Tag Archives: science fiction

Demons of Eden

I know I was just complaining about how these Deathlands books are just extruding titles now, but maybe someone else thought the same thing lo these 27 years ago? Because Demons of Eden is basically on the nose. I could wish the editors were better about paying attention to character continuity now that there are multiple authors, or for that matter about scene continuity within a single volume.

And I could especially wish the books had not suddenly remembered their genre and started turning all male gazey. 38 books in, plus owning all of them, I’m not likely to stop now. But I miss being able to recommend them with almost no reservations[1], back when they were subverting the expectations of their audience instead of pandering to it, and back when there was a little more science in my speculative fiction.

But my original point was that at least the plotting is a bit more interesting and on track and acting like it and the title are related, which is not nothing. This time, our heroes tackle ancient Sioux and conquistador legends about lost cities of gold, which might also hold the key to undoing a century of nuclear damage to the entire planet. But if the only way to reach that end is to despoil one of the last idyllic locales in the post-holocaust world, is it worth it?

In conclusion, ley lines and Gaia and leaning more into earth-based fantasy plotting is all well and good, but I miss when the characters were jumping into government funded teleporters all the time.

[1] Way too detailed about guns in use, which is its own kind of uncomfortable in these fallen times, and some pretty explicit violence on the regular. But otherwise? A+, for a long run of books.

Nona the Ninth

It is my understanding that Tamsyn Muir wanted to name this book Nona, rather than Nona the Ninth, but her editor and/or publisher told her she couldn’t if she expected people to find the book and continue reading the series. The compromise position they reached was Nona the Ninth, and to my regret, this is not something I can reflect in the post name. So just be aware I would have if I could have.

Nona was much easier to read than Harrow, but I find that it is much harder to describe without spoilers. Part of that is because it is the third book in a nominally four book series, of course. Part of it is because Tamsyn Muir never met a plotline (or a character development) she couldn’t obfuscate inside out and backward[1].

So let’s see. If Gideon is a book written from the perspective of the Nine Houses, and Harrow is a book written from the perspective of The Emperor and his Divine Saints, then Nona is a book written from the perspective of the citizenry of the Empire that exist outside the Houses[2]. Nona and her friends (and the citizenry that surround them) live in a city on a planet under siege. Under siege by the [let’s say] terrorist organization Blood of Eden, under siege by the Empire, under siege by the glowing blue light in the sky. Within five days (as heavily implied by the early text of the book), everything is going to go straight to hell, and Nona (and her friends, let us not forget) must balance the razorwire to make it through those five days. Also, not for nothing, that’s when Nona’s birthday is!

Before I go, I will introduce you to Nona, by telling you that her primary concerns are her job at school, and her upcoming birthday, and dogs, and absolutely none of the dangers that surround her. (And her friends.)

[1] To be clear, this is a compliment. I think a grudging one, and that is probably what makes it not be clear, but a compliment nonetheless.
[2] Which is already sort of a spoiler for the series, because as far as I could tell reading Gideon, the Nine Houses were the entirety of the Empire; I had no idea a separate citizenry existed!

Solyaris

A long time ago, I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris, a movie about which I remember essentially nothing except that I sort of hated it. The open (and unanswerable) question is: was past me wrong? Later, my horror(?) movie podcast decided to watch the original[1] Russian Soviet adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel, which is what brings us here today. Arguably, having watched these movies in reverse order, I should next pick up the book.

Solaris, in a non-spoilery nutshell: there’s this guy, and he wanders around his family property staring distantly at the lake and the underwater reeds and the empty road. Later, a second guy comes to visit and recap his history with the largely oceanic planet Solaris, which we[2] have a station in orbit around. Some people went missing, and the second guy piloted a failed solo rescue mission in which he saw a lot of weird things that his onboard camera system did not corroborate, as a result of which he has advice for the first guy, who is a psychologist going to the station to decide whether it should stay open. Also, the second guy has a son who seems unfamiliar with the concept of horses, and then afterwards the second guy and the son go on a long, pointless[3] drive in [probably] China. Later yet, the psychologist goes to the station, and discusses with the remaining two residents a) what happened to the until recently remaining third resident (who was the psychologists’s friend) and b) why there are in fact rather more than two residents. Then he spends the remainder of the movie coming to grips with the answers they provide him, as well as the answers they do not provide him.

I think I might have gotten more out of the film if I had a better grasp on the painting where those hunters(?) are returning to town on a ridge while everyone ice skates in the valley town below, or more fully caught the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky references, for examples. But even at three hours, it only wears out its welcome once or twice during the most drawn out and inexplicable scenes, or when director Tarkovsky gets a little too clever by switching to various black and white shades as though we’re meant to know what is being conveyed by this change in that moment. The rest of the time, we are presented with a slow (nay, lingering) meditation on what it means to be human, and to behave humanely, in the face of the unknown.

And really, you cannot ask for much more out of your science fiction than that.

[1] False! There was a TV movie in the USSR four years earlier, which, huh, okay.
[2] humanity? The Soviets? It’s not perfectly clear, but probably humanity.
[3] Okay, that’s editorializing. I have no idea whether it was in some way central to the plot or it wasn’t.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I played a good deal of the then-new Zelda game in 2018, but kind of too fast? I mean, I rushed it. I mean, I did tons and tons of main quest and did not treat it like a sandbox RPG where you luxuriate in exploring every nook and cranny, and fulfill the need of every minor and major person you come across, even those who it would seem will not actually trigger a quest at all but you just have a sense that they ought to, and only after all of that is completed do you fiddle with the main quest. Or at the very least, you spread out the main quest pieces amongst all this luxuriating and fulfilling, such that you’re only thinking about that last little bit of game when you’re also running out of anything else to do anyway,

Then, for reasons that are lost in the mists, I stopped playing it.

Now, five years and one already-released sequel later, I have played a great deal of Breath of the Wild. Previous Zelda games have been a) smaller, which okay is a contributing factor, but mainly b) have been in fantasy settings. Sure, there are monsters around and a bad guy to defeat, and eventually villages and villagers and various races of creatures besides generic green elf-costumed heroes with swords, but all in service of a bit of magic trinketry and a giant boss fight and a princess of some kind to rescue and/or be rescued by.

This game, though… it is post-apocalyptic, and it is lonely. Okay, yes, there are obviously a lot more people to interact with than in any prior game in the (let’s say) series, and a lot more ways to interact with them, but the world is so huge, and so full of formerly rampaging sci-fi behemoths, and so full of monsters, and so devoid of people on a moment by moment basis, and even more devoid of people who aren’t huddled together in tiny enclaves of light against the darkness… It’s hard to hit every nook and cranny. And it’s a little depressing to try.

Well, no. What I mean is not depressing, it’s melancholy. Every action you take that isn’t directly related to fulfilling someone’s quest, you are either wandering around in the wilderness (hence the name) fighting things or looking for immeasurably old tombs to raid or collecting ingredients, or else you are unraveling the tragedy of a hundred years ago when everyone you hypothetically care about was killed.

I’ve noticed I’m making the game sound not fun, which is just spectacularly not true. There are so many puzzles to solve, so many stories to discover, so many things to collect, and upgrade, and defeat. I think I’m over 150 hours into the game at this point? There are still things I want to accomplish, but not many more that I feel I must. Uh, wait, you are asking yourself. If you didn’t finish, and especially if you are close to finishing, why the review?

So, funny story. I was killing time on Sunday while waiting for the in-game clock to reach night time, as a few quests I’m working on can only move forward at that time of not-day, and I was exploring Hyrule Castle plus trying to kill guardians to collect their cores (which they do not drop nearly often enough), when I wandered into a room that seemed to me not nearly high enough in the castle to be the place I would have been going for the big boss fight, only I noticed something that made me say wait, I probably shouldn’t be- and before I finished the thought, cut scene. And then, somehow, I won the boss fight on my first attempt, counter to expectations. And all in all, it feels like waiting to write the review after seeing the end of the game would be a mistake. So here we are!

The thing where most of the equipment in the game is consumable / degradable, i could do without. And some things are maybe a little too hard to accomplish. (Which arguably it would be more accurate to say, I haven’t figured out how to accomplish, but it isn’t actually all that hard. I have reason to believe this is the case.) But man, I understand why this game received the acclaim it did. It’s practically perfect in every way, as long as you don’t mind feeling melancholy.

Harrow the Ninth

I have been reading one book for the entire summer. I just… what even is this? And it did not help that I found Harrow the Ninth extremely difficult to read. If I had not come off the high of Gideon, I might have just quit a few chapters in. But then again, it’s the act of reading the first book that made this one so distasteful to me. It’s hard to explain without spoilers.

I mean, everything about this book is hard to explain without spoilers. In the first book, the necromantic flowers of the Nine Houses, and the cavaliers who defend them, are called to the God-Emperor’s home to become the new round of Lyctors, his hands who help him, I don’t know, run the empire or something? This has not happened in 10,000 years, so it’s kind of a big deal. But then they start <spoiler>ing.

This book picks up with the newly graduated(?) Lyctors, learning what it is exactly that the Emperor needs them for, and how to deal with their new jobs as well as the endless aeons of immortality that await them. Simple as far as it goes, except… yeah, legitimately anything I said by way of explanation would be a spoiler of the book’s central conceit. I compared the prior book to Rendezvous with Rama, and I stand by that. Half the joy of both books so far is in the act of discovery under an almost entirely alien set of circumstances; well, “joy” for the reader, I’m not sure that word plausibly applies for the characters, but still, the similarity is real.

Still though, I simply must get this off my chest, and so the rest goes under the spoiler-cut line. But I’ll say this one other thing: half the book is written in second-person. This is awkward and difficult to get used to, far moreso than I’d ever have guessed. A good friend, lost to me for seven years, used to joke about making a second-person shooter video game, and while the untenability of that is obvious… second-person narration is nearly as off-putting. The only difference between this and the game concept is, you can eventually get used to it in print. Or maybe I’m wrong, and you could eventually get used to having to turn around constantly to affect whatever is coming up behind you, or to walking backwards through the places you’re meant to go. I guess the mind can acclimate to anything, given sufficient time and cause.

Oh, actual last thing: I sort of think that saying whether I liked the book or not would still count as a spoiler, for reasons that would probably be obvious to you if you loved the first book and were only a few chapters into this one. But I will say that I have every intention of reading the next book.

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Gideon the Ninth

On paper[1], Gideon the Ninth seems tailor-made for me to love it. It’s like someone took Rendezvous with Rama, decades of D&D necromancer jokes, and a modern snarky television teenager, and threw them all in a blender, then poured the puree into a puzzle box that is, if probably not solvable for any given reader, at least has a satisfying solution.

And I want to be clear that even though the first few chapters were a slow, uphill start, it turns out I really did enjoy every single one of those elements, disparately and in conjunction. Nevertheless, I have big, complicated feelings about this book, which are impossible to get into without massive story-destroying spoilers. And so, a cut!

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Field of Dishonor

A thing worth noting is that I have only the barest memory of the plot of these Honor Harrington books. She’s supremely competent, and always correct in a ’90s hawkish conservative kind of way, and half the book is other people talking about how awesome she is. I read The Short Victorious War, let’s see, basically six years ago[1].

At that time, I correctly predicted that Field of Dishonor would immediately follow from a timeline perspective, while incorrectly predicting that I would therefore read it any time soon. The book is, as I also predicted, a complete deviation from the series so far, in that it’s 100% political (well, and personal), but 0% military, except insofar as it’s military politics. This is never quite offputting, but boy does it bring into sharp relief how much everyone (except the bad guy, obvs) in the book thinks Dame Honor is the absolute bee’s knees.

Despite the percent of the book dedicated to lavish praise of the main character (and despite the fact that Weber has decided that to be an effective conservative icon, one must be rich as well as titled, and therefore dumped nearly nine figures into her lap), there was ample intrigue and suspense to keep me entertained for the entire book, with one exception, which I am forced to drop below the cut due to spoilers for the finale and epilogue.

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Bitter Fruit

Eventually, I liked the plot for Bitter Fruit. Cryogenically frozen bioterrorists first rebuild the Celtic empire[1] and then plot to wipe out most of the already dregs of humanity that yet remain, a hundred years past the nuclear holocaust that already basically marked the end of the world. Luckily, we know who can probably stop them! (Oh, this is a Deathlands book, if you didn’t actually know yet who could stop them.)

I say “eventually”. While this was not the first book in the series to have a new author, it was the first book where I noticed. Characters subtly out of character[2], a big change in the way book transitions work[3], and most damning, a possible change in the gender egalitarianism of the series. I’m reserving judgment on that last bit, as one data point is not a trendline, but all the same, none of the female characters have ever used sexuality to extricate themselves from danger before this author, so. (The main male character has at times tolerated sex while in danger, which I suppose is technically rape, and also I do not object to using sex as a tool in the toolbox when required. I’m just leery of it from a first time to the series author, after having spoken so much about the quality of the books to date.)

Worst news: this new author will be popping up frequently for a little while. Man I hope someone smacks him around and sets him straight.

[1] Well obviously empire is not the right word here. People isn’t what I want though, and kingdom is nearly as wrong as empire is, albeit a little less inadvertently snide.
[2] Just because you call a dude laconic, if he talks all the time and in much more detail than he used to, I’m both going to notice that and also judge you for not having known what laconic meant in the first place, nameless (unless I went to wikipedia and checked again) Deathlands farm writer!
[3] Instead of “end a book, pick up the next book immediately where the prior book just ended”, this was “end a book, skip forward by about three chapters of what I would have expected to read, but those three chapters wouldn’t make any sense at all if they’d been written, which I guess is why they had to be skipped, but since I noticed, you didn’t actually accomplish much.”

Stoneface

What do you say after 34 books in the same series?

I guess the first thing I’ll say is that I like how they’ve added some new villains and secondary characters that will maybe pop up again in the future, because it’s important not to get bogged down and run out of new ideas. (Plus, one of them has cool mutant powers like the main lady character, Krysty Wroth, and it’s nice to have positive mutations as more often than a one-off, since they sure don’t skimp on the negative mutations. Thermonuclear radioactivity, what are you gonna do? shrug emoji)

The second thing I’ll say is that even though it’s arguably lazy to set a book a hundred years in the future and then rely on the present as grist for your novel mill, I really do like when we get bigger glimpses into the way the world was when it ended, and this is a big one indeed. What would you say to a mountain full of pre-nuke government officials who have been keeping themselves alive with cryogenics and constant organ transplants? I, for one, can dig it. …and then there’s a suspiciously familiar cult, too. It’s an embarrassment of 20th Century riches, is what.

The third thing I’ll say is I have a disappointment, particularly because of how often I’ve been surprised by progressive egalitarianism throughout the series. When you call your book Stoneface, and it is partially set in and around Mount Rushmore, with characters[1] from the indigenous Lakota people, well, I was really hoping they would bring up the Six Grandfathers at all. But that’s a lot to ask of 1996’s authors, you know? In a lesser men’s adventure series, which let’s be honest is basically all of them on the “how progressive can this genre be?” scale, it would never have crossed my mind to be disappointed here.

Counterpoint, though, I really like to hope I would not have read 34 books deep into such an alternative series. Despite what it looks like, I do have standards.

[1] one of them even a potential recurring person from my prior mention

Prey (2017)

For all that it’s five years old, Prey is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and certainly the best one I’ve finished in recent memory[1]. (I need to get back to Pillars of Eternity. And also Horizon Zero Dawn.)

It is approximately like, what if Half-Life, but extremely modern and therefore with the ability to have and track quests and side quests, and the survivors you meet are actually able to, on occasion, take care of themselves a little bit instead of solely serving to keep you in a somber mood. You can play guns blazing, or extreme stealth, or anything in between, while being as kind or cruel or unconcerned as you prefer. In a different world where I didn’t have an infinite number of massive games I wanted to play, nevermind the smaller ones, I might be inclined to play this again with a different focus. I happen to know there are things I never saw because I played differently than what would have allowed me to see them.

As far as the plot: go in as blind as you can. All I knew was a) praise and b)… actually, I can no longer swear what I knew about b), so it would be unfair to say anything, wouldn’t it? But the game starts off on your first day joining your big brother in the family business. Wake up, get ready, fly across town in a helicopter while the credits roll, then take the evaluation tests you need to pass to go up to the space station where the real magic (by which I mean science) happens. Only, the tests don’t really make even a lick of sense? And why is that table running around, and why are the alarms going off? And then things get weird.

In conclusion, I liked it really a lot. The plot twists never really stopped, no matter how far into the game you think you’ve gotten. I am uncertain about the expansion? But I would play the hell out of a sequel.

[1] “Okay, but what about Hollow Knight?” It’s like this. They are both exemplars of their respective types of game, but Prey has the better plot. HK has the better mood, if that makes you feel okay about things.