Book Review: The Judge of Ages by John C. Wright

The Judge of Ages is the third book in the science fiction series by John C. Wright that began with Count to a Trillion and continued with The Hermetic Millennia. (See my review here.) It follows directly from the second book and assumes familiarity with the offense and concepts of its predecessors, so it's definitely a series that should be read in order.

In 11,000 AD, the Armada of an unimaginably advanced civilization of machine intelligences from the Hyades will complete a journey of nearly 8,000 years and arrive on Earth as conquerors. For almost all of that time, Menelaus Montrose- 22nd-century Texan lawyer/duelist turned space traveler and subject of a more-or-less successful self-administered experiment in intelligence augmentation- has fought against his former friend and shipmate, self-proclaimed Master of the World Ximen del Azarchel, for the future of the human race, each using post-human brilliance and the science of historical prediction gleaned from an alien monolith discovered on humanity's first manned expedition beyond our solar system, in a long struggle to shape the course of cultural and biological evolution.

For almost all of that time, del Azarchel and his allies have worked tirelessly to turn humanity into a servile race that will submit to the invaders and survive, rather than risk extinction trying to defy them. For the Hyades are themselves only the vassals of an even mightier civilization,  who are themselves subordinate to the unimaginably advanced civilization that rules our entire galaxy from the globular cluster M3.

While his trusted lieutenants gather people from across the ages who wish to escape their own era in a network of underground cryogenic tombs, Montrose has slept away the centuries and millenia in cryogenic suspension beneath the earth until times when his intervention is needed. He lives for the hope of creating a human civilization that can stand against the Hyades- and of living long enough to someday be reunited with his wife Rania, departed on a desperate 70,000 year voyage to M3 to make an appeal on behalf of the human race.

It is the year 10,515. Montrose and hundreds of his sleeping clients have been awakened by tomb raiders seeking the legendary Judge of Ages- the godlike figure Montrose has become in the myths of cultures spanning thousands of years, said to slumber beneath the earth until he arises to pass terrible judgments on entire eras and civilizations. Accompanied by human and posthuman allies from across eight millennia of radical transformation and turmoil, Montrose must regain control of his tombs and protect his clients so that he can resume his battle for the human race- a human race that appears disturbingly absent on the barren, frozen surface of the Earth he's awakened to. Meanwhile, del Azarchel is still working to turn humanity into a race of perfect slaves for the Hyades, who are just centuries away.

I liked The Judge of Ages quite a bit. The central premise of the entire series is one of the more intriguing ones I've run into in recent years, and Wright continues to do interesting things with it. We learn more about some of the post-human inhabitants of the Earth and just what's happened to reduce the world to its desolate and seemingly uninhabited state, as well as the true nature of Azarchel's machinations and the scope of Montrose's response, both of which turn out to be even vaster than they previously appeared.

And I realize that “vaster than they previously appeared” sounds sort of absurd in the context of an 8000-year conflict between supergeniuses where human evolution itself is the battleground and entire sapient species are casualties, but therein lies one of the great strengths of the book and series. Wright throws out interesting ideas with wild abandon, from little details about future technologies or societies to much larger things with important consequences to the entire story or setting, and yet does so in such a way that even bizarre or outrageously grandiose concepts still seem natural and reasonable within the logic of the story. It combines thoughtfully worked out consequences of technologies and other ideas and the constraints of reasonably hard science fiction (there's no FTL, antigravity, or my personal bugbear, nanotech-as-magic) with the sort of wild exuberance I'd usually associate with old pulp space opera or early Marvel Comics.

(Wright's writing in general often seems to have this quality, whether he's doing science fiction or fantasy, where there's such a proliferation of stuff that the story seems like it ought to either be crushed under its own density or go careening out of control and over the side of a cliff, but doesn't.)

There are some excellent action scenes, and Wright uses the collision of technologies and biologies from across his future history- powered armored and other relatively conventional science fiction weapons like railguns, a monstrous race of posthumans capable of radically modifying their own biology and ruthlessly optimized for conflict, colossal 22nd-century dueling pistols with bullets that have their own engines and countermeasures and accompanying escorts of smaller defensive bullets, a self-replicating computer system that's been gnawing at the iron core of the earth long enough to have significant influence on the planet's magnetic field, among other things- effectively in this regard as well.

I still like Menelaus Montrose a lot as protagonist and viewpoint character. It helps that his odd backstory allows him to serve as a sort of audience surrogate in a very strange world without being ignorant, ineffectual, or bland in the way such characters often are. He's able to quickly understand and adapt to the bizarre conditions he finds himself in thanks to his augmented intelligence, but his original background is in a society much closer to our own then to its successors. Consequently, he appreciates just how bizarre his world and his own story are (from the perspective of a 21st-centuryish human) in a way most protagonists of far future science fiction do not, without being a bewildered primitive or inept fish out of water. He approaches things with a combination of wry, seemingly detached humor and a very serious sense of purpose, and the mixture works well.

I also enjoyed a lot of the supporting characters, and especially Montrose's archnemesis Ximen del Azarchel. Wright's portrayal of him is extremely charming and likable, so much so that when he appears in a scene it's quite easy to temporarily forget the atrocities he's committed. There's also a certain point in the story where, at a key moment, Azarchel does something that is clearly tactically unwise- but his characterization is strong enough that, rather than seeming like an author writing himself into a corner and turning his villain into an idiot to get out of it, it felt completely natural and appropriate given the situation.

My chief criticism is the pacing in the first part of the book. After the scope and scale of the story thus far, the first chapters of The Judge of Ages felt somewhat claustrophobic. Montrose spends quite a bit of time as a captive down in his tombs as he tries to get in position to begin an uprising against his captors, and while I still enjoyed the section I felt it went on too long and weakened the momentum and tension built up by the end of the second book. Things certainly pick up, and taken as a whole the book is still quite strong, but it would've benefited from spending less time on that part of the story and more on some of the events and revelations later in the book.

That aside, though, I really liked The Judge of Ages and would strongly recommend it, and the entire series, to anyone interested in science fiction. (Though as I said above, be sure to read the series in order.) I'm really looking forward to seeing where Wright goes next with it.

Book Review:Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds

Terminal World is a science fiction novel with steampunk elements by Alastair Reynolds, author the Revelations Space series, House of Suns, and others. It's completely stand-alone and doesn't require knowledge of any of Reynolds' previous work.

In the distant future human civilization is clustered around the great city of Spearpoint, built on the surface of a huge spire extending up into the heavens. The laws of nature are not constant, with Spearpoint divided into different zones where different levels of technology are possible, from the ultraadvanced heights of the Celestial Levels at the top to Horsetown, were even simple mechanical mechanisms break down. Humans can live in any of them, but leaving your native zone without medication or an unusually adaptable constitution is dangerous  due to “zone sickness,” a painful and potentially lethal condition that occurs as your body is forced to cope with natural laws subtly different from what it's accustomed to.

The main character is Quillon, a pathologist working in the mid-level Spearpoint community called Neon Heights. The story begins when he is presented with a dying “angel,” a transhuman resident of the Celestial Levels who fell to Neon Heights. Before dying, the angel delivers the message to Quillon that was the real reason for its “fall.” He knows that Quillon is an angel as well, the last survivor of a project to reengineer natives of the Celestial Levels to survive and function in lower zones- and now one faction among them is looking for him.

Quillon has no desire to go back and seeks out aid from Fray, an ally in Neon Heights' criminal underworld who has helped him keep his real identity hidden. Fray introduces him to Meroka, an expert in covertly getting people in and out of Spearpoint. They flee the city, pursued by angels with far cruder versions of Quillon's adaptations, and escape into the world beyond. But there is no safety to be found in the world outside Spearpoint- a cold, hostile place with its own zones on a much larger scale, where bands of bandits and psychopaths prey on the sparse population, cyborg monstrosities harvest living human body parts to replace their own, a militaristic, nomadic society called the Swarm rules the sky from an armada of dirigibles, and zone boundaries can shift unpredictably.

But soon there is no safety to be found in Spearpoint, either, when the world is unexpectedly struck by a zone shift of unprecedented severity, this time affecting Spearpoint itself- as Quillon realizes, watching the great glowing spire of his distant home, as its lights start to go out...

I enjoyed Terminal World. The plot had no trouble keeping my interest, and way it unfolds as the story of Quillon's escape becomes part of much larger events is effective and Quinlan himself is a compelling character.. The story's revelations about its world's history and true nature are interesting and well-paced, and the reasoning eventually given for why things work as they do makes sense and doesn't feel too handwavy or arbitrary.

The central premise of the Zones is intriguing, as is the strange hybrid setting Reynolds creates with it. Travel between zones is extremely difficult and dangerous, so much so that even with sufficient “antizonal” drugs  people who do so frequently eventually develop mental problems as the accumulated stress of too many transitions starts to take a neurological toll. There's a painful feeling of division and separation throughout the setting. People in the lower levels of Spearpoint and its surrounding lands look up at the electric lights of of far wealthier societies that are mere miles away but forever denied them, and can spend their life savings for a short once-in-a-lifetime excursion upwards for mundane but life-saving medical procedures.

The fact that it also provides a justification to have “angelic” transhumans, an ancient structure that reaches beyond the atmosphere, and cyborgs that hunt people for their organs in the same setting as aerial battles fought by giant steampunk dirigibles is also pretty cool, naturally.

Speaking of which, the “vorgs,” or carnivorous cyborgs, that live beyond Spearpoint are especially interesting. Vorgs are ancient intelligent machines that have survived by replacing many of their original components with living matter better able to adapt to the lower zones. They're absolutely horrifying- grotesque, predatory, intelligent but seemingly possessed of no desires or drives other than survival, utterly without conscience- and simultaneously the most pitiful figures in the story.

Quillon is an interesting protagonist, and I enjoyed seeing how he developed. He's a cold, isolated, seemingly callous man by necessity rather than nature, after spending years in hiding and exile, and the events of the story affect him in ways I found both compelling and believable.

I'd recommend Terminal World for fans of science fiction, as well as any steampunk fans interested in a story that mixes in science fiction elements or has a setting different from the usual alternate history Victorian trappings of the genre. If you're a fan of Alistair Reynolds' more conventional science fiction  works like Revelation Space or House of Suns, I'd encourage you to give this a chance even if you're not interested in steampunk; it's still very much the sort of story and worldbuilding you'll probably like if you enjoy his other work. It's an all-round strong book with plenty to offer lovers of both genres.

Book Review: The Hermetic Millennia by John C. Wright

The Hermetic Millennia is a science fiction novel by John C. Wright, author of the "Golden Age" trilogy (The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcendence) and a fantasy trilogy beginning with Orphans of Chaos, among others. It is the second book in his "Eschaton Sequence" and a direct sequel to his previous book Count to a Trillion, which should definitely be read first.

For 8000 years, transhuman genius, gunslinger, and former space traveler Menelaus Montrose has waged a secret war for the future of the human race against his former comrades, the crew of humanity's first manned interstellar spacecraft, the Hermetic. Fifty lightyears from Earth, the human race found a source of all but limitless energy and wealth in the form of an entire star made of antimatter and dramatic evidence of alien intelligence on a monolith orbiting it, inscribed with a vast library of knowledge far beyond humanity's.

The Hermetic was sent to investiagte the monolith and, using stellar lifting equipment sent ahead of them by unmanned craft decades previously, begin mining the star. They succeeded- but returned to earth over a century later not as explorers but as conquerors after a mutiny killed the original captain and much of his crew.

With control of the only interstellar spacecraft, the vast knowledge gleaned from the monolith, and enough antimatter to either Usher the earth into a golden age of almost unlimited energy or turn its cities to ash, they became the masters of the world while Montrose slept in cryogenic hibernation to preserve his life and sanity after an ill-advised decision to inject himself with an experimental serum that restructured his brain to superhuman levels of intelligence but left him dangerously unstable for much of the expedition. Finally awakened decades later, his former comrades- now calling themselves the Hermeticists- welcomed him into their new elite, but Montrose soon becomes disaffected with them as he sees the oppressive world they've created and starts to regain his memories of what happened on their expedition.

In 11,000 AD, an invasion fleet sent by an unimaginably advanced civilization of machine intelligences in the Hyades Cluster will reach Earth. The monolith was a trap, and by successfully mining the nearby star humanity alerted the monolith's builders to our existence and our possession of sufficient technological sophistication to be useful subjects. We will serve them, or be exterminated. Even if we could fight them off, they are only one among many vassal races of a still greater power, which is in turn subject to an even more advanced civilization in the M3 globular cluster.

With the intent of the Hyades civilization coldly laid out in the monolith left for us to find and the apparent impossibility of defeating them demonstrated by the staggering knowledge contained in it, the Hermeticists begin a project to save the human race: Reshaping our biology and culture to make us the best slaves possible, so that the Hyades civilization will find it worthwhile to let humanity survive in some form rather than snuffing us out.

Equipped with his transhuman intellect, advanced knowledge in the alien monolith, the physical and financial resources acquired in his brief stint as one of the Hermetic elite, and skills acquired from his early days as a "lawyer" in a devastated 22nd-century Texas where the practice of law frequently involved quasilegal duels fought with pistols that were practically entire artillery batteries unto themselves, Menelaus Montrose is the only man on earth who can stand in their way. And so for millennia, as civilizations, societies, and entire posthuman species rise and fall, Montrose has used all the vast mental and physical resources at his command to wage a slow struggle against his former crewmates, trying to steer humanity onto a path that will allow it to resist the threat from Hyades long enough for humanity's one hope- an expedition to M3, 33,900 lightyears from Earth- to succeed.

In the year 10,500 AD Montrose finds himself unexpectedly awakened to discover that his hibernation chamber has been found and dug up by the dominant civilization of this time- and, with it, those of thousands of others from across the ages who, disaffected with their own eras, chose to sleep away the millennia in cryonics facilities maintained by Montrose's agents. Now, Montrose must recruit aid from the wildly diverse array of post-humans who have been awakened with him in order to free himself and continue his struggle. And the fleet from Hyades is not far away...

I liked this book a lot. I love the whole concept of the series, with its vast scope in both space and time and, and Wright executes it well. The central conflict between Monrose and the Hermeticists is interesting, there's some exciting action sequences, and Wright incorporates a lot of interesting and inventive ideas into it and into the larger backdrop it's set against.

Much of the book is episodic in format, with people of different eras telling their own stories as Montrose meets them and recruits them into his planned rebellion. We encounter a bewildering array of post-human species and cultures, from the militaristic, eugenicist Chimera, to the almost mindlessly hedonistic Nymphs, to grotesque beings that can incorporate parts of other organisms into themselves, to group-mind beings, and more. Interspersed, and sometimes intersecting, with these are stories of Montrose's periodic awakenings during each era to counter the machinations of Hermeticists.

Most of the post-humans are pretty interesting, and the way the author presents them makes them more compelling. Some of them initially come across as caricatures or stock archetypes- the Proud Warrior Race, the Innocent Hedonists, the Hive Mind, the Embodiments of What the Author Thinks Is Wrong With the World- but they have more depth than that. Many of them are monstrous, morally and sometimes physicaly, but they are not monsters; Wright does a good job of portraying all of them with at least some degree of dignity and sympathy, and the book is much stronger for it.

Menelaus Montrose is a highly enjoyable, likable protagonist, and its enjoyable watching him put his talents to work to understand and survive the situation he's thrust into upon being awakened. I thought his characterization was effective in portraying a man with a naturally idealistic temperament hardened by his youth in an impoverished, violent, borderline post-apocalyptic world ravaged by decades of religious conflict and biological warfare. He works well as a primary viewpoint character, since he comes from something at least vaguely resembling the world as we know it

His personality and disposition- hopeful without being saccharine or Pollyanna-ish, strongly concerned for others, trying to think of himself as just a person unlike any other despite his augmented intelligence and the godlike stature he has gained in myths of the legendary "judge of Ages" created by his periodic and sometimes dramatic returns over the millennia- provides an interesting contrast in tone with the setting of the series. (As do many of the other characters, to a lesser extent.)

The galaxy revealed in Count to a Trillion is a terrifying, brutal place, with relationships between species governed by utterly amoral considerations of economics and game theory. The purpose of the human expedition to the civilization in M3 is not to appeal to their sense of mercy or justice, but to the same calculations laid out in the monolith explaining why we are currently nothing but the Hyades civilization's chattel. Interstellar invasions are staggeringly costly endeavors even for races millions of years beyond us, and it's far more efficient to interact peacefully with a species if they can make plans and commitments on the vast timescales required for a galaxy-spanning civilization limited by the speed of light.

The pitiful insignificance and vulnerability of the human race amongst such vast, superior, ancient, and utterly uncaring powers is almost Lovecraftian, cosmic horror by way of hard science fiction. The history of humanity and posthumanity across the millennia is scarcely kinder. The Hermeticist's create and then discard sapient human species as they try to shape humanity into something that they think will survive the arrival of the invasion from the Hyades, each failure consigned to extermination by its successors

The contrast between the warmth and humanity of most of the characters and the cold heartlessness of their world (the very first scene even begins with the protagonist encased in a cryonic hibernation chamber) is very effective at making both stand out, and adds a lot to each.

I greatly enjoyed The Hermetic Millennia and would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in hard science fiction, space opera, or stories about transhumanism, though you should definitely read Count to a Trillion first. I greatly look forward to the next book in the series, The Judge of Ages.

Book Review: The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Fractal Prince is the second novel by Hannu Rajaniemi and the sequel to his science fiction debut, The Quantum Thief. It continues the story of Jean le Flambeur, a daring adventure and thief in an advanced advanced far-future solar system. It is a direct sequel to that book, and I very strongly recommend reading its predecessor first.

The story focuses on the city of Sirr, the last surviving human settlement on Earth in a future where the planet has been ravaged by out-of-control nanomachines, called “wildcode,” and most of human civilization resides elsewhere in the solar system. Decades ago the Sobornost- a vast collective of uploaded human intelligences, or “gogols,” that is the dominant power in the solar system and seeks to eventually absorb all of humanity- was thwarted in its attempt to absorb Sirr when the wildcode rose up against them, forcing the Sobornost and Sirr into an uneasy truce. Much of Sirr's economy is based on the gogol trade, seeking out the buried still-operational computers running virtual reality afterlives that wealthy people of past eras uploaded themselves into and trading their occupants to the Sobornost.

Tawaddud, estranged daughter of one of Sirr's leading citizens, is given a chance to return to her family's good graces by serving first as a companion for Abu Nuwas, a prominent gogol merchant whose political influence is important to maintaining relations with the Sobornost and then as a guide for a Sobornost envoy. However, what starts as a mere social task soon becomes much more grave as internal unrest and violence begin to wrack the city, and tensions rise with the Sobornost- who would still gladly seize control of the city, its inhabitants ,and the entire planet if given the opportunity.

Meanwhile, legendary master thief Jean le Flambeur is still bound to the service of Mieli, a warrior from the Oort cloud who, for reasons of her own, is in the service of a Sobornost gogol with her own agenda. With her sentient spacecraft Perhonen, Mieli rescued Jean from captivity in a Sobornost virtual prison and heklped him recover some of his lost memories that his prior self had hidden away in storage on Mars. (See The Quantum Thief.) Now she and Jean must perform the task that Jean was broken out for: gaining access to the Kaminari Jewel, a data store with the key to unimaginably advanced technology vital to the ultimate goals of the Sobornost and it's godlike ruler, the Founder Matjek Chen. But the kaminari jewel is a product of the Zoku, a wide-ranging subculture of posthumans implacably hostile to the Sobornost, and won't reveal its contents to just anyone. The key Chen needs, whatever it is, turns out to be somewhere on Earth...

I enjoyed The Fractal Prince a great deal. The story is interesting and cleverly constructed (I won't specify how). I liked the characters, both those returning from The Quantum Thief and the new faces. It's also quite moving in parts- especially, rather surprisingly, the parts involving Matjek Chen.. There are some very exciting action sequences and elements reminiscent of heist movies, both of which take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the books ultra-advanced setting.

It's also very enjoyable and impressive from a purely stylistic standpoint. Rajaniemi's writing is filled with beautiful or clever moments without ever seeming self-conscious or eager to actively call attention to itself, and keeps events barreling along at high speed without ever seeming merely utilitarian.

Part of that is accomplished by throwing the reader into the deep end and expecting him to swim on his own, to an even greater degree than usual for far-fure science fiction. There are a lot of concepts and terms that the reader is left to figure out on his own, through context or previous knowledge. I think Rajaniemi does it very well, but if you don't enjoy that sort of complete-immersion worldbuilding you may find the book frustrating. For the same reason, it's also not a book or series I would recommend for someone who is relatively new to the science fiction genre.

The book further fleshes out the setting first seen in The Quantum Thief in some interesting ways. We learn more about Mieli's culture, a Finnish-influenced society settling the distant Oort Cloud, and see Earth for the first time. Sirr is a very interesting setting, like a fantasy out of the Arabian Nights recast in a post-apocalyptic, posthuman future where the grotesque remnants of past ages lurk in the desert and ruins like ghouls and those with the knowledge can bend reality around them to their will with mysterious "words of power" that command the omnipresent swarms of nanomachines. It's quite cool, and Rajaniemi does a good job of incorporating these fantasy-like elements without making Sirr seem less like science fiction- it still fits naturally into the rest of the ultra-high tech setting, rather than coming across like a fantasy world that's been transplanted into the far future with the word "magic" scratched out.

There's a great deal more about the Sobornost, a vast society of uploaded human minds, or gogols, dominated by "copyclans," uncountable minds originating as copies- or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc.- of just a few people, the Founders, branched off at different points in their progenitor's own vast lifetimes for different specialized purposes. It's a very interesting look at a radically different sort of society that is nevertheless comprised of individuals who are more or less psychologically human, some of the ways in which it functions, and the reason that the Sobornost uses human gogols for computing tasks that one might have expected to be the province of AIs or just mindless software.

We also learn more about the ideals and goals that drive the Sobornost, the “Great Common Task,"which are very human and yet suitably grandiose for rulers who exist in billions of simultaneous iterations and get their building materials by casually ripping globs of matter as massive as Earth out ofthe Sun.

One of my favorite bits is the Sobornost's abhorrence for the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. (This is just one of the implications of the Great Common Task, not its primary motivation or guiding principle,, but it's one that figures prominently.) For instance, there's a scene in which a higher-level Sobornost gogol speaks with some of his juniors who are running ultra-detailed virtual worlds inhabited by conscious simulations of people who lived in the pre-Sobornost era. A passing question as to whether the detail goes "down to the quantum level" leads to a panicked response from one of the researchers explaining the lengths they've gone to to avoid such "contamination." It's a brief thing, but the sense of paranoia and ideological intolerance it evokes is palpable.

That initially seems like a bizarrely esoteric thing to be angered by but, on reflection, makes perfect sense- dislike for the unpredictable or uncontrollable or messy is a common enough trait, one sometimes taken to an extreme. Take human beings with that sort of mentality and scale them up until they have the power of gods and intellects that fill computronium brains the size of moons, and the sorts of things flesh-and-blood humans try to impose order on pale into relative insignificance. It's the kind of moment I love in science fiction, where something that initially seems unreasonable, out of place, or downright absurd suddenly fits perfectly.

(I still remember, back when I was a little kid listening to Carl Sagan explaining what atoms were like in Episode 9 of Cosmos, being genuinely unsettled by the revelation that an atom's electron cloud contained almost all of the atom's volume but almost none of its mass, and that everything I thought of as solid was actually almost entirely empty space. So I can empathize with the idea of being offended by the behavior of subatomic particles more than most, perhaps. The chilling climax of this dramatic reenactment starring Agent Smith and Morpheus conveys it better than I ever could.)

Rajaniemi does interesting things with ideas like mind uploading and artificial intelligence, especially in the way he integrate some of them into the heist thriller elements of the book. Conflicts can leap from the virtual to the real and back as minds abandon their physical bodies or take them up again, move and copy themselves through computer systems and virtual reality environments, or transmit themselves as data from one physical substrate to another to stay a step ahead. People can radically alter their own personality and memories, take on temporary mental personae- in effect, actually be someone else- while their higher "metaself" oversees them, or go into states of altered consciousness appropriate to particular situations. Individual minds can be copied en masse, either entirely or in limited partial versions.

There's also a refreshing diversity of opinion on the philosophical ramifications of such copying. Some people are casually accepting of it, while others find the idea of being copied deeply violating. The Founders of the Sobornost have built an entire society around it and treat subordinate gogols-- including fully conscious copies of themselves- as casually disposable. Other issues are also raised-- for instance, the extent to which an earlier iteration of yourself who did things you can't remember doing was "you." The book doesn't focus on these things, but they are dealt with in an interesting way.

I strongly recommend The Fractal Prince and its predecessor, The Quantum Thief, for seasoned fans of science fiction, especially if you're interested in far-future settings or subjects like artificial intelligence, mind uploading, and posthumanism, or just like a fast-paced adventure story or crime/heist thrillers, provided you don't mind some fairly dense world-building. It's entertaining, finely written, has an intriguing and imaginative setting, and strongly rewards reading more than once.

Book Review:Transcendent by Stephen Baxter

Transcendent is a science fiction novel in Stephen Baxter's expansive “Xeelee Sequence” (Raft, Ring, Timelike Infinity, Vacuum Diagrams, etc.) and the third book in the “Destiny's Children” subseries, following Exultant and Coalescent. Like most of those books it has a more-or-less standalone story, but you'll get a lot more out of it if you're familiar with its universe; I'd recommend at least reading Exultant and Coalescent first, and the short story collection Vacuum Diagrams wouldn't hurt. (I recommend Vacuum Diagrams as the best entrance point for new readers to the Xeelee Sequence a whole, actually.)

Earth in the 2040s is a world drastically diminished. Global warming has raised sea levels drastically shifted climates around the world, devastating the biosphere and displacing entire nations. The cost of fossil fuels and desperate efforts to contain further environmental damage has made the average person dramatically less mobile, with automobiles a memory, air travel a luxury of the ultra-privileged. 

Michael Poole is a middle-aged engineer who has never recovered from the death of his wife Morag over a decade ago. He's plagued by ghostly visions of his dead wife- except that these visions began not only before she died, but long before Michael had even met her. His life is thrown into turmoil when his son Tom is nearly killed by the sudden eruption of methane gas from the thawing ground of Siberia. Michael comes to a disturbing realization- the colder regions of the world are filled with such deposits, frozen into ground that is now unfreezing, and the release of enough in a sufficiently short period of time could further increase the greenhouse effect, releasing more gas and driving the temperature still higher in a vicious cycle that could render the world uninhabitable.

Michael sets out trying to find a way to prevent this catastrophe, struggling with his grief over his dead wife, his strained relationship with his son, and the challenge off mustering support for a geoengineering project of massive scale in a world that has grown increasingly decayed and fatalistic. And, meanwhile, the ghostly image of his dead wife is appearing more frequently.

500,000 years in the future, the human race is united across the galaxy in a vast Commonwealth ruled by a collective consciousness of immortal post-humans called the Transcendence. Their technology is so advanced that they can peer into the distant, and each of the Commonwealth's countless trillions of inhabitants is required to Witness the life of a single human who lived and died long ago. Michael Poole's Witness is a girl named Alia who is unexpectedly pulled from the life she knows when she is chosen for the rare honor of becoming a transcendent herself. An agent of the transcendence takes her on a journey across the galaxy, teaching her the lessons each of its members must learn.

Along the way, she starts to learn more about the origins and nature of the Transcendence, and about its goal of “redeeming” the suffering-filled history of the human race before its continuing evolution puts it beyond humanity forever- but doubt starts to set in as Alia starts learning what this “redemption” will entail. The Transcendence, on the cusp of godhood, can do more than just look into the past...

I greatly enjoyed Transcendence. It's filled with the imagination and awe-inspiring sense of scale commonly seen in Baxter's work and the Xeelee Sequence in particular. The speculative elements are interesting, and the dual setting lets Baxter incorporate an unusually diverse set of ideas, from the social and economic effects of life without automobiles to human evolution after hundreds of thousands of years and alien environments and the cosmological theories that form the basis for the Transcendence's ability to see into the past.

The two plot threads alternate chapters, and Baxter does a good job of balancing them and keeping both interesting. I repeatedly had the experience of wishing a chapter would go on longer because I didn't want to leave that plot behind yet, only to get drawn into the other thread in the next chapter strongly enough that by the end of it I didn't want to return to the thread I had just regretted leaving. That's always a good sign.

Both the near-future and far-future settings for the story are interesting. Technology in Michael Poole's era has continued to advance, with developments including sophisticated virtual reality interfaces and holographic projections, a new source of power based on Higgs fields, and true artificial intelligence that has become so ubiquitous that people who specialize in working with computers have more in common with psychologists than programmers.

But much has been lost. The automobile has been abandoned and air travel is too expensive for anyone but the most privileged, making the accessible world much smaller for the average citizens of industrialized countries. The disruption of the ecosystem brought by rapid global warming has led to mass extinctions on a scale never seen in human history, while declining birth rates in many countries have turned formerly bustling cities into near-ghost towns. The world of the 2040's has an eerily quiet, empty atmosphere- not unlike outer space in a lot of hard science fiction, actually- that Baxter uses to good effect.

Meanwhile, Alia's thread fills in an era that has been largely blank in the Xeelee Sequence until now. The tens of thousands of years of bloody turmoil that raged as humanity waged war for domination of the entire galaxy are over, and the nightmarish totalitarian government called the Coalition that drove those conflicts is long gone. (See Exultant and the short story collection Resplendent for more on this era.) Hundreds of thousands of years of both natural evolution and genetic engineering in a vast diversity of environments has given rise to myriad sub species of humans and post-humans, at peace under the rule of the Transcendence.

We see a number of different environments- Earth, still bearing the scars of an alien occupation nearly half a million years in the past, an ancient generational starship converted into a mobile space-going city, and planets with environments that have radically reshaped humanity.

My favorite element is the Transcendence itself, a group intellect of godlike power and intelligence that is nevertheless as burdened by its evolutionary history as a human being, even if that inheritance is intellectual and psychological rather than genetic. The result is something not only interesting but quite poignant, which is not usually a word I use to describe far-future post-human superintelligences, but it really works well here.

I definitely recommend Transcendent to anyone who's a fan of Stephen Baxter and the Xeelee Sequence. I also recommended it to fans of far-future science fiction in general, though as said above it's not the Baxter book to start with.

Book Review: Armored, edited by John Joseph Adams

Armored is a new collection of stories from Baen Books edited by John Joseph Adams, all based around the idea of powered armor. The idea of powered exoskeletons as weapons of war is a venerable one in the science fiction genre, figuring prominently in books such as Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and one of my personal favorite novels, John Steakly's Armor.

This collection contains 23 stories by authors including Alastair Reynolds, Jack McDevitt, Sean Williams, Tanya Huff, and Michael Stackpole, and Dan Abnett, plus a foreword by Orson Scott Card and an introduction by John Joseph Adams

I really like this collection. It's got lots of action, some interesting speculative ideas, a few lighthearted stories that are quite fun, and some effective emotional moments, including one of the more shudder-inducing climaxes I've encountered recently (No points for guessing that it's the Alastair Reynolds story.)

Many of the stories in Armored are in the military science fiction subgenre, naturally enough, such as “The Johnson Maneuver” by Ian Douglas, “Jungle Walkers” by David Klecha and Tobias Buckell, and “Contained Vacuum” by David Sherman. However, there's quite a variety of other genres represented as well, along with settings that range from extremely near-future Earth to more distant futures among the stars to fanciful alternate histories. Beyond the common element they all share, they're also enjoyably diverse in subject matter. Aside from the obvious subject of exploring the battlefield implications of powered armor, there's also quite a bit about relationships between humans and artificial intelligences, the blurring of man and machine, and the struggle for survival in alien and inhospitable environments, among other things.

Standout stories for me include:

“Death Reported of Last Surviving Veteran of Great War” by Dan Abnett- One of the shortest entries in the collection, told in first person by the eponymous veteran as he recounts his life. He gave up his chance for a normal life and much of his human body to become part of an elite corp of supersodliers physically merged with powered armor “shells”- only to rapidly become obsolete as the technology marched onward and then left cruelly diminished in both body and mind when his worn-out shell- including the electronic storage containing much of his memory of his years joined to the shell- had to be removed.

This story has an excellent premise, and Abnett uses it very well. The story's description of the pitilessly rapid obsolescence and irrelevance of men who had been at the apex of human capability and given up everything to achieve it is both powerful and quite plausible. The sense of loss and sadness is palpable, and made all the more poignant by the stoically matter-of-fact way the narrator tells his story.

“Hel’s Half-Acre” by Jack Campbell- Darkly humorous story of a front-line infantry unit whose soldiers each have their own personal AI riding along in their powered armor, mostly to threaten them into line.

"Jungle Walkers" by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell- American Marines in a fairly near-future South America find themselves caught unprepared and facing down a column of powered-armored invaders when conflict erupts on the Colombian-Venezulean border.

What I found interesting is how much of it involves things going wrong. The Americans have their own armor, but are forced to fight without it because their superiors didn't anticipate the maneuverability and maintenance problems the armor faced in the Colombian jungle, and the Marines consequently resorted to doing routine patrols unarmored. The Venezuelan invaders, meanwhile, are using new military technology bought from the Chinese that they have little familiarity or experience with. It's a good action story, and it was interesting to see a story where the protagonists aren't the guys with the fearsome new technology.

“The Last Days of the Kelly Gang" by David D. Levine- Outlaws force a reclusive inventor to build a steam-powered 3,000 pound suit of powered armor in 19^th century Australia. Lots of fun.

“Trauma Pod” by Alastair Reynolds- A human officer on a battlefield dominated by autonomous bipedal war machines called Mechs is badly wounded, kept alive in a survival pod that protects him and allows a military surgeon far from the battlefield to treat him remotely until he can be extracted. Frustrated as that extraction is repeatedly delayed while he sits helpless and unable to do his job while the battle rages around him, he orders the Mech sent to watch over his pod to bring him aboard.

I won't say what happens next, except that it's chillingly horrifying in a similar vein to Reynolds' other horror-oriented science fiction like “Diamond Dogs”- cold, creepy, with the more viscerally (literally or figuratively) horrifying elements being less disturbing than the minds that bring them about. Despite being a horror story, it remains science fiction in the purest sense- the scientific underpinnings of the premise are inextricable from the events, and the story could not be translated to a different genre and remain intact

“Power Armor: A Love Story” by David Barr Kirtley- Present-day (more or less) story about a time-traveling inventor from a totalitarian future who fled into our era. He's encased himself in an invulnerable suit of powered armor that he never, ever takes off, for fear of the assassins he knows the rulers of his original era have sent after him- one of whom has found him, and seeking a way to get at him through defenses no weapon can penetrate.

The premise is interesting, there's a lot of humor, and despite the light tone the story and main character also had considerable emotional power. The central metaphor of a man who's walled himself off behind a protective shell is sort of obvious, but it works, and in some ways is more subtle than it initially seems in ways that give it more emotional punch. (The protagonist comes from a particular background, the armor was built in a context related to that background and is worn because of a specific type of threat- if you stop at “this guy wears armor all the time” you're missing most of it.

“Helmet” by Daniel H. Wilson- Dark, rather chilling story where the protagonist lives with his little brother in a devastated city periodically terrorized by the central government's marauding powered-armored troop- until he finds himself carried off to be made one himself. It's very creepy, has a compelling main character, and has one of those moments that I love in science fiction where a setting element that doesn't seem to make sense suddenly fits perfectly.

I definitely recommend Armored. It will be of particular interest to military science fiction fans, but there's plenty of good stories beyond that subgenre as well that made it worthwhile for fans of science fiction in general. Also, in light of how common powered armor is in modern gaming- Warhammer 40,000, Halo, Crysis, Fallout, etc.- it might also make a good gift/gateway drug for someone who likes videogames or media franchises with science fiction settings but hasn't had much exposure to written SF.

Book Review: Firebird by Jack McDevitt

Firebird by Jack McDevitt is the sixth book in McDevitt's ongoing science fiction series about far future antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his assistant/partner/pilot Chase Kolpath. Ideally, I'd recommend reading the Alex Benedict series in order (A Talent for War, Polaris, Seeker, The Devil's Eye, Firebird) but like the other books in the series Firebird works quite well as a stand-alone book and should be fairly easy to understand whether you've read its predecessors or not.

40 years ago on Alex and Chase's home, the colony world Rimway, the famous and controversial physicist Dr. Christopher Robin mysteriously vanished from the planet, never to be seen again. When his widow dies 40 years later, Alex is commissioned to find buyers for the renowned scientist's personal items. Seeking information that could help them build interest in the items among potential buyers, Alex and Chase delve into the history of Dr. Robin, an enigmatic man whose theories on the existence and nature of alternate universes made him a figure of intense controversy, shunned by some and idolized by others, whose mysterious disappearance has made him the subject of wild speculation ever since.

The trail leads them to encounter two of Robin's other interests. One is records, some recent and others going back thousands of years, of unidentified ships appearing near human worlds and then fading into nothingness a few minutes later. The other is human interstellar ships that depart on routine faster-than-light trips and are never seen again, a rare but troubling phenomenon that has claimed numerous victims throughout humanity's thousands of years of interstellar travel- including Gabriel Benedict, Alex's uncle and Chase' former employer. They also begin to discover clues that Robin was up to something strange in the final years before his disappearance- and may have been on the verge of a discovery with implications far beyond the mystery of his own fate.

Firebird is another solid entry in the Alex Benedict series. The main story is interesting and goes in some unexpected directions, and Chase Kolpath is once again an enjoyable character and first-person narrator. Much of the story is fairly sedentary and not too far removed from a conventional mystery story, with Chase and Alex investigating Robin's past by fairly prosaic means- interviewing people who knew him, searching for records, visiting places he been- but the mystery is interesting and made these scenes satisfying for me. It also segues well into the more specifically science fictional aspects of the story that become predominant as it progresses. There are also some more fast-paced or tense bits that work well.

I especially enjoyed the part of the story where the investigation takes Benedict and Chase to the planet Villanueva, a formerly populous and advanced world that was cut off from humanity for centuries by an interstellar dust cloud that extinguished the human population but left the infrastructure and the AIs charged with running and maintaining it intact. Left to themselves, they've continued to do exactly that, keeping Villanueva's dead cities intact and running for thousands of years- and making new human settlement impossible by attacking any who land. It's quite creepy, as Alex and Chase search for clues in clean, well-maintained, still-powered cities completely devoid of human life. The way the story deals with the AIs of Villaneuva is interesting, and leads to some interesting scenes later when Alex Benedict becomes the center of a political debate on the nature of AIs and human responsibility for those left behind by the death of Villaneuva's human population.

McDevitt is good at using rather mundane elements in ways that complement the science fiction/space opera aspects of the story- the implications of AI sentience are argued about on evening talk shows, Villaneuva is dangerous to human life not because its AIs are either interested in or capable of attacking humanity but because of the hordes of pro-AI activists and amateur treasure hunters descending on the planet and getting themselves killed after it becomes a subject of media attention, and the search for the truth about Dr. Christopher Robin is at least as much about old-fashioned investigative skills as it is dangerous journeys on hostile planets or in deep space. This could be dull if it were handled poorly, but in Firebird it's effective at giving the setting a greater feeling of solidity than it would have had otherwise.

The relatively familiar, recognizable future presented in the Alex Benedict books has often been the subject of criticism, for reasons I can appreciate but don't share. It fits the larger context of the setting, where human interstellar civilization has undergone multiple dark ages in the time between the present day and the stories, so thousands of years in the future doesn't equal thousands of years of technological progress. I also think the similarity of McDevitt's setting to our own world tends to be overstated by some people, probably because of what does and doesn't get attention in the stories. For instance, there are allusions to the fact that on many human worlds one can simply forgo employment and live- and apparently live fairly well- on some sort of government stipend every citizen gets, and that this is not a rare or stigmatized choice. That implies economic productivity far beyond what we have now, as well as a profound cultural difference, but the technological underpinnings of that don't come up because there's no reason for them to..

A lot of it boils down to one's own beliefs about the future and the extent to which a setting deviating from those beliefs impairs your enjoyment of the story. (I'm not of the “life in the future will necessarily be unrecognizable to us today” school of thought. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't consider it so self-evidently true that the contrary assumption attacks my suspension of disbelief.) Both of these things vary widely from individual to individual, so while I like it myself I can certainly understand why it's a sticking point for some.

I would definitely recommend Firebird for fans of Jack McDevitt, and for fans of science fiction with a mystery/investigative bent. If you didn't care for McDevitt style before it's not going to wow you into changing your mind, but if you've enjoyed his work in the past it's well worth reading.

Book Review: Orb Sceptre Throne by Ian C. Esslemont

Orb Sceptre Throne by Ian C. Esslemont is the most recent book set in the same universe of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson, which Erikson and Esslemont created together, and Esslemont's fourth book in that universe. It is set chronologically after the eighth book in Erikson's series, Toll the Hounds, and picks up on many plot threads from that book and other earlier books, so I would strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with the series before reading this one. Reading Esslemont's previous three books before Orb Sceptre Throne would also be a good idea, but isn't as essential.

As usual, the book is split into a number of different plot threads. The story is set on the continent of Genabackis, focusing on the city-state of Darujhistan and its environs. The region has been wracked by conflict, with much of the continent devastated by war and its northern areas brought under the rule of the Malazan Empire. Moon's Spawn, an ancient flying fortress that recently plummeted into the sea, has become a hot spot for treasure hunters seeking to make their fortunes-including Antsy, one of the deserters from the armies of the Malazan Empire who settled in Darujhistan- and for those who would prey upon them.

On an island to the south, the army of the Seguleh- a mysterious, isolated people whose warriors are swordsmen without compare- set out for the mainland and Darujhistan, in response to a prophecy that they believe is now being fulfilled. They are led by Jan, the Second, who is eager to lead them to what he believes is their destiny and purpose as a people after millennia of exile from their original homeland- not realizing just what has summoned them back and what that destiny is.

Meanwhile, the situation around Darujhistan remains precarious, with many of the formerly independent cities of northern Genabackis and the nomadic tribes of the continent's plains chafing against the continued presence of the Malazans. Torvald Nom has been newly elevated to a seat on Darujhistan's ruling council, and finds himself faced with something far worse than the city's Byzantine and already frequently deadly politics. The region will soon be thrown into turmoil by a discovery made in the ruins outside Darujhistan, remnants of an ancient era when the city was the seat of a great empire. Now the evil that ruled over that empire thousands of years ago is returning, seeking to regain its power, starting with Darujhistan itself.

Orb Sceptre Throne is an enjoyable book that is worth reading for Malazan fans, though I wouldn't place it in the top tier of that series. The main story is quite interesting, though some of the secondary plot threads drag early on.. There's some quite exciting action sequences, including our first look at the Seguleh fighting as an army- previously they've only appeared one or two at a time- and some scenes involving the fully u unleashed power of the Malazan Empire's mysterious allies, the Moranth. The story also ties up some plot threads and answers some questions left by previous Malazan, in what I thought was a very satisfactory way. Parts of the ending were too abrupt and something of an anticlimax, though it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the journey there, and there were also aspects of the conclusion that I quite liked.

I liked the characters, and especially Jan of the Seguleh- the ruler and greatest warrior of an army of the deadliest swordsmen on the planet, and yet trapped and paralyzed by what he believes his duty and the duty of his people to be. The reborn Tyrant of Darujhistan is suitably creepy and ominous, utterly silent behind a blank mask as he holds court while another man speaks as his “voice.” The book also sees the return of some old favorites including Antsy and the other former Bridgeburners settled in Darujhistan, Torvald and Rallick Nom, the mysterious Kruppe, and - my other personal favorite- Traveler, AKA Dassem Ultor, trying to withdraw into quiet anonymity now that his decades-long quest for revenge against Hood, god of death, was made pointless after he was cheated of his chance for vengeance during the events of toll the hounds.

As with his previous book, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne shows a marked improvement in Esslemont's writing style compared to his first two books, Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard, moving the story smoothly and confidently along without the occasional awkwardness seen in his earlier work. Esslemont's writing style is once again more straightforward less prone to digression than Steven Erikson's; whether that's good or bad is a matter of taste, but for the most part I thought the story benefited from Esslemont's approach.

While it's not at the same level as his previous book, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne is a solid effort by Ian C. Esslemont that I would definitely recommend it for fans of the Malazan series.  

Book Review: In the Lion's Mouth by Michael Flynn

In the Lion's Mouth is the third book in Michael Flynn's science fiction series that began with The January Dancer and was followed by Up Jim River. I'd recommend reading those before reading this one; it's not strictly necessary in order to understand what's going on during In the Lion's Mouth, but it certainly helps.

In the far future, humanity is spread across countless worlds dominated by two great powers in a centuries-long cold war, the despotic Confederation of central worlds and loose alliance that opposes it called the United league of the periphery. Donovan buigh was once a Shadow, an agent of the confederation's elite intelligence service- before he was subjected to experimental mind altering-procedure that was supposed to create a single man with the skills and expertise of an entire team of experts but instead left him with huge gaps in his memory and a fragmented mind split between multiple quarreling personalities. He ended up in the Periphery, a broken man quietly drinking himself into his grave until he found himself drawn back into the long struggle between the and Confederation and league, now defending his new home from the machinations of the Confederation and it's rulers, the mysterious oligarchs known only as Those of Name.

He has finally started to gain a measure of peace and purpose in his new life when he finds himself forced back into the old one by a Confederate agent he met decades before (during The Januaryy Dancer), Ravn Olafsdottr. She abducts Donovan and smuggles him back into the Confederation- but not on behalf of Those of Name. The Shadows are wracked by an internal struggle between those loyal to Those of Name and those who now seek to overthrow them, and the latter want Donovan- less for who he is than for who he used to be, in the long empty gaps of his memory. Donovan eventually agrees to join them, putting him on a collision course with some of the deadliest killers in the galaxy, the truth about his own identity, and Those of Name themselves.

In the Lion's Mouth is a highly enjoyable book and a fine continuation of the series that started with The January Dancer. I loved the central characters Donovan buigh and Ravn Olafsdottr, and the plot is interesting and exciting. There are a number of well-done action scenes, and Flynn's talent for description in general is again in evidence.

The framing device of the book is that the story is being told by Ravn Olafsdottr, who has snuck back into the League after the main events of the book to bring Donovan's story to Bridget ban, a long-time veteran of the League's own intelligence service, who has spent her life on the opposite side of the long cold war between the two great powers, and her daughter with Donovan, Mearana. This proves to very effective, both because it provides a different viewpoint from the previous books in the series and because of the atmosphere it creates when the book occasionally shifts from the main narrative back to the frame story. The tension of the interactions between two lifelong enemies sharing a brief truce and the stress and anxiety of Bridget ban and her daughter as Ravn tells herstory - and mockingly refuses to reveal ahead of time if Donovan will be alive or dead at the end of it- are palpable, and this adds a lot.

My one initial disappointment with In the Lion's Mouth was that it is relatively constrained in scope, focusing on just a few worlds. Consequently, it doesn't have the same variety and epic sense of scale as its predecessors, which took the reader all the periphery and beyond. In the Lion's Mouth, by contrast, is relatively modest in scope, concentrating on a few planets. I say “initial” because once I had adjusted to it I thought it worked quite well for the sort of story the author is telling here, and Flynn shows that he can still do a good story in this setting while working on a more constrained scale. The narrower scope of the main story also fits well thematically with the setting, adding to the contrast between the despotic Confederation and the freewheeling diversity of the League, and complements the claustrophobic anxiety of the frame story.

I highly recommend In the Lion's Mouth for space opera fans, though I would encourage people who haven't read The January Dancer and Up Jim River to do so first. The entire series is well-worth getting into.

Book Review: Star Dragon by Mike Brotherton

Star Dragon is the debut novel of Mike Brotherton, who works as a professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming. You can visit his website here.

Centuries from now, in a world where biotechnology is ubiquitous in the human race has begun to spread outwards to other stars, a corporation called Biolathe receives a centuries-old radio transmission from an interstellar probe transmitting from SS Cygni. SS Cygni a variable binary star system comprised of a main-sequence star and a white dwarf, notable for the dramatic novae it periodically undergoes as hydrogen from the larger star is drawn off by the gravity of its smaller but much denser companion, accumulating and eventually undergoing nuclear fusion on the surface of the dwarf. The probe's engine signal, however, contain something even more interesting- in the accretion disc of stellar plasma spiraling towards the dwarf there is something alive, somehow able to survive at temperatures and pressures that are nearly enough to ignite nuclear fusion.

Eager to learn more about this unprecedented- and potentially very lucrative, if they can figure out it works- form of life, which Biolathe has dubbed a “star dragon,” the company decides to send a manned expedition to SS Cygni to study on one of their ships, the Karamojo. Their mission will be to study, and if possible capture, this newly discovered form of life. The relativistic speeds human spacecraft can achieve have made regular interstellar flights to nearby solar systems feasible- but SS Cygni is so distant that, while the voyage there and back will take only a few subjective years for the crew of five, 500 years will have passed back on Earth by the time they return.

Interstellar flight is a technology humans have mastered and the risks involved in actually traveling to SS Cygni are modest, but the trip is still potentially perilous. SS Cygni's variable cycle lasts seven to eight weeks, but it still isn't possible to determine in advance just when its next outburst will come, and when it does the binary's luminosity jumps to many times its normal level in less than a day and becomes more than enough to fry a ship nearby. Aside form its existence and habitat, virtually nothing about the dragon is known- its behavior, its origins, its abilities, how many fellow members of its species it might be accompanied by, or just how it will react to an attempt to capture it. All five members of the crew have their own reasons for essentially saying goodbye to virtually everything they've ever known to go a journey that will end with them half a millennium out of their own time. For shipboard xenobiologist Samuel Fisher it's his fascination, and then growing obsession, with the dragon itself- an obsession that threatens to bring into conflict with other members of the crew in the midst of what is already a potentially very dangerous situation filled with unknowns.

I liked Star Dragon. Brotherton makes good use of his background in astrophysics to make SS Cygni a compelling environment, and the story of the character's journey there and exploration of it is well-done and does a good job of combining human drama with the dangers and wonders of SS Cygni and the mysterious dragon.

I enjoyed the characterization, which was both nicely done and more integral to the story than is often the case in hard science fiction stories focused on an unusual environment (e.g. Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, etc.) The crew is interesting, and Brotherton does a good job of something I particularly like to see done well- portraying a character being a jerk without being a villain, and without either making him seem one-dimensionally, pointlessly, or irredeemably bad, or going too far in the opposite direction and making him so reasonable or sympathetic that his faults seem trivial. I also liked the Karamojo's AI, Papa, who is an interesting character in his own right as a being with a personality that is in many ways human-like, but is often bound by the inescapable imperatives programmed into him by his creator- he has enough freedom to wish he could give a crew member he doesn't like a piece of his mind, or resent it when a crew member's emotional distress sets off a program that compels him to start asking questions designed to probe their psyche when he wishes he could just express sympathy, but not enough to actually do what he wants. The parts of the book with him as the viewpoint character were especially effective.

The setting is nicely realized, but inside and outside the Karamojo. Brotherton's portrayal of SS Cygni was quite effective at evoking an alien, dangerous, almost apocalyptic environment, and the book's examination of how the binary, its accretion disk, it's a recurring nova cycle is interesting and incorporated into the story well. The Karamojo itself is rather unusual, the product of a society where biological technology is ubiquitous and so advanced that people can radically change their entire bodies almost casually and entire live organisms can manufactured as readily as mechanical parts. While we are shown very little of human society at large what we get from the ship and crew does a very good job of giving a sense of a future that seems quite alien in many ways.

My only complaint is that I wish there had been more on the star dragon itself, and how it functioned in an environment as hostile as an accretion disc around a nova-prone white dwarf. What we learn is interesting, but I feel there was something of a missed opportunity here.

That's a fairly minor complaint, however, and all in all Star Dragon is a fine book that I'd recommend to any hard science fiction fan, especially if you want a story with more emphasis than usual on the characters or like science fiction about possible forms of life in exotic and extreme environments in the vein of authors like Hal Clement or Stephen Baxter. It's a very solid debut for Mike Brotherton.

Book Review: Gilded Latin Bones by Glen Cook

Gilded Latten Bones is the 13th book in Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. fantasy/detective series. Like all Garrett books, Gilded Latten Bones' primary plot stands alone, but I very strongly recommend reading the previous Garrett books before reading this one; the story is enjoyable on its own, but there's a lot about the book that is more effective if you've spent time with Garrett and company before.

As the story begins, Garrett has finally started to settle down. He and his longtime on-again off-again girlfriend Tinnie Tate are engaged, and Garrett has left his uncertain and often dangerous life  as private investigator for secure employment in his home city of TunFaire, capital of the kingdom of Karenta, as a security specialist for the wealthy Tate family's thriving manufacturing empire. This new-found peace is shattered by the late-night arrival of several armed thugs who had been hired by an unknown party to abduct Tinnie, followed by the news that Garrett's long-time friend Morley Dotes, elven assassin and underworld figure turned mostly-legitimate entrepreneur, is comatose after being brutally attacked and left for dead in a late-night ambush on the streets of TunFaire. Despite Tinnie's disapproval, protests, and volcanic temper, along with Garrett's own desire to leave the danger and economic insecurity of his old career as a private eye behind him, he now delves back into TunFaire' s criminal underworld to find out who is responsible for the attacks on his fiancée and his best friend- and whether or not they're related.

TunFaire has settled down, too. Karenta's decades' long war with its rival Venegeta, a devastating conflict over silver mines (fuel for the magic of the sorcerer-aristocrats who rule Karenta) that consumed whole generations of young men, is over. The omnipresent racial tensions that threatened to boil over into large-scale violence with the war's end, when thousands of newly unemployed conscript soldiers were thrust into a civilian society where many trades were dominated by nonhumans after decades of economic adjustment to the lengthy and often permanent absences of virtually all of its young human men, have cooled a bit. The establishment of a more professional and less corrupt police force by Deal Relway, the recently appointed commander of the city watch, has brought an end to much of the overt criminality that plagued the city and created an era of (comparative) law and order.

To resolve the mystery, he'll have to seek out the aid of his old ally the Dead Man, the 500-year old corpse of a member of a powerful nonhuman race called the Loghyr whose original occupant hasn't departed yet, and some other acquaintances from his less reputable past. His investigation will required him to face a cabal of corpse-stealing sorcerers and their grotesque creations, mysterious political interference with his investigation, corruption at high levels of TunFaire society, and, hardest of all to confront, the knowledge that his duty to his old friend may cost him the love of his life.

I greatly enjoyed Golden Latten Bones and think it's an excellent addition to the Garrett series. As always, Garrett's first-person narration and jaded sense of humor is highly entertaining and is a huge part of what makes the story so enjoyable. I liked the central mystery, though to a great extent it's a backdrop- this book is, probably more than any other entry in the series, about Garrett rather than the case he's working on. The book is somewhat more sedentary than usual, with Garrett doing less of the legwork for the case himself- his circle of allies, sources, and friends has grown greatly since the beginning of the series, and that comes into play here. The story remains interesting, however, and there are some nice action sequences as well.

The book is more character-focused than its predecessors, and the book has a particular focus on how Garrett and the people in his life have grown and changed- or how they haven't- since we first met them. Barrett is noticeably off his game when he first begins investigating after spending over a year in his less demanding job working for the Tate family, and begins to wonder if he's no longer cut out for the demands of his old career and lifestyle. When he first moves back into his old residence- which his assistant Pular Singe and long-time housekeeper Dean have continued to use in his absence- so that he can keep an eye on the wounded Morley, he's startled by just how much frailer the elderly Dean has become. Singe, meanwhile, has grown remarkably since first meeting Garrett. A member of a despised race called ratpeople, an unnatural hybrid species created a few centuries ago in some sorcerer's bizarre experiments, she has gone from living in desperate poverty under the yoke of her thuggish elder brother and working as a tracker due to her preternaturally sensitive sense of smell to working as the manager of Garrett's office and financial affairs, has learned to read and write (an uncommon skill in general and unheard of among ratpeople), and speaks to Garrett as an equal.

I especially liked the portrayal of Tinnie Tate. Tinnie has generally been portrayed as a short-tempered, possessive, and frequently unreasonable person. And she still is, but we see her in greater and more sympathetic depth here as someone whose driving emotion is not anger or jealousy but fear, who knows that her behavior is frequently unreasonable, self-destructive, and threatens to drive away the very people she loves and is so afraid of losing, but feels like she is so locked into that pattern of thought and behavior that she can't stop. Cook's portrayal of this is very effective, and rather poignant if you've known somebody like that yourself.

The city of TunFaire remains one of my favorite fantasy settings, taking many of the typical conventions of fantasy- fairly widespread magic, a roughly medieval level of technology, races like elves and dwarves- and creating something that feels quite different from the typical fantasy world. It's interesting to see how it, too, is changing, as society adjusts to the end of the war, new inventions make large-scale manufacturing more economically significant than it has ever been before, and Relway's reformed city watch brings a previously unknown level of law and order to the city- and is becoming a political force in its own right. TunFaire is more peaceful than it used to be- though that's a relative measure.

The overall tone of the story is more upbeat than many of the previous Garrett books. The Garrett, P.I. series has never been as dark as Glen Cook's Black Company series, and Garrett himself is a fun character and narrator, but nevertheless a number of the previous Garrett books have had a strong sense of sadness or melancholy about them. There's some of that here, too, but all in all the world seems brighter here than it often has in the past.

Gilded Latten Bones is is very strongly recommended for fans of the Garrett series, and I strongly recommend the series as a whole (starting with Sweet Silver Blues) for anyone who likes fantasy and is interested in something different from the norm.