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%.

The Years of Rice and Salt

A while back I did a post about Agent of Byzantium.  I talked about how it was not at all bad but the short story format didn't flesh out the world nearly as much as I wanted it to and how I wished that it had gone further down the path of history.  The Years of Rice and Salt answers most of those complaints, ironically from the opposite direction.  In Agent of Byzantium, Islam is never founded and so the Eastern Roman Empire never falls.  The premise of this book is that instead of one third of Europe dying during the black plague, 99% does.  The book starts when the black plague is just finishing up its course and goes through about 2050 C.E. So it covers about a 1000 years and really fleshes out the world showing how different parts adapted differently.

The book was recommended to me by a friend after he lent me Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.  I didn't get around to reading it for about four years until it caught my eye in the small used book store in the little town where my Dad lives.  Since I have a difficult time leaving a book store empty handed I bought it.  $8 for a hard cover in good condition is pretty good.

Unlike a lot of alternate histories, this book does not make special effort to point out that certain events did or didn't happen.  Perhaps it is partially because this is so drastic of a historical change but I would like to attribute it at least partially to Mr. Robinson's skill at writing.  Despite the massive change, it is a pretty believable history (though Japanese ronin helping Native Americans fend off  Chinese conquistadors is a little far fetched, I will admit).  The history, rather than focusing on the leaders and major events, follows the lives of relatively normal people.

The book covers its time span by having 10 short-story-esque parts with varying amounts of time between each one.  The group of characters are always the same group, reincarnated in different positions.  This would merely be a quirk of the book except that some of the stories follow the characters after death while they have conversations in the afterlife; a seemingly needlessly fantastical flourish.  Each of the characters is then reincarnated as someone whose name starts with the first letter of the last life's name so you end up thinking of the characters as K and B.

One of the themes of the book is that the idea of a one overarching "shepherd" god is a bit naive and that there is holiness in all things.  Multiple different characters express this view and even the ones that don't seem to believe it.  In addition, the book spends a lot of time following the advancement of women's rights in the world and, while not as much the progression of science, the progression of scientific thinking.  It is very interesting.

This book makes for an good read, however, it can come across as a bit dry at times.  Not exactly a fun read, but a nice intellectual one.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

1Q84

1Q84 piqued my attention when it first came out.  1984 was one of my favorite books that I was forced to read for school (probably no coincidence that it was the closest to science fiction) and a similar book by a well respected Japanese author sounded quite interesting.  The book hung out on my list for years; basically, I was waiting to see it in a used book store to pick it up.  Finally, one of my friends offered to loan it to me which I gratefully accepted.

The book takes place (most of it, anyway) in an alternate 1984 Japan and for the first two parts flips back and forth between two limited third person viewpoints, oddly reminiscent of Leviathan Wakes in that respect (and almost no other).  The third and final part adds a third viewpoint, whose chapters are written in a slightly more omnipotent style but still keeping the same general method.

This 1984 has a slightly different history (though honestly I know very little about recent Japanese history so I could not tell you how different other than what the book highlights) and has some magical aspects which allows the author to sculpt a much more exciting world than a period piece about 80's Japan would have been.

This book opens wide a window into a fantastical world, taking the reader on a tour of many interesting things in the world.  The problem is that this world asks a lot of questions but doesn't really give very many answers.  Lots of varying things are introduced that seem to have no bearing on the plot.  It seems almost like the author had a succession of cool ideas and tried to tie them all together with a story but realized around page 900 that there was no way that the plot could do justice to all these ideas and so just left a bunch of potential things hanging.  Perhaps this was intentional, possibly setup for a sequel or just the authors way of showing that life in the world will continue after the final page has been turned.

However, if you outlined the actual key plot points and shaved off all of the interesting world building, you end up with a not particularly exciting story.  As I described it when talking with my friend, the plot itself seemed like a story that did not really need to be told.  The world is interesting and I would read a sequel but I would hope that it picked up some of the many loose ends at the end of this book.

Note: The title of the book seems a little weird considering when/where the story takes place.  Perhaps it would make more sense if the book was 198Q.  However, the title is done this way because in Japanese 9 and Q sound similar and so it is sort of a play on words.  An equivalent English title would be 200-Too (pronounced "Two Thousand and Too" and a great name for a sequel).  Also, at 1157 pages, this book has more pages than any other book I have read cover to cover.

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%.

Leviathan Wakes

I picked this book up as part of my flurry of buying books on December 31st, 2012 (I had a four hour layover).  This book came personally recommended by George R. R. Martin and being a Science Fiction fan as well as a GRRM fan, I knew that I would have to pick it up at some point.  After receiving it, the book languished on my shelf for a few months because I wanted to read the entire series together in one go.  After the third book came out, I started reading this one (though it appears that there are a few more in the works).

James S. A. Corey is the penname of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  Daniel Abraham is a relatively well known sci-fi and fantasy author while Ty Franck is GRRM's assistant.  It seemed an odd paring and I wondered if the recommendation by GRRM was not quite as honest as it could have been.  However, my distrust was misplaced.

In short, this is a really good book.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The action is well done and the setting is interesting.  In an interview in the back of the book they say that most sci-fi falls into two categories: the near future with only a few changes or the far future where there are basically an incomprehensible number of changes.  This book aims to fall in between the two.  There are human settlements on Mars, the asteroid belt, and a few places beyond but the only real technobabble technology is the drive that the ships use to make travel times a little more reasonable.  It is by no means faster than light, it just means that a trip from Earth to Mars can take weeks rather than months.

Similar to A Song of Ice and Fire (or The Gap Cycle, since this is sci-fi), each chapter follows a viewpoint character from the third person limited perspective.  Unlike the previous two, this book (with the exception of the prologue) alternates back and forth between two characters.  In the beginning this was frustrating because I was far more interested in the character that involved spaceships than the one living on an asteroid.  Since the most recent series I read in this format was ASOIAF, it was slightly disconcerting because in ASOIAF all of the characters generally trend towards separating whereas in this book from 100 pages in it becomes clear that the characters are going to meet up pretty early on.




One of the other interesting parts about this novel was that it was certainly science fiction (hard to have a book with spaceships shooting at each other that isn't) but it also has elements of horror stories and detective stories which make it different than some other sci-fi novels.  It is not hard sci-fi like Vernor Vinge or Alistair Reynolds, but it is pretty close.

This book was very fun read and I sped through it.  I have high hopes for the sequels.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

The Short Novels of John Steinbeck

This book was a Christmas gift, from the same Christmas that Gravity's Rainbow came from.  Luckily, this book was much more enjoyable.  The book (as the title implies) is a collection of some of Steinbeck's novellas, none of which are more than ~100 pages.  There are six novels in the book and, because I love to order things, I ranked them in amount I liked them from most to least.

1. The Moon Is Down

2. Cannery Row

3. Tortilla Flat

4. Of Mice and Men

5. The Pearl

6. The Red Pony

Since this book is really six novels, I will do a mini review of each one in the order that they are in the book (which is the order they were published in, not they order they were written in).

Tortilla Flat - I started this book with a little trepidation.  Every time I start reading a book by a famous author, I feel slightly worried that I won't like it.  How can I consider myself a good reader if I don't like famous author X?  However, I was gratified when I liked this story.  It is divided up into 17 bite sized chapters and they chronicle the adventures of a group of friends in the town of Tortilla Flat.  It was an enjoyable read and the way the characters were written it seemed a little like br'er rabbit but with people.

The Red Pony - This book was really five short books.  They all had the same characters but they wee relatively unrelated.  It follows the adventures of a young boy on his family's farm.  When I started it, I had hoped it would be similar to Shane.  However, there was no such luck.  None of the stories have the boy coming out very much the winner and that, combined with the less than happy ending of Tortilla Flat made me wonder if no Steinbeck story was going to end on a positive note.  The end of Tortilla Flat was passable because it was one part of the whole story but The Red Pony just threw repeated trials and pains at the kid and it just kept getting worse for him.  While it is certainly well written, it is hard to enjoy something where the main character's life just keeps going downhill.

Of Mice and Men - This is arguably the Steinbeck novel, either this or The Grapes of Wrath (which I haven't read yet).  I was surprised at how short it was, clocking in at less than 60 pages.  Perhaps that just shows how little space he needs to make his ideas known.  The story was interesting and unique, certainly an artifact of its time.  The lifestyle of his characters is uncommon in modern society.  However, after reading the previous two stories immediately before it, the ending tone the ending was going to take was apparent from early on. I will admit that the ending was slightly spoiled by 11/22/63where they put on a play version of the novel.  Despite this, the ending still had its surprises.

The Moon Is Down - In my opinion, this was the stand out novel in the collection.  To be fair, this is the closest to the genre I normally read of any in the book.  It is a story about a small town that gets invaded.  The exact sides are kept obscured, though from some clues in the story (and the time it was written) it seems like it is a German invasion of a French town.  The conversion of a normal people to guerrillas a bit at a time is fascinating to watch.  In this story, the end is at least marginally more positive.

Cannery Row - This story is the majority of the book, pages-wise.  It follows the inhabitants of a part of a town and their day to day trials and experiences.  He makes the metaphor of the stories being like a flatworm crawling into a scientist's collection plate.  They do add up to a coherent narrative, though there are some offshoots that don't really add anything. Because this story has so many characters, there are some likable characters for everyone.  This novel closes out with for the most part, positive feelings, a first for this book.  I am sure I will read the sequel, Sweet Thursday, at some point in the near future.

The Pearl - The final novel of the book felt a little like a letdown.  After the (relatively) lengthy epic that was Cannery Row this shorter story that was very tight and concise had a very different tone and feel.  As I prefer lengthy epics, this was somewhat less enjoyable.  In addition, I found the characters and their situation somewhat hard to emphasize with, which always detracts from my enjoyment.

The book as a whole was very enjoyable.  The two that I liked the least (The Pearl and The Red Pony) took up only about 20% of the book.  However, the book would have been worth it even it was only those two stories and The Moon Is Down, which was superb.  One complaint I had with the formatting of this book was that each page contained two justified columns of text rather than the normal full page.  This was not really a problem it just made physically reading it slightly more awkward.

In the back of my copy of this book (which was from a used bookstore), there is a quote from Steinbeck, followed by "2:18:58".  I don't know what the numbers mean.  I considered date started or finished (the book came out in 1953) and also time started or finished but both of those seemed silly.  Another option could have been the quotes location in the book but the quote is from another of Steinbeck's works and is not even found within the pages of this book let alone at 58 words into the 18th line of the second novel.  The most logical choice seems to be time spent reading the book.  It would be an interesting idea to time myself while I read but I feel like there are too many variables to get any meaningful data out of it.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.