Scifi – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 KABU KABU by Nnedi Okorafor /2014/kabu-kabu-by-nnedi-okorafor/ Sun, 23 Mar 2014 12:30:42 +0000 /?p=26049 Book Quote:

“Lance the Brave stood on the edge of the cliff panicking, his long blond hair blowing in the breeze. Behind him, they were coming fast through the lush grassy field. All Lance could do was stare, his cheeks flushed. Once upon him, they would suck the life from his soul, like lions sucking meat from the bones of a fresh kill. He held his long sword high. Its silver handle was encrusted with heavy blue jewels and it felt so right in his hand.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAR 23, 2014)

Nnedi Okorafor’s story collection Kabu Kabu, published in 2013, provides the reader with a fascinating glimpse into the author’s rich imagination, vibrant language and captivating scenarios. Created at different stages in her extensive writing career, Okorafor treats us to a range of intriguing characters and their adventures, skilfully (and successfully) combining elements of speculative fiction and fantasy with African folklore and magical realism, and yes, indeed, political and social present day issues. Many of her stories have been nominated, shortlisted and/or have won literary recognition and awards as have her novels.

Born in the US of Nigerian parents, Nnedi Okorafor developed strong ties to her parents’ home country since her childhood. Not surprisingly, her stories here are set in Nigeria – the real and the imagined society. In fact, Okorafor is a convincing advocate for African science fiction category of storytelling. It opens, among others, new avenues for creating future realities.

Admittedly, I am not usually a great fan of speculative fiction, yet, Okorafor has captured my attention and imagination, from the first story to the last – all twenty one of them. I particular enjoyed the character of Arro-yo, the “windseeker”, who appears in several somewhat linked stories. Arro-yo is an outcast in her community because she can capture the wind and fly. Okorafor expands with her stories on African folklore that singled out girls born with “locked hair” and who had special powers. They could bring misery and misfortune to their home and were therefore chased away. Arro-yo’s adventures in Okorafor’s stories are nonetheless anchored very much in reality, whether she is caught up in civil unrest or fears for her life for other reasons.

The title story, Kabu Kabu – the name for an unlicensed taxi – sets the reader up for a roller coaster of a ride. The protagonist, a young woman living in Chicago, needs to catch a plane to return to Nigeria for a wedding… a hilarious escapade and a great opening story for the adventures that follow in Africa… humorous at times, serious at others, yet always engaging and thought provoking. It would take too long to introduce other stories… just read them all. Whoopi Goldberg provides a motivating introduction to the book

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0 from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Prime Books (October 2, 2013)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
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EXTRAS: More on this book
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]]> ORFEO by Richard Powers /2014/orfeo-by-richard-powers/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 12:56:07 +0000 /?p=25519 Book Quote:

“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 34 readers
PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> ARCHANGEL by Andrea Barrett /2014/archangel-by-andrea-barrett/ Sun, 02 Mar 2014 13:53:33 +0000 /?p=25691 Book Quote:

“Why are we interested?” Taggart said. He smiled at his old teacher. “We’re both just curious about them— there’s a lot of discussion about how they evolved. Why do you think a cave-dwelling species might lose its eyes?”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 2, 2014)

Phoebe Cornelius, the protagonist of “The Ether of Space,” the second of the five long stories in this collection, makes a living explaining scientific concepts to laymen. This is Andrea Barrett’s forte also. Three of these stories are set in the wings of some great scientific discovery: Phoebe is trying to comprehend Einstein’s Relativity; her son Sam becomes a pioneer in the relatively new science of genetics; and an earlier story explores the impact of Darwinism on the younger generation of scientists in America. In all these cases, Barrett explains the underlying concepts with great clarity. Sometimes, though, the stories seem to be running on two tracks simultaneously, one scientific and the other personal; I don’t know that readers with little interest in science would get much out of the book on the personal level alone.

For some reason, Barrett seems to be drawn to scientists who are deluded or blind, rather than the great innovators. “The Island” is about the summer school set up on Penikese Island (the predecessor of the Woods Hole Institute) by the eminent American scientist Louis Agassiz, a celebrated critic of Darwinism. The grand old man in the background of Phoebe’s story is Sir Oliver Lodge, the great English physicist and radio pioneer who, late in life, made the double error of rejecting Einstein and embracing spiritualism. And Phoebe’s son Sam, although on to something important, invites ridicule by suggesting that some discredited Lamarckian notions might nonetheless coexist with Mendelism.

Barrett’s bookend stories are less tied to scientific theory. In the first, “The Investigators,” a Detroit teenager named Constantine Boyd, spends a summer at a research farm in upstate New York run by his uncle, and watches the early experiments with flying machines taking place in the adjoining valley. In the last, “Archangel,” Boyd reappears as one of the Polar Bear Expedition, that small contingent of American troops sent to Northwest Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks; the true protagonist of that story, however, is a young American woman working with early X-Ray equipment in a military hospital. I liked these two stories especially for their greater emphasis on historical action and human qualities. But despite their concern with scientific theory, the other stories share these qualities too. “The Particles,” the story about Sam Cornelius, begins in high drama with the sinking of the ATHENIA, the first British ship to be torpedoed in WW2. And Phoebe Cornelius, after all her tussles with the mathematics of Relativity, ends with an understanding of relativity in quite a different sense, in the embrace of her extended family, both living and dead.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 22 readers
PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, edition (August 19, 2013)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Andrea Barrett
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/ /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:37:21 +0000 /?p=22307 Book Quote:

“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 31, 2011)

Haruki Murakami doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. Though his prose is spare, almost styleless, it’s more supple than muscular, and though his stories are often occupied with mundane domesticities, they’re also often founded in the surreal. It’s no surprise, then, that Murakami’s long-awaited latest, 1Q84, isn’t easy to shelf –it’s at home among either fantasy, thriller or hard-boiled noir – but one thing’s for sure: this book is grotesquely Murakami. That is, quiet domesticity punctuates adventures tenuously connected to reality, and yet for all its faults – and some have argued there are many – this is a book that haunts you long after you’re done, a book that, like a jealous lover, won’t let you move on.

For all its parallel worlds and magical creatures, for all its anonymous sex and ruthless violence, this is a book about love. The lovers in question, Tengo and Aomame, haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. In fact, they may have never spoken at all. Their shared history is limited to a 5th grade incident during which a ten-year-old Aomame reached for Tengo’s hand – and stilled his soul. But for Tengo, a popular athlete and academic star, to befriend Aomame, a religious freak who stands up and shouts a version of the Lord’s Prayer before she eats lunch, would’ve been social suicide. Aomame transfers schools before Tengo acknowledges to himself what she means to him.

Twenty years pass – it’s 1984 – and Tengo, considered a math prodigy, has frittered away his promise: he teaches math at a Tokyo cram school while moonlighting as a novelist. Though he has weekly sex with a married girlfriend, he still wonders about Aomame.

Disowned by her family for breaking with their church, the Society of Witnesses, Aomame is a lone-wolf. She works as a fitness instructor at a swanky Tokyo gym and although she trolls for wild one-night stands, her heart, after all these years, still belongs to Tengo. As it turns out, she moonlights too –as an assassin. Under the auspices of a wealthy and mysterious dowager, Aomame, with a method of her own invention, kills wife-beaters and rapists.

The Tengo-Aomame attachment – their love itself – is absurd, and this absurdity calls into existence a strange alternative world – 1Q84, the world with a question mark – with a second, “moss-green” moon. Ostensibly, Aomame enters this alternate world, like Alice down the rabbit hole, when she escapes a gridlocked Metropolitan expressway by climbing down an emergency stairwell. But it’s Tengo, in ghost-writing the best-seller, Air Chryaslis, or perhaps in writing a novel of his own, that opens that portal. What has brought Tengo into 1Q84 isn’t entirely clear – although his skill as a storyteller is a factor – but, unbeknownst to the other, both are trapped in 1Q84, a world that becomes increasingly perilous.

When Komatsu, Tengo’s editor, suggests Tengo rewrite a manuscript submission, a fantastical, but compelling story, told in substandard prose, Tengo is hesitant. The author, a strange and beautiful 17-year old girl, who goes by the name of Fuka-Eri, insists that her story, a tale about Little People who emerge from the mouth of a goat and weave wombs out of strands of reality, is true. The Little People use these wombs, or air chrysalises, to gestate doubles, or dohtas. The dohtas act like antennas of sorts, receivers for the perceivers of “the voice.” Fuka-Eri has no literary ambitions and gives Tengo permission to rewrite her work.

But when Air Chrysalis is a runaway hit, a powerful and mysterious cult, Sakigake, is angered. Although most people read the book as fantasy, Sakigake maintains that Fuka-Eri, the estranged daughter of their mysterious Leader, has revealed sacred truths not meant for outsiders. It seems they’ll stop at nothing to halt publication, but when their Leader is found dead, Sakigake must devote itself to finding his murderer.

As it turns out, the Leader is suspected of raping pre-pubescent girls, Fuka-Eri, his daughter, among them. The dowager charges Aomame with dispatching the Leader to “the other side,” but when he demonstrates his supernatural powers, Aomame becomes conflicted and confused. A telepath, the Leader knows Aomame’s intention, but the cost of his great gift is excruciating pain. The Leader welcomes death, and when Aomame hesitates, he bargains with her: his death for Tengo’s life. Unfortunately, killing the Leader will likely mean Aomame’s death too. But, in sacrificing her life for Tengo’s, their connection inexplicably tightens, and the danger Aomame flees inadvertently flings them together.

1Q84 is possible because of faith. It is the belief in love, in something beyond reason, something magical, that creates the metaphysical space for impossibilities to actualize themselves. Born from air chrysalises, dohtas are affectless shadows, without desires or dreams of their own. But we only need look around us, at the “hunched over people carried by force of habit into the new day” to see that it’s all too easy to lose your dreams and desires to the monotony of everyday life, individual passions and secret hopes lost to the roles we play – father, mother, teacher, banker – unaware that if you stop and look up, you might just see two moons. Of course, the real problem, as Tengo and Aomame figure out, is not the revelation of the magical, but how to steal a bit of that wonder up the rabbit hole, to the mundane world of day jobs and traffic jams.

Murakami shirks conventional expectations, refusing to answer the questions he poses and tie his loose ends into pretty little bows. He breaks from craft wisdom – stick to the essentials – with gratuitous descriptions and his characters repeatedly mull over the same plot points. He even challenges Chekov’s famous maxim by introducing a gun that never goes off. But I can’t help but feel that’s the point; life isn’t pared down to essentials, and insofar as our lives have meaning, they’re necessarily narratives, stories just as mundane – and hopefully just as magical, if not as fantastical – as this one.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 514 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/feed/ 1 WHEN SHE WOKE by Hilary Jordan /2011/when-she-woke-by-hilary-jordan/ Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:16:53 +0000 /?p=21410 Book Quote:

” ‘Hannah Elizabeth Payne, having been found guilty of the crime of murder in the second degree, I hereby sentence you to undergo melachoming by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to spend thirty days in the Chrome ward of the Crawford State Prison and to remain a Red for a period of sixteen years.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 6, 2011)

Hannah Payne is twenty-six years old and Red, with a capital R, her badge of shame. Her skin has been “melachromed” by the State for her crime of abortion, and for not naming the abortionist and not identifying the father, the celebrated pastor and TV (“vid”) evangelist, Aidan Dale, who is now the nation’s “Secretary of Faith.” Her sentence is thirty days confinement, and then sixteen years in the community as a Red, where she will be constantly ostracized and persecuted.

Other criminals of the same or different color (depending on the crime) are wandering through the prison of life, beyond the walls of crowded cells (this is the State’s answer for overcrowding), and many don’t survive — the Blue child molesters have especially low survival rates. Hannah is deeply in love with the married Aiden, and refuses to upbraid him or the doctor who was kind and tender to her. She is also a product of her religious upbringing, and when she wakes up Red, she concedes that she deserves this punishment.

Many dystopian novels are noir and bleak -— you can just hear Mahler’s symphonies in your imagination -— the lost world of childhood, the yearning of fulfillment, life’s despair and discord. Therefore, Jordan’s more insistent, high-strung tone in reimagining a liberal interpretation of The Scarlett Letter, Hawthorne’s gothic melodrama, was unexpected. Her exuberance is like a lit match that never goes out. It has a pumping action, much like Dennis Lehane’s in his Kenzie and Gennaro series.

It also conforms to the margins of conventional genre more than the open-endedness of literature; Hannah is portrayed as a solid, misunderstood hero, and the demarcation of villain/hero-martyr is obvious and continuous with the secondary characters as well, except for a surprising and complex French radical named Simone, the most intriguing character in this tale. Much of the time, Hannah is on the lam with her newfound Red friend, Kayla, and heartily braves and overcomes dangerous hurdles at a page-turning glee.

In this near-future world, Roe v Wade has been overturned, and most of the fifty states have outlawed abortion. The government métier is fundamental New Testament, and is ruthless and unforgiving in its Kingdom-minded law. From reading this book, it appears that abortion is the primary preoccupation of the militant State, and that Aidan Dale is the only celebrity on the vid. Much of the novel takes place in the North Dallas area, where Jordan partly grew up. She knows the ingrained and forceful pieties of the area (the actual geographical area of Roe v Wade), and seems to draw on them. She started this book even before Mudbound, and it is left to wonder if she was shaking loose some demons from the Texas Red Oaks.

This is a commercial novel, unlike Mudbound, with a knowing arc and slender, reductive characters. She has a gift for thrumming action, even if it tends toward didacticism and a tidy outcome. This isn’t a novel that provokes thinking, as Jordan does much of the thinking for the reader, but it does provide action and visceral thrills and some poetic lyricism amidst the many indictments against religious zealots.

There is an exquisitely transcendent scene about two-thirds through, where a quietness and stillness pervades for a few pages, and Hannah reaches a key turning point in her life, and expresses it in a way that I hope others won’t fail to appreciate. It may seem lurid at face value, or even gratuitous, but it is anything but —- rather, it is sublime in its implication. This was the high point of refinement in this not typically nuanced novel.

Twists and turns are relentless and exciting, although it is obvious, in this world of morally challenged monkeys running the State, who will prevail. Ambiguity is not a paramount trait in this heavy-handed story with potboiler themes. It is comfort food—like popcorn with a little too much butter, and addictive. The author will keep you fastened till the end, because Jordan’s thrall with her characters and exultance with her story is contagious and highly spirited.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 351 readers
PUBLISHER: Algonquin Books (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Hillary Jordan
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> THE VISIBLE MAN by Chuck Klosterman /2011/the-visible-man-by-chuck-klosterman/ Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:21:15 +0000 /?p=21540 Book Quote:

“Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (OCT 6, 2011)

It was more than one hundred years ago that H. G. Wells penned the science fiction classic, The Invisible Man, which subsequently paved new paths in the horror genre. The idea of a mad scientist who makes himself invisible and becomes mentally deranged as a result, is one that has taken root in popular culture ever since.

In his genre-bending new novel, Chuck Klosterman borrows the essential elements from Wells’ classic with some modifications. For one thing, he fixes the science. There has been some discussion that a truly invisible man would have been blind whereas Wells’ lead character, Griffin, clearly was not. So Klosterman’s protagonist, referred to simply as Y_, is not invisible — he is the visible man. But Y_ , much like Griffin, has an ability to make himself invisible to others.

At the novel’s outset, Y_ calls a therapist Victoria Vick and sets out some pretty elaborate conditions for his therapy sessions: she will ask no questions, meetings will be only over the phone, no forms will be filled out and payments will be sent by cash. “I came to you so I could manage the guilt I don’t deserve to have,” Y_ tells her.

Not sure what to make of the situation, Vicky tentatively agrees. So begins a series of sessions during which Vicky finds out that Y_ is a scientist who has developed technology that can make him invisible. Y_ once worked for the NSA in Chaminade, Hawaii, creating a special “cloaking” device—a membranous suit which when slathered with a special cream can make anyone invisible to others.

Y_, who has always been obsessed with trying to figure out what really makes people tick, uses this device to make himself invisible and spy on all kinds of people. He slips into their homes and watches the minutiae of everyday life — an extreme form of voyeurism. Quite psychotic, Y_ never suspects this could be a problem but instead justifies his activities as essential to his understanding of the human spirit. “How was I supposed to relate to these people if I didn’t even know what they were really like or who they really were?” he asks, “I knew how they acted, but that’s not the same thing.”

The Visible Man is written in an interesting format; it is narrated by Vicky and laid out mostly as a collection of reports from each therapy session. This format allows the reader to not only peek into Y_’s bizarre temperament but it also lets us see Vicky’s increasingly impaired judgment as she lets Y_ continually break traditional patient-therapist rules.

Over the weeks, as Y_ keeps up with his stories Vicky finds herself spellbound. Her normal life is disrupted and she gets pulled into an elaborate web that Y_ weaves. “To this day, whenever I slipped into boredom, I find myself fantasizing and reimagining the stories he told me,” Vicky remembers.

As the novel moves along, The Visible Man gets incrementally creepy until the very end. Klosterman, whose Downtown Owl was a gem, does a great job of using science fiction as a frame against which to pin a very contemporary story. It is to Klosterman’s credit that the idea of a delusional man creating a suit and cream that would make him invisible, doesn’t seem extremely far-fetched.

Even more fascinating is the fact that the readers too will come to find much of interest in Y_’s subjects’ lives. By boiling down life to its very essence — to the level of mere existence — Klosterman does a wonderful job in pointing out what matters to most of us. “I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from,” Y_ says, quite observantly.

“People need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting,” Klosterman writes. If that is not a mirror held up to contemporary society, I don’t know what is.

The Visible Man sometimes gets too caught up in its own ingeniousness and the story strains under the weight of the novel’s structural construct. The letters, the bullet points, they start to seem restrictive after a while.

Nevertheless, The Visible Man eventually proves to be a worthy follow-up to the fantastic Downtown Owl. It is creepy precisely because the story is just ever so plausible. When gawking through Twitter and Facebook is possible, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to have an invisible man checking you out during your most intimate and mundane moments. You’ll be sure to look over your shoulder more than once.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 66 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Chuck Klosterman
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> REAMDE by Neal Stephenson /2011/reamde-by-neal-stephenson/ Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:55:08 +0000 /?p=21095 Book Quote:

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 508 readers
PUBLISHER: William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

]]> THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss /2011/the-twelfth-enchantment-by-david-liss/ Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:47:23 +0000 /?p=20422 Book Quote:

“I know that changes are coming, and we must be ready to face them. Dark and terrible things, things such as what you saw with Lord Byron and at the mill, but those things are … minor disturbances, harbingers of beings much more dangerous.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  AUG 26, 2011)

The Twelfth Enchantment, by David Liss, starts off promisingly. It is the early nineteenth century and our heroine, Lucy Derrick, is a twenty-year-old orphan who is living unhappily in Nottingham, England, with her cruel uncle and an abusive woman named Mrs. Quince. Although she was well-educated by her late father, Lucy was left almost penniless when he died. She is at the mercy of her vicious uncle, Richard Lowell, who cannot wait to be rid of her. In fact, her uncle plans to give her hand in marriage to a thirty-five year old, dried up prune of a man named Olson, the owner of a local hosiery mill.

Although the Industrial Revolution has brought prosperity to some, this newfound wealth and efficiency has come at a high price. Smokestacks belch thick and toxic fumes that pollute the areas bordering the factories. In addition, manual laborers have been replaced by machinery, leading to high unemployment and abject poverty for those who can no longer feed their families. Furthermore, conditions in the factories are vile and unsafe; even the children who work the looms are beaten when they do not meet their overseer’s expectations.

Lucy’s existence is upended by a series of strange events involving Lord Byron (he shows up often in historical fiction these days), a roué named Mr. Morrison who tarnished Lucy’s reputation when she was just sixteen, an avuncular William Blake, and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Mary Crawford, who introduces Lucy to a world of spells. It seems that Lucy has uncanny abilities that, if harnessed properly, would give her enormous power. She will need to master a huge amount of arcane knowledge and show tremendous courage, for she will find herself pitted against mighty and evil forces.

Meanwhile, Lucy must decide whether to fend off Byron’s not entirely unwelcome attentions (she admits that he is gorgeous to look at but a thorough reprobate). Lucy has a great deal on her plate: Whom can she really trust? Does she have the intellect and determination to use her unique talent effectively? Will she ever meet the love of her life?

By now, you may have deduced that Liss has overstuffed his narrative. There is a derivative quality to this novel that brings to mind familiar (and better) works, such as: Jane Eyre, who was cast off without a penny but stood up for herself as a proud, moral, and independent woman; Hard Times, in which Charles Dickens decries the forced labor of children and excoriates those who would enrich themselves on the backs of the poor; and the Harry Potter series, in which J. K. Rowling breathes life into magic and wizardry, while also dealing with feelings, relationships, and social issues. Liss often writes lush sentences, is a skilled descriptive writer, and he imbues Lucy with warmth and spirit. It is really too bad that, as the book progresses, the author resorts to clichés, contrivances, and silly twists and turns. The conclusion is flat and anticlimactic, when it should have been exciting and exhilarating. Much of The Twelfth Enchantment is captivating, but the weak conclusion may leave readers less than spellbound.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 47 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Liss
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> ZERO HISTORY by William Gibson /2011/zero-history-by-william-gibson/ Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:05:47 +0000 /?p=19999 Book Quote:

“Above him, near the room’s high ceiling, illuminated by the large Italian floor lamp with its silver umbrella, the matt-black manta ray was turning slow forward somersaults, almost silently, the only sound the soft crinkling of its helium-filled membrane. He wasn’t watching it. Instead he was focused on the screen of the iPhone, watching the feed from the ray’s camera as it rolled…It was hypnotic, and all the more so because he was causing the roll, maintaining it, executing it each time, with the same sequence of thumb movements on the phone’s horizontal screen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  AUG 21, 2011)

 Zero History by William Gibson continues his critique of contemporary civilization through a window of technology that renders the everyday into science fiction.

We follow a complex and sophisticated plot revolving about shadowy, powerful and unscrupulous figures that use the more sympathetic protagonists to further their financial and political ends. Think something like a James Bond story told by a cyberpunk sophisticate. There is adventure aplenty and lots of action. Cutting edge technologies and their implications further the action that is intense and unrelenting.

Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian entrepreneur, shadow figure par excellence who sports a Klein Blue suit (after the artist, Yves Klein who famously had nude women covered with his signature color of blue paint writhe about on bare canvas, painting it with their naked selves) entices ex-rocker, Hollis, and Milgrim, recovering addict, to find the designer behind Gabriel Hounds, a line of clothing that appears to echo and perhaps anticipate U.S. military design. Bigend wants to be in the recession-proof business of designing U.S. military clothing. Bigend’s enterprise is under attack by an American competitor.

In the course of the story, Hollis and her feisty rocker friend Heidi call on Hollis’ old boyfriend, Garreth, a performance artist who jumps from extremely high buildings wearing what is essentially a flying squirrel suit, for some high tech action to save the day. Garreth is able to call upon some really shadowy and powerful friends. We enjoy a very active and twisting ride featuring, among other novelties, a flying manta ray made of mylar that is controlled by an iPhone and sports a surveillance camera and a taser.

Gibson’s focus on fashion, taste, marketing and manipulation by those privy to the newest of the new and savvy to the implications of cyber-technology is so clearly exact as to appear prescient. His work only appears to be science fiction to those of us who are out of touch with the new. If you are up to date or think you are up to date, just blink your eyes and you are as out of touch as the rest of us. To remedy this situation, read Gibson, master of cyberpunk. He is a must-read for anyone who hopes to have a clue as to where the contemporary world is headed.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 97 readers
PUBLISHER: Berkley Trade; Reprint edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: William Gibson
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> NEUROMANCER by William Gibson /2011/neuromancer-by-william-gibson/ Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:56:02 +0000 /?p=20303 Book Quote:

“Just thinking out loud . . . How smart’s an AI, Case?”

“Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune, anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd AUG 21, 2011)

One of the rare books to wear the coveted triple-crown of science-fiction, winning all three major prizes in the genre (the Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, Nebula awards), as well as being included on Time Magazine’s 1995 list, “All TIME 100 Best Novels,” it isn’t hyperbolic to claim that William Gibson’s 1983 classic, Neuromancer, is a must-read in our world of ubiquitous WI-FI, 24-hour connectedness, and the Blue Brain reverse engineering project, a world in which a recent Time magazine cover claimed The Singularity would be upon is in less than 40 years.

If  you – like me – are late to this party, and haven’t yet read this book, you’ll find it hard to believe it was published in 1983, and you’ll undoubtedly see the influence that it has had on a number of later works. Let me put the publication date in perspective: I was 5 and played Space Invaders on a Commodore-PET computer at school and it was almost a decade and a half later before I surfed the net (on dial-up, no less) or, even, had an email account. So I can’t imagine how Neuromancer – a book about hackers who jack into cyberspace and troll the matrix, essentially a virtual reality representation of all computers, and their data-structures, linked on a global network– was received in a 1983 world of Commodore computers.

Case is a “data-thief,” a hacker for hire, who loses his ability to jack into “a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” when he makes the “classic mistake” of stealing from his employer during one of his runs. His punishment: forced administration of mycotoxin, the ensuing neurological damage locking him out of the matrix, a devastating punishment for a man who “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace.” High on amphetamines and suicidal, Case scours black-medicine clinics in Chiba City, Japan, which has become, with its “poisoned silver sky,” a “magnet for the Sprawl’s [an eastern seaboard megacity that spans from Boston to Atlanta] techno-criminal subcultures.” That is, until he’s picked up by Molly, a street samurai, with silver lenses “surgically inset, sealing her sockets” and retractable scalpels embedded under her nails, who takes him to see her boss, Armitage .

Armitage, a former Special Forces soldier, has a job for him. He promises to repair Case’s neurological damage if he agrees to work for him. To ensure his complete co-operation, Armitage has time-sensitive sacs of the mycotoxin inserted into his arteries: if Case completes his assignment, Armitage will have the sacs removed; else, the mycotoxin will be released, his neurological restoration undone. Much to his chagrin, Case is given a new pancreas to boot – one that renders him insensitive to the amphetamines he was partial to. Faced with the prospect of living in his “prison of flesh” without the option of pill-popping escape, what choice does Case have but to agree?

But before he can get started on the actual job, Armitage needs a piece of hardware – a recording of McCoy Pauley’s consciousness, a legendary hacker, and one of Case’s mentors. The Dixie Flatline construct—McCoy Pauley survived brain death, or flatlined, three times while jacked into the matrix, hence his nickname, and the moniker for his construct– is locked away in the corporate headquarters of Sense/Net in Atlanta. With the help of a group of cosmetically modified radicals called the Panther Moderns, Case and Molly prepare to break into Sense/Net to steal the construct; they’ll need the Dixie Flatline’s expertise for the actual job. Rigged with a device that’ll allow him to toggle into a “simstim” stream of Molly’s “sensorium” while inside the matrix, Case will infiltrate Sense/Net’s security systems, breaking through the Intrusions Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, to facilitate Molly’s passage through Sense/Net headquarters.

While things at Sense/Net don’t go exactly as planned – a riot breaks out; Molly breaks her leg – they succeed in lifting the construct, and so the group is off to Istanbul to retrieve the last member of their team, a heroin-addicted sociopath who gets off on betraying people, with a surgical implant that allows him to project images onto other people’s retinas – Peter Riviera.

But Case still doesn’t have any idea what they’re really up to or who Armitage really is. According to his research, there’s no record of Armitage being a part of Screaming Fist, a US military operation that sent US soldiers to infiltrate Russia on a doomed mission in order to glean information about the EMP weapons they knew the Russians would use to thwart the attack. And so, Molly has the Panther Moderns investigate Armitage: turns out he takes his orders from Wintermute.

Wintermute, an Artificial Intelligence, has been orchestrating the gig from the get-go, and now that its team is assembled, it arranges for them to fly to Freeside, a Vegas-like space resort that orbits Earth. Freeside is owned by a rich and mysterious family, the Tessier-Ashpools. No Tessier-Ashpool stock has been traded for more than 100 years, and it is rumored that the family – both original members and clones – exist in a state of cryogenic slumber in their labyrinthine space-station mansion, Villa Straylight, awaiting the time when technology renders man immortal.

Wintermute is housed somewhere in Villa Straylight, as is his AI sibling, Neuromancer. Two parts of super-intelligent entity, they were built with barriers between them to keep the Turing police, the law-enforcement body that regulates the construction of AIs, from destroying them. But to ensure their eventual consolidation and evolution, Wintermute was built with a single, overriding desire – to merge with Neuromancer. However, many non-digital safeguards were put in place, and in order for the fusion to happen, someone must speak a password into a console located somewhere in Villa Straylight. While Case breaks through the ICE that separates Wintermute from Neuromancer, Riviera and Molly will have to convince the only member of the Tessier-Ashpool family not in cryogenic freeze, 3LadyJane, to give them the password. If all goes according to plan, the two entities will fuse, creating an autonomous super-intelligence.

Believe it or not, this is a necessarily superficial sketch of a quite complicated plot, but for all its nuances and drama, I couldn’t get caught up in the suspense of it all: I was too impressed by Gibson’s enviable imagination, and it’s to his credit that the book never feels overburdened by detail. While, for the most part, the characters don’t rise above being clichés of the genre, this is an intelligent meditation on the conditions of autonomous intelligence.

Questioning the conditions of autonomous intelligence, or for lack of a better word, personhood, is as old as human society and has had many moral implications, from granting (and denying) women political participation to the emancipation of slaves, and I suspect in years to come, the ways in which we answer this question will be used to argue for (or against) the rights of machine intelligence. And yet, even as I type this, part of me balks at the assumption that machine intelligence, the kind of intelligence that deserves constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, is even possible. Although Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence is quite clear, I can’t ignore my resistance to the claim that any machine that behaves indistinguishably from an intelligent consciousness is an intelligent consciousness. Reading this book forced me to examine why that is: what about our minds am I so reluctant to admit might be reproduced in silicone?

In the current state of things, our brains are phenomenally superior to the best computers not in terms of memory, but of adaptability and processing power. The ways in which we learn and assimilate information is far more sophisticated than the way even the “smartest” computer program learns now. The Dixie Flatline construct, essentially a ROM construct, is not really alive, not really an autonomous intelligence, precisely because it cannot learn or adapt to new material.

In fact, it is the restriction of this capacity, the capacity to bring together information stored in disparate parts of the brain, that renders Armitage so unstable. As it turns out, Armitage did participate in Screaming Fist, known then as Colonel Corto. The sole survivor, Corto was physically and psychologically shattered. Wintermute first makes contact with Corto in a psychiatric hospital in Paris when he’s assigned to a computer-based rehabilitative program. Wintermute essentially constructs the Armitage personality around Corto’s broken psyche. The result is a personality with limited access to itself, and hence, limited assimilative and adaptive capacity, resulting in something more like an automaton, as Case notices, little more than “a statue.”

When Case asks “where had Corto been all those years,” he’s asking an age-old question about the nature not just of consciousness, but of our selves. While prostitutes, or “meat puppets” are able to disconnect the connection between their minds and their bodies, a neural cut giving a computer chip temporary control of their bodies– women literally objectifying themselves – in a way that suggests consciousness is strictly neurological, the language Mr. Gibson uses to describes Case’s experience in the matrix – “disembodied consciousness” – and the descriptions of Case’s consciousness piggy-backing on Molly’s experience through the simstim rig are more suggestive of embodied souls – Cartesian ghosts in the machine – than neurologically reductive consciousness.

And just as Case prefers the freedom and bliss of disembodied consciousness, Neuromancer, with its own stable personality, prefers solitary existence to the restrictive loss of self it believes merging with Wintermute would entail. But as the emergent Neuromancer/Wintermute super-intelligence suggests, the two are better together; and perhaps for all its advanced technology and autonomous Artificial Intelligences, Neuromancer really is a humanistic book; perhaps in encouraging Case to get emotionally involved in his work – to find his hate –Wintermute is pushing him to draw on his dual natures, rational and emotional, pushing him to be paradigmatically human.

At the end of all this, the Wintermute wins, and a superintelligent entity is born, one that is “the sum total of all works, the whole show.”  I, like Case and the Tessier-Ashpool matriarch who designed it, can’t really imagine what such an intelligence might be, but if Ray Kurzweil is right, and this day will soon be upon us, I look forward to one thing, the same thing that surprised and pleased me about this book: whatever a conscious AI entity looks like, whatever its motivations and character, whatever fortunes or calamities it spells for mankind, it will undoubtedly answer some of the important philosophical questions about what exactly it is to be human in this all too physical world.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 505 readers
PUBLISHER: Ace Trade (July 10, 2000)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: William Gibson
EXTRAS: ExcerptWikipedia on Neuromancer
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

 

 

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