Recent-ish books: sci-fi
Recent-ish books: sci-fi
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
This is by the same author as The Martian, so I was very excited to read it.
It's very good. There's a lot I can't say about it without being spoily. But it starts with the protagonist waking up and not knowing who he is or where he is, and trying to figure things out from first principles - and so it basically does for science what The Martian did for engineering. Where Mark Watney hacks things together to make them do other things they were never intended to, this guy uses his knowledge of maths and physics to conduct experiments and work out what the heck is going on. It helps that he doesn't just understand broad scientific principles but also has a good memory for the values of constants and various pieces of data. And there's another character who handles the engineering side.
Like Weir's other books, this is uplifting and just very fun.
The big spoiler is that [Spoiler (click to open)]this is an alien first-contact story, and that doesn't become apparent until at least a third of the way through. The alien, "Rocky", is the engineer I mentioned. The bit where they first meet and learn to communicate is great and seems linguistically plausible, like Story of your Life (Arrival). They start with mathematical universals before they move on to actual language. Then they learn to communicate, to work together to survive, and to become friends and even joke together. At first I found this a bit implausible: it can be hard enough to relate to humans from other cultures and find common ground and shared humour, never mind actual aliens. I was thinking this was another case of "not alien enough". But then I realised that the way they bond is through their shared understanding of science, and science is (largely) objective and culture-independent, and that the reason they become friends and share jokes is because they are both nerds and they "get" each other (in a way that many of their compatriots don't), and that transcends national and even planetary boundaries - which I thought was actually quite awesome.
Last One at the Party - Bethany Clift
This is about a killer pandemic, much worse than Covid (it was written recently enough that the comparison is explicitly made). The infection rate is extremely high and everyone who catches it dies of it.
The government try to develop and roll out a vaccine, but scientists are dying too quickly to achieve it, so they fall back to mass distribution of a painless-suicide pill instead. The protagonist is mysteriously immune and finds herself as possibly the last person left alive. (We never learn her name; I found myself thinking of her as "Beth", based on the author's name and my reluctance to use my actual daughhter's name for her.)
A book like this could be horribly depressing, but it manages not to be, largely because Beth's narrative style is very entertaining and darkly comic, and partly because of the "triumph of the human spirit" angle. For both these reasons she reminds me a bit of Mark Watney from The Martian, and she even makes the comparison herself at one point.
There are some pretty dark bits, though, like [Spoiler (click to open)]the bit where the official government advice is to administer the suicide pill to your children before yourself, and the bit where Beth visits a zoo after all the humans who look after the animals have died but the animals are still alive... for now.
She has to learn how to survive in the short- and long term, fending off surprisingly scary gangs of feral rats and seagulls that have had the opportunity to develop a taste for humans, and she also has various leads to follow that might help her find out whether there's anyone else left alive.
The really good thing about this book is the questions it raises about who we are when no one is watching, and what the point of life is when there's no one to interact with or witness it, and also just the "what if?" angle (so many practical tasks are either massively harder or massively easier with no other humans around, and I've previously wondered about what I would do in that situation, so it's interesting to compare my thoughts to this author's).
This Is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Very interesting, unusual and memorable book. I really liked some parts of it and didn't like other parts.
The two main characters belong to two rival factions which (as far as I could infer) are each trying to use time travel to alter the multiple strands of history in line with their opposing goals, although we never learn what those goals actually are; it's just a backdrop against which the main characters can interact. They begin leaving each other messages, initially taunting each other as enemies, then growing in admiration for each other as worthy rivals, then deepening into respect, friendship, and eventually love.
I loved their letters to each other. They are both very eloquent, which makes sense as they fall in love based on each other's words.
I didn't so much like the third-person narrative chapters that were interspersed with the letters, because it was a bit hard to follow what was going on in them. But in a sense the details didn't matter; they mostly boil down to "Red/Blue spends centuries crafting a message to Blue/Red, and here it is" - the letters are the important part. One of the interstitial chapters I did follow involved growing a tree in such a way that the rings spell out the message.
The Psychology of Time Travel - Kate Mascarenhas
I was extremely excited to get this for my birthday (thanks alextfish) because I hadn't heard of it and it sounded so totally up my street: time travel plus psychological thriller plus locked-room mystery.
It was quite good, but sadly it didn't really live up to my expectations. I didn't feel it did enough with the time travel. The four scientists make this huge breakthrough, they test it with a rabbit and it seems to work, then they try it with themselves, sending all four of them an hour into the future to meet their future selves. They meet, hug, chat briefly, then return to their own time - and then the narrative cuts out and picks up the next day. I wanted to see it an hour later from the "future selves"' POV, like in Bill and Ted. I wanted to see whether and why they go through the same conversation - whether they feel compelled to say the same words, whether they could choose to do something different if they wanted to.
Unlike in most time travel stories, where a single individual or a small group can time travel and the rest of the world doesn't know about it, these people announce it on TV the next day, and the time travel "Conclave" later becomes a national organisation whose inner workings are secret but whose existence is very public, a bit like GCHQ or something. And there doesn't seem to be any massive social change as a result. (In this story you can't travel back before the invention of time travel, so it does make sense to talk of "before" and "after" as far as society is concerned.) I would expect lots of people (from the general public, not necessarily time travellers themselves) to have existential crises on learning that their future actions were already known, maybe going into deep depression or suicide because they no longer believe they have free will, or alternatively trying to defy or alter their futures, but the book doesn't explore this. The circumstances of people's deaths are potentially knowable and sometimes actually known, but this doesn't seem to cause either an epidemic of depression or a huge rise in risky behaviour by people who know this skydive/joyride/drug trip won't kill them. Presumably the betting industry would be destroyed. Elections would be changed beyond recognition, and competitions would be massively impacted, from the Olympics to school sports day. Dating would be weird, because you could know from the beginning whether it was going to last, and the other person might know even if you didn't.
There's only one brief exploration of how people interact with their known futures: someone asks "Why did you all get into the time machine that day, knowing it was going to explode and injure you?" and the reply is something like "Didn't you ever know something was a bad idea but do it anyway?" I didn't find that very satisfying. When people know something is a bad idea, sometimes they do it anyway and sometimes they resist, and it varies by personality and by how important the thing and its negative consequences are (and, in the real world, they're only ever *likely* negative consequences). Out of all the time travellers involved in the incident, did none of them even try to resist? Subjectively, did they experience their wills getting magically overridden, or did they come up with some convoluted rationalisation why they actually really wanted to do it after all? Enquiring minds want to know.
The book was weirdly provocatively feminist: the blurb begins "Four female scientists...", the six main characters and about 90% of the secondary characters are women, and it doesn't get within sniffing distance of passing reverse-Bechdel, but most provocatively, the third-person narrative uses "she" and "woman" for generic people, like (inexact quote from memory) "it was now the domain of hobbyists, women who liked to tinker with old technology and restore it." Yes, I know a typical 1950s male sci-fi author would have said "he" and "men". He would have been wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.
One thing I did like was the language angle. Time travellers evolve their own terminology, like "green-me" and "silver-me" for your younger and older selves, "emus" for non-time-travellers (as emus cannot walk backwards), and various slang terms for sex with past or future versions of your partner or yourself, and "atroposium" for the fuel that enables time travel.
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
This is by the same author as The Martian, so I was very excited to read it.
It's very good. There's a lot I can't say about it without being spoily. But it starts with the protagonist waking up and not knowing who he is or where he is, and trying to figure things out from first principles - and so it basically does for science what The Martian did for engineering. Where Mark Watney hacks things together to make them do other things they were never intended to, this guy uses his knowledge of maths and physics to conduct experiments and work out what the heck is going on. It helps that he doesn't just understand broad scientific principles but also has a good memory for the values of constants and various pieces of data. And there's another character who handles the engineering side.
Like Weir's other books, this is uplifting and just very fun.
The big spoiler is that [Spoiler (click to open)]this is an alien first-contact story, and that doesn't become apparent until at least a third of the way through. The alien, "Rocky", is the engineer I mentioned. The bit where they first meet and learn to communicate is great and seems linguistically plausible, like Story of your Life (Arrival). They start with mathematical universals before they move on to actual language. Then they learn to communicate, to work together to survive, and to become friends and even joke together. At first I found this a bit implausible: it can be hard enough to relate to humans from other cultures and find common ground and shared humour, never mind actual aliens. I was thinking this was another case of "not alien enough". But then I realised that the way they bond is through their shared understanding of science, and science is (largely) objective and culture-independent, and that the reason they become friends and share jokes is because they are both nerds and they "get" each other (in a way that many of their compatriots don't), and that transcends national and even planetary boundaries - which I thought was actually quite awesome.
Last One at the Party - Bethany Clift
This is about a killer pandemic, much worse than Covid (it was written recently enough that the comparison is explicitly made). The infection rate is extremely high and everyone who catches it dies of it.
The government try to develop and roll out a vaccine, but scientists are dying too quickly to achieve it, so they fall back to mass distribution of a painless-suicide pill instead. The protagonist is mysteriously immune and finds herself as possibly the last person left alive. (We never learn her name; I found myself thinking of her as "Beth", based on the author's name and my reluctance to use my actual daughhter's name for her.)
A book like this could be horribly depressing, but it manages not to be, largely because Beth's narrative style is very entertaining and darkly comic, and partly because of the "triumph of the human spirit" angle. For both these reasons she reminds me a bit of Mark Watney from The Martian, and she even makes the comparison herself at one point.
There are some pretty dark bits, though, like [Spoiler (click to open)]the bit where the official government advice is to administer the suicide pill to your children before yourself, and the bit where Beth visits a zoo after all the humans who look after the animals have died but the animals are still alive... for now.
She has to learn how to survive in the short- and long term, fending off surprisingly scary gangs of feral rats and seagulls that have had the opportunity to develop a taste for humans, and she also has various leads to follow that might help her find out whether there's anyone else left alive.
The really good thing about this book is the questions it raises about who we are when no one is watching, and what the point of life is when there's no one to interact with or witness it, and also just the "what if?" angle (so many practical tasks are either massively harder or massively easier with no other humans around, and I've previously wondered about what I would do in that situation, so it's interesting to compare my thoughts to this author's).
This Is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Very interesting, unusual and memorable book. I really liked some parts of it and didn't like other parts.
The two main characters belong to two rival factions which (as far as I could infer) are each trying to use time travel to alter the multiple strands of history in line with their opposing goals, although we never learn what those goals actually are; it's just a backdrop against which the main characters can interact. They begin leaving each other messages, initially taunting each other as enemies, then growing in admiration for each other as worthy rivals, then deepening into respect, friendship, and eventually love.
I loved their letters to each other. They are both very eloquent, which makes sense as they fall in love based on each other's words.
I didn't so much like the third-person narrative chapters that were interspersed with the letters, because it was a bit hard to follow what was going on in them. But in a sense the details didn't matter; they mostly boil down to "Red/Blue spends centuries crafting a message to Blue/Red, and here it is" - the letters are the important part. One of the interstitial chapters I did follow involved growing a tree in such a way that the rings spell out the message.
The Psychology of Time Travel - Kate Mascarenhas
I was extremely excited to get this for my birthday (thanks alextfish) because I hadn't heard of it and it sounded so totally up my street: time travel plus psychological thriller plus locked-room mystery.
It was quite good, but sadly it didn't really live up to my expectations. I didn't feel it did enough with the time travel. The four scientists make this huge breakthrough, they test it with a rabbit and it seems to work, then they try it with themselves, sending all four of them an hour into the future to meet their future selves. They meet, hug, chat briefly, then return to their own time - and then the narrative cuts out and picks up the next day. I wanted to see it an hour later from the "future selves"' POV, like in Bill and Ted. I wanted to see whether and why they go through the same conversation - whether they feel compelled to say the same words, whether they could choose to do something different if they wanted to.
Unlike in most time travel stories, where a single individual or a small group can time travel and the rest of the world doesn't know about it, these people announce it on TV the next day, and the time travel "Conclave" later becomes a national organisation whose inner workings are secret but whose existence is very public, a bit like GCHQ or something. And there doesn't seem to be any massive social change as a result. (In this story you can't travel back before the invention of time travel, so it does make sense to talk of "before" and "after" as far as society is concerned.) I would expect lots of people (from the general public, not necessarily time travellers themselves) to have existential crises on learning that their future actions were already known, maybe going into deep depression or suicide because they no longer believe they have free will, or alternatively trying to defy or alter their futures, but the book doesn't explore this. The circumstances of people's deaths are potentially knowable and sometimes actually known, but this doesn't seem to cause either an epidemic of depression or a huge rise in risky behaviour by people who know this skydive/joyride/drug trip won't kill them. Presumably the betting industry would be destroyed. Elections would be changed beyond recognition, and competitions would be massively impacted, from the Olympics to school sports day. Dating would be weird, because you could know from the beginning whether it was going to last, and the other person might know even if you didn't.
There's only one brief exploration of how people interact with their known futures: someone asks "Why did you all get into the time machine that day, knowing it was going to explode and injure you?" and the reply is something like "Didn't you ever know something was a bad idea but do it anyway?" I didn't find that very satisfying. When people know something is a bad idea, sometimes they do it anyway and sometimes they resist, and it varies by personality and by how important the thing and its negative consequences are (and, in the real world, they're only ever *likely* negative consequences). Out of all the time travellers involved in the incident, did none of them even try to resist? Subjectively, did they experience their wills getting magically overridden, or did they come up with some convoluted rationalisation why they actually really wanted to do it after all? Enquiring minds want to know.
The book was weirdly provocatively feminist: the blurb begins "Four female scientists...", the six main characters and about 90% of the secondary characters are women, and it doesn't get within sniffing distance of passing reverse-Bechdel, but most provocatively, the third-person narrative uses "she" and "woman" for generic people, like (inexact quote from memory) "it was now the domain of hobbyists, women who liked to tinker with old technology and restore it." Yes, I know a typical 1950s male sci-fi author would have said "he" and "men". He would have been wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.
One thing I did like was the language angle. Time travellers evolve their own terminology, like "green-me" and "silver-me" for your younger and older selves, "emus" for non-time-travellers (as emus cannot walk backwards), and various slang terms for sex with past or future versions of your partner or yourself, and "atroposium" for the fuel that enables time travel.