Fiction
Hello from the newly named Rivkave (it pronounces much better than it writes; maybe "Riv-cave," along the lines of "Bat-cave"?). I've been slacking on the reading, but I still have some reviews in the hopper. One humor and three sf this time.
Christopher Buckley, No Way to Treat a First Lady: Elizabeth MacMurray, better known in the press as Lady BethMac, has been accused of killing her husband, the President of the United States. Her only hope is the man she jilted in law school for the president. The satire is too mild to have real satirical bite; Thank You For Smoking, Buckley's novel about the MOD Squad (Merchants of Death, lobbyists for alcohol, tobacco and firearms), remains his best comic novel in my opinion. There are some cute legal scenes, but they're pretty obvious, with nothing extra to make you pick up the book. Inoffensive, but skippable.
Elizabeth Moon, Change of Command: Interstellar politics, romance, and rebellion, through multiple points of view - there's less to complain about on the POV front this time, because it's consistently switching, which makes it more panoramic and less dislocating when there's a change. This book is not a standalone. It recounts a bunch of events using characters from Moon's earlier books, and sets up conflicts for later resolution. There's not a complete story here, but I felt at the end that the players were in place for a fast-paced denouement, so I'll see whether she pulls it off.
Lisa Mason, Arachne: This exercise in late 80s/early 90s cyberpunk feels pretty dated now, if only for the starting salaries of lawyers, which shot up faster in reality than sf writers could imagine. A young legal hotshot develops trouble with the link that allows her to participate in virtual court; she keeps seeing a strange alternate reality and a menacing spider. Pr. Spinner, a cranky, obsolete (10 years old) robot, thinks she's found an archetype, thrown off by fragments of human consciousness that don't fit the formal parameters of the web. Spinner wants the archetype for herself. The only problem is that getting it will require a human's death. The characters are uniformly unpleasant. I didn't want any of them to win. Bleh.
John Birmingham, Weapons of Choice: Apparently I'm reading military sf to go along with my military history these days, and this was a fun mixture. A multinational peacekeeping force, assembled hurriedly in 2021 to deal with a coup in Indonesia, drags with it a US research vessel. Unfortunately, something goes very wrong with the US experiment, and much of the force is propelled back in time. Many of the ships land smack dab in the middle of the US carrier group steaming towards the battle of Midway. The first third of the book essentially recounts the first fifteen minutes of that confused, horrendous, deadly encounter, where the contemporary group thinks they've been attacked by the Japs and the future, still reeling from the physical effects of the transfer, thinks they've been attacked by a new terrorist weapon. Even crippled, the future ships are able to inflict devastating losses on the US forces - the ones that were supposed to win the battle of Midway, thus shortening WWII in the Pacific. So, even when things are somewhat sorted out and hostilities terminate, there are enormous problems of what to do next, compounded by the presence in the future group of a Japanese ship and a large number of personnel who are nonwhite and/or female. Also, the remnant force might not have been the only thing to come back in time. History has been destroyed, but the war is still going on; what next? This isn't literature - "it seemed as though the data was floating in space" manages to hit my pet peeve of mistaking both tense and number - but it is tremendously exciting. (It never hurts to have Nazis as your bad guys.) The military stuff is fun, with a sensor "feeling its way up the [mountain] range like a blind man running his fingers over a face," and the future soldiers able to perform feats of magic against forces with no real protection against precision weaponry. And you've got to love the British, whose contemporary representative, upon being briefed of the events, wires home, "I must report a most unusual event in the Pacific theatre." Ya think? The book makes the horrible waste of war even clearer than usual with the tragedy in the beginning, and its comparisons between the relatively innocent, prejudiced Americans of the past and the hardened but egalitarian multinational force of the future made me think. Will the future always seem cruel and mechanical to the past, just as the past appears crude and unreasonably resistant to obvious necessities? The narrative also makes the most of the social differences between the two eras, showing that technology is not, in the end, as important as hearts and minds. This is the first book in a proposed series, and I'm definitely going to buy the next one.
Christopher Buckley, No Way to Treat a First Lady: Elizabeth MacMurray, better known in the press as Lady BethMac, has been accused of killing her husband, the President of the United States. Her only hope is the man she jilted in law school for the president. The satire is too mild to have real satirical bite; Thank You For Smoking, Buckley's novel about the MOD Squad (Merchants of Death, lobbyists for alcohol, tobacco and firearms), remains his best comic novel in my opinion. There are some cute legal scenes, but they're pretty obvious, with nothing extra to make you pick up the book. Inoffensive, but skippable.
Elizabeth Moon, Change of Command: Interstellar politics, romance, and rebellion, through multiple points of view - there's less to complain about on the POV front this time, because it's consistently switching, which makes it more panoramic and less dislocating when there's a change. This book is not a standalone. It recounts a bunch of events using characters from Moon's earlier books, and sets up conflicts for later resolution. There's not a complete story here, but I felt at the end that the players were in place for a fast-paced denouement, so I'll see whether she pulls it off.
Lisa Mason, Arachne: This exercise in late 80s/early 90s cyberpunk feels pretty dated now, if only for the starting salaries of lawyers, which shot up faster in reality than sf writers could imagine. A young legal hotshot develops trouble with the link that allows her to participate in virtual court; she keeps seeing a strange alternate reality and a menacing spider. Pr. Spinner, a cranky, obsolete (10 years old) robot, thinks she's found an archetype, thrown off by fragments of human consciousness that don't fit the formal parameters of the web. Spinner wants the archetype for herself. The only problem is that getting it will require a human's death. The characters are uniformly unpleasant. I didn't want any of them to win. Bleh.
John Birmingham, Weapons of Choice: Apparently I'm reading military sf to go along with my military history these days, and this was a fun mixture. A multinational peacekeeping force, assembled hurriedly in 2021 to deal with a coup in Indonesia, drags with it a US research vessel. Unfortunately, something goes very wrong with the US experiment, and much of the force is propelled back in time. Many of the ships land smack dab in the middle of the US carrier group steaming towards the battle of Midway. The first third of the book essentially recounts the first fifteen minutes of that confused, horrendous, deadly encounter, where the contemporary group thinks they've been attacked by the Japs and the future, still reeling from the physical effects of the transfer, thinks they've been attacked by a new terrorist weapon. Even crippled, the future ships are able to inflict devastating losses on the US forces - the ones that were supposed to win the battle of Midway, thus shortening WWII in the Pacific. So, even when things are somewhat sorted out and hostilities terminate, there are enormous problems of what to do next, compounded by the presence in the future group of a Japanese ship and a large number of personnel who are nonwhite and/or female. Also, the remnant force might not have been the only thing to come back in time. History has been destroyed, but the war is still going on; what next? This isn't literature - "it seemed as though the data was floating in space" manages to hit my pet peeve of mistaking both tense and number - but it is tremendously exciting. (It never hurts to have Nazis as your bad guys.) The military stuff is fun, with a sensor "feeling its way up the [mountain] range like a blind man running his fingers over a face," and the future soldiers able to perform feats of magic against forces with no real protection against precision weaponry. And you've got to love the British, whose contemporary representative, upon being briefed of the events, wires home, "I must report a most unusual event in the Pacific theatre." Ya think? The book makes the horrible waste of war even clearer than usual with the tragedy in the beginning, and its comparisons between the relatively innocent, prejudiced Americans of the past and the hardened but egalitarian multinational force of the future made me think. Will the future always seem cruel and mechanical to the past, just as the past appears crude and unreasonably resistant to obvious necessities? The narrative also makes the most of the social differences between the two eras, showing that technology is not, in the end, as important as hearts and minds. This is the first book in a proposed series, and I'm definitely going to buy the next one.