have come out if not into the daylight then at least into knowledge. There’s been war – the Voodoo Wars – and humanity has been significantly reduced in size. There are magic users, part-demons, weres (not just wolves, but all sorts of other changelings as well) and vampires. Vamps are regarded as the worst of the bad bunch and most of them, particularly the antagonist of this story, are pretty nasty pieces of work. Mostly people don’t survive an encounter with a vampire, they just tend to die.

This novel has two great things about it. The characterisations of all the major and most of the minor characters is brilliant (it’s one of McKinley’s strengths as a writer). Her take on the “good vampire” is also much better than most and works at the character level. However, the weakness of this book lies in the backdrop. It’s very detailed but it’s all two dimensional. It just doesn’t quite seem to work when one thinks about it. Characters in the defence force against supernatural wrongdoing fear that in 100 ears people will be ruled by vampires completely. There was huge attrition in the Voodoo Wars. None of this seems to really work, though, if one thinks about it a lot. This was published in 2002, so probably written a year or a couple earlier and there’s an Internet-equivalent in there with some interesting elements, though it seems quite dated and text-oriented, a bit like A Fire Upon the Deep, so maybe it was written even earlier than that. Anyway, what troubles me about this is that if many of the big cities have been de-populated, then how has advanced civilisation survived as well as it has? THe “New Arcadia” medium sized city is one of the larger ones left, we’re told, though we’re not actually told where it is, beyond it being the US. It’s somewhere with deciduous trees and real seasons including winter, not just climate, but it could be New England, Pacific NorthWest, Great Lakes. There’s a distinct lack of locality to it which distracted me rather.

I think this would have made a great few books gradually exploring this world in more detail and explaining just how it came about, and how close it went to the lights going out, how they were and are kept on and what the danger is short, medium and long term from vampires and other “Others”. But McKinley doesn’t seem to write series, only one-offs (plus the odd related book).

Still, very recommended for those who like the vampires but not the fang-fucker sub-genre. See also, Charlie Stross‘ forthcoming The Rhesus Chart for his take on vamps.

The third Peter Grant urban fantasy detective novel by Ben Aaronovich. It’s quite good, but not quite up to the excellence of the first two (Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho). This time Peter is seconded to an almost normal murder enquiry, with just a hint of weirdness. The weirdness escalates slowly through the case, to the dismay of the murder investigation team. There’s a sub-plot following up on the ongoing story arc about illicit magicians and there’s nice character follow-on with Peter and new recruit to the team Lesley. Another of Peter’s many relatives is introduced as a probable ongoing character (a mouthy thirteen year old cousin). As the name suggests this novel dives into the London Tube system, lovingly used by many for supernatural fictive inspiration before by the likes of Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, soon to be revamped as a radio play by BBC Radio 4/Extra). It’s a decent read but just felt slightly thin compared to the previous two. The plot plods along ((pun intended) as a more-or-less normal murder enquiry, just with added magic. It’s all a little bit mundane. Still a cut above many in this oeuvre, but I hope Aaronovich can raise his game back up to the first two in the future.

The final installment in Robinson’s Science in the Capital story is to my mind the weakest of the three books. An American friend once called The West Wing “Liberal wishful thinking on screen”. This book is somewhat like that as well. There are intertwined plots about an NSF-turned presidential bureacrat (adviser to the President’s science adviser) who struggles with a brain injury leading to an inability to make decisions (and the need to make a decision whether or not to have the surgery to try and correct it) while simultaneously the same man is having an affair with a spy (linked to a friendwith links to the intelligence community as well); a presidential aide (think Sam Seaborn from the West Wing) struggling with raising a young family; Tibetan buddhists re-initialising Shambala near Washington, DC; the battles against global warming both scientific and political.

The subplots more or less work individually but I think there’s too many of them and they tie up too neatly. While there’s an acknowledgement that averting everything bad about global warming by the end of the book isn’t feasible I find this way too optimistic about whether US politics will ever be able to face up to the reality of climate change, even with the serious weather consequences in the first two books. There’s also a distinct lack of timing about the book in the tech. Unlike in Antarctica (which I’m now re-reading, more on that later) where he at least makes an effort to project the tech slightly, in this it could easily be 2012 from the tech available. Perhaps it’s meant to be a parallel world in which global warming has progressed slightly faster and this is 2012 (well, 2007 when the book was written, anyway).

The whole trilogy is interesting but not spectacular. Certainly far from my favourite Robinson and lacking the deep sparks that made the Three Californias books so brilliant.

The second book in Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. There’s definitely some wish-fulfillment going on here, with scientists in an adventure with global warming and left wing politics in the US. Definitely mundane SF with a bit of magic realism dropped in as the “one impossibility” allowed. I wasn’t as happy with this book as the first one. A majority of this is taken up with Frank as the main viewpoint character and as the story went on I found him less and less sympathetic (and I found him the least engaging of the viewpoint characters in the first book). There’s a side plot about him being romatically involved with a spy that reads rather false compared to the realism of much of the rest (the magic realism aside). still, generally well-written and it cracks along at a decent pace, but maybe a bit much filler to get to the finale, which I’ve now started (Sixty Days and Counting, review coming soon).

Having fallen so far behind on reviewing I’m going to try to keep up with what I’m reading now rather than trying to catch up in order. Forty Signs of Rain is the start of Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy about climate change, starring a cast of very well drawn people n the NSF, a congressional office and a biotech startup. It was written in 2004, well before MacLeod’s Intrusion but shares some interesting parallels with that one – married with young children protagonists, biotech companies, climate change leading to European cooling and rising sea levels. There’s just a hint of mysticism in Forty Signs of Rain (less than Intrusion) but it might build up over the trilogy. There’s a flashback to Robinson’s earlier Escape from Kathmandu with the story also featuring Tibetan Buddhists from Shambahla.

This is an excellently written piece of mundane SF. It doesn’t even have the one miracle piece. Somewhat like his earlier Gold Coast (partof the Three Californias trilogy) this is a “if this goes on” tale, though the direction thigns are heading are looking more like they could lead to “The Wild Shore” than the Gold Coast future. It’s unusual these days to have scientist protagonists (early SF like Doc Smith had hero adventurer scientists, but Robinson features working scientists who worry about funding, political inteference, political fallout and the philosophy of science.  While we’ll see how the trilogy pans out, this is an excellent start.

If I’m feeling up to it I’ll tackle “The Years of Rice and Salt” and “2312” after this trilogy but they’re both hefty single volumes, though as a trilogy these three outweight them. Strange that as I’m still a little convalescent from the colitis, (and. in fact just come down with a moderately bad head cold yesterday and today) I feel up to tackling a trilogy of about 1200 pages but not 650+ (Years) or 550+ (2312). I also have still never read his Mars Trilogy though I’ve read most of the rest of his work. Maybe I’ll re-read Antarctica as a warm-up to the Mars Trilogy, soon.

Between travel (Worldcon in Chicago, followed a week after getting back by a trip to the UK for a conference) and then getting seriously ill (major colitis attack) I’ve gotten well behind on my book reviewing, though I’ve been reading a lot as I convalesce. However, I felt moved to review this latest read ahead of trying to do a catch up on earlier reads.

This should have been Ken MacLeod’s masterpiece. His 1984 (he’s described on a cover quote as a modern Orwell). Unfortunately he had a wonderful idea and failed in the execution. This is mundane SF and includes the one allowed magical idea. Unfortunately it’s this magical idea that makes this merely a reasonable read instead of 1984 for 2012. The magical mcguffin element turns what should be a clear clarion call against the direction of travel of the UK particularly (but also much else of Western civilisation) in the risk versus freedom debate (going way too far in reducing risk and denying people’s freedoms, and actually causing greater harm in fighting the risks in many ways) into something of a damp squib. Instead of a clear example of how far a society with supposedly its own citizens’ safety and security at heart could become the threat itself, the characters are saved by a desu ex machina from the consequences of minor infractions and over-reaction by the authorities. Worth reading if you’re a MacLeod fan, but he’s written better in recent years (Learning the World being his last, so far, space opera, and The Restoration Game is a wonderful paranoid political SF novel which reminds me of Halting State/Rule 34 and Declare simultaneously).

Sigh.

The first thing I noticed is that this book is typeset rather differently. The earlier ones had a somewhat distinctive look. This one is uchmore densely set and is thus a lot more words since it also comes in at a few more pages. Too many plot threads to tie up in the same number of words as the earlier ones, I think. This really works as a finale to a series. All the major plot points, personal and societal, come together in a nicely converging pattern and Compton’s ingenuity, diplomacy and fighting skills are all given a work-out here. There’s a mix of action on the trains, the train stations, another space station and a planet. Ancient tech, ancient crimes, revelations of past and present duplicity by individuals and races all come together in a satisying action-packed denouement.

My only problem is that one of the mysteries of “Trains in Space” was never solved. Sure, in the first book the explanation is given that it’s not the trains, tracks or tube that are the secret, but the coreline. However, this doesn’t really explain how the tube that encloses the coreline can be built over such huge distances (halfway across the galaxy). A bit of hand-waving is given where an apparent speed of 100 kmh compared to the tube translates to 1 light-year per hour “external” (relativity, schmelativity) speed (and no worrying about causality problems). But there’s no mention of any contraction of space occuring and a tube big enough to take sixteen train lines across tens of thousands of lightywars would need the mass of multiple star systems to complete. Still, this is Space Opera, not hard SF and so one just has to accept the background without delving too deeply and enjoy the story.