Smithology

Look, do you really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats? What was that? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t quite hear you, you’ll have to try not to breathe so hard.—What are you—some kind of voyeur? Fuck Off!

I’ve finally caught up on the much talked about and slightly hyped Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. It was listed on a Tor list of kinky scifi sex and I seem to recall seeing it mentioned elsewhere as putting the Barbarella back into scifi. Then there’s the eye-catching cover.

So is there anything more to this book than just an excuse for sex in microgravity? Well, yeah, of course! It’s Charles Stross so it’s packed full of awesome original world building and mind blowing ideas. And an excuse for sex in microgravity. But it’s very funny sex in microgravity and in fact I think Stross might have held back on where he could have gone with the robot sex gags and managed to keep things reasonably decent.

So anyway, Saturn’s Children is set in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth-ish century a couple of hundred years after humans mysteriously went extinct. However, in their wake is a civilisation of robots continuing to kind-of do the work of their masters – when they’re not enslaving each other and getting up to no good.

Freya Nakamachi-47 is a femmebot who sadly seems to have missed out on carrying out her primary function which was to – you know, ahem, do it with human men. Instead she roams listlessly around the solar system until she is recruited by a butler-bot and finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy of galactic proportions, fighting for her life while she tries to piece together what’s going on. Along for the ride are the memories in her sibling’s soul chip, various dwarves, a couple of mining robots, some nasty robotic dominatrixes and anime-aristocrats and countless other sentient fixtures, some of whom have unusual sex lives.

The premise for the robot sex stuff is that robot brains are electronic facsimiles of human brains, complete with many of the autonomic responses of humans. Apparently, it was the only way we could manage to manufacture anything approaching a human consciousness in a machine (seems reasonable to me). So as a result, the robots are a little bit more human than we might expect.

As you might guess, the whole thing is a little tongue-in-cheek and Stross has a lot of fun playing with the idea of horny robots but also inevitably does reflect a bit on human nature. I enjoy some of his more absurd moments like the mental image of Freya earnestly playing the bouzouki during a Hungarian folk revival.

Anyway, as usual I recommend yet another Charles Stross book. This one is a real original and very enjoyable.

Uncategorized books, charles stross, saturns children, scifi

Halting State is one extremely smart species of fun – or so says William Gibson and I agree with him. Set in near future Edinburgh, Halting State takes us on a journey into massively multiplayer online gaming, virtual economies, black nets, spies and information politics. Our unwitting tour guides are likeable and sympathetic and each of them turns out to be admirably heroic in an understated way. There’s Elaine, the legal arse kicker who’s job is a little bit like swimming in a tank full of sharks (keep moving, but not too fast), Sue the underwhelmed police woman who wishes criminals would stick to simple break and enters and not freak her out with computers and Jack the games programmer who carries a fold-up keyboard in his cargo pants and gets embarrassed when he sees someone in the real world.

These three characters (and a few other memorable jocks) are thrown together when an unprecedented bank robbery takes place: unprecedented because it occurs inside a game and the stolen goods are all game items. Seemingly just an annoyance for the game company and players: until the dead bodies start showing up.

I really enjoyed this book and it hit critical mass for me about two thirds through, after which I had to finish it in a mammoth session that saw me finishing up at 2:30am (a bit past my bedtime).

The near future aspect of the book means it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The characters can remember stuff that has happened in our recent past from their childhoods yet the amount of computing power and bandwidth available to them makes their society slightly alien.

One of the well realised aspects is how much the characters rely on the Internet for information every minute. At one point Jack remarks on how nobody remembers street names anymore and how people back in the day had to remember how to get to places. For Jack, you just search for it and follow the directions or more commonly let the car take you there.

The way that the games overlay everything through use of virtual reality is also well done. Similar to William Gibson’s Virtual Light where glasses can be worn that project labels and data onto the real world view, the glasses in Halting State transform ordinary streets into game environments where virtual objects can be found and other players can be located.

Stross has a lot of fun with these ideas as he leads us through the mystery of the virtual robbery and also spends a little time on exposition of how game economies work, a little bit of cryptography and how governments can use information warfare in more subtle ways than just hacking the crap out of each other.

The end is satisfying enough even if the ultimate premise is a little bit thin or convoluted, we’ve had so much fun getting there, we don’t mind if the bad guys, or good guys who turned bad or whatever have overstretched the imagination a bit. On the other hand, as Sue remarks, if people are willing to kill each other over a few thousand dollars, what lengths would they go to for a few million?

Currently reading: The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod.

Uncategorized books, charles stross, halting state, near future

The Merchants’ War is book four in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series which follows the adventures of Miriam, a tech journalist from Boston who discovers she is the long lost daughter of a family of world walkers who live in an alternative parallel universe which is still stuck in the medieval age.

If you haven’t read any of the books in this series, then I recommend that you skip the rest of this spoilerific review and get hold of the first books in the series and read them. If you like the idea of mixing history up like bringing machine guns into a medieval battle and a bit of sociology and collision of cultures then you’ll like these books.

Also, if you haven’t read this one yet and you care, then come back and read this when you have.

At the end of book three, Miriam zapped herself into the steam age world to escape an exploding building and book four takes Miriam deeper into the world of “New London” and steam-age Boston with all its unfamiliar and dangerous politics. Meanwhile Mike the DEA agent in over his head and his spooky friends zero in on the clan in modern America. The new King Egon wastes no time in executing plans to waste the clan in the Gruinmarkt leaving poor Duke Angbard in a spot of bother. Brill is assigned the job of bringing Miriam back to the clan while some new characters Huw and his gang discover yet another world.

I really really enjoyed this book and found it a little more satisfying than the previous one (The Clan Corporate) because it seemed to end at better place. I remember getting to the end of The Clan Corporate and going “Is that it? Are you just going to leave it all hanging like that!?” This one ends on a cliff hanger too – in the middle of a desperate battle in fact but other characters stories kind of wind up and converge a bit more nicely. I’m looking forward to the next books but hoping if Stross is going to keep the series going for many more books, that the stories can be more self contained. He does this well with the Laundry books ( Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue) but I realise the story of the Clan is on a much bigger scale so it has to be told in parts.

[tags]books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchants’ war, the merchants’ war[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchant princes

I was just reading the happy news over at Charlie’s diary that he’s finished writing The Fuller Memorandum, the third book in the series beginning with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. Which reminds me, I forgot to write up my thoughts on The Jennifer Morgue which I finished last week during the ADSL outage at our place (we were changing over to iiNet Naked ADSL so the lines were dead for a few days and the ADSL had to be killed off for a period of two weeks before that due to some insane bureaucratic rituals that Telstra has).

So The Jennifer Morgue was a great read. Pretty much everything I said about The Atrocity Archives applies. Just a fresh, exciting, funny, clever adventure / spy / fantasy novel set in a world where magic is real and it’s the government’s job to keep it a secret. I really don’t want to spoil this book too much because I think you should all just read it.

For those of you who have read The Atrocity Archives, this book is more of the same but with new villains (obviously) and just generally ramping up the fun a bit. There’s plenty to explore in the “magic is real and it’s the by-product of certain types of maths” universe(s) that Stross has created and he gives us plenty of ideas to think on in this book.

If I have one criticism: If you think too hard about the kinds of things that are being achieved with magic in this book, then it gets absurd very quickly. Yes, that’s part of the comedy but sometimes it can go too far and you might just stop trying to expect any logic at all from the book which then might make you just think “this is rubbish” and put it down. This book goes close to that line but manages not to cross it, for me at least.

Visit me on librarything

[tags]books, charles stross, the jennifer morgue[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross

My mum dropped around a box of dusty old books that she was getting rid of some months back and amongst them was a set of the Lensman series of science fiction books be E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith. The back cover of the first book compares itself to Asimov’s Foundation series and given the seventies art-work, I wrote these books off in my mind as some trashy seventies gibberish where a Mills and Boon writer had tried to branch out to a new audience or something.

Having finished watching “Flight of the Conchords” the other night and not having been to Pulp Fiction (my favourite bookshop) for some time, I picked up the first of the Lensmen novels and began reading. As I suspected it was boring, third person abstract stuff about some galaxies colliding and minds floating in space etc… the word ‘millions’ being mentioned a lot and tedious descriptions of planetary formations and an almost ridiculous set-up of the ‘bad’ guys being unfeeling ancient amoeba’s from another dimension.

But when I woke up this morning, I had a niggling feeling that there had been quite a bit more intelligence behind the story than I had first summised and I wondered if I’d judged it too harshly before even opening it. For example, C. J. Cherryh’s book Foreigner also starts off with a tedious description of some interstellar space craft getting lost and spanning generations of culture in order to manufacture two ‘races’ of people on the one craft before they bump into first contact with the aliens.

So I am going to give ‘Doc’ another chance because I also wikipedia’d him this morning and was shocked and amazed that he wrote in the 1930s (which gives him more cred in my eyes) and he is allegedly seen as “the father of space opera” (so he at least has fans who like him enough to talk him up on wikipedia). He also hung out a bit with Robert Heinlein so that must make him cool:

In Heinlein’s essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of “superman” when he asked Dr. Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction—a process apparently improvised on the spot. (E. E. Smith, Wikipedia)

Here’s hoping that the book picks up a bit once I’ve trudged through the ‘info dump’ part at the start. As an aside, Charles Stross has blogged about the necessary but painful phenomenon of the info-dump in sci-fi writing and how difficult it is to do without bogging the story down. Perhaps when Smith was writing, this kind of high level universe imagining was considered to be exciting where as now we’re used to all those ideas (e.g. to me I see galaxies colliding on APOD every week and I’ve known what a solar system was since I was a kid)

So has anyone out there read any ‘Doc’ and what did you think? Any thoughts on how science fiction has changed in the last 80 years?

Links

E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith on Wikipedia
Triplanetary on Librarything has some good reviews with interesting points of view too
Charles Stross talks about using second person voice to avoid infodumps

[tags]books, boring books, brain dump, e. e. smith, judging a book by its cover, lensman, scifi[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross, scifi

I finished reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross the other night so here’s my usual half baked spoilerific review:

The Atrocity Archives is like James Bond meets Yes Minister meets Shaun of the Dead. We join Bob Howard, a trainee field agent working for “The Laundry” as he battles zombies, tentacled monsters with a taste for brainz, demon possessed Nazi’s from outer space and accidental discoveries in computational number theory. Oh and he also has to brave the admin and accounting department as well trying to avoid being noticed by a spooky upper management ex-field agent legend with vampirish vibes.

I liked this book. It was funny, clever, engaging, fast paced and charming. The main character, Bob Howard is likeable, cheeky, aware of irony and balls-y.

I’m just trying to think of anything I didn’t like about the book and I’m coming up short. But don’t take my word for it. You can get a taste of what the book is like by feasting your browser upon the exciting (no really) new Tor website and downloading Down on the Farm which is a short Bob Howard adventure. (note that part way down the page on the left is menu from which you can download the pdf version and an audio version. Thanks Tor!!)

P.S. Checkout my library on librarything

[tags]bob howard, book review, charles stross, the atrocity archives[/tags]

books books, charles stross

In the absence of anything truly insightful to post about, I thought I’d share on some of the sci-fi I’ve been reading.

I have been reading a lot of Charles Stross ever since a friend (Nick) sold me onto him and also from getting into Ken Macleod (also through Nick). The Merchant Princes series is pretty cool and a bit different because he’s broken away from his sci-fi stuff and gone for a fantasy / parallel universes story with a kind of Mafia that can travel between worlds. I’ve read the first two and while the third is already in the shops, I’m waiting for the paperback so I can bang it about in my bag for awhile and generally abuse it. So go get a copy of the first one if you haven’t read it: The Family Trade

I’ve also finished the second book of the ‘Foreigner’ series by C. J. Cherryh which is called Invader . These books are also pretty different, once again a fantasy kind of thing but a little bit sci-fi. I once read someone complaining that there are too many humans lost on a planet somewhere who’ve reverted to medieval society books and this series could broadly be seen as that but it’s appeal is that it is really psychological and about culture and politics somehow. It really works. So much of what grabs me about these books is the way Cherryh has invented a whole different psychology of these aliens and a biology that looks fairly similar to humans but is totally whacked when it comes to the basic social instincts. So that’s what keeps me coming back. Oh and I have to find out what happens to the dudes in the thing (trying not to do a spoiler but I wish I’d bought the third book at the same time!)

What these books have in common is that they go into differences between cultures and they have anachronisms where modern technology is mixed with medieval tech in a cool way.

[tags]books, science fiction, stross, cherryh, fantasy[/tags]

books books, charles stross, cherryh