a-cubed.info

Continuing with my reading of my stock of unread Alastair Reynolds books. Century Rain is, I think, his first published novel not in the Revelation Space universe. It’s an interesting mix of a bit of alternate history, detective novel and nanocaust. He seems to be coming up against the singularity problem: how to write interesting fiction that’s accessible to human 1.0 readers about human 2.0+ characters. He falls back on the discovered alien ruins for a major plot macguffin as well. A similar “network” of FTL travel systems that various others have used (Cherryh’s Gates from Morgain, Zahns “Night Train to Rigel” being the two that come straight to my mind but there are plenty of others). As befits a stellar physicist his system has more detail about how it operates (not how it works, but how it’s used) that most of the others.

A story which cracks along at an intense pace for all of its 500 pages combining some compelling human drama along with whiz-bang pyrotechnics and interesting science speculations on the links between the very large and very small scales of physics. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the last sentence which seemed unnecessary and rather against character for that protagonist. I’d have preferred that line to be left as unwritten, though the consideration that led up to it could have been left in. I think that kind of unfinished thought would have also given more weight to the possibility of a “frozen in time” outcome as well. That may have just been me, though.

Alastair Reynolds is the Hal-Con Overseas GoH this year. Years ago I read Revelation Space (a couple of years after its release) and really liked it. I started buying his books, mostly in hardback. However, Reynolds’ work is deep and complex, in plot, fictional structures, science (fact and fiction) and writing style. None of this is a bad thing, but through most of the period from 2003-2010 I was rarely up to reading things this complex. So, I kept buying and storing his books but never getting around to reading them. I kept them when I did the great cull before moving to Japan, though. Like my growing unread Gene Wolfe pile, I always wanted to get back to being abe to read things like this and now I can. My new circumstances give me the energy to tackle things like this again, so I’m catching up on at least some of his work. I started last year with what I thought was the Inhibitors trilogy by re-reading Revelation Space and then reading Chasm City and Redempton Ark for the first time. I’ve got but haven’t read the related short story collection Diamond Dogs, Turquois Days. On returning to Reynolds this year I looked at the order of his books and found that Absolution Gap was the fourth and final Inhibitor book. Oops. This was something of a mistake on my part. In particular it was probably the worst point at which to break the story. Everything that happens in the first three is needed to understand this one. There is no handy “what has gone before” revision guide. The in-text in-character descriptions just about sufficed to bring me up to speed, but I struggled occasionally with understanding bits that depended on knowing the previous history between the various characters. Definitely not a book to recommend for stand-alone reading. However, as the finale to a series that started out with stunning scope and widescreen baroque science fictional concepts, it works tremendously. With each book weighing in at around 600 pages, the 2400 pages of this series takes in so many concepts of science fiction it’s impossible to list them all (Charlie Stross is another author who throws fifteen ideas in where more parsimonious writers would flog one out for each book). From group minds to bio-engineered sentient pigs. From just-slower-than-light travel with time dilation, life extension and cryo-sleep to nano-plagues and brane theory both impacting on brains. It’s a wonder that he manages to fit a plot in around all the high concept stuff here, but the characters are all believable, even the inhuman, non-human, post-human ones. The depiction of the madness of Quaiche (deliberately dosing himself on indoctrinal viruses to shore up his religious faith), the twisted semi-group minds of conjoiners like Skade, Remontoire and Clavain and the mystical child messiah of Aura, are all tours de force. Not in this book, but in Redemption Ark, the one descriptive piece that really stayed with me is the brief point-of-view element from the Inhibitors and their creation of a short-lived “intelligence” to fulfil their mission of removing star-faring intelligence while retaining as much as possible of the rest of the ecosystem. Wonderful stuff. I’m continuing on with Reynolds now, reading Century Rain. I must read the Inhibitor universe short stories before my memory of the setting fades again, but I’m not in the mood for short stories just now.

I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.

If you came across the phrase “hikikomori shut-in” in a short story, would you understand what it meant or would it jar you out of the reading zone and maybe necessitate you looking it up? It’s a bit of verbiage, I know (all hikikomori are shut-ins), but I like the idea that the term hikikomori could enter English more thoroughly than it has, but as it hasn’t entered it fully yet adding the “shut-in” verbiage seems like a reasonable compromise for a near-future story. I could just use “shut-in” but that has a broader meaning anyway and doesn’t necessarily include the cutting off of physical contact with others, just an inability to leave one’s home due to physical mobility of psychological issues. Please comment on LJ or a-cubed.info as to whether you would find it distracting in a short story.

I’ve just finished Chris Wooding’s “Retribution Falls” and “The Black Lung Captain” and felt like a little light reviewing. Warning, some mild spoilers ahead. (more…)

On The Register recently there was an interesting article about ebooks and how the book publishing industry seem to be following the music and movie industry down the same path of woe by trying to screw their customers in the move to digital distribution. Leaving aside the actual proportion of costs which the physical printing, distribution and returns of overstock entail, the idea that the digital edition costs MORE than the print edition really is utterly stupid. Modern publishing uses internal digital formats for the files which are then passed to the printer for physical printing. Getting this into the digital distribution medium is  trivial one time programming exercise. While I would be willing to accept that the digital price difference should only be small, the fact that new ebooks are selling at higher prices than the hardcover is just stupid.

Anyway, that’s all covered in the article. In the comments the author discusses the issue of the public lending library with some of the commenters. That’s what prompted this post, actually, which is thinking how it might be possible to run a public lending library with ebooks. (more…)

I recently ordered the new Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel “Iorich” from Amazon.co.jp. I’ve been waiting since January 2010 for it to come out in paperback. Always annoying that long delay before a paperback, especially when they suddenly start producing hardbacks of a once a year series. I don’t like having different types in a series, particularly a long one like this and since i’ve got the rest in standard sized paperback, I’m going to continue in that vein. So, Amazon in Japan finally indicated it was due in January 2011 and I ordered it. Then they kept pushing back when it would be sent and finally they pushed it back to January 2012! WTF? Checking on Amazon.com, it turns out that Tor have now produced a trade sized paperback (8.2inches tall) which unlike my Harry Dresden books is too big even to fit on the shelf that the others are on. So, we now have the hardback appearing in January 2010, the stupid size paperback in January 2011 and the mass market sized paperback not until January 2012. A wait of two years until the ordinary paperback comes out. The book publishing industry seems to be hell bent on following the music publishing industry into screwing itself up by pissing off its regular customers. They’re insisting on DRM for ebooks, they’re not making all the older even very popular material available in ebooks (Pratchett’s Discworld isn’t all available for example) and even when they do they’ve screwed up the permissions so there isn’t a worldwide appearence (sometimes if you want it in ebook form it’s out but the only way to get it is illegitimate), and their core product is being over-squeezed in its traditional market in a way that annoys regular purchasers. Way to  destroy your own industry, guys. I don’t have an ebook reader, but if I did I’d be tempted to download one of the versions available on bittorrent. Especially since the legitimate version seems to be Nook only (that’s right, restrict your market – great way to keep your customers).

In three pieces of fiction involving heaven and hell (relatively) recently, I’ve come across a similar kind of concept: the idea of a place outside the influecen of heaven and hell. Is this a new meme bubbling up in fiction or is it just an old trope I’ve not recognised before? The three in question have very different versions of the idea, though:

• Mike Carey’s Lucifer series starts with Lucifer gaining an exist from God’s creation to “the void” beyond;
• Simon R. Green’s Nightside is explicitly created to be outside the power of both heaven and hell, although both angels and demons do visit it when the plot demands;
• Liz William’s The Shadow Pavilion introduces a new element to her classic Eastern mythology with Between the places in the cracks where inspiration comes from.

I’ve always liked supernatural thrillers, although they were few and far between until recently. Starting with Laurell K. Hamilton (there were others writing such stuff before her but she seems to have been the first really high profile success – and yes, I’m ignoring Anne Rice here) and her Anita Blake series, there has been a growing sub-genre of urban gothic. It usually posits a re-emergence of some or all of the traditional ghosts and ghoulies into society, either completely openly or partly hidden.

However, being a fan of the supernatural thriller elements in this fiction, I’ve ended up reading a bunch of stuff which has a 180 page supernatural thriller buried inside a 500 page book filled out with kinky sex. I don’t mind the odd sex scene in my fiction. Sex is part of life and including it in fiction can round out the emotional content. However, I find that many of these books are descending into what I’ve decided to dub “Thrills and Moon”, where the sex becomes the principle story and the thriller element becomes a sideline. Here is a list of some of the books in the supernatural thriller category I’ve read, with an indication of how much Thrills and Moon element they contain (all in my opinion of course).

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Someone just linked to the Lolthulhu site from User Friendly comment board. I’d not come across this one before. Great fun.