Horns

Horns was a book that spiked in popularity last year due to a movie based it that starred Daniel Radcliffe.  I didn't actually see the film but I read the book because a friend had and wanted to discuss it.

The basic plot is that the protagonist wakes up one morning with, you guessed it, horns.  He quickly realizes that these horns have powers that affect the people around him and much of the book is an exploration of those powers.

Horns' protagonist, while not fundamentally unlikable, generates a lot of pity.  He has lived a rough life and, as such, doesn't use his powers in the best possible way.  However, he shies away from being completely evil, avoiding my complete disgust,

The book was billed as a horror story but there isn't really very much scary stuff going on.  Instead of keeping you up at night worrying someone will come after you with a hacksaw, you are more likely to be kept up wrestling with the worst of human nature.  (Despite what I said about a lack of actual scary parts, there is one place where the reader is reminded that the brain is a physical object that can be damaged without being destroyed, a concept that always troubles me.)

The book also has a quote that I really enjoyed. "When the world comes for your children with its knives out, it is your job to stand in the way.  Everyone knows that."  This quote, while it comes at a trying time in the book, is representative of the parent I want to be when taken out of context like this.

To summarize, while this book has an interesting concept or two, there isn't really that much special there,  It sits squarely in the no man's land between good and bad, without making huge leaps towards either side.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

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%.

Godel, Escher, Bach

I read Godel, Escher, Bach  at the recommendation of one of my friends.  It is quite the massive tome and so it was with some trepidation that I picked it out of my stack of books-to-read.  I am not sure I have read a longer non-fiction book in my life.  Certainly not one that wasn't about history.  But then, that isn't fair to GEB (as it is commonly abbreviated), it is about history, and math, and biology, and computer science, and linguistics, and neurology.  And those are just the subjects that it talks about for a chapter or more; it touches on many more topics briefly throughout its sojourns through the world's knowledge in its quest to reach its thesis.

What is its thesis, you might ask?  Well, there are a lot of sub-theses.  Each chapter could be a research paper in and of itself.  There is a lot of talk about how self-referential systems (like humans) have many interesting qualities and potential problems. However, what the book is building towards is that true AI, an actual intelligence that is as intelligent as a human, will have to work very similarly to how the human brain works.

Every chapter starts with a dialogue between the tortoise and Achilles; the pair made famous by Zeno's paradox.  The discussions are generally the introductions to the ideas in the following chapter and it makes it so there are easier to read breaks between the relatively dense discussions of whatever the chapters discuss.

The title referring to three seeming unrelated people is just the beginning of the vast majority of topics this book covers.  All three of them are related to various chapter theses and their fundamental differences and similarities also underlie the whole work.  The amount of work that goes into even one chapter of this book is simply impressive.  I'm sure the more times you read this book, the more you could get out of it.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

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%.