Books
Been a while since I've done this...
Finished: City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear
Three young people in the modern day have the ability to 'fate-shift', to become parallel universe versions of themselves. They also share inexplicable dreams of a city in the far future, the last city in existence, and guardian-ship over strange stones called sum-runners. They're pursued by people who seem to want to complete the destruction of time.
Okay, the title is an evocative image, and the premise is intriguing enough that I had to pick it up. And it starts off fairly well... the city of the Kalpa is odd but plausibly 'so far futuristic it might as well be magic' without outright seeming magic most of the time. And the modern-day stories of being on the run from the Chalk Princess and her minions... well, it's engaging enough, if a little too into the 'fantasy' side for my tastes. It goes reasonably well for about half the book. Then it all turns to $@!$.
(spoilers behind cut, fairly significant ones)
One of the big problems is that the enemy of the far future city is Chaos itself, which has destroyed all of reality and working backwards in time to unmake everything and replace it with more Chaos.
The problem there is... well, how do you depict Chaos? Complete and utter chaos should be virtually incomprehensible to us. And yet, part of a writer's job is to make the story comprehensible, right? One of the ways to do this is to make the agents of Chaos (and occasionally, not-Chaos) in our world bizarre monsters but who seem to have goals that they work towards, and immortal Gods, basically turning the story into a horror/fantasy novel. And yet... that's almost the most dull way to do it, in my opinion. It may also be the only way to reasonably approach it (if you just make it a bunch of crazy, undirected stuff that happens, it loses its power as a story, and if you view it completely from the outside with things falling into the chaos never actually being experienced or being able to report back... well, it might work, but then you might as well just make the enemy nonexistence), however... I get the feeling that this approach has been done enough, that if you're going to write a story with Chaos and you DON'T have a dramatically different way of doing it (if one exists), you might as well not write it.
But that's not the REAL problem with the novel. That's the sort of problem that makes it into a 'not especially necessary' book. What makes it a bad book is that the conclusion of the book is the three main characters, who aren't especially well-defined or characterized to begin with, living through the death of reality, themselves protected by the sum-runners as they... walk. Through Chaos. To reach a city that may or may not exist and may or may not be able to withstand the Chaos. And they walk. And walk. And talk about how the world's dying. And face crazy. And Chaos. It's not even especially INTERESTING crazy and chaos, a few monsters but not even all that cool ones. It's just a walk through crazy. For what feels like half the book.
AND NONE IT %#%!ING MATTERS. As one of my favorite old sayings goes, "If literally ANYTHING can happen, who gives a !@%% WHAT happens?" With every turn of the page it might as well be that the author just wrote up one of his dreams and made his characters encounter it and move on, because there's no real meaning to everything, there's no sense that the universe has rules it must follow (another of the big problems with using Chaos as an antagonist). And when they get to the end, I don't care that they saved reality, because it never feels like they ever did anything specific to make it happen all they did was walk, not even with a specific goal, but directed by their sum-runners. It's like a novel where the second half is pages upon pages of description of a stone rolling down a long hill. Even if you manage a grand feat of describing the journey in a fantastic way that doesn't repeat itself (and most likely, you didn't)... IT'S STILL JUST A STONE ROLLING DOWNHILL. WHY SHOULD I CARE? Even if the stone is rolling down the hill to land on the head of the monster terrorizing everybody and saving the world.
Give me compelling characters who make choices, who risk things, anyday.
Finished: Century Rain, by Alastair Reynolds
Last one was a book I thought had promise at first, but wound up hating. Here's a book with an almost opposite story. I though I wouldn't much care for it, but I wound up really enjoying it. Part of the reasons for my misgivings was the author - I've liked some of his work, but I didn't like my first experience with him, and even some of the sequels have elements I didn't much like, mostly because it was full of characters I didn't like.
The other part was that the premise, although okay, wasn't one I was super-excited about. I thought from the description that it was going to be a specific, fairly common type of SF story, and to my pleasant surprise, it turned out to be completely different. To explain more goes into minor spoiler territory, so I'll cut.The back of the book described a universe where the Earth was rendered uninhabitable, and various factions of humanity in conflict, and the discovery, at the end of a wormhole, of twentieth century Earth, 'preserved in amber'.
Naturally, I thought it was going to be a wormhole through time, and questions about whether they had the right to alter history (if it turned out to be one-timeline), or if they should exploit another timeline to your own advantage (if multiple timeline). As it turned out, though, it was literally a wormhole to a copy of Earth, in our own universe, inside a Dyson-Sphere type shell (meant to mimic the view of the universe from Earth to those inside). So, the story follows a private detective in this world (which is also an alternate history where WWII ended a lot earlier, and so humanity wasn't quite as shocked by all the horrors of totalitarianism) who investigates a very strange case that involves the modern day (in terms of the universe, far future to us) humanity who've been subtly monitoring the world, and a character from modern day humanity who is on this Earth and trying to figure out what happened to one of their agents, and uncovering a major threat to everything.
Now, that itself is not all that GREAT a plot (it doesn't have the 'oh wow, I must read this!' factor), but the way it unfolds and develops is really done well and I got caught up in the characters and their story. Lots of cool tech ideas too, which I of course love.
It's not a perfect book... I thought the romantic subplot, for example, happened a little fast and without much justification, and some of the 'complete loss of history' claims were a little overblown and unlikely, not to mention the motivations for some of the villains... but overall, it was an enjoyable little romp.
So, with a few flaws, quite liked, and I'd even like to see a follow-up.
Finished: Accelerando, by Charles Stross (reread)
Finished: Glasshouse, by Charles Stross (reread)
Both rereads, and multple-time-rereads, so there's not much more to say on them. Always enjoy Stross, particularly these two works of his.
Finished: Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman
A prose superhero novel, following dual storylines, one of Doctor Impossible, a supervillain engaging in his latest plot to take over the world, and another, Fatale, a cyborg hero and relatively new member of the New Champions, who are reforming to investigate the disappearance of Superman (or rather, the Superman analog of the world, named CoreFire).
It's fairly enjoyable, using the tropes of superhero comics, if not in particularly novel ways, than at least in novel form (ha, see what I did there?). Some decent explorations of characters, but too much of it feels familiar, like warmed over stuff I've already read many times, and only a cool new insights to why things are the way they are. Still, not every book has to break new ground, and I liked it, except, I think, it fell down at the end a little, and by extension, throughout the book. (minor spoilers, although I don't actually reveal much about the ending itself, just the feel of it).
One of the minor annoyances is that certain elements of the character's history felt like it didn't really all mesh in a logical way. Like, for example, Doctor Impossible's identity. He's been in prison several times. He has key connections to many of the heroes. Yet nobody knows what it is. I realize some of this is set up for a gag/character moment, but it doesn't really feel like it WORKS, like it's something that can happen.
A bit more of a problem is that the ending kind of felt a bit flat. Dramatic revelations out of nowhere, okay, fair enough, comic trope, and some of them did make me smile, but... I don't know, nothing about it really satisfied me and made me feel, 'yes, this is a proper ending'. Nor did it even feel like "okay, this is mimicking a superhero comic, and this is just the end of one adventure, but another awaits, and it continues on forever." It's somewhere in between, like this was MEANT to sum up everything, to be the definitive superhero examination, at least in this universe, but just failed at it in the end.
But minor flaws, and I did enjoy it, and hey I got it used for $2, so at that price, a bargain.
Started: The Evolutionary Void, by Peter F. Hamilton
Started: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, by Robert Charles Wilson
Finished: City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear
Three young people in the modern day have the ability to 'fate-shift', to become parallel universe versions of themselves. They also share inexplicable dreams of a city in the far future, the last city in existence, and guardian-ship over strange stones called sum-runners. They're pursued by people who seem to want to complete the destruction of time.
Okay, the title is an evocative image, and the premise is intriguing enough that I had to pick it up. And it starts off fairly well... the city of the Kalpa is odd but plausibly 'so far futuristic it might as well be magic' without outright seeming magic most of the time. And the modern-day stories of being on the run from the Chalk Princess and her minions... well, it's engaging enough, if a little too into the 'fantasy' side for my tastes. It goes reasonably well for about half the book. Then it all turns to $@!$.
(spoilers behind cut, fairly significant ones)
One of the big problems is that the enemy of the far future city is Chaos itself, which has destroyed all of reality and working backwards in time to unmake everything and replace it with more Chaos.
The problem there is... well, how do you depict Chaos? Complete and utter chaos should be virtually incomprehensible to us. And yet, part of a writer's job is to make the story comprehensible, right? One of the ways to do this is to make the agents of Chaos (and occasionally, not-Chaos) in our world bizarre monsters but who seem to have goals that they work towards, and immortal Gods, basically turning the story into a horror/fantasy novel. And yet... that's almost the most dull way to do it, in my opinion. It may also be the only way to reasonably approach it (if you just make it a bunch of crazy, undirected stuff that happens, it loses its power as a story, and if you view it completely from the outside with things falling into the chaos never actually being experienced or being able to report back... well, it might work, but then you might as well just make the enemy nonexistence), however... I get the feeling that this approach has been done enough, that if you're going to write a story with Chaos and you DON'T have a dramatically different way of doing it (if one exists), you might as well not write it.
But that's not the REAL problem with the novel. That's the sort of problem that makes it into a 'not especially necessary' book. What makes it a bad book is that the conclusion of the book is the three main characters, who aren't especially well-defined or characterized to begin with, living through the death of reality, themselves protected by the sum-runners as they... walk. Through Chaos. To reach a city that may or may not exist and may or may not be able to withstand the Chaos. And they walk. And walk. And talk about how the world's dying. And face crazy. And Chaos. It's not even especially INTERESTING crazy and chaos, a few monsters but not even all that cool ones. It's just a walk through crazy. For what feels like half the book.
AND NONE IT %#%!ING MATTERS. As one of my favorite old sayings goes, "If literally ANYTHING can happen, who gives a !@%% WHAT happens?" With every turn of the page it might as well be that the author just wrote up one of his dreams and made his characters encounter it and move on, because there's no real meaning to everything, there's no sense that the universe has rules it must follow (another of the big problems with using Chaos as an antagonist). And when they get to the end, I don't care that they saved reality, because it never feels like they ever did anything specific to make it happen all they did was walk, not even with a specific goal, but directed by their sum-runners. It's like a novel where the second half is pages upon pages of description of a stone rolling down a long hill. Even if you manage a grand feat of describing the journey in a fantastic way that doesn't repeat itself (and most likely, you didn't)... IT'S STILL JUST A STONE ROLLING DOWNHILL. WHY SHOULD I CARE? Even if the stone is rolling down the hill to land on the head of the monster terrorizing everybody and saving the world.
Give me compelling characters who make choices, who risk things, anyday.
Finished: Century Rain, by Alastair Reynolds
Last one was a book I thought had promise at first, but wound up hating. Here's a book with an almost opposite story. I though I wouldn't much care for it, but I wound up really enjoying it. Part of the reasons for my misgivings was the author - I've liked some of his work, but I didn't like my first experience with him, and even some of the sequels have elements I didn't much like, mostly because it was full of characters I didn't like.
The other part was that the premise, although okay, wasn't one I was super-excited about. I thought from the description that it was going to be a specific, fairly common type of SF story, and to my pleasant surprise, it turned out to be completely different. To explain more goes into minor spoiler territory, so I'll cut.The back of the book described a universe where the Earth was rendered uninhabitable, and various factions of humanity in conflict, and the discovery, at the end of a wormhole, of twentieth century Earth, 'preserved in amber'.
Naturally, I thought it was going to be a wormhole through time, and questions about whether they had the right to alter history (if it turned out to be one-timeline), or if they should exploit another timeline to your own advantage (if multiple timeline). As it turned out, though, it was literally a wormhole to a copy of Earth, in our own universe, inside a Dyson-Sphere type shell (meant to mimic the view of the universe from Earth to those inside). So, the story follows a private detective in this world (which is also an alternate history where WWII ended a lot earlier, and so humanity wasn't quite as shocked by all the horrors of totalitarianism) who investigates a very strange case that involves the modern day (in terms of the universe, far future to us) humanity who've been subtly monitoring the world, and a character from modern day humanity who is on this Earth and trying to figure out what happened to one of their agents, and uncovering a major threat to everything.
Now, that itself is not all that GREAT a plot (it doesn't have the 'oh wow, I must read this!' factor), but the way it unfolds and develops is really done well and I got caught up in the characters and their story. Lots of cool tech ideas too, which I of course love.
It's not a perfect book... I thought the romantic subplot, for example, happened a little fast and without much justification, and some of the 'complete loss of history' claims were a little overblown and unlikely, not to mention the motivations for some of the villains... but overall, it was an enjoyable little romp.
So, with a few flaws, quite liked, and I'd even like to see a follow-up.
Finished: Accelerando, by Charles Stross (reread)
Finished: Glasshouse, by Charles Stross (reread)
Both rereads, and multple-time-rereads, so there's not much more to say on them. Always enjoy Stross, particularly these two works of his.
Finished: Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman
A prose superhero novel, following dual storylines, one of Doctor Impossible, a supervillain engaging in his latest plot to take over the world, and another, Fatale, a cyborg hero and relatively new member of the New Champions, who are reforming to investigate the disappearance of Superman (or rather, the Superman analog of the world, named CoreFire).
It's fairly enjoyable, using the tropes of superhero comics, if not in particularly novel ways, than at least in novel form (ha, see what I did there?). Some decent explorations of characters, but too much of it feels familiar, like warmed over stuff I've already read many times, and only a cool new insights to why things are the way they are. Still, not every book has to break new ground, and I liked it, except, I think, it fell down at the end a little, and by extension, throughout the book. (minor spoilers, although I don't actually reveal much about the ending itself, just the feel of it).
One of the minor annoyances is that certain elements of the character's history felt like it didn't really all mesh in a logical way. Like, for example, Doctor Impossible's identity. He's been in prison several times. He has key connections to many of the heroes. Yet nobody knows what it is. I realize some of this is set up for a gag/character moment, but it doesn't really feel like it WORKS, like it's something that can happen.
A bit more of a problem is that the ending kind of felt a bit flat. Dramatic revelations out of nowhere, okay, fair enough, comic trope, and some of them did make me smile, but... I don't know, nothing about it really satisfied me and made me feel, 'yes, this is a proper ending'. Nor did it even feel like "okay, this is mimicking a superhero comic, and this is just the end of one adventure, but another awaits, and it continues on forever." It's somewhere in between, like this was MEANT to sum up everything, to be the definitive superhero examination, at least in this universe, but just failed at it in the end.
But minor flaws, and I did enjoy it, and hey I got it used for $2, so at that price, a bargain.
Started: The Evolutionary Void, by Peter F. Hamilton
Started: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, by Robert Charles Wilson