Silo Series

I had heard for many years about how good Wool was and how I should give it a try. I finally bought a copy and it sat unread on my shelf for another couple of years until I made it far enough into my to-read list to start it.  And the praise was right, it didn't disappoint. The world was interesting, the characters were interesting, and the division of it into shorter, smaller books made it more digestible and made the viewpoint transitions flow well.

Unfortunately, the second book, Shift, really went downhill. It continued almost none of the threads from the first and much of it is an extended flashback. This really crystallized for me when I was reading Descender but if a series needs an extended flashback season/volume/book then I think there was something wrong with the world building and plot at the beginning. There's some interesting stuff in here, and some questions get answered, but it doesn't seem worth the effort to read the thing.

However, Dust, brings the series to a roaring finish and is much closer to the quality of the first book than the second. If I could go back in time but was only limited to conveying information to myself about what I thought about this book series, I'd recommend I skip the second book and just read the wikipedia summary and then go straight to book 3. (of course, I would probably ignore that advice because I'm a completionist).  However, please don't let book 2 put you off, all the best parts of book 2 made it into book 3 along with the enjoyable parts of book 1.

Lastly, for a donation to charity, I got an advance reader copy of Howey's short story collection Machine Learning. This includes three short stories set in the Wool Universe and they are the reason I'm writing this post. It was difficult to figure out where they are set in the timeline and when you should read them. I recommend treating them all as one story and absolutely not reading the last one before you finish Dust.

It is particularly difficult to find if there are any other stories in the Wool universe for two reasons. The first is that some people call it the Silo Series and others call it the Wool universe/series/trilogy.  The other is that Howey has opened up his world to allow people to write and publish fan fiction in it under the Kindle Worlds banner which means that if you search for short stories you end up with a lot of things that may or may not be good but are definitely not by Howey.

Anyway, I'd recommend you read them in the order of Wool, Shift, Dust, and then the three short stories last. However, the books are divided into and were originally published as novellas and so if you were truly interested in reading them in chronological order you could read in the following order (ordered by the end point of the stories):

Shift: Legacy > In the Air > In the Mountains > Shift: Order > All of Wool > Shift: Pact > All of Dust > In the Woods.

Again, I don't recommend reading it this way (though I haven't tried) but it seems like it would be more of a slog going through most of what I liked less first before getting to the parts I enjoyed. That being said, perhaps reading it in this order would make the parts I didn't enjoy more enjoyable. If anyone ever reads it in this order (especially for a first time read) feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts.

Revelation space

As you can see from my last post I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the Revelation Space series recently.  I've liked Alastair Reynolds since House of Suns.  I had heard that this was kind of his magnum opus but I had always been a little intimidated by the sheer number of pages involved.  I finally decided to start last October... when I saw that, after years, he was writing a sequel to The Prefect which came out in January, so I decided to hold off for a little bit.  Since there are 14 short stories and 5 novels, I'll do a series of micro reviews (in in-universe chronological order of course).  Please see the above linked post for the collections where you can find the stories.

[I'll try to avoid character level spoilers but event level spoilers are going to be hard to avoid]

"Great Wall of Mars": This story is a great introduction to all the factions that are tearing apart the solar system at the beginning of the series.  It really feels like you are in media res and there could easily be another story before this but Reynold's story telling is such that you can happily make do with what you have.

"Glacial": This one is basically a thought experiment/murder mystery with the characters from the previous story. Stories like this are basically why I read Alastair Reynolds.  It has a totally unique idea and weaves it into an interesting story.

"Night Passage": A totally distinct set of characters with a little bit of a haunted house story.  Again, Reynolds' understanding of astrophysics shines here as he does some things (believably) that I wouldn't have even thought of.

"A Spy in Europa": Reynolds' version of a spy thriller.  It is an interesting idea but I think that it is less well executed than some of the others.

"Weather": One part love story, one part pirate story, one part mystery this story is less concerned with ideas (though it has several) and more with the characters.  The relationships and interactions all feel very true to life.

The Prefect: This is definitely my favorite novel in the series.  It shows what human culture could achieve with, as Reynolds describes it, "Democratic Anarchy".  Everyone is voting all the time through implants in their skulls.  This combines it with a noir detective thriller where the technology is not just a sideshow, but an integral part of the story.

"Open and Shut": Basically just a check in with the main characters of The Prefect in the aftermath of the story.  If you've read the story, it is a nice stop over between it and the sequel but nothing special by itself.

Elysium Fire: The sequel to The Prefect, another detective story.  This one isn't quite as good, but it is still very good while doing a great job building on the events of the story, showing how they affect our main characters and the world around them.

"Monkey Suit": A ship fleeing a disaster and our narrator has to go out in a refurbished spacesuit.  It's an interesting story about what happens as we give all of our appliances even rudimentary personalities

"Dilation Sleep": To be honest, I barely remember this story.  It's one of the earliest written stories in the series and it shows.  It is basically an exploration of how wealthy can fly around at near the speed of light to avoid current problems.

Chasm City: This is Alastair Reynolds tries to write Phillip K. Dick.  It feels a lot like Minority Report, Total Recall, or Paycheck.  Lots of interesting things with memory and mistaken identity.  It's an interesting story of how far the mighty can fall.

"Diamond Dogs": Alastair Reynolds does Saw or maybe just a puzzle room.  Basically a story that asks how much it is worth sacrificing to achieve goals.

"Grafenwalder's Bestiary": This has similar themes to "Diamond Dogs" with people in the upper echelons competing to own the rarest animals.  It's an interesting epilogue to both that story and "A Spy in Europa".

"Turquoise Days": Alastair Reynolds' take on a vastly different alien life than ours.  It's an interesting idea about how much of our thought processes are recordable and what people would do with that capacity.

"Nightingale": This story covers the aftermath of the historical parts of Chasm City and is the closest we get to a true horror story (a room with walls of skin!).  This story makes me wonder if Reynolds is a pessimist about war and the costs of peace.

Revelation Space: We made it, the "first" book in the series!  This book won Reynolds a bunch of awards and it is easy to see why.  It is jam packed with interesting ideas and characters.  It ties together a bunch of threads and ideas that have been built up in the other stories, while still letting readers who started here be able to follow the action.  It also does some interesting things jumping around in the timeline to make sure that both stories hit the climax at the same time.

"The Last Log of the Lachrimosa": A spooky story where lust for treasure gets the better of a crew.  It does some interesting things with perspective though, to make a mystery within the story.

Redemption Ark: Hope you read "Great Wall of Mars"!  Those characters make their appearance into the main storyline like a hammerblow.  They are suddenly, and for the rest of the series, very important.  Despite that, it's another really enjoyable book and has some of the best space battles of the series.

Absolution Gap: I know a lot of digital ink has been spilled over how this book is not as good as the others, and I fully respect those opinions and see where they are coming from.  However, I really enjoyed this book.  Once the plot finally gets going, which takes a while, it has a lot of interesting moral dilemmas for the characters.

"Galactic North": This story goes from near the beginning of the timeline to the very end concerning a cycle of revenge between two former friends.  It has what I consider to be almost a Reynolds cliche which is two ships chasing each other at very near the speed of light for an extremely extended period of time (due to relativity).  It is a nice little coda to the story, showing that humanity always finds a way to persevere.

Overall, I'd highly recommend the series.  The quality is, of course, a little variable but it is a chock full of great ideas and fun characters.

Revelation Space Timeline (Updated 3/2025)

I just finished my journey through all the published Revelation Space stories in (in-universe) chronological order (review of the series in my next post).  I am big on that ordering; my Narnia set starts with The Magician's Nephew and, when Winds of Winter gets announced, I plan to do a reread using the interleaved chapters from A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons.

However, I found that the resources to help someone read Revelation Space in order are in somewhat short supply and I found the ones present to be lacking in various areas.  Some of what I used you can find at the bottom.

Official Alastair Reynolds timeline - Doesn't have events from every story on it, however I consider all dates on it gospel for the purpose of making my own timeline
Neal Ulen's blog - Almost perfect but I dispute a few of his years and the ordering
Wikipedia's timeline - Missing several stories and some of the years definitely don't make sense given the events in the story.  Primarily used to encourage me to make this.

One last thing, if you are not a completionist and want to know if any of these will help your understanding of the Inhibitor Trilogy (the main three books), I would say the top 5 things to read, in order of importance:

1. "Great Wall of Mars"
2. "Galactic North"
3. Chasm City
4. "Glacial"
5. "Turquoise Days"

To be clear, I don't believe these to necessarily be the best or most interesting of the stories below, just the ones that add the most depth to the main trilogy. Obviously, the main trilogy can be read without any support but I highly recommend at least reading "Great Wall of Mars" at some point before Redemption Ark because it helps add some development and backstory to the main characters of that book.  (Also, don't read "Galactic North" before the main series, it spoils a lot of what happens).

Some notes on the timeline:

• If multiple stories cover the same stretch of time, I sort them by their end date
• I kept all the books together with the exception of Chasm City because I think it is better to read the prologue before the stories that take place concurrently with it (at the same time, I think reading the short stories wholly after Chasm City robs them of a little emotional impact)
• If my reason for choosing a year contains spoilers for other stories, I'll put it at the bottom so that you can use this as a resource without seeing spoilers.
• If a story has an epilogue that takes place long after the story, I won't consider that as part of when the story takes place unless it spoils other events
• The Prefect has been republished in some places as Aurora Rising.
• "Quoted text" denotes short stories and novellas, italics denotes full novels, blue denotes stories with characters from Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies (a subseries), and green denotes stories with characters from the Inhibitor Trilogy (the main series)

Story	Year	Book that contains story	Explanation for year
"Great Wall of Mars"	2205	Galactic North or Beyond the Aquila Rift	From AR timeline
"Glacial"	2217	Galactic North	From AR timeline
"Night Passage"	2338	Infinite Stars or Belladonna Nights	From AR timeline
"A Spy in Europa"	2339	Galactic North	Clearly shortly before event in AR Timeline
"Weather"	2358	Galactic North or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [0] at bottom
The Prefect/Aurora Rising	2427	The Prefect	Explicitly says year in story
"Open and Shut"	2428	Gollancz or Belladonna Nights	Clearly shortly after The Prefect
Elysium Fire	2429	Elysium Fire	Stated it takes place two years after events in The Prefect
Machine Vendetta	2435	Machine Vendetta	Stated it takes place six years after events in Elysium Fire
Chasm City Prologue	2510	Chasm City	From AR timeline (technically takes place in 2517 but almost exclusively describes events in 2510)
"Monkey Suit"	2511	Deep Navigation	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
"Plague Music"	2512	Belladonna Nights	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
"Dilation Sleep"	2513	Galactic North	Clearly shortly after event in AR Timeline
Chasm City	2502-2524	Chasm City	Explicitly says year in story
"Diamond Dogs"	2500-2527	Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [1] at bottom
"Grafenwalder's Bestiary"	2530	Galactic North	Said to be "two centuries" after the events in "A Spy in Europa" and shortly after the events of "Diamond Dogs"
"Turquoise Days"	2539-2541	Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days	From AR timeline
"Nightingale"	2545	Galactic North	See note [2] at bottom
Revelation Space	2524-2567	Revelation Space	From AR timeline
"The Last Log of the Lachrimosa"	2530	Subterranean Press or Beyond the Aquila Rift	See note [3] at bottom
Redemption Ark	2605-51	Redemption Ark	From AR timeline
Absolution Gap	2615-2727 [4]	Absolution Gap	Explicitly says year in story
Inhibitor Phase	2791-2858	Inhibitor Phase	Explicitly says year in story
"Galactic North"	2303-40000	Galactic North	Explicitly says year in story

(Minor) Spoilers:
[0]: Not many hints on when this takes place but after 2350 based on the AR timeline.  The other websites use 2358 so I will go with that
[1]: The story explicitly starts "a century and a half" after The Eighty but the melding plague hasn't hit yet which doesn't work with the AR timeline.  2500 seems to be about as late as I can put it while still leaving the ending early enough.  The ending year is again, about as late as I can put it.  I would argue that textual evidence implies that it is after the end of Chasm City and hints in "Turquoise Days" imply that that story takes place decades later.
[2]: Clearly after the parts of Chasm City that take place on Sky's Edge. The story says there has been 250 years of war starting immediately after their arrival on Sky's Edge which the official timeline says happened in the 23rd century.  Given people's memories and skills, I think this has to be at most 10 years after the end of the war. Since Khouri arrives on Yellowstone in 2524, and the war was still going when she left, this means the range of possible years of the story is 2510 to 2559 (260 + 2299)
[3]: I know that this one is out of place but I think that it is better read after Revelation Space when you know what the Inhibitors are and their history.  The year is almost entirely conjecture, some point after 2510 and before 2600 but closer to 2510

[4] The prologue and epilogue of Absolution Gap take place in ~2950 and contain at least one character who is also present in Inhibitor Phase, spoiling their survival. However, Reynolds clearly made a choice to bookend Absolution Gap with this flashforward so I am hesitant to advise you to skip both until you finish Inhibitor Phase. Inhibitor Phase should definitely be read after the main body of Absolution Gap.

In addition, I came up with a dependency tree for how all the stories interact.  I'll post it down here since it has minor spoilers.

The Phillip K. Dick Reader

The Phillip K. Dick Reader is a selection of 24 Phillip K. Dick stories.  It collects mostly earlier stories from the mid 1950's with the exception of the inspiration for Total Recall (which was published in the 60's).  As with many short story collections, the quality varies, especially for a collection early in an author's career.

All of the stories have the seed in an interesting idea.  One that is particularly memorable to me is  about aliens fishing for humans and what sort of lures they would use.  Other ideas include marketing bomb shelters and robots that try to sell themselves, various post apocalyptic situations, and questioning mental states.  A short story collection like this is a great way to experience the author's work because he had so many interesting and unique ideas, even if they weren't always executed perfectly.

My favorite story in the book is the basis for the movie Paycheck (which I didn't know until I started writing this blog post), which I haven't seen (and from the rotten tomatoes rating, maybe I shouldn't).  It follows a man who has lost his memory and put himself in a perilous situation. However, he has mailed himself a few items which are all critical in the present time.  It's a fun deduction game to determine how the pieces are going to be used to help the protagonist.

Overall, I would give this collection an 89%.

Kalki

I picked up Kalki a while back because I had always heard that Gore Vidal was a good author and that this was the most science fiction like of his books and it was described as something akin to Mad Max meets Hemingway.  If that doesn't pique your interest even a little, I don't know what will.

Before I get into this book, I just want to say a quick thing about gendered nouns (it is at least tangentially related, I promise).  I generally don't like gendered nouns, they seem a little archaic and slightly sexist.  However, on occasion I will come across a word that is just plain cool, and I have to love it regardless of its other qualities.  This book introduced me to one of those: aviatrix.

As I said above, this was my first read by Gore Vidal and, frankly, I was blown away.  I'll admit the plot was not that interesting, perhaps I am a little jaded for apocalypse stories, but the lower level sentence and paragraph constructs were excellent.  I found myself repeatedly enjoying individual sentences because they were exquisitely crafted.

I found it a little difficult to emphasize with the protagonist because she (the aviatrix) makes a lot of frustrating and questionable decisions and in general seems a little blind to what (to me, the jaded reader seemed to be obvious) consequences her actions would have.  Vidal also repeatedly emphasizes the fact that she is a woman who cannot reproduce and that she is attracted to other women which are both perfectly fine character traits but seem strange for repeated emphasis.

Overall, I would give this book an 86%.

Tatja Grimm's World

I picked up Tatja Grimm's World after I read Vernor Vinge's short story collection because at that point it was basically the last piece of his fiction bibliography that I hadn't read.  It had lackluster reviews but it was also short, so I figured I owed it to the author of A Deepness in the Sky and Across Realtime to complete my collection of his work (mentally and physically).

The first part of the book is a barely changed version of a short story in the collection I read.  Which was honestly what drew me in to the story.  Tatja is a very smart woman in a world of normally smart people and the viewpoint characters for a couple parts are book publishers who love books which obviously immediately endeared them to me.

However, the book itself is one of the author's first works.  Comparatively, it lacks depth and cohesion and if you look closely you can see a lot of ideological ties to his later works.  Things that he hadn't quite worked out how he wanted them to go but knew he liked the concept of.  In addition, it is hampered by basically being a few stories hammered together in an attempt to make a novel and some of the jumps are a little jarring.

Basically, if you like Vernor Vinge and his work, you should read this.  It is pretty short and definitely in his style, but come at it expecting short stories set in the same universe rather than a novel.  However, this should definitely not be your introduction to Vernor Vinge, for that I recommend either Deepness in the Sky or Fire upon the Deep (depending on if you believe in reading things in chronological order or the order in which they were published).

Overall, I would give this a 81%.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One  is a nerdy, sci-fi love letter to the 80's.  I don't mean that it is written in the style of 80's science fiction stories but that the book is full to bursting with blatant, deliberate references to 80's pop culture.

The basic setting of the book is a near future where Earth is decaying.  Instead of fixing their problems, people retreat inside their virtual worlds to escape.  This makes it sound like the book is preachy, but it really isn't.  For most of the book, it just sort of treats this as the state of the world without much comment.

Further, the book doesn't take itself particularly seriously and, as such, makes for a light, fun read full of nostalgia.  I imagine it would be an even better read for someone who was actually a nerdy teenager in the 80's but I still enjoyed it with my moderate grasp of 80's geekdom.  The whole book is designed to make the reader exclaim "Oh yeah, I remember that!"  Everything from Zork to a Joust arcade machine to a specific Dungeons and Dragons handbook makes an appearance.

The book feels a little like a low budget Snow Crash that attempts to make up for its short comings with nostalgia.  I don't want to say that it completely failed because I enjoyed it, but it was definitely a beach read (which is where I read it).

Overall, I would give this book an 82%.

The Gone-Away World

hey you should read The Gone-Away World

Is good?

Is good.

K

The above conversation, from last February was the first time I had heard of The Gone-Away World.  I put it on my personal backlog until May when I saw it hanging out in the window of a used bookstore I had never been in.  When I finally got around to reading it, I wished I had gotten to it sooner.

I would say that the book has three distinct phases.  The first phase is the first chapter which alone is about 5% of the book.  It throws you into the deep end of a post apocalyptic world and hurls a large number of characters and concepts at the reader.  It can be overwhelming but it is worth soldiering on because the second phase, almost two thirds of the book takes place before the first chapter.  The author takes that time to explain how the world of today managed to change to the world shown in the first chapter and gradually introduce the readers to the same characters and concepts that they were barraged with before.  The final phase, comprising the rest of the book takes the readers from the first chapter to the thrilling (and a little silly) conclusion.  Along the way there are some serious twists that would be disastrous to spoil so I will say no more.

The characters are all excellent and have enough detail to show they are unique characters with their own lives and aspirations but not so much that you lose track of the importance of the narrator.  Many authors will throw world building details into their novels, but this book does world building through its characters.


The book manages to take itself just seriously enough that it can get away with absurd things without being absurd itself.  It manages to wrap its silliness in a cloak of plausibility in a way I have seen few other things do.  It reminds me of Vonnegut's books in a way.

Overall, I would give this book a 97%.

Cibola Burn

Bloggers note: I am deferring my other graphic novel post for a little while but I promise I will come back to it.  I liked Lucifer too much to not write about it.

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Cibola Burn, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, and Abaddon's Gate,  the previous books in the series, simply by virtue of discussing the plot at all.

Right before I started reading The Expanse series they announced that instead of being a three book series, they are making it six books.  In between book three (Abbadon's Gate which I reviewed earlier) and this one, they announced that they are making a tv show on Syfy.  The show has no release date yet beyond "2015" but news is gradually coming out.  Regardless of how well the show does, shortly before this book came out the writers announced that their contract had been extended to 9 books.  I think it is safe to say that the series is taking off.

Cibola Burn starts off a little while after the third book leaves off and has some general sci-fi settling an alien planet cliches along with some space western cliches but it blends them well and still has some originality and pushes the overarching plot of the series in an exciting direction.  As with the other books in the series, the authors manage to weave another genre in with sci-fi.  This time it is clear from early on that the genre is Western and there a lot of plot points that could come directly from a spaghetti western but infused with scifi trappings.

I was privileged enough to get the chance to hear them talk when they were on their book tour (Side note: in case you were confused by my use of plural pronoun, James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) and they said that the book was inspired by a game a role playing game that they were playing that was a fusion of Traveller and d20 modern (I was hoped it was inspired by Diaspora, my space RPG of choice) and overall they were very charming and interesting (but then again, I have yet to meet an author whose books I like that I don't like as a person as well).

I think this might be better than the series the other books in the series.  It manages to have political intrigue, space combat, and classic western frontier style plottings all blended together.  It also repeatedly shows the authors careful tracking of how the events in their story affect their setting as a whole and the political balances within it.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

Idoru

My only other experience with William Gibson was his most famous book, Neuromancer.  I enjoyed it but I read it directly after Snow Crash which was my introduction to Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors.  Following that, even a great book would feel a little lackluster.

I had heard interesting things about Idoru so I picked it up when I saw it for sale at my local bookstore.  Considering my last experience with William Gibson, this book is surprisingly similar to Snow Crash (though still very different).  It was written in 1996 so while it was speculative, it was close enough to the present to get a lot of things right.

The book is set in the near future and the plot is about a celebrity who decides to marry a digital being (the idoru of the title).  The various people this affects, from his fan club to his entourage get caught up in a lot of intrigue and it is an interesting commentary on celebrity culture and some discussion of the future of the internet and fame and romance.

I think the part of the book that I will remember the best is the concept of nodal points.  It is the concept that giant mass of data people generate move in certain patterns around certain points that make it possible to predict large things that are not part of the data.  Now this less exciting with machine learning like when Target advertising determined a teen was pregnant before she told her parents but the concept of a human being able to know what to look for and be able to intuit things like that is interesting. The author says that he based it off of his own ability so it is, seemingly, possible.

At the time I was reading it, I didn’t realize it was part of a trilogy (and the middle book no less!) I really didn’t feel that it was missing in backstory or conclusions, which are both valid concerns for the middle book of a trilogy so I am happy to say that this one can stand alone, though I would have preferred to read it in its proper place. 

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The first (and only before this) Murakami book I read was 1Q84.  It was not a great book.  It had a lot of unresolved questions at the end and yet also spent a lot of time on things that didn't really matter.  It was a good 400 page book hiding in the midst of 1100 pages.  Then someone recommended Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to me.  The title sounded interesting and I thought that I could give Murakami one more go.  Boy, am I glad I did.

The book has the unique trait of being almost two books in one.  The odd chapters are in "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" and the even numbered chapters are at "The End of the World."  It is not even clear at first how the two stories are related or even if they are at all.  But the two stories are different even in tone so it really feels like you could be reading two different books.

I read that Hard-Boiled Wonderland was slightly inspired by Raymond Chandler and I can definitely see that.  I am a fan of that style of fiction (though I have read more Dashiell Hammett and The Thin Man is great) but this takes it and mixes it with a sort of semi-futuristic experience. Also, unlike those stories, it isn't as much about detective work as it just is sort of the tone of the story is similar to those types of books.

The End of The World, on the other hand, is a subdued, slightly fantastical story.  It has several interesting concepts but there is a lot of symbolism that ties into the other story which really is probably the most interesting part.

This book has a lot of the problems that 1Q84 had: seemingly random pointless details and plot threads that don't go anywhere but this book handles it a lot better.  Possibly because it didn't have 1000 pages to get my hopes up that some of them were going places.  In this book they were slight defects, in 1Q84 they were borderline deal breakers.

I think that the part of this book that will stay with me the longest after I have read it is its discussion of consciousness and the unconscious mind and how they interact.  At the end of the book there are some great points to think on (that I would not dare to spoil here).  Suffice to say, I quite liked this book.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

The Man in the High Castle

After reading and enjoying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I knew I wanted to read more Phillip K. Dick.  I read that The Man in the High Castle was an interesting alternate history story and, without seeing anything else about it, decided to pick it up.  It turns out to be an alternate history where the Axis wins World War II and divides up America between Germany and Japan.

The book follows several characters around as they try to live in this world.  They are related but the storylines do not really intersect to come to a climax, it is more like we just see several people's stories that flesh out the world.  The story focuses generally on people trying to continue to live with their American ideals even a world where those are belittled and unvalued.

The racism in this book is so intense that it actually bothered me to read.  The way that the culture treated basically every non-Aryan, non-Japanese person caused me a moderate amount of stress while reading.  The fact that people could be that horrible to one another, and these people weren't even the villians of the story, just casual people off the street, is amazing and not in a positive way.  History was rough, but this clearly shows it could have been rougher.

Almost every character in this book consults the I Ching which I am not exceedingly familiar with but my understanding is that it is a fortune telling device like tarot cards.  The way that the people tend to read whatever they want into it seems like a minor critique of fortune tellers while at the same time showing how much America has changed from the one of the real world 60's.

I think the part that will stick with me the longest is a quote towards the end of this book: “We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”  The quote has an interesting sentiment and I like the concept that doing good is hard but it is worth doing anyway.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

The Atrocity Exhibition

The Atrocity Exhibition initially attracted my attention because of its shape.  The copy I have is shaped like a thick magazine but with a more rigid cover.  What was something that looked like this doing in the science fiction section?  My curiosity piqued, I resolved to give it a try.

The book is setup like a collection of short stories.  Most of them follow around a single person whose name changes every story which implies some sort of breakdown or identity crisis.  The order of the stories does not seem to a matter a great deal, though perhaps you can feel the rationality fade from one story to the next. The edition that I have had some wonderfully bleak photographs that really helped set the mood.

Tacked onto the end are a few more stories that don't follow the same plot or characters (some of which are the "four additional stories" advertised on the cover).  One of them is on the appeal of Ronald Reagan in a... unique way.  An interesting one is "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" which is exactly what the title implies it is.  It assigns everyone involved roles and has many puns.  Three are excerpts from medical text books but edited so that the patient is a celebrity (Mae West, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret).  The last story in the collection is about World War III.

I think that this last story is by far the best in the book.  It is about how celebrities and the endless barrage of the 24 hour news can distract from what is actually important in the world.  The premise is that World War III has already happened but only one man of the general public actually remembers it because everyone else is so distracted by the unimportant things that the news inflates to its importance.  Of all the stories in the book, it is perhaps the most poignant despite being set in a cold war timeline where Reagan is on his third term.  The news has only become more about what kind of headlines will grab viewership rather than what is important.

The main plot of the book is almost entirely symbolism and allegory.  One could almost see it as a postwar, compressed Gravity's Rainbow.  However, in this, the allegory is more direct.  The characters literally call out names like Ralph Nader and others but since the book was written in the 60's I am sure that there a lot of references that were pertinent at the time that are now borderline unintelligible. I worry that 50 years from now some of my favorites will be equally difficult to comprehend.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.

Star Wars: Crucible

This book marks the end of an era.  This is almost certainly the furthest ahead in the timeline Star Wars publishing will go before Episode VII comes out.  As someone who is pretty invested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the concept of Episode VII destroying all of the canon that I have come to love (warts and all) worries me.

Before Episode VII was announced, this book was intended to be a passing of the torch novel.  Luke, Han, and Leia (and Lando!) would fight one last big fight and then at least move a little into the background.  However, when Episode VII was announced Troy Denning actually rewrote the end of the novel so that it was less blatant who the characters were passing the torch to.

Denning obviously felt that he needed more than just the characters advanced age to retire them.  I won't spoil which, if any, of the characters survive the book but basically every single character takes a beating.  Jedi healing trances are pushed almost beyond belief and while there is not that high of a body count, there is a very high injury count.

The book is almost a direct sequel to the last Fate of the Jedi book and it starts in a galaxy that is sort of in a unique position in Star Wars.  There are many Sith throughout, the Jedi are not a part of the government at all, and there are multiple other independent states but still only one big government.  It is a shame that this political situation is (probably) about to get plowed under by the new movie.

There have been some complaints that the villains of this book do not make for a fitting last hurrah for the big three, and maybe that is true.  However, considering all that they have faced, it would be hard to do something so galaxy shatteringly intense that hasn't already been done.  However, these antagonists are different than the vast majority of previous antagonists and that makes them interesting.

Overall, I would give this book a 87%.

Doomsday Book

It feels a little unfair to compare this to Blackout/All Clear because this was written years earlier and Ms. Willis has obviously improved as a writer in the intervening timespan.  However, with their both being part of her "Oxford Time Travel" series, it is hard not to.  Don't get me wrong, Doomsday Book is quite the good book, it is just not as good as Blackout/All Clear.

Instead of World War II, this story takes the time travelling protagonist to England in the Middle Ages.  Also, in this book it continues to follow the characters in the "present" as well as in the past which makes for some interesting parallel dramatic tension (though if you don't understand the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendar, the timeline can be a mite bit confusing).

The beginning and the ending of this are both very strong,  but I felt that it slacked off a little in the middle.  Some important things happen, for sure, but I feel that it could have been compressed.  However, the final act is wrought with emotion and a pretty moving expression of what life what probably like in that time period for some people.

Despite the slowness in the middle, I would say that the biggest problem that I had with this book was, since it was written shortly after I was born, the future that the time travelers come from no longer feels very futuristic.  There is surprisingly large number of pages devoted to one of the characters trying to find someone to stay by his phone while he goes out, which kinda broke my suspension of disbelief because he really should have a cell phone.

Like Blackout/All Clear, the strongest part of the book is the characters, heroes and "villains," they are all very well done and you really feel for them.  It would be hard to imagine a time travel story that tried so hard to emphasize the lives of everyday people that wasn't by an author of Connie Willis' caliber.  She is the only author that can consistently bring me to (at least) the verge of tears whenever she tries to.   I think that these characters will live on in my head for a long time.  (Also, there are two little girls in this book who remind me a great deal of an Arya and Sansa Stark if they lived in the actual middle ages rather than Westeros.)

That being said, the time traveler in this book seemed a little less competent at her job then those in Blackout/All Clear (last comparison, I promise), she is much freer with information that she is from the future than the other books' protagonists.  She is also a lot quicker to give up hope than the others.  To be fair, she is less experienced than at least some of the characters in the other books so she has that rationalization going for her.

Overall, I would give this book a 93%.

Out of this World: An Anthology of Fantasy

I recently inherited all of my late grandmother's books.  After finishing The Thorn Birds, I chose a book at random from a box that came from her collection.  The one that I pulled was this one.  Generally speaking, I like fantasy and so the title sounded interesting.  Plus, this collection has some surprisingly famous authors in its pages.  The most surprising was probably Jack London, who I know from his books like White Fang and The Call of the Wild, both of which I read as a child.  In this collection, his contribution is dark, post-apocalyptic story, which is very different from the brand of wilderness adventure that I am used to seeing from him.

This is my copy, the lines are some sort of plastic cover that has developed linear bubbles.

This is not really fantasy in the modern sense. There isn't any unicorns or centaurs or really magic. This is an older definition of fantasy. In addition to the story about the world trying to recover from an apocalyptic plague, there is, for example, a story about people who live in department stores and their feud with the night watchman. All of the stories could be described as “fantastical” if someone tried to convince you that they actually happened, but would not be what you would expect from the fantasy section of your local book store.

Some other famous contributors were H.G. Welles with his vision of the last judgment and Oscar Wilde and his story about a British ghost that becomes exasperated with Americans. H.G. Welles’s story has his same biting style of cynical commentary as many of his other works but it is much more humorous than some of his other stories and Oscar Wilde's story shows how America (and really the world) has moved beyond tradition ghosts in horror.

The story behind this book was that it was compiled by a Sergeant named Julius Fast during World War II of the soldiers favorite short stories read. It is sort of interesting to imagine a different generation reading these stories in their makeshift quarters somewhere in Europe or the Pacific while I am sitting reading these over a hot meal in my comfortable apartment.

I think the thing about this book that I will talk about the most later on is Robert Arthur's "The Devil and Sam Shay" which is about a man winning a bet with devil, and the devil, furious, curses him with never being able to win another bet again and the story explores the aftermath. The character behaves rationally and does exactly what I would have done in the situation. It is great example of making the best of a bad situation.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

The Songs of Distant Earth

I picked this book up in a little used bookstore in Northwestern PA.  To be honest, I picked it up because the title reminded me of the title of George R.R. Martin's tribute to Jack Vance: Songs of the Dying Earth. However, this book bears no relation to that collection or its subjects but it is a very enjoyable read.  Arthur C. Clarke has said it was his favorite of his novels, which is interesting because authors are often unwilling to name their favorites of their work.

The only other Arthur C. Clarke books that I have read before this point have been the 2001 tetralogy. I enjoyed all of them, except for the last one which was really pretty bad.  This book however, was quite good.  The science in it is quite interesting and the new world is close enough to be relatable while still having some distinguishing features.  It is hard to say that there is anything superlative about this book, but there is certainly nothing bad about it.  The parts of the book meshed well to hold my interest and the end leaves it both ambiguous and hopeful.

Where this book really shines, is in its description of the events that had happened before it began.  There are multiple chapters devoted to the history of Earth in this universe and I would love to see a story told of those days.  That perhaps might be a better book than this one.  But, as I have said multiple times before, I am a sucker for a complete canon.

One of the more interesting parts of this book was that (with a small enough population) they had "perfected" democracy. Everyone was informed enough and able to vote on every decision. They did have a president, but they were chosen by random lottery and nobody wanted the job because it was basically just being the master of ceremonies at events and listening to people complain.  That may be the most influential thing I take away from this to talk about later.
Overall, I would give this book a 87%.

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

Ursula Le Guin is somewhat a shame of mine.  I consider myself a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy and yet I have read almost none of her books.  My mother recommended this short story collection to me, saying that I had to read the final story.  It seemed silly to only read one part of a short story collection, so I read the whole thing.  The recommendation was correct: the novella at the end was what made it worth reading, but there were some other good parts as well. 

Perhaps this collection would have been more enjoyable for me if I had read more of the author's work.  Since most of her stories take place in the same universe the shorter ones might have benefited from some context.  None of them were incomprehensible or even close to it, I just wonder if I could have liked them more.

Having never read much Le Guin before, I was surprised at the degree that (especially of the earlier stories) were concerned with sex.  There was a lot of interesting gender roles or changes from our world but it was just interesting how much they revolved around sex.

In my opinion, the best two stories, the title story and the novella, occupied the last third of the book.  The title story is about a primitive culture being exposed to the larger world around them.  It is a science fiction-y look at conquistadors from those being conquist-ed, with a twist.  I liked the stories naive viewpoint.

The novella, called Paradises Lost,  is a very interesting take on what would happen on a generation ship.  Without giving too much away, it has to do with a religion being formed around the concept of the journey and how the ship completely cares for them.  It comes across as completely plausible (while at the same time reminding me of Battlestar Galactica in some ways).  The characters are believable and interesting and I have difficulty coming up with another story that looks at life aboard a generation ship like this.

The theme of the collection is societies different than those found on today's Earth and in that it certainly does a good job of showing off a variety of different societies in the Ekumen universe.  There are some interesting thought experiments contained within the pages of this book but none so good as the final novella.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

Abaddon's Gate

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Abaddon's Gate, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War, the previous books in the series.

As I mentioned in the Caliban's War review the authors said that they wanted to do a different thing with each book.  This book is certainly different than the previous two.  The first two hopped about the solar system.  The majority of this book takes place on one ship that barely moves for most of the story.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, once again, it is just different.

Based on the timing of the blog post in which they discuss it, it looks like the authors recieved an offer for three more books while they were writing this one.  It is exciting because I enjoy this series and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes but there are a couple places in the book where there are visible stretch marks of the book being changed from the thrilling conclusion to now the middle book of the six book saga.

This book, like the previous one, has four characters that are followed from the third person limited perspective.  However, with the exception of Holden, these characters all new (as in the readers didn't even know they existed in the universe before now).  None of them were as well done as Avasarala but I think the average quality of these four is better than those of the previous four.

The combat in this was very cool.  In the first two books, a lot of the combat takes place between ships but in this one it takes place mostly person to person.  While the layout of the battlefield was a little confusing at a couple points, the intricacies of zero gravity combat were well explained.  In addition, this book makes good references to the previous two with the technology and name dropping characters from other books.

There was one plot element that seemed to be basically a red herring, which is fine but it seemed a little like a wasted storytelling opportunity.  In addition, there was a second plot point which appears to have just been dropped.  Perhaps it will be picked up in future books but I have difficulty seeing how that would happen.

I know I spent a lot of page space on complaints here but this book is really pretty good.  It is a lot like the first two but with just enough tweaked to make it exciting and different (and more tweaked than the second one which felt a little like a slightly more complex repeat of the first).

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

Caliban's War

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Caliban's War, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, the previous book in the series.

On one of the interviews with the authors, they talked about how they wanted to make each book in the series a slightly different genre.  Caliban's War is certainly sci-fi but this one is definitely lacking the noir aspects of the previous one.  It has a much more action movie feel than Leviathan Wakes, which I guess is what happens when you replace the detective character with a marine, a politician, and a scientist.

Unlike the last book, which flipped back and forth evenly between Miller and Holden, this book has no set order to the characters and so sometimes the readers can go a while with out seeing one.  Holden is still certainly the star of the show but I enjoyed the politician's chapters a great deal.  She is a well done female character.  A lot of times (especially in stories written by men) the female characters can be simply "men with boobs" but this character is convincingly female while also being nowhere close to being the other stereotype: the damsel in distress.

While the overall tone was enjoyable, I felt that the plot of this one was a little too derivative of that of the first book.  However, unlike the first book, this one gave us a view of the political underpinnings of the event, which made it still a good read.  Holden's conflict with his "inner Miller" was tedious and, combined with his self-righteous attitude make it a lot harder to like him this time around.  It seems that the authors are going to make him the main character of the whole series and I am glad that most of his personal issues are out of the way by the end of this book.

The series is obviously building towards something, however this book just feels a lot like the scaffolding.  Hopefully the next installment pushes the overarching plot along a little more.  However, for the people who gobbled up the first book, unless Miller was your favorite character, they will probably gobble up this one too.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.