Book Review: De Bello Lemures by Thomas Brookside

De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica is a self-published book, about the length of a long novella, by Thomas Brookside.

De Bello Lemures is presented as a newly recovered and translated Latin text, originally written in the late 2nd Century AD by Lucius Artorius Castus, a Roman military commander. The story begins in Armorica (Brittany), a minor backwater of Roman Gaul where Artorius and his troops, a mix of Roman legionaries and Iazyges (an Indo-Iranian tribe that settled in Eastern Europe) auxiliaries, have just successfully put down a native uprising. When the surviving rebels are put to death by crucifixion, one of them calls out a curse in his native tongue just before expiring, saying that he will lead the dead to take revenge on the Romans.

Artorius, contemptuous of the natives and what he regards as their barbaric superstitions, thinks little of it. That night, however, while returning to camp after dining with a wealthy local citizen, Castus and his companions- Radamyntos, an Iazyges officer, and Pacilus, a tribune- are attacked on the road. Their assailants are men dressed in rags, covered in blood and filth, and bearing terrible wounds, incapable of any speech other than inarticulate moans. Possessed by bloodlust and able to shrug off wounds that no man should be able to survive, they fall upon the local farm boy serving as Castus' guide and tear him apart with their bare hands and teeth before Castus and his fellows are finally able to bring them down.

In the distance, Castus and his companions can now hear a low, dense droning sound- the sound of more inhuman voices like those of their attackers, filling the forest. With the countryside overrun by ferocious and almost unkillable madmen, they will need to find defensible shelter to survive the night. What fuels the murderous insanity of the men who attacked them is unclear, although Radamyntos recognized one of their assailants- he had killed him in battle and seen him dumped in a mass grave the day before...

I'm not generally a fan of zombie horror, but I greatly enjoyed De Bello Lemures. The storytelling held my interest, and the atmosphere was very strong. Castus is very effective as a protagonist and narrator, and Brookside does a good job of making him compelling without soft-pedaling or glossing over the sort of attitudes a man of his time, place, and station would likely have.

Brookside makes extremely effective use of his historical setting, and this adds to the story enormously. What makes everything work for me is that the historical element isn't a gimmick or an excuse to just retread standard zombie tropes in fancy dress. It's far more fundamental, and it greatly affects the impact of the book.

As described above, the book uses a “lost document” framing device and is built on the conceit that De Bello Lemures is an actual recovered work written by a second-century Roman Roman general. The story is prefaced with an introduction describing the discovery of the original text due to advances in the use of synchrotronic x-ray analysis on ancient documents, the provenance of the medieval palimpsest where the recovered text was found (including an explanation of why the title of the book, appended to it centuries later by a medieval copyist, is written in incorrect Latin) and the intense controversy incited in the scholarly community. It also includes information about Castus and the various theories that have been offered to explain its bizarre contents. The story is footnoted throughout to explain allusions made by Castus,  the historical and cultural context in which he lived, and the implications of certain statements and events in light of the overall body of knowledge about ancient Rome.

The main body is told by Castus in the first person. What really makes it work is that, while there are some concessions to modern writing conventions, primarily concerning dialogue (which the foreword explains as interpolations added to the English translation rather than features of the original Latin text), Castus' voice feels very authentic; Brookside does a very good job of capturing the tone and style of translations of genuine Classical histories.

The historical verisimilitude is enjoyable in itself, but it's even greater power is the atmospheric effect it creates. Zombies have become a very well-worn pop culture trope at this point, and for me personally they don't really work well as horror because they're too transparent and too concrete for my tastes- what they are, what they want to do, and usually some clue as to how they can be overcome or at least resisted usually becomes apparent to both the readers/viewers and the characters fairly quickly, even if their ultimate origin is not explained. While I'm sure I'd be horrified by the idea of a dead body coming back to life and attacking people in real life, in fictional contexts they usually just seem generic to me- they're orcs or stormtroopers or nameless hoodlums, except ickier.

De Bello Lemures manages to avoid this problem. The book's historical details and academic presentation, along with Castus' terse, no-nonsense writing style, creates a context in which the presence of zombies seems much more jarring and incongruous, much more wrong, than it would in a story set in present-day. This drives home just how incredibly bizarre, unnatural, and disturbing zombies would really be in a way nothing else I can think of really has. It made them seem truly horrifying, instead of merely dangerous

I'd strongly recommend De Bello Lemures for any fan of horror or dark historically-based fantasy. It's a short read, but well-worth getting and a very promising debut for Thomas Brookside. You can read a free preview here.

Book Review: Stealing Light by Gary Gibson

Stealing Light is the first book in the “Shoal Sequence” space opera trilogy by Gary Gibson. Though part of a series, Stealing Light also works very well as a self-contained story. Gibson is an author who is, unfortunately, all but unknown in the United States; I became aware of him by sheer chance and had to track down the British versions of his books.  Happily, it was worth it.

Five centuries from now, humanity has begun to spread among the stars with the help of the Shoal, an ancient race of aquatic aliens with a monopoly on faster-than-light travel. Their vast interstellar vessels have made an interstellar human civilization possible- but one utterly dependent on the Shoal. Humans are only allowed passage through a small portion of the vast expanses of space under the Shoal's dominion. Our contact with- or even knowledge of- other sentient species is strictly controlled and filtered by the Shoal, and our technological development is restricted to ensure that we can never become their equals.

The main character is Dakota Merrick, a pilot and former soldier turned smuggler. Merrick is one of a small number of surviving “machine-heads”- products of a disastrous and now abandoned military project to create soldiers with implants that allow their minds to directly interface with machines. On one of the more marginal human-settled worlds two groups of settlers, the Uchidans and the militaristic Freeholders, wage war for control of the planet. The war is going badly for the Freehold, but its agents make a momentous discovery- an unimaginably ancient alien spacecraft, older even than the Shoal, with technology that could put whoever possessed it on an equal footing with them. Successfully unlocking the knowledge in the ship's vast databanks and taking control of the vessel is beyond their abilities- but it may not be beyond a machine-head's.

Machine-heads have been hard to come by since the tragedy that led to the abandonment of the technology, but when Merrick finds herself in need of work and a way to lie low after a job goes awry she becomes an ideal candidate. She accepts employment with the freehold accompanying an expedition to the Nova Arctis system for what she has been told is an expedition scouting possible locations for the freehold to relocate if it loses the war. There, buried, the ship that the freeholders stumbled upon awaits. With her is Senator Arbenz,an ambitious Freeholder politician, and Lucas Corso, a freehold specialist in alien programming languages who Arbenz has blackmailed into coming along.

Their mission could radically change a state of affairs that has persisted in this region of the galaxy for tens of thousands of years. Meanwhile, an agent of the Shoal who calls himself Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals is about to become a player in these events.  The Deep Dreamers, huge genetically engineered Shoal that can perceive the vast web of possibilities shaping the near future and predict probable future events, have seen a catastrophe unfolding in the near future that would mean the destruction of countless species, and perhaps even the Shoal. Trader has dedicated his millennia-long life to protecting his people, no matter the cost to other species- and his mission will soon bring him into contact with Dakota Merrick.

I liked Stealing Light quite a bit. There's a lot of excitement, excellent pacing, and some very impressive action sequences. The central conflict held my interest, and the revelations about the questions raised earlier in the book- the motives of the Shoal, the nature of the disaster predicted by the Deep Dreamers, the reason the machine-head project was abandoned- are interesting and well-done.

The book has a tighter focus than many large-scale space operas- the great majority of the book directly follows Dakota Merrick, rather than a large number of different plot threads and characters in the manner of stories like Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth series or Alastair Reynolds. In Stealing Light's case this works out quite well- Dakota Merrick is an interesting protagonist, and the focus helps the book keep up its momentum.

I greatly enjoyed the setting, which had a nice sense of eeriness and successfully created an impressive sense of scale. This starts off early, with the revelation that humans had recently detected a massive series of supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud. In addition to creating a sense of foreboding and mystery, it drives home the inhumanly vast scope of events, in both time and space- it took 160,000 years for the light from this catastrophe to reach human territory. The later revelations about both the Shoal and the mysterious race that built the ship abandoned Nova Arctis add to this.

I also especially like the briefly glimpsed Shoal home planet, a world intentionally set adrift from its parent star and propelled into interstellar space by the Shoal's unimaginable technology and sustained by the light and heat of the miniature artificial fusion “suns” orbiting it. The entire surface is covered by ocean, and  in the complete darkness of ts lowest depths lie the Deep Dreamers- vast expanses of genetically engineered nerves and flesh the size of mountains, peering into possible futures. At times Stealing Light it put me in mind of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, though Stealing Light's tone is less bleak and gothic.

Stealing Light by Gary Gibson is recommended for any fan of modern space opera in the vein of authors like Hamilton, Reynolds, or Neal Asher. If you like  it, you can continue the story in Nova War, followed by Empire of Light.

Book Review: Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson

Dust of Dreams is the ninth of the planned 10 books of the Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series by Steven Erikson.  Familiarity with the story up to this point is essential to understanding what's going on; this is definitely not a place to jump in if you haven't been following the series. Unlike the previous Malazan books, which are part of a larger story but meant to have some sort of resolution within each individual book, Dust of Dreams ends on a cliffhanger that will be continued directly in the forthcoming tenth and final book, The Crippled God.

(Newcomers should start at the beginning with Gardens of the Moon. I highly recommend the whole series for fantasy fans, especially if you enjoy books like Glen Cook's Black Company series)

The Bonehunters, renegade former Army of the Malazan Empire, have crossed the seas to the continent of Lether, a previously isolated land where beings of tremendous power are converging. Adjunct Tavore, their leader, intends to lead them past the civilized lands of the Empire of Letheras into the barren Wastelands beyond, and from there to the distant land of Kolanse- for reasons she will reveal to no one. Outlawed in their native lands and half a world away from everything they've ever known, the bone hunters have only their trust in the Adjunct and their loyalty to their comrades in arms to drive them as they march towards a lonely, lifeless land on a mission they don't comprehend or expect to survive.

Their allies have reached Lether are on the move to join them: the veteran cavalryman of the Khundryl Burned Tears and the Grey Helms, a warrior-cult dedicated to the war gods Togg and Fanderay. Meanwhile, other forces are at work. The matron of the last surviving bastion of the K'Chain Chemelle, the ancient species whose hive-like societies once dominated much of the world, is making a desperate and seemingly mad bid to save her people- one that rests on a human woman. Onos Toolan, the ancient and formerly undead warrior who has become chieftain of the nomadic White Face Barghast, struggles to maintain peace in the face of clan leaders and other rivals calling who are calling for war against the neighbors of the barghast and increasingly resentful of their new leader's opposition. The Errant, one of the ancient Elder Gods who ruled the world in its prehistory before being displaced by a younger generation of deities, is gathering his fellows in the hope of making a bid to regain his ancient power and glory. And somewhere in the midst of these events lurks the Crippled God, whose machinations to free himself from his torment and imprisonment have laid whole nations to waste.

I really enjoyed Dust of Dreams. Stylistically, the book lies somewhere between the more straightforward earlier books in the series and the more introspective and occasionally digressive style of its immediate predecessor, Toll the Hounds. The balance is mostly pretty successful, moving the action along steadily while still giving a lot of time to build up atmosphere. There are parts that get a bit too verbose, but the the book as a whole was more than strong enough to keep me reading. Erikson has a talent for evoking emotion through both large-scale, often cataclysmic events and individual struggles and tragedies, and the combination of the deeply personal and the implacably, pitilessly impersonal side by-side is very effective

The Malazan series has always been quite dark, despite containing a good deal of humor and inspiring heroism, and Dust of Dreams is even more so. The tone is relentlessly grim and foreboding, something reinforced by the book's events, the descriptions of the bleak, empty expanses on which most of the action takes place, and the thoughts of the characters as they march onward in a seemingly hopeless and senseless cause.

This is one of the ways the vast history of Erikson's setting, stretching back across hundreds of thousands of years, pays off. It's particularly striking in this book, and it adds a lot to the atmosphere. We finally get a close look at the K'Chain Chemelle-  hundreds of thousands of years ago the world's dominant intelligent species and builders of wonders far beyond any achievement of humans, now a single isolated enclave barely clinging to existence. We  learn more of the ancient history of the Tiste Andii; once the race whose vast power cast down the dominion of the  K'Chain Chemelle, now themselves a fading remnant that has all but vanished from the world. Lether itself is changing, it's long isolation and stasis shattered by the arrival of the Malazans. The Errant and his fellow Elder Gods, who once commanded fundamental forces of the world and were worshiped with vast offerings of blood and human sacrifice, are a shadow of what they once were and have been all but forgotten. The weight of history feels almost crushing, with vast gulfs of time swallowing up even the mightiest beings and empires, every civilization and event built atop the dust of countless once-glorious races, nations, and even gods long since dead and forgotten.

The darkness can seem almost overwhelming at times, and it's added to buy some brutal emotional punches in the story. Despite this, it still- like the previous Malazan books- has a certain positivity that distinguishes it from a lot of other fantasy on the darker, grittier end of the spectrum. The heroism of many of the characters, whether they're marching off to war like the Bonehunters or struggling to prevent one like Onos Toolan, is in many places quite inspiring and moving, and grows even more so set against the dark background of Erikson's story and setting.

I definitely recommend Dust of Dreams for anyone who's followed the Malazan series so far. It's a rewarding continuation of the series so far and a fine buildup to the series' climax in The Crippled God.

Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic... RISE.

I've decided to bring Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic back to its original home at Blogspot. I would like to thank the people at BSCreview.com for hosting this blog for the past few years, and for all of their assistance. I've imported everything back, but there are still some kinks to work out and the layout is something of a work in progress, so please bear with me if you run into a broken link or something that looks wonky.

If you have a site or blog that links to my previous location, please change your link to point here,  http://vastandcool.blogspot.com/. If I had a link to you that didn't survive the transition here, contact me at vastsf AT hotmail DOT com and let me know.

Content here has been sparse of late. The past few years have been extremely draining on me, for various reasons, and that's taken its toll on this blog. However, some of those clouds have parted and I'm more optimistic looking to the coming months. I'd like to thank everyone who reads this blog and everyone I've encountered and interacted with- other bloggers and reviewers, authors, people in publishing- as a result of it,  for helping to make it possible and giving me the drive to continue with it. That means more than I can express. I'm going to make 2011 the best year Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic has ever had.

Book Review: The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook

Though he is much better known for writing fantasy, Glen Cook has also written several science fiction books in the course of his career.  The Dragon Never Sleeps is a dark space opera originally published in 1988, and recently made available again in a new edition from Night Shade Books.

Far, far into the future, humans are the slowly declining but still unquestioned masters of Canon Space, a sprawling interstellar empire ruling over many species and linked together by a mysterious network of faster-than-light travel routes called the Web.  At its apex are the guardships, colossal war machines that are  milennia old and have crews that are equally ancient. Hostile forces from beyond Canon Space, challenges to human hegemony by Canon Space's many nonhuman subject species, or bids for power by the huge human merchant houses at the apex of civilian society are mercilessly put down by the guardships, huge, ancient war machines with unmatched destructive power and crews that are equally ancient.

Simon Tregesser, ruler of one of the great merchant houses, plots to overthrow the rule of the guardships.  After millennia of their unquestioned dominance such a thing seems impossible, but Tregesser has an advantage that those who tried to defy guardships before do not: He has successfully formed an alliance with a mysterious force from beyond Canon Space one that possesses great military might and insights into the Web that even humanity has not achieved.

The situation is made more precarious by the reappearance of the long-vanished Kez Maefele- once one of the greatest leaders of a now-conquered alien race called the Ku, now one of its last survivors, and the warrior who came closer to actually stopping the seemingly omnipotent guardships than any other being in their long history. He has long since given up his futile struggle against the rule of Canon Space and seems content to live in peace and obscurity, but the existence of a force strong enough to overcome the guardships might be able to convince him to take up his old cause again.

The reign of the guardships is despotic and pitiless, but there is no promise that Tregesser's mysterious allies will be any different, and a conflict large enough to overthrow Canon's rule will entail death and destruction on a colossal scale. As Tregesser sets his plan into motion, the guardships will find themselves fighting their first serious threat in centuries. Mysterious beings with some sort of connection to the Web have appeared in Canon Space, their nature and goals unknown. And meanwhile, both House Tregesser and the guardships search for the enigmatic Kez Maefele, whose loyalties may determine the outcome of the war and the future of humanity and every other species in Canon Space.

I liked The Dragon Never Sleeps a lot, both on its own individual merits and as an opportunity to see Glen Cook working outside the genre of his better-known books like the military fantasy series The Black Company. The plot is interesting, complex, and unpredictable, and Cook does a good job of keeping a story with a large number of separate plot threads moving along. The battle scenes are great, both for their excitement and for the way they evoke the awe-inspiring scale of their combatants.

My favorite aspect of The Dragon Never Sleeps is the setting and atmosphere. This is displayed most strongly in the guardships themselves. Despite being built and crewed solely by humans, the guardships frequently seem like the most alien things in the books. The huge crews of each ship are thousands of years old, their personalities and memories uploaded into new incarnations made from their DNA again and again over the centuries. Whole armies are kept in cryogenic hibernation and awakened when needed, and they too are reborn over and over. The ships themselves enjoy the same immortality, recreated complete with their uploaded databases and resurrected crews in the (almost unheard-of) event they are lost in battle.  The most-well regarded members of the crew join the ranks of the Deified, uploaded human intelligences that are part of the ship itself, upon their physical deaths. The central core of each ship is a nascent intelligence in its own right, often dangerously close to developing a consciousness and will of its own, and some ships have awakened to sentience and subsumed their crews entirely.

Each guardship is effectively a complete and usually isolated community unto itself, and despite remaining united in purpose the culture of each has evolved in ways that can make them alien even to each other.  The homes and families that the guardships' crews left behind have been gone for thousands of years. Despite having ready access to the faster-than-light travel of the Web that unites Canon Space, the guardships and their crews seem profoundly alone.

The rest of the setting adds to this tone. As the book begins, Canon Space has long been technologically, scientifically, and socially stagnant.  Humanity and Canon civilization as a whole are utterly dependent on a phenomenon, the Web, that they are able to use but have no real understanding of. The human race is in decline- though it's power remains unmatched and its control absolute, the human population of Canon Space is slowly dwindling. Aside from the guardships, among the most frequently seen areas of Canon Space are the DownTown's- the desperate underclass areas of Canon worlds, populated by desperate humans, aliens, and cast-off creatures called artifacts, living beings manufactured for the use of the elite and frequently left to fend for themselves when no longer desired or useful.

Much of the story has an almost palpable feeling of isolation and loneliness. Everyone seems cut off and isolated- Canon Space from the unknowns beyond its borders, DownTown from the higher echelons of society, artifacts from their uncaring creators, Kez Maefele from his now-decimated species and his abandoned hopes, humanity from the species it rules, guardships and their crews from nearly everyone. This combines with the decaying, uncanny atmosphere of Canon Space to create a powerful sense of eeriness and foreboding that adds tremendously to the book. Readers who enjoy the atmosphere of stories like Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series or Sean Williams' Astropolis series should find a lot to like here.

At the same time, the characters prevent the book from being overwhelmed by gloom. Many of them are fairly lightly sketched in, but Cook has a talent for creating characters that feel relatable and down-to-Earth while still fitting into a story where they are surrounded by remarkable, alien settings and events, and remain sympathetic in the midst of a morally murky struggle.  This complements the setting very well, making it feel like a more human place, and the emotional effects of both the setting and characters were strengthened as each cast the other into starker relief.

I greatly enjoyed The Dragon Never Sleeps and would recommend it for any fan of Glen Cook or far-future space opera.

James P. Hogan, R.I.P.

I was saddened to learn that science fiction author James P. Hogan passed away on July 12th, at the age of 69.  Hogan was the author of numerous books, of which I own a great many, including Voyage From Yesteryear, Inherit the Stars, Code of the Lifemaker, and Multiplex Man.  Rest in peace.

Book Review: The Legions of Fire by David Drake

David Drake is among my favorite authors, so I was quite excited when this book arrived.  The Legions of Fire is the first entry in Drake's planned four-book fantasy series, The Books of the Elements.

The story begins in Carce, capitol city of an empire that dominates the known world.  Corylus, a soldier's son with a scholarly bent who grew up on the empire's frontiers, attends a public recital given by his friend Varus, a young aristocrat and scholar with aspirations of being a poet.  Varus is reading his poem when he, Corylus, and Varus' sister Alphena are seized by bizarre visions, and Varus shocks the crowd- and himself- when he stops reading his poem, tears the manuscript apart, and begins making apocalyptic pronouncements warning of the imminent destruction of the world by fire.  Pandareus, Varus and Corylus’ rhetoric instructor, takes the two young friends to meet his friend Priscus, one of the commissioners of the Sybilline Books- ancient prophecies that only a few men have ever seen, kept under strict guard and opened only by order of the Senate of Carce.  During the meeting, Varus falls into another trance, and a startled Priscus reveals that Varus’ rants are in fact quotes from the Books.

Terrible supernatural forces are gathering around Varus'  family and friends.  Varus'  father Saxa has been spending most of his time with a strange man named Nemastes, who claims to be a sorcerer from Hyperborea.  Alphena, visiting the temple of Tellus with her and Varus' stepmother Hedia (who is not much older than they are) to pray for a suitable husband, is terrorized when the statue of the goddess moves and speaks in a man's voice, proclaiming that she will marry Spurius Cassius- a famous citizen of Carce put to death by the Senate centuries ago.  Corylus finds himself repeatedly slipping over the boundary into some other world, where strange beings urge him to kill his friend Varus before it's too late.   The cataclysm spoken of in the Sybilline Books that Varus has unwillingly prophesied is real, and its architects intend to use Varus as their instrument to bring it about.  The barriers between worlds are weakening, and Varus, Corylus, Alphena, and Hedia all find themselves drawn into strange realms nothing like the world they know, where they must struggle to survive and find out how they can stop what is coming.  If they fail, the entire world will burn.

I greatly enjoyed this book.  Drake once again demonstrates his talent for intense action and complex plotting, juggling four major plot threads and viewpoint characters as their stories separate and then intersect again.  Drake's use of historical and mythological inspirations is very effective, and he creates a world that feels very concrete and real and yet profoundly strange at the same time.

I liked the characters- the hedonistic yet grim-minded and duty-bound Hedia, earnest and straightforward Corylus, intellectual yet sentimental Varus, and fearful but determined Alphena.  With Alphena and Varus, Drake also does a nice job of portraying courage and determination shown by people who are in completely over their heads, each in their own way, and know it but still press on.  Drake has a knack for infusing the mindset of his viewpoint characters into the way each section is written without hitting the reader over the head with it, and makes each plot thread feel like its main character.

The setting is a little unusual.  The Legions of Fire is not historical fantasy, but the story is set, sort of, in the early Roman Principate during the reign of Emperor Tiberius; for most practical purposes, Carce is Rome.  Aside from Carce itself, even the names are kept the same: there are references to the Gauls and Carthaginians, real historical (to the characters as well as the reader) figures like Julius Caesar and Spurius Cassius, the Rhine and Danube rivers, and so on.  I found this a bit jarring at first, but quickly came to like it.  It allows Drake- who was a classics major in college and has frequently used his extensive knowledge of Latin literature and Classical history as inspirations- to set his story in a world that feels very solid and defined without the need for large digressions providing background information, and ancient Rome offers a setting that feels as alien as any fantasy culture.  In my case, it helped that Classical antiquity is a longstanding interest of mine, but I think the setting will be enjoyable even for people who don't have that background.

The fantasy elements, too, are in large part grounded in real Roman (and Norse) beliefs, such as the prophetic Sibyline Books that are consulted by the Senate in times of crisis.  Magic in Carce is likewise based on old Roman beliefs: It is secretive, feared, widely disapproved of both legally and socially and yet widely sought, and people who claim to wield it are more likely to be charlatans and con men than authentic magicians.  Genuine magic in Carce's world is rare, sinister, and frequently unsavory and disturbing.  Other aspects of the story draw on Norse myths.  Again, you'll get more out of this aspect if you know something about the source material, but even without that background  knowledge it's quite evocative and effective on its own.

I'd recommend The Legions of Fire for anyone who enjoys David Drake's work, fans of heroic fantasy, and readers of historically-based stories who are interested in something different from normal historical fiction.  It's a fine start to the Books of the Elements series and I look forward to whatever is next.

Book Review: Bitter Angels by C.L. Anderson

Bitter Angels is the winner of the 2009 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction.  It's a space opera/espionage story by Sarah Zettel , published under the pseudonym C.L. Anderson.

Terese Drajeske is a former operative of the Guardians, the organization tasked by the United Earth Government with countering threats to the peace between earth and her many colonies.  She is jolted out of the more peaceful life she has built for herself  by the news that Bianca Fayette, her longtime friend and mentor, has been mysteriously killed while conducting an investigation.  Despite having once sworn that she would never return to the Guardians, Terese agrees to come out of retirement, despite the pleas of her family and the risk that she will destroy the peace and happiness she has found since the devastating events that drove her out of the Guardians the first time.

Terese travels to the Erasmus system, where Bianca died.  Once a prosperous group of settlements, Erasmus suffered an economic collapse after advances in faster-than-light travel made its formerly lucrative position as a shipping hub obsolete.  It's hereditary rulers maintain their grip on power through a massive system of surveillance and secret police and a crushing system of debt bondage that keeps the bulk of the population in a state of permanent indentured servitude to their rulers.   Though seemingly too impoverished and busy struggling for survival to present a serious threat to outsiders, the Guardians believe that Erasmus is a source of instability and a potentially serious threat to the peace of interstellar civilization.   Terese will have to delve deep into this oppressive, decaying society  to discover just what happened to Bianca, and find out what she had discovered that was worth killing over.

Bitter Angels is a good book, but a somewhat frustrating one.  The book has a strong start, a strong conclusion, and lots of good elements that sometimes felt like less than the sum of its parts due to pacing problems.  After a very effective setup, the story started to drag, spending a lot of time seeming like things were about to get more interesting without doing so.  I liked the premise and the setting enough to keep going, and was ultimately glad I did, but too much of  the time I spent reading felt like something I had to trudge through to get to the payoff.

The book does have considerable strengths.  Erasmus is a very well-done setting, and Anderson does a great job bringing it to life.  There's an intense sense of decay, fear, and desperation as we see as we see the people of Erasmus struggling to escape their crushing debts to their rulers, while draconian laws, ubiquitous government surveillance, and the power of the secret police to create a nearly Stalinist level of paranoia.

I thought Therese's emotional struggle as she is torn between loyalty to her dead friend and her promise to her family that she would never go back to the Guardians was very well-done.  Therese's relationship with her husband is a particularly strong element here, as Therese faces the possible dissolution of her life's great source of stability.  Despite his relatively modest time on stage, her husband is a well-drawn, sympathetic character; his importance to Therese, and hers to him, comes through strongly, and his pain and fear at the thought of his wife returning to a career that nearly killed her and left her psychologically shattered is palpable.  Similarly, the portrayal of the sacrifices made by characters from Erasmus as they struggle through their lives in a dehumanizing, spirit-crushing society was very effective and added a lot.

Overall, I would recommend Bitter Angels for fans of science fiction, provided you're willing to be patient with some parts that drag in the middle.  The setting and premise work well, the characters are very effectively done, and the conclusion has an emotional charge that ultimately makes it worthwhile.

Book Review: Incandescence by Greg Egan

One of the things I love about science fiction, and especially hard science fiction, is that it rejects conventional presumptions about what it's proper for fiction to be about and treats things like science, logical and creative extrapolation, system-building, and- more generally- reason as worthwhile subject matter in their own right.  Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City, etc.) is an unabashed practitioner of science fiction in that vein, so I was quite pleased when his new novel Incandescence arrived.

The story follows two characters in the far, far future.  Rakesh is a citizen of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilization home to an immeasurable host of organic beings, artificial intelligences, and uploaded personalities.  An adventurous man (or male-identifying uploaded intelligence), he has grown restless living in a society that tamed the galaxy and seemingly discovered everything that can be discovered eons before he was born.

The story begins when he is approached by a stranger named Lahl, who tells him that she has evidence of a species unknown to the Amalgam, deep in the galactic core.  The core is the domain of the Aloof, an enigmatic civilization that has spurned the Amalgam's attempts to communicate for millions of years.  Despite this, they broke their silence long enough to show Lahl- who was taking a shortcut through Aloof space to cut a few thousand years off her travel time- a meteor containing fossilized DNA-based cells that belong to no known known species, and that must have originated in the core itself.

For their own incomprehensible reasons, the Aloof have charged  Lahl with the task of finding a "child of DNA," a member of a species born from the smae panspermia that gave rise to the sample and to many of the species of the Amalgam, willing to help seek out the DNA's source.  As a human, Rakesh fits the bill.  Presented with this opportunity, Rakesh agrees to enter the domain of the Aloof in search of the discovery he thought he'd never have a chance to make.

Roi is an alien living in a strange world of tunnels called the Splinter, where the strength and direction of of gravity depends on your location and everything is brilliantly lit by the all-pervading light they call the Incandescence.  She lives a normal life, tending crops nourished by the light and heat of the Incandescence with the rest of her work team, until the day she meets Zak in the weightless heart of the splinter, the Null Line.  Too old, eccentric, and unhealthy to be targeted for recruitment by a work team, he spends his time trying to understand the nature of their home, seeking lost records and studying the shifting patterns of weight around the Splinter.  Like everyone she knows, the question of why their world is as it is is something she had never taken an interest in before, but her encounter with Zak awakens, for the first time in her life, to understand.  So overwhelming is her curiosity that it overpowers her natural biochemical bonds joining her to her work team,  and she begins returning to the null line to learn more from Zak.  Together, starting with simple experiments about motion in the weightless environment of the null line, they begin probing into the nature of their strange home.  As time passes, their discoveries lead to an ominous conclusion- the Incandescence is not the safe, eternally static place they had thought, and their growing understanding may be the only way to preserve the Splinter from catastrophe.

I really enjoyed Incandescence, but I have to be a bit cautious in recommending it.  If you like hard science fiction that really delves into the science, I recommend it strongly.  If you don't, you're likely to find it rather dry.

For those who do like especially science-heavy hard science fiction, this book has much to recommend it.  Egan creates two radically different but fascinating environments in the Amalgam and the Splinter.  I liked the way the Amalgam is introduced- it initially seems like a strange but somewhat recognizable future, but it quickly becomes apparent just how alien it really is.  Despite that, it didn't have the chilly, eerie feeling that I often associate with settings involving the extremely distant future, posthumanity, and/or large-scale interstellar civilizations without faster-than-light travel.  I enjoy that feeling, generally speaking, but Incandescence's Amalgam was a pleasant change of pace.  The Amalgam characters were generally not delved into deeply, and their psychology and mode of existence was quite alien in some ways, but to me their personalities and interactions had a sense of good-natured warmth to them that I don't often see, and I quite enjoyed that.

The Splinter is a fascinating creation that should intrigue people who like science fiction about life in environments radically different from our own in the vein of Hal Clement, Robert Forward, or Stephen Baxter.  There have been many books about bizarre environments, but incandescent is the first SF novel I'm aware of to use a location- an object closely orbiting a black hole- where the effects of relativity can be readily seen in day-to-day life.

One of the things I enjoyed was that the book is about science not just as an existing body of knowledge, but as a process of learning and discovery.  Again, this is not the sort of thing that can be recommended for people of every taste, but I found it very satisfying to follow Roi as she  learned the underlying laws behind her world, gradually seeing things that seemed meaningless, baffling, or arbitrary come together into a coherent, comprehensible whole.  Egan is also quite ingenious in showing ways that intelligent beings might be able to gain a sophisticated understanding of physics in an environment where the science that drove so much of it's advancement on Earth, astronomy, is impossible.

Greg Egan's Incandescence is a fine book for devotees of hard science fiction.  It's definitely not suited to everyone, but if you enjoy far-future SF that takes science seriously and want a story that conveys the excitement of discovery in an unusual way, Incandescence is well worth your time.  For some neat background materials, check out the Incandescence section at Greg Egan's homepage.

Book Review: Balefires by David Drake

David Drake is known first and foremost for his importance to the field of military science fiction, and many of his recent books have been space opera or heroic fantasy.  However, many of Drake's early publications were in the horror genre, often influenced by the classic pulp fantasy, horror, and "weird fiction" of writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Manly Wade Wellman.

Balefires: Tales of The Weird and Fantastic contains 24 of Drake's fantasy and horror stories.  The emphasis is on Drake's early work from the 1960s and '70s, but the stories included span almost three decades.  A few have previously appeared in the David Drake collections released by Baen Books, but many have been largely unavailable since the 1960s or 1970s.

The settings are quite diverse.  Several of the stories, drawing on Drake's own experiences, involve American troops in the Vietnam War.  Drake's interest in history also frequently comes to the fore, with a number of stories stories set in Viking Age Scandinavia, the Roman Empire, or other eras.  There are also a number of stories set in contemporary America (including one about 30 miles from my home, which I got a kick out of.)  Some of the stories are clearly influenced by cosmic horror in the vein of Lovecraft or Howard.  Others portray evils on a more human scale, and a few stories are more in the mode of heroic fantasy, albeit of a very dark sort.  The one anomaly is "A Land of Romance," a fun, light-hearted story written in tribute to influential SF writer L. Sprague de Camp.

Drake's talent for depicting intense, furious action manifests itself a number of times, but the dominant mood of many of the stories is not visceral terror but a relentless feeling of cold.   Horror that draws its atmosphere from the idea of a pitiless, uncaring universe beyond human comprehension is quite common thanks to the popularity and influence of H.P. Lovecraft, but Drake does it better than most, and the effect is quite chilling.  (Among other things, I think Drake's relatively austere writing style, which is highly evocative while remaining very straightforward, is generally better-suited to this sort of bleak tone than the more ornate style often associated with Lovecraftian horror.)

Despite the cosmic horror aspects, however, much of what is horrifying in the stories is more personal in nature.  As is the case of in much of Drake other work (most notably his military SF),  the most terrifying things arise from human psychology- the psychological devastation left by trauma and violence, what suffering and brutality can twist people into, the dulling of emotion and conscience, and the things that  human beings will do, condone,  or become.

In addition, each story has a short preface written by Drake about how the story came about and the idea behind it.  These provide some very interesting information about various stages in Drake's career, as well as some of the influences that have shaped his work- growing up in Iowa, classic science fiction and fantasy, his military service in Vietnam, and his love of Classical history and literature.  It's quite interesting for the insights it gives on Drake's work, as well as his thoughts on horror fiction more generally and his first-hand accounts of what the field was like in the 1960's and 70's.

All in all, Balefires is a great collection of stories and an intriguing look at David Drake's roots.  I would enthusiastically recommend it for anyone who is a fan of Drake's work, and for anyone who enjoys horror and dark fantasy.

Stories collected in Balefires:

The Red Leer
A Land of Romance
Smokie Joe
Awakening
Denkirch
The False Prophet
Black Iron
The Shortest Way
Lord of the Depths
Children of the Forest
The Barrow Troll
Than Curse the Darkness
The Song of the Bone
The Master of Demons
The Dancer in the Flames
Firefight
Best of Luck
Arclight
Something Had to be Done
The Elf House
The Hunting Ground
The Automatic Rifleman
Blood Debt
Men Like Us