Anathem

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s hard to encapsulate a book that is so large in scope and so enjoyable to read. Your intellect revolts at trying to peg it down by mere description and emotionally… well… I just didn’t want the thing to end. When I found, on his site, someone had actually been inspired enough to create music (
http://nealstephenson.com/anathem/music….
) for Anathem I was amazed but, now that I’m done, I understand.

What can I say that you can’t read elsewhere. I might warn you that Stephenson is a master world builder and so it takes effort to get out of this world and into his. But, by God, it’s worth the effort!

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Cryptum

Cryptum by Greg Bear

I admit I am a Halo fan but since his novel Eon I’ve been a Greg Bear follower. I was surprised but sceptical to see these two put together but I was willing to give it a chance.

The first few chapters didn’t make sense at first since it implied space-faring humans were involved with Forerunners 100,000 years ago. But eventually that was explained and the idea grew on me.

It’s no Eon, but that may not be fair as it isn’t a pure Bear invention. I certainly enjoyed it enough to want to read the next in the trilogy. I liked the revelation at the end.

Even so, I’d say this is only for diehard Halo fans.

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Wonder

WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sawyer bills his WWW trilogy as the story of an optimistic singularity event. Where an AI achieves awareness but doesn’t go bad. Of course, it’s never so simple in a story by Canada’s dean of science fiction. Webmind has ‘his’ (he seems a him to me) growing pains especially when the powers that be in China decide to sever him again with a firewall.
I think it’s appropriate that the first e-book I have ever purchased is excellent science fiction like this. The formatting on the kobo app on my iPad had many faults but this final book of this series was such a page turner I found myself not caring.
This book is well worth the price of admission.

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Chimerascope

I just finished reading Douglas Smith’s second collection of short stories, called Chimerascope (Chizine Publications). These stories are primarily science fiction but there is fantasy and horror too. I enjoyed Smith’s characterization the most. These personas fly off the page and into your head and force you to think their thoughts. And that’s just about the best that fiction can aspire to.

Here’re the stories:

• Scream Angel
• The Red Bird
• By Her Hand, She Draws You Down
• New Year’s Eve
• The Boys Are Back in Town
• State of Disorder
• Nothing
• Symphony
• Out of the Light
• Enlightenment
• Murphy’s Law
• The Last Ride
• Jigsaw
• The Dancer at the Red Door
• Going Harvey in the Big House
• A Taste Sweet and Salty
• Memories of the Dead Man

My favourites were Scream Angel and Enlightenment which are both stories in Smith’s Merged Coporate Entity universe (as is another excellent story, Memories of the Dead Man, which is from the early days of the MCE). The idea of a totally ruthless corporation driving conquest out into the stars using this drug called Scream which turns horror and pain into ecstasy was a revelation. And why wouldn’t such an extrapolation of the corporate greed that can create the tar sands and a thousand other environmental devastations upon the Earth be possible? I like these two stories because they offer hope that there is an answer and opposition to greed in Enlightenment.

The Boys Are Back in Town is an odd story combining a tavern on one of the Toronto Islands and characters from Norse and Greek mythology using mind altering substances to allow the mix. High adventure with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour. Smith is right. I think Roger Zelazny would have loved it.

My son’s been watching the Saw movies and so I had prejudicial ideas about name of the story ‘Jigsaw’ but it was such a great story and nothing to do with horror. I think the Wormer idea is so cool but I won’t spoil the story by saying what that is.

The evidence for Smith’s talent is in abundance through this entire book. There wasn’t one story I didn’t like, even the horror genre pieces which I’m normally not into. They’re all so different, even the ones set in the same universe, that it’s hard to believe they came from the same person.

Very highly recommended.

Uncontained

It took
Mom’s funeral
to bring me home.

Or what had been home
41 years ago.

The gravity was a killer
but it was nothing like the sky,
the magnified sun,
the big everything else.

I’m a Lunie now.
My wife, kids, were born there.
Adjusted to being enclosed and liking it.
We are the tunnelers.
Comfortable in the small
spaces where
you can count your breaths.

But, then, coming down
was not what I expected.
Sky blue with mashed potato clouds?
Somehow no.

I was thinking
gravity gravity gravity
the whole way down the
Clarke Elevator.
For I’m a very strong man
on the Moon
on Earth I’d be the weakest of children.

But in the wheelchair
on the ground
terrorized and fascinated by
a night time full of stars
my head lolling
I shut down. Passed out.
It was all that outer space.
Over-the-damn-top-whelmed.

I still get nightmares.
All far larger than
anything possible.
Yet nothing but thin air.
Me falling
up into vastness.

Then I had to fly to make the service.
It at least looked like a
secure tunnel but those windows
kept reminding me.
Held up by nothing more than air.
The airline had inexpensive drugs
to unscare my wits.

Courage and
a litre of airport whisky
was pretty much how
I managed the cemetery.
Loved that wheelchair.
Even if I could have stood
I couldn’t have.
Racing the chair’s motor
from tree to tree
was how I kept from seeing
the falling up sky.

And gravity? Ha!
I loved that gravity.
Crush me more, gravity!

My wonderful mother
was gone and I miss
talking and laughing with her
terribly
but, in that agony,
the urn couldn’t be placed
into that damn niche
fast enough.

The family must have found
my speedy answers
drunk
and bolting for the van
incredibly rude.
I couldn’t help it.
And was so grateful
to be back indoors.

The rest of the trip I lied.
I had to stay inside to keep
from sunburn.
The gravity was
simply too much.

But I was the happy guest of honor:
fine with cards,
better with a drink,
loved meeting my grand-niece.
See the sights? God no!
I just want to talk!

My last day
I remember very little
as I took three pills
found in Mom’s sleeping meds.

There were tears in my eyes
after I woke
far above the atmosphere
on the ride up.
A stewardess offered help.
No.
Just happy.
I’m almost home.

-Tyco Enclave 2038/01/14-

The Road

This is an amazing piece of work. The main story, about a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), takes place well after an apocalyptic nuclear war. Ecosystems have failed where they walk, possibly globally, and the big problem is finding food and avoiding those who would want to use them as food. This is not an easy picture to see. Everything is stark and soullessly grey. The director (John Hillcoat) chose to film it using the devastated landscape around Mt. St. Helens and on garbage-filled urban settings. What remains of happiness has to be found beneath the surface, in the relationship of the man and boy who are essentially nameless for the entire movie.
I haven’t read the novel by Cormac McCarthy (the screenplay was done by Joe Penhall) but I certainly want to now.
This film is all about the acting. Mortensen is immersed in his character 120%. He obviously starved himself and portrays the protective but practical father impeccably. Kodi Smit-McPhee will be an actor to watch for in the future: he will go far. It was amazing to see a young Australian actor playing an American boy so well and without a hint of an accent. Michael K. Williams plays a brief role as the thief so well that the memory of the encounter with the travelers is seared into my brain. Cameos by Robert Duvall (the Old Man), Guy Pearce (the Veteran) and Charlize Theron (the Mother) and others are superbly done.
The film is difficult to experience but is the most realistic depiction of the effects of a nuclear winter that I have ever seen outside of a documentary. I definitely recommend it.

Watch

Reading Watch, Rob Sawyer’s 2nd in the WWW trilogy, was awesome and worth the wait since last year’s Wake. Caitlin Decter is getting physically older but I expect she’s far too smart to be ‘growing up’ just yet. That is certainly part of her charm. Hell, that’s part of the charm of any teenager who knows too much for his or her age or good. I particularly enjoyed the incredibly quick ‘getting it on’ of Caithlin and Matt Reese. I love their first ‘date’ where Caitlin observes:

And — wow! — boy’s eyes really did do that. She’d read about it, but hadn’t yet seen it: straight to the boobs, and only apparently with an effort of will coming up to the face.

Webmind, on the other hand, is maturing incredibly fast. I’m very interested in seeing where Sawyer is going to take this super-intelligence in Wonder. I liked the ending with the poetic interruptus where the reader sees Webmind thinking in spurts around the single words of a human sentence. Kewl way to show human thought and speaking speeds as compared to the incredible speed of Webmind’s hopefulness.
Sawyer’s technical side is usually very well stocked with fact and there is nothing different here except that I would question Webmind’s ability to delete e-mails so easily and quickly. And more fundamentally I wonder how an entity built from ‘cellular automata consciousness’ would know if parts of it were under attack. It boggles the mind.
Like all of Sawyer’s books, this challenges and engages. Very worthwhile reading and recommended.

The Graveyard Book

I was in the audience when Neil Gaiman won the Hugo for best novel of the year and I have finally read The Graveyard Book. I devoured this book including the wonderfully simple yet complex illustrations in one day. It, like Coraline, was a joy to read. Gaiman is a wizard with language. He’s economical and yet adventurous with English. There are sentence structures all over the map (some long, some short, some nuts) and yet he’s just so enjoyable to read. and not just by adults but children and comic book lovers too. I wish I could write like that. I imagine that, like all art that looks beautifully simple, it took a long time to get right. I enjoyed the macabre twists too. I’m not into horror at all but I don’t mind being scared by Neil Gaiman.
Very highly recommended.

Survival

Julie E. Czerneda‘s first book of the trilogy Species Imperative is called Survival. This is the first full length novel I’ve read by Czerneda who impressed me with her sense of humour, presence and down to earth personality when I saw her in Montreal at Worldcon.
This book appeals to the biologist and xenologist in me. I love good writing about encounters with new intelligent species and Julie E. does it very well. Czerneda is, after all, someone who comes from a Biologist background and her main character Mac (a female Salmon researcher who is struggling to keep a research station station going) is very authentic. From terrible first impressions to genuine friendship, Mac and Brymn (a Dhryn archaeologist) follow a path to mutual understanding that is compelling and original. The sinister portent pages that are present at various points in the book underline the ‘survival’ issue that both Mac and Brymn are trying to get to the bottom of. I look forward to reading the other two books with excitement.
Highly recommended.

Coyote

Allen Steele‘s novel Coyote is an excellent, hard science fiction novel about the colonization of a new world. It combines politics, adventure and science into a pleasant reading experience. There are some minor discrepancies in the writing (like the river delta described in the trip down to the Equatorial ‘River’ being on the wrong side according to the map) but these are picky things and easily ignored.
The Coyote series was mentioned in two of the sessions I attended at Worldcon 2009, particularly Lots of Planets have a North. Steele was also one of the authors participating in the Atlanta Nights hoax novel I golbed about earlier.
I recommend it and would like to read the rest of the series!