This is a rather workmanlike entry from Scalzi, neither as hyperkinetically witty as he can be in works like Redshirts, nor as old-school Space AdventThis is a rather workmanlike entry from Scalzi, neither as hyperkinetically witty as he can be in works like Redshirts, nor as old-school Space Adventure as he is in the superior Old Man's War.
If OMW was Scalzi's (I think largely successful) attempt to channel Robert Heinlein, this comes across as his homage to Arther C. Clarke. It's 'big idea' sci-fi, with a number of vaguely floating questions about morality, identity, and so on, many of which I suspect were occasioned by fan reactions to OMW wondering about how that universe would change what we mean when we say someone "is" such-and-such when their bodies and brains are as interchangeable as LEGO parts.
The problem is, Scalzi is not really a 'big idea' author. He's a writer of potboilers, and he's good at that. But just as Redshirts fell to horrible pieces when he tried to turn that frothy bit of entertainment into a Meaningful Book about metatextuality, so this one falls a bit to pieces when the characters start sounding less like space soldiers and more like late-night philosophy graduate students. The tone doesn't fit, and there's no real conclusion that's reached on the basis of the characters' in-world actions, so it just comes across as masturbatory, or worse, as filler.
In brief: Wool's merits are obvious. It manages to be an almost entirely character-driven novel in a universe which could have easily devolved into a One-Damn-Thing-After-the-Other plot-heavy event-driven spectacle. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But the skill with which Howey *does* keep so much of the focus on character, rather than event, is refreshing.
On the other had...I'm maybe too optimistic to enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction much. Well, and too old. The apocalypse is a poetically attractive metaphor for the 17 year old, who views all revolutions as both necessary and good. The 43-year-old...not so much.
I thinking I'm turning myself into the World's Greatest Expert on ths sub-sub-genre of books-about-gaming. Not books which happen to be set in gameingI thinking I'm turning myself into the World's Greatest Expert on ths sub-sub-genre of books-about-gaming. Not books which happen to be set in gameing universes, or which serve as tie-ins to games, but books which prominently feature gamers and gaming itself as integral plot elements. It's an intersection of geekery and speculative-fiction I find impossible to resist. And, sadly, damned difficult (though awfully fun) to write in. If you are aware of any works out there which fit the bill and which I haven't yet reviewed, please drop me a PM.
Anyhoo, on to business. This book kind of suxxored.
The book was published under Del Rey's "New Discoveries" imprint for new authors, and the faults which we might expect of any such are abundant. The exposition is clumsy, funny fonts are used to distinguish speakers, and way too much attention is paid to loving descriptions of utterly unimportant background details. I'll give credit to Wentworth for clearly loving her setting.
Where the book really blows it are in its characters' motivations and, strangely for a spec. fic. piece, the complete failure of the author to consider the logical ramifications of her plot setup.
We are supposed to believe that in this futuristic game world - a kind of live-in Disneyland/Westworld hybrid with a Roman theme - people have willingly given up the conveniences of modern life in order to compete to become 'Emperor' of the game. Silly enough, but it gets even sillier when we discover that the computer programmers, and their families, share this ardent desire to give up microwaves and running water in order to be, well, another dirty faux-Roman. And these people supposedly do this for *years* at a time.
I belonged to the SCA for a few shame-filled years. There's a reason "Anachronism" is in the group's title. Even medievophilics enjoy flushing toilets and matches.
Then there are the robots which supposedly populate this Brave New World. We're to believe that we've handed over law enforcement to androids ni The Future...but that these plasticene losers are too stupid to understand human motivations, or how to gather evidence, or what constitutes probable cause...and that when one of them *does* become convinced our protagonist is a murderer, the robot just lets him walk away. No, sorry.
Of course, law enforcement is just one use for robots. They also play the lower-classes, slaves, and sacrificial victims in the game dome. Well, some of them...because the author wants to believe that people who are, remember, *paying* to play this game, are willing and legally able, to serve themselves, or their children, up as slaves or gladiators. With real rape and death and so on. All legally.
Yeah, I'm sorry, this is when I started skimming the book. Around chapter two.
The protagonist comes across as a sexist ass, with no more care for the fact that his programs just killed some people than he would if they had gotten a page-fault in memory. The author doesn't seem to understand programmers. gamers, nor women. Historical note, I just checked her wikipedia page and discovered, to my absolute shock, that the author was a woman. I had to go through and change all the pronoun genders. I'm frankly amazed that an actual female, even one born in the early 1950s, could be this grotesque in her treatment of female subjects. Ick. ...more
I am a late-comer to Stross' "Halting State," and he has moved on to bigger (better?) things. Therefore I feel perfectly comfortable in noting the booI am a late-comer to Stross' "Halting State," and he has moved on to bigger (better?) things. Therefore I feel perfectly comfortable in noting the book's weaknesses as well as its strengths.
This is one of the most annoyingly written good books I've ever read.
The plot is a futurist geek's dream: gamers and hackers and cops and robbers and ninjas all fighting for control of a distributed Augmented Reality RPG which turns out to be the key to, well, pretty much all of civilization. Plus a bucketload of cash.
Stross' love for, and knowledge of, his subjects is on sharp display here...perhaps a bit too sharply, since he has a nasty habit of dropping piles of loosely associated computer terminology and gamer-slang into conversations. For the most part, he does so accurately, though at times his urge to name-drop a SQL trick or an OD&D reference trips him up, in ways which would ever really only matter to other uber-nerds, like myself, who can make fine sport out of spotting niggling little errors like those. That's not a problem.
A problem is Stross' bizarre decision to write the entire novel from the second-person POV. Yes, I get what he was aiming at here: the choose-your-own-adventure feel of early Infocom text adventures, or classic RPG supplements. The constant "you feel this" and "you suspect such and such" and "So you do that thing..." is quirky at first, and a little hard to navigate simply because it's such an unfamiliar narrative mode. About three chapters in, the reader gets the rhythm down, and the flow smooths out. But then, about three chapters later, the persistant "you, You, YOU" becomes like a finger jabbing out of the text, painfully poking the reader in the eye at every turn. There's a reason that the 2nd-person is not frequently used for narrative: it actually accomplishes the opposite of its intention. Rather than making me feel more like I was part of the story, it was as if a character on screen kept breaking the fourth wall and reminding me I was in a theater; it completely threw me out of the tale. This problem was exacerbated because the jargon-laden sci-fi setting necessitates a fair amount of exposition, which had to be rather ham-handedly stuffed into appositive constructions. "You suddenly remember about CMOS, the layer of programming underlying the OS, or Operating System, which yuo might use to..." See? Ugly.
So, an ambitious move. Daring. Bold. Totally flops. Which is a pity, because the book and characters themselves are quite likeable, much in the vein of Ernie Cline's Ready Player One. The rating above reflects my mixed feelings. ...more
However - and this is the essential however - it's still compelling as all get out. Hamilton can make a 834 page tome Good Christ this is a long book.
However - and this is the essential however - it's still compelling as all get out. Hamilton can make a 834 page tome fly by like a, well, like a merely 652 page tome. It's still a long read, but hey, we're all about value for the money here anyway, right?
As the back-cover-blurb reveals, this is really three stories, each with its own protagonist, and as they converge on a backwater planet with a massive secret, the threads become more and more deeply entangled. It is absolutely to Hamilton's credit that I began the novel completely certain that protagonist A was the real "hero" of the piece, protagonist "B" the villain, and protagonist "C" a red-herring...then halfway through, I knew with absolute clarity that "A" was the villain," "B" the red herring, and "C" the hero. By book's end, I'd gone through several more evolutions, and ended up satisfied both with the characters' respective fates, and how logically each had moved through the plot. These are realistic and complex characters, and literary testaments to the principle that nobody ever believes that he or she is the 'bad guy.' Everybody has a justification.
The other nice payoff was that the 'massive secret' was, contrary to some chequered history in this genre, actually as massive as promised. This book is a stand-alone in Hamilton's ouvre, and I've been wary of diving into his long series work because of their daunting lengths, but this has served as the perfect appetizer. If you can call 834 pages an "appetizer."...more
Sometimes you finish a volume with the idea that hiding somewhere inside it was a good book, but that the poor thing got smothered with over-writing, Sometimes you finish a volume with the idea that hiding somewhere inside it was a good book, but that the poor thing got smothered with over-writing, poor direction, expository nonsense, or ham-handed diadicticism. In this case, I felt like there might have been not two, but *three* potentially good books which kind of crashed into one another and left nothing terribly satisfactory. Still, kudos for trying.
McKiernan, one of the Great Grey Sages of the late 70's/early 80's fantasy boom, here takes his signature Tolkien rip-off and wedges it into a quasi sci-fi premise: some famous rpg gamers get the chance to use a newly developed technology to live out their characters' lives in a game run by a new developed AI, which promptly goes haywire, stranding their minds inside the computer.
I say quasi sci-fi because, even by the very vague understanding which should be available to lay people, this book mistreats the sciences of neurology and computer engineering so very badly that I can't quite believe it was the product of simple ignorance. You have to work *hard* to be this crazypants about technology. It's not just the "AI goes crazy and becomes murderous" silliness common to a billion Hollwood movies, it's the overwrought supposed 'scientists' who try to earnestly debate metaphysics they simply misunderstand, from Plato's allegory of the Cave to the Mandarin's Dream. Worst of those is the caricature of a neuroscientist who claims science has categorically "proven" that there is no soul...a stupid character, badly handled.
All of this might be excusable if either the sci-fi shenanigans of trying to stump the AI, or the fantasy quest story in the game, were compelling. They're not. Worst of all, McKiernan doesn't seem to understand basic character motivations here: why in the world would players of a game want to literally give up their identities in order to allow some computer to puppet them around a fantasy landscape. That's not them playing, so why would they bother? Where's the benefit? And if they were that self-defeating, then how is that 'their' souls in the machine at all, if the AI has erased their basic memories and motivations?
Just incoherent.
I gave the book a sole extra star for ambition, but almost took it off again for the last chapter which is the most over-the-top silly part of all and which I will now ruin for you: having escaped the AI, the gamers now have their characters' magical powers from inside the fantasy game. Because apparently the laws of physics are easily broken by a little extra voltage across your synapses and some wishful thinking.
As a drummer, Neil Pert is without equal, able to make sounds so rapidly, precisely, and fascinatingly blended that you'd swear an entire step-squad mAs a drummer, Neil Pert is without equal, able to make sounds so rapidly, precisely, and fascinatingly blended that you'd swear an entire step-squad must be involved.
As a writer...hey, have I mentioned what an incredible drummer Neil Pert is?
Seriously, kudos to Pert for staying current with trends, riding that steampunk wave, reinventing the band's image for the umpteenth time, and coming up with some fine plot hooks in his lyrics. Credit most of all for having apparently *finally* grown out of that childish fascination with Ayn Rand and her travesty of a "philosophy." Conceptually, Clockwork Angels is an allegory all about riding the line between extremes of order and chaos, government security and individual freedom. The Watchmaker who rules the steampunk society in the novel is a caricature of controlling statism, but just so the Anarchist who opposes him is a caricature of careless, thoughtless, chaos, ignorantly causing destruction and pain in the name of 'freedom.'
No, the 'credit' for this book's failures lie squarely on the shoulders of Kevin Anderson, who manages to flatten the caricature characters even further with bland dialog, badly written expository first-person musings, and, worst of all, no plot direction. Candide, Voltaire's satirical novel of resistance to would-be guru philosophers, serves as the scaffolding for the picaresque plot here, but where Candide works because each character has a story arc they relate to the protagonist, Anderson makes the mistake of focussin on that protagonist who is, frankly, a cypher incapable of holding our attention or our empathy. This one ends with a whimper. ...more
This book was statistically remarkable: it's generally really, *really* difficult to produce an anthology without even one good story in it.
Still, somThis book was statistically remarkable: it's generally really, *really* difficult to produce an anthology without even one good story in it.
Still, somehow they managed here. It's partially a matter of selection, I suspect, since only a few second-string authors make appearances here, and the rest are relatively unknown. In genre fiction, as with most fields, cream does tend to actually rise to the top by the Law of Large Audiences. Yes, there are plenty of unknown authors who just need the right break, myself included, but there are others who are obscure for good damned reason: they stink.
That, sadly, is all too much the case here. I almost feel like the editors must have gone out of their way to find the most banal possible stories for this collection. For an anthology dealing with such a rich topic, how else do you explain the fact that every story limps, every fight scene bores, every long-winded expository passage makes one scramble for the table of contents, sure that some other story must, *must*, statistically, be an improvement? It never is, sadly. ...more
I finish Suarez' debut with mixed feelings. I've gotten over my initial angry-ranting stage, which would have seen here a scorched-earth review full oI finish Suarez' debut with mixed feelings. I've gotten over my initial angry-ranting stage, which would have seen here a scorched-earth review full of all the bile I had coughed up over the course of reading it, and I can acknowledge that there is a good deal of merit in the premise of the book, and occasionally very well handled action sections.
However, I don't think I'll be looking for the sequels. The pacing is uneven at best, with sudden time jumps, dropped plotlines, and the usual clumsy exposition scenes common to newer science fiction ("here, ignorant bystander, let Dr. X explain again just how his machine works...").
None of these are mortal sins. The unforgivable problem with this novel is that it relies on (a) a basic misunderstanding of essential truths of history and culture and (b) rank stupidity.
The 'villain' of the piece is a computer program which has been set in motion by its inventor's death, which activates a bunch of deathtraps and financial machinations and long-dormant schemes like a bunch of expert-system terrorist cells. Fine stuff, this first part of the book, good thriller material. Unfortunately, throughout the latter two-thirds of the novel, Suarez apparently decided this wasn't threat enough, so it turns out the evil program begins recruiting millions of converts to its cause, which is nothing less than the annihilation of society. This is lame, and demonstrates the author's fundamental ignorance of history and human nature. Those few times that truly revolutionary movements have erupted, they have necessitated charismatic leaders, but even if some of these anarchists were so self-destructively idiotic as to agree to the destruction of the very culture they feed off of, and without which they will all starve, they are anarchists. The very type who, you know, wouldn't take orders, and certainly not with the robotic precision necessitated for the scheme to work. The idea that a bunch of distributed nobodies could gather, assemble, and deploy the types of weapons, informational and physical, seen in the book is frankly laughable.
In order for the plot to work at all, Suarez has to cheat, and he cheats openly and badly. His protagonists are beyond stupid. They are, universally, amongst the stupidest people I've ever read of in any fiction, ever. If you were facing off against a supercomputer which could hack into and control any computer system, what's the one thing you absolutely WOULDN'T use to operate, say, the security doors in your top-secret anti-terrorist lab? If you answered "networked computers," you are smarter than every protagonist in this book. Seriously, these guys give the dolts in Deep Blue Sea a run for their money (that's the horror movie in which the 'scientists' decide the best place to locate their lab for studying hyper-smart giant sharks is *inside* the shark enclosure, underwater). And if you were so dumb as to use computerized doors, and were being threatened by (not kidding) an evil blade-covered motorcycle, where would you go? I would go up some stairs. Not these guys. They run outside, to a conveniently flat, open plain where they can be hunted down. These dummies have to work HARD to get killed.
So no, Mr. Suarez, you didn't convince me of your vision. Does cybercrime exist? Sure. Does it want to end society? No, because it's not as stupid as that. A parasite that kills its host dies. And even if it did, humanity at large is not as moronic as to go out of its way to make it easier for the baddies.
This book was something of a downward spiral. Perhaps with such a brilliant premise, there was no way for it to be anything but.
The central plot of the book (and this is spelled out in the back-cover blurb, so I'm spoiling nothing here) is that a group of low-ranking crewmembers on an Enterprise-esque starship in a Star-Trek-esque universe discover that they are, in fact, expendable cannon fodder. This part of the book, the first third or so, is solid gold. Scalzi's black humor is on full display here, and the dialog between the snarky-yet-doomed crewmen is Joss-Whedon caliber funny, and stands as a stark contrast to the wooden posturing of the senior officers who are the seemingly invincible 'stars' of the show.
Unfortunately. Scalzi suffers here from Monty-Python syndrome: driven by this wonderfully absurd premise to this point, he doesn't know where to end it. Instead, he has the characters break through their fourth wall and confront the authors of their show. This begs all sorts of narratological questions, including why, given their now infinite power over their universe, they don't ask for a quick ressurection of all their dead friends, or a million other boons.
Not content with that, Scalzi then unfortunately nails the coffin shut by breaking the fourth wall of the book itself. If the premise of the novel is that fictional characters resent their treatment, then that applies to characters in novels by John Scalzi too, and suddenly we're made uncomfortably aware of the reading process as the narrator starts to intrude on the text. Not content with thus upsetting the consistency of the book, Scalzi decides to make the apparatus of production even more evident by tacking on some loosely connected "codas." I've read enough freshman essays to know when someone is desperately padding their work, and this last 20,000 words or so stank of all the miserable fear of the English 101 student who just realized that their 12-page essay on the French revolution is due in the morning, and they've only penned 5 pages. It's unworthy material.
The biggest sin here is not that Scalzi plays fast and loose with our expectations, nor even that he breaks the fourth wall of the narrative. After all, plenty of works in the genre, most notably The Princess Bride, have played with just that sort of self-aware winking at the audience. No, the problem is that the manner in which he does so renders the first half of the book, the really stellar and entertaining part, null and void. "How dare you take pleasure in these fictional characters," the text demands. "Recognize them for what they are: made-up characters in a made-up story, with no real agency, no real humanity, and thus impossible to empathize with." It's a rather sneering point, inelegantly made, but if that's what Scalzi wants, that's what he gets.
Demand that I no longer suspend my disbelief, and that I no longer invest in the diagesis of your fictional universe? As you wish. ...more
It's my tendency to give almost any anthology a '3' rating on principal. With rare exceptions, the nature of the beast is that some entries are going It's my tendency to give almost any anthology a '3' rating on principal. With rare exceptions, the nature of the beast is that some entries are going to fail and some soar. Steampunk! is not an exception.
Don't get me wrong: there are some stellar stories in here, notably Cory Doctorow's "Clockwork Fagin," and some thoughtful, enjoyable work like Dylan Horrocks' "Steam Girl" and Holly Black's "Everything Amiable and Obliging," but there are also some rather pedestrian efforts like Elizabeth Knox' "Gethsemane," and some outright flops, including both of the (strangely poorly drawn) comic-book works in the anthology. The editors' decision to specifically avoid the cliches of the steampunk sub-genre did not serve them very well in this regard. What the hell are stories such as the final one, about ancient Roman artificers, even doing in this book? Anyone searching for an introduction to the genre would be better served elsewhere.
This book very nearly landed on my books-I-sort-of-regret-reading list (see my bookshelves), not necessarily because of any intrinsic Bait and Switch.
This book very nearly landed on my books-I-sort-of-regret-reading list (see my bookshelves), not necessarily because of any intrinsic flaw but because it indulged in the 'My Girl' sin: it promised to belong to one genre, then ended up somewhere else entirely.
The packaging, title, cover, back blurbs, press, and even the first chapter suggest heavily that this is going to be a noir comic-book inflected action story of super heroes among us, perhaps not on the order of Watchmen, but perhaps in the same vein as A Once Crowded Sky. It isn't. The 'super heroes' - which aren't, by the way, super - appear only in a few brief cameos, there is no uber villain, and the actual plot revolves around a down-on-his-luck cliche of a private eye. Not what was advertised.
The book still might have been saved had it been significantly better written. Unfortunately, the whole plot, such as it is, hinges on the protagonist having no clue what's going on. It is precisely half-way through the book, to the very page, that we even find out the name of the Big McGuffin everyone wants to control. And then that McGuffin turns out to be not actually controllable. Our 'hero' is a sad sack, bumbling around in the dark with no agency, constantly being reminded by the *actual* movers and shakers of the Empire State that his actions are pretty much meaningless. Well congratulations, you sold me on that idea. The writing is leaden, the plotting unbearably slow, and the 'payoff' at the end is a whimpering trail-off without much to look forward to.
So why isn't this getting a 'one'? There are hints here of a much bigger, more important story taking place outside the confines of this book. All the significant choices and characters are offstage, and our hero is reduced to an ineffective sidekick, at best. It's like reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as if Hamlet had never existed. There's no brilliance here, no particular wit, not much action and less meaning. It is, like the Empire State itself, a reflection, dimly perceived, of some better work which this reader was searching for. ...more
This book is not very deep. It has little artistry. It will not make you a better person. It will not attend our sorrow. It will not console our childThis book is not very deep. It has little artistry. It will not make you a better person. It will not attend our sorrow. It will not console our children. It will not be able to help us.
But holy crow is it fun.
This is, for my money, the most sheer fun I've ever had reading a book. It's absolute popcorn fare for the dorkiest gamer, trekkie, cosplayer, or other form of geek with which you might be familiar. It's pure fan service. In addition to the sheer indulgenece of the setting (a nerdtastic mixture of the Holodeck and GenCon), there's the undeniable message: victory, in the end, does not go to the swiftest, the strongest, nor even the fastest. It goes to the min/maxer. The rules-lawyer triumps. May the best gamer win. The future belongs to the munchkin....more