Review Quartet
Hey,
I've been reading books. Maybe I should tell you about them.
First up: Revenger by Alastair Reynolds. A sci-fi story set in the future, the far-future where the solar system has been dismantled and hundreds of thousands of micro-planets and space stations house humanity. This is the 13h Occupation -- the 13th time humanity has spread out through the solar system (and by this time a few aliens and robots are part of it). As they go out into the void, they uncover orbitals and stations from previous occupations full of delicious high-tech loot. Starship captains ply their solar-sailed vessels across the system and try to recover these caches to earn fabulous riches. So it's really sort of a sci-fi version of a D&D pirate game.
Anyway, the Ness sisters are living a mildly comfortable life on their habitat, but their father has a lot of grandiose ambitions and they're not so sure they want to be part of them. Adrana Ness tricks her sister Fura into taking a test to determine if she, like Adrana, is a Bone Reader, a young person with the skill to receive and interpret signals coming from these high-tech skulls that allow for fast, long-distance communication. A good Bone Reader can also listen in on other calls if they're good at it.
Obviously, the Ness sisters are Bone Readers and they sign on with Captain Rackamore and the Monetta's Mourn. They're on the trail of a juicy piece of loot and need one or two good Bone Readers to help out. Unfortunately, the notorious space pirate Bosa Sennen jumps them, kills most of the crew and takes Adrana with her. Now it's up to Fura to get back to civilized space and plot her revenge to get back at Bosa and get her sister back.
The book is pretty good. Mr. Reynolds is a solid writer. Things definitely move along smoothly. Although there's very clearly a sequel indicated at the conclusion of the book (and indeed the sequel is already out), the book ends at a pretty decent stopping point. I did enjoy the book, but I'm not sure I'm in a rush to pick up the next volume in the series. I did really enjoy a fair number of neat sci-fi ideas along with portraying a society rebuilding on the bones of several previous ones, but I guess I've got an aversion to age of sail stories done up in sci-fi paint.
Next up: The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco. Head's up -- this might be one of the best books I'll read all year.
In the January of 1887, at the western tip of the Olympic Peninsula, in the port town of Port Townsend, Alma Rosales has just arrived. Alma used to work for the Pinkerton Agency before a bad operation got the women's department shut down. Alma drifted to San Francisco and fell in with the largest criminal network on the West Coast. Now Alma is in Port Townsend because the organization's heroin shipments have been coming up short and Alma is there to plug the leak. Alma makes good use of her detective skills and disguises herself as Jack Camp. Things get progressively more complex.
Alma is a fantastic character and given how easy it would be to botch up writing someone so complex, it says something about how good the story is. The other character are also all pretty memorable and well-rounded, the dialogue is snappy, and the plot just grabs you and pulls you to the end of the book. I suspect the reason why some of the chapters flick back and forth in time is partially to slow you down just a bit.
I think what I appreciate most is that Alma/Jack makes some ambitious plans, but they're always able to roll with the inevitable setbacks and in the end, they succeed because they're able to execute on their plans. A lot of similar books finds the protagonists pushed around until they just sorta wind up solving their problems, but Alma/Jack is much more proactive and I appreciate that.
Again, this is a fantastic book, I highly recommend it.
On a couple of long plane flights I got through: Same Same by Peter Mendelsund. Head's up -- this one is terrible.
The writing is pretty good. Reading the sample convinced me to give it a go, but I'm pretty sure I got Tristram Shandy'd on this book.
So our hero, Percy Frobisher, has come to the Institute -- a massive domed structure in the middle of an unnamed desert country. The Institute brings in the best and the brightest to help them produce their greatest works and then deliver a Discourse on it (imagine if the TED talk was the capstone presentation for some blue-sky research facility). Percy meets up with his personal administrator, gets introduced to a number of other Institute fellows (all working on a wide range of projects), and...gets a stain on his uniform. That's not allowed, so Percy eventually sneaks into the nearby city where the Same Same shop is located. Sure it looks like a simple copy shop, but they'll make copies of everything. Percy gets his uniform duplicated but the copy, aside from not having the stain on it, seems even better than the original.
It's at this point, that the story slowly draws you into a cul de sac and quietly circles around until you realize that you've been had. That realization kicks in just a little over halfway through as things at the Institute start to break down and the end becomes pretty obvious. The story has no real plot and it just grinds out to nothing by the end and you think "well, there's 500 pages I've read for no purpose".
So now I have to warn you about it because then I'll have salvaged something from all this.
What I should've read on the plane is: The Guilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi. An historical-fantasy crime novel, this was pretty good even if the ending was pretty ragged.
The central conceit is that there are these items called the Fragments of Babel that allow some people to Forge items (basically, they can create magical artifacts/creatures depending on the person's affinities). In Europe, the Order of Babel, a pan-European secret society guards their Babel Fragment and, in conjunction with non-magical colonialism, are busy scooping up every magical item they can from all over the world. In France, there were once four Houses associated with the Order. One of them was destroyed for trying to play god and one of them was disbanded because the heir to the house had no affinity for magic. Severin Montagnet-Alarie was supposed to be that heir but the Order couldn't stand for a bi-racial House Patriarch so they fixed his test so he'd fail and cast him out.
Still, even though he's not in the Order, his family was incredibly wealthy so when he came of age, he came to Paris, set up an amazing hotel and attracted a crew of talented specialists from around the world to steal back his family treasures and perhaps find the leverage to force the Order to restore him to his rightful place. Then the head of one of the other Houses tricks Severin into helping him recover a lost artifact that may hold the key to everyone's problems.
A very solid book. The world-building was solid and never painted themselves into a corner. The plot is pretty good and keeps you reading and the characters are all pretty well done up. They're all quite young (perhaps this was a YA book?), which is fine, but it leads to a few really familiar plot points. Again, this is a book where the main characters come up with plans and execute them and deal with the curve balls which I really appreciate. I'm not too keen on how loose it ended -- there's absolutely a sequel or two in the works and you can see a number of long-term issues that will result in teen angst before they resolve. I dunno. It's a fine book and if you're into YA this could definitely be your jam. I'll probably skip out on the sequels though.
Anyway, that's it for now. Join us next time when it's POW! To the moon!
later
Tom